Embodied Geopolitics: The Discursive Construction of Refugee Men and Masculinities in Turkey

Öçal, Devran Koray; Gökariksel, Banu; Aykaç, Betül (2024). Embodied Geopolitics: The Discursive Construction of Refugee Men and Masculinities in Turkey. Geopolitics Taylor & Francis 10.1080/14650045.2024.2342914

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A new wave of displaced people from Afghanistan arriving in
Turkey in August-September 2021 generated public debates
about how the country would protect its borders while continuing
to face the ‘problem’ posed by more than 3 million displaced
Syrians. Much of these debates centred on refugee men and
scrutinised their bodies and bodily acts to produce them as
Other. This article analyses how the racialised and gendered
depictions of refugee men in Turkey discursively produce geopolitical
spatial hierarchies. Our analysis includes political leaders’
speeches, news articles, and opinion pieces published in
mainstream media outlets and social media about displaced
people from Syria and Afghanistan since 2016. We build on
and contribute to feminist geopolitics and refugee studies by
focusing on refugee men and masculinities, teasing out the
contradictions in the geopolitical narratives centred on refugee
men’s bodies, and analysing their implications for representing
civilisational hierarchies. Using the concept of embodied geopolitics,
we show how the dominant anti-refugee discourse in
Turkey operates through a series of contradictory -but eventually
complementary- geopolitical depictions of refugee men’s
bodies, appearance, and behaviour that simultaneously masculinise
and feminise them. These portrayals present refugee men
either as fighters or cowards, as modern or backward. We argue
that gendered and racialised refugee bodies animate geopolitical
narratives and demonstrate that bodies are not simply
territories with fixed meanings. Instead, they are constantly
and simultaneously inscribed with multiple meanings that operate
together and, ultimately, produce international hierarchies,
ethnic boundaries, and the modern/backward dualism.

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