ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses particularly on social interactions on small building sites to examine how gendered performances of humour, teasing and socializing among different workers contribute to the wider construction of Polish masculinities and their differentiations with other white builders in London. Masculinities have been well researched in the West within the geographies of work largely focusing on white working-class unemployment in the aftermath of Fordist manufacturing. In the UK, this has been marked by a crisis of masculinity in which the taken for granted associations between manliness and manual work were affected by men's anxieties about loss of employment. Masculine identities and gender relationships, as they take shape among Polish male migrants in the UK today, are connected to their wider socio-political, historical and geographic contexts the socialist state, the Polish republic and the UK labour market.
