State containment and closure of gendered possibilities among a millennial generation: On not knowing Muslim young men

Abstract

Within a British context, the South Asian Muslim community is currently a significant media spectacle with a millennial generation of British-born young men inhabiting public personae that officially are perceived as being a ‘suspect community’. An epistemological assumption of this perception appears to be that religion is the dominant and exclusive social category shaping their behaviour. Using qualitative research that synthesizes postcolonial and critical men’s studies, this article explores how Muslim millennial men are ‘categorically’ contained with accompanying forms of (de)gendering. The article is based upon research with Birmingham-born millennial young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, aged 18–25. The research found that a major effect over the last few years of establishing a securitized regime involving ascribed values, reviled violent bodies and designated locations has been to circumscribe the spaces within which Muslim young men are able to perform masculinities in public spheres. The ‘no-go’ spaces of hard physical borders and the increasing complexity of imagined (post-Brexit) borders have imposed racially intensified patterns of stratification in austerity Britain. We conclude by arguing that young men are subjectively negotiating the discursive construction of Muslim identities. This negotiation engages with dynamic dissonances that are (re)constituting their remembering of the past and the living and doing of the present and their imagined futures.