Masculinity, sexuality, and illegal migration : human smuggling from Pakistan to Europe / Ali Nobil Ahmad.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Gender, the household and migrant masculinity -- Sexuality and migration: thinking beyond the economic -- Fortress Europe, Afro-Eurasia: human smuggling and restrictive economy -- Eroticism, history and base materiality: migrant experience in travel and transit -- Myths and realities of return and arrival: gender and generation in Pakistani migration -- Time, space and illegality in the new migrant economy -- Conclusion.

Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration makes use of extensive new empirical material to explore the phenomena of migration, human smuggling and illegal work, in order to develop a compelling account of international migration, linking it with irrational, risky economic behaviour and male sexual desire. Interviews conducted with successive waves of Pakistani immigrants in the UK and Italy, together with ethnographic fieldwork amongst local journalists, immigration officials and smugglers in Pakistan, serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary comparative analysis of illegal migration across time and space. Challenging the received idea that labour migration is driven purely by rational economic forces, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration draws upon psychoanalytic social theory to examine the roles of masculinity and irrationality in the decision to migrate, thus stimulating a more complex debate about migration's causes and consequences. The arguments it makes raise wider questions about the folly of thinking about economic concerns in isolation from other aspects of human experience. As such, this book will appeal to those with research interests in economics, social theory, migration, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.