Introduction: Masculinities and place

Hibbins and Pease, in their introduction to a collection on migrant men, suggest that despite two decades of escalating ‘men’s studies’, there is still a shortage of empirical work on the connections between migration, ethnicity, masculinity and sexuality. There are moments in Abbas’s narrative where he voices what might be seen as a patriarchal, peasant masculinity, but there are also moments when he seems to embrace the values and opportunities a modern, Western society offers. Abbas’s anxiety is caused, of course, not simply by the dissonance between competing ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ sexual codes, or an abstract disconnect between the social values of village society and those of Western modernity, or the wider sense of social and economic dislocation. He is struggling to get used to the visceral processes of navigating the physical and social spaces of a city and its infrastructure, learn English, and get a job.