Illegalisation, Masculinity and Intimacy

The Impact of Public Images on Male Migrants with a Precarious Legal Status

Abstract

The «Event Köln» (Dietze 2016) has shown how public images of migrant men as being potentially dangerous to women can be exploited for justifying more restrictive migration control. The reported sexual assaults of women by migrant men from North Africa in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 were followed by a moral panic and political demands to expel «those who were believed to endanger post-feminist Germany» (Boulila et al. 2017: 286). This event forms part of a series of other instances in which the supposed protection of women has served nationalist agendas in order to assert more restrictive policies. Such racialised and highly gendered public images – mostly referring to men of a Muslim and / or African background – are mirrored in the narratives and experiences of male migrants with precarious legal status.