Migrant masculinities and domestic space: British home‐making practices in Dubai

Abstract

Existing research has tended to highlight the working lives, career trajectories and networking practices of skilled migrant men. In contrast, this article asserts the significance of domestic space in the constitution and narration of migrant masculinities, examining the role of domestic practices, objects, and relations. To do so, I explore the practices and narratives of British migrants in Dubai, drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews surrounding international relocation and domestic material culture, as well as participant-observation within homes. Migrants with a range of occupations, migration trajectories, residence biographies, and living arrangements are included in the discussion. Through the analysis it is demonstrated that the co-constitution of domesticity and masculinity in migrants' lives is complex, involving geographies of absence and presence, mobility and emplacement, international careering and settlement. The heterogeneity of British men in Dubai challenges any singular representation of masculinity in this migration context and generates alternative meanings of home and belonging. The article concludes that further analysis of domestic material culture and home-making is necessary to complicate our understanding of the relationship between masculinities and home, for those who stay put as well as those who move. key wordsUnited Arab Emirates skilled migration masculinities gender home ethnography

The spatial and gendered politics of displaying family: exploring material cultures in grandfathers’ homes

“…'Displaying' in the homespace Walsh (2011) identifies an extensive interest in the home by geographers (e.g. Blunt and Varley 2006;Brickell 2012), located both in broader debates within cultural geographical research that have been concerned to rematerialise geography, but also a larger interdisciplinary literature on material cultures and consumption (Blunt 2005;Jackson 2000;Miller 2001).…”

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities, spaces and young men at home

“…This includes work on partnered heterosexual men's gender roles, domestic labour and fathering (Tosh 1999;Singleton and Maher 2004;Aitken 2009), do-it-yourself (DIY), leisure and care work (Gelber 2000;Cox 2013), work/ life balance and meanings of home (Chapman 2004;Gorman-Murray 2011b, 2013b, retirement transitions (Varley and Blasco 2000;Atherton 2009), and domestic geographies of grandfathering (Tarrant 2010). Further work examines migrant men across different national contexts, and the significance of 'masculine' homemaking practices for identity work and building social/familial relations (Datta 2008;Walsh 2011;Brickell 2012); bachelor domesticity, housework and home creativity in the West since the nineteenth century (Chudacoff 1999;Snyder 1999;Pink 2004); and gay men's uses of home to create sexual subjectivities, same-sex relationships and communities of practice in heteronormative societies (Gorman-Murray 2006b, 2013aWaitt and Gorman-Murray 2007).…”

Campsite Migrants: <i>British Caravanners and Homemaking in Benidorm</i>

“…In the context of transnational migration, social scientists have more specifically been interested in the connections and discrepancies between 'home' as an everyday living space and 'home' in terms of belonging (Walsh 2011: 516; see also Ahmed, Castañeda & Sheller 2003). Katie Walsh's studies of British expatriates in Dubai provides a prime example of the importance of material culture of the domestic arena in terms of negotiating and handling questions of belonging in a transnational context (Walsh 2011: 516, Leivestad 2017. Her research follows a renewed interest in domestic materiality and homemaking within both social anthropology and human geography (see Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995;Miller 2008) that acknowledges the house dwelling not as a permanent and stable entity but as 'unfixed, dynamic and mobile' (Dalakoglou 2010: 763).…”

“…Rather than centring on the objects of the domestic sphere and how they make sense in relation to migrant homemaking (see Walsh 2006Walsh , 2011, I am interested in the way caravans are materially transformed and the role they play as nodes in economic and social relationships. As I have argued elsewhere, domestic materiality is thus more than the mobile objects that indicate rooting or belonging (see Leivestad 2017).…”

“…Drawing on a growing body of literature on the domestic sphere and migration (see, e.g. Appel 2012;Dalakoglou 2010;Walsh 2006Walsh , 2011, in this article, I show how social networks are produced through people's engagements with the materiality of the home dwelling. For migrant campsite dwellers such as Gary and Margaret, the caravan itself plays a central part in the narrative of the campsite as a version of the good life.…”