Embodied Geopolitics: The Discursive Construction of Refugee Men and Masculinities

Abstract

A new wave of displaced people from Afghanistan arriving in Turkey in August-September 2021 generated public debates about how the country would protect its borders while continuing to face the ‘problem’ posed by more than 3 million displaced Syrians. Much of these debates centred on refugee men and scrutinised their bodies and bodily acts to produce them as Other. This article analyses how the racialised and gendered depictions of refugee men in Turkey discursively produce geopolitical spatial hierarchies. Our analysis includes political leaders’ speeches, news articles, and opinion pieces published in mainstream media outlets and social media about displaced people from Syria and Afghanistan since 2016. We build on and contribute to feminist geopolitics and refugee studies by focusing on refugee men and masculinities, teasing out the contradictions in the geopolitical narratives centred on refugee men’s bodies, and analysing their implications for representing civilisational hierarchies. Using the concept of embodied geopolitics, we show how the dominant anti-refugee discourse in Turkey operates through a series of contradictory -but eventually complementary- geopolitical depictions of refugee men’s bodies, appearance, and behaviour that simultaneously masculinise and feminise them. These portrayals present refugee men either as fighters or cowards, as modern or backward. We argue that gendered and racialised refugee bodies animate geopolitical narratives and demonstrate that bodies are not simply territories with fixed meanings. Instead, they are constantly and simultaneously inscribed with multiple meanings that operate together and, ultimately, produce international hierarchies, ethnic boundaries, and the modern/backward dualism.