I am lord, ... I am local' : migrant masculinity, sex and making yourself at home

In reading much of the scholarship over many decades on migration and diasporic communities, you might be mistaken for thinking that the success of migrants in fulfilling the economic and social functions of reproduction" the aims of immigration policies in many countries" was accomplished without recourse to (hetero)sexual activity. This blindness was partly addressed by the increasing scholarship on gender and migration, and an interest in families and the sexual divisions of migrant labour, but this literature not only focused overwhelmingly on women's experience, it also tended to talk about sex primarily in terms of domestic violence and the sex industry or, more generally, as a means of gender subordination (Willis and Yeoh 2000, Palmary et al. 2010). The many calls to bring gender into migration studies have been successful in critiquing the presumption of the masculine migrant subject and in drawing attention to the specificity of women's experiences, but, as several commentators have pointed out, there has been a resulting tendency to neglect and over-simplify men's experiences and, through a politicised contrasting of men's and women's experiences, cast migrant men as 'tyrannical patriarchs' (Ryan and Webster 2008: 4-5, Herbert 2008: 189). Ironically, this can only foster the wider social view of migrant men" particularly those of Muslim and Middle Eastern backgrounds" as sexually perverse (Dagistanli and Grewal 2012). There are two issues here for us: a diminishing of the social role of sexual practices and a neglect of the specificity of men's experiences.