‘Queering Foreign Bodies: Discourse and Identity in Visual Representations of Straight Migrant Men'

Notions of male sexuality and gender identities, practices and desires are curiously absent from migration studies, where sexuality is almost always referred to and associated with the migration experiences of women. Likewise in art and visual culture the male migrant body and its visual representation is still very much uncharted territory. In this chapter, and the body of original photographic work on which it is based, I examine the subject of male foreign workers and gender performativity in the context of Central and Eastern Europe’s conservative and ultra-macho working-class culture through the prism of queer theory. By focusing on Central and Eastern European male migrant workers living in contemporary Britain, and incorporating underlying references to the male-dominated arenas of the building site and the boxing gym they inhabit (key sites where masculinities are fashioned), the work investigates sexuality from within the heterosexual mainstream and establishes links between the context of location, identity, decadence and obsession. In doing so it proposes a radical break with the long-dominant photographic style and photographic tradition of lyrical social documentary associated with the theme of migration and migrant workers, and offers a subversive reading of the figure of the male migrant as a contemporary symbol of heterosexual and homoerotic desire.