Skip to main content
Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit

'By Education I'm Catholic'. The Gender, Religion and Nationality Nexus in the Migration Experience of Polish Men to the UK

Abstract

To date, the literature on gender and migration continues a longstanding bias towards female over male experiences. Similarly, research on Polish post-EU accession emigration has not sufficiently addressed the male experiences of migration. Drawing on 20 interviews with migrant men, this paper contributes to the existing research on the variety of masculinity practices and gendered migration from the Central and Eastern Europe. In so doing, it focuses on the relationship between masculinity, religion and migration in the context of migration from Poland to the UK. While religion is also rarely addressed in discussions on the post-EU accession migration of Poles, it proves to be important in shaping world views and influencing migrants' positionalities in the new social context. Indeed, in migrants' narratives, gender, religion and the nation intertwine with one another. Analysis shows how certain aspects of men's social identities that were originally assets turn into burdens and how the men reach to religion, while distance from the institutional Church, to renegotiate their new positionality in order to avoid denigration or to support social recognition - which is especially important in the social reality shaped by Brexit.

You might also be interested in :

Brexit and Beyond: Transforming Mobility and Immobility
This Guest Editorial introduces a special issue entitled Brexit and Beyond: Transforming Mobility and Immobility. The unfolding story of Brexit provided the backdrop to a series of events, organised in 2018 and 2019…
Push, Pull and Brexit: Polish Migrants' Perceptions of Factors Discouraging them from Staying in the UK
The fate of European citizens living in the United Kingdom was a key issue linked with Britain's departure from the European Union. Official statistics show that some outflow has taken place, but it was no Brexodus. This article investigates Brexit's impact within a theoretical (push-pull)…
Talking about Bordering
In the summer of 2019 as the UK was in the midst of heated Brexit debates and Theresa May's minority government clung on to power, Professor Louise Ryan interviewed Professor Nira Yuval-Davis about her recent book Bordering (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019).
The Impact of Brexit on Young Poles and Lithuanians in the UK: Reinforced Temporariness of Migration Decisions
The main aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which the 2016 Brexit referendum impacted on the decisions of young Polish and Lithuanian migrants to stay in the UK or return to the country of origin.

Journal

Central and Eastern European Migration Review

Author

Article meta

Country / region covered

Population studied

Year of Publication

Source type

Keywords