From Health Check to Muslim Test: The Shifting Politics of Governing Migrant Masculinity

Racialised notions of ‘foreign masculinity’ play a crucial role in migration discourses. This paper argues that such constructs are firmly embedded in political rationalities of migration control. Analysing Austrian post-war migration policies, the paper shows that shifting constructs of ‘foreign masculinity’ were used to legitimate restrictive migration laws. The early ‘guest worker’ regime was mainly interested in questions of bodily health, strength and resilience, as migrant men were primarily seen as work objects. When migration was later reframed as a security threat to the nation and its people, new images of dangerous migrant masculinity arose. Contemporary politics of governing migration and integration construct images of archaic migrant masculinity to define unwanted populations and legitimate differentiated techniques of evaluation, inquiry and exclusion. The analysis leads to a call for critically reflecting the role that the social sciences play in constructing particular notions of migrant masculinity and its entanglements with migration control.