ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on research carried out over the last few decades across the postcolonial city of Birmingham (UK), in which Irish (Catholic) and Pakistani and Bangladeshi (Muslim) migrants have been projected as ‘suspect communities’. This transnational urban space and more specifically ‘no-go’ inner-city neighbourhoods have been the subject of sensationalist media images over the years as the centre of Irish Republican Army and jihadi terrorism and radicalisation. The ensuing securitised policy response has had specific gendered implications. The chapter’s focus is the accompanying closure of gendered possibilities through a continual pathologisation of two diasporic generations – young men of Irish (Catholic) heritage and young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi (Muslim) heritage – and their responses through emerging narratives of masculine identities and subjectivities. The chapter brings together two theoretically led frames – critical men’s studies and postcolonial analysis – to explore these young men’s lives and emerging (dis)located masculinities. A key argument of the chapter is that dominant containing discourses of institutional gendered closure are projected by the state and public institutions onto the bodies of Catholic and Muslim boys and young men, contributing to a range of reflective and agentic responses.
