Conclusion: Towards a Poetics of Migrant Masculinities

Abstract

Michael Kimmel’s observation testifies to the importance of finding new modes of rethinking masculinities in the diaspora. When I first embarked upon this project, the first questions that were posed to me were: ‘Why women writing about men? Why not focus on men talking about themselves?’ My answer was simple: ‘We are always reading about men and their accounts of their circumstances. I want to examine what it means to be an immigrant woman writing about men and how she understands and perceives the changes in her male counterparts as she gains a new voice and status in the migratory space’. In this study, I have attempted to highlight the different ways in which immigrant women have employed their newfound voices and positions in their host societies in France and Canada, to depict the concomitant transformations which can be observed in masculinities. My purpose has not been to identify and reconstruct these masculinities through the texts I have explored, nor has it been to reify the concept of masculinities itself. Rather, I have sought to demonstrate that migration allows for a reshaping of masculinities, and underlines their mutability. The capacity for change, in turn, permits an understanding that men and their suffering too must be treated sensitively. My contribution to the conversations around masculinities that has been growing in the past two decades has been through close readings of immigrant women who write about men through autobiographical narratives, short stories, essays, an epistolary novel, a novel written in anecdotal form, leading to what I would call a form of poetics of masculinities.

Globalization changes masculinities—reshaping the arena in which national and local masculinities are articulated and transforming the shape of men’s lives. Globalization disrupts and reconfigures traditional, neo-colonial, or other national, regional, or local, economic, political, and cultural arrangements. In so doing, globalization transforms both domestic and public patriarchy.

—Kimmel, Misframing Men