ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on undocumented, working-class, rural South Asian migrant men who have migrated to Greece. They are overwhelmingly employed in agriculture and the urban informal economy. These male migrants, whose identities as disposable workers are layered with other identifiers of race, class, religion and ethnicity, face a double bind in their attempts to shake off the tag of failed masculinity they carry from their home countries. In Greece, they are collectively othered through a racist and Islamophobic discourse of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and the framing of racialised migrant men’s masculinity as dangerous and needing containment. Using theorisation from critical studies of men and masculinities, political economy and bordering regimes, the chapter draws on extensive multi-sited research conducted in Greece among undocumented Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian migrant men. It demonstrates how racial capitalism uses culturally specific masculine crises and migrant men’s anxieties about emasculation by deportation, along with discourses of othering operating in Greece, for capital accumulation. This process also sets off contestations and reworkings of masculine ideals within each national group and pits them against each other. While this fractures unity, communal actions such as strikes, participation in sports and collective events allow the men to exercise agency.
