Abstract:
This research aimed to analyze migrant men’s spatial trajectories with an emphasis on how they are negotiating with intersecting hierarchies and how they refine and transform their refuge, workplaces. With a lens of feminist geography, it mapped Syrian entrepreneurs’ workplaces in Basmane and Buca, İzmir. To attend the social relations and also gendered practices of Syrian men who run small enterprises and to scrutinize the aspects of their life within broader political, socio-cultural and economic contexts, a feminist ethnographic research was conducted. While heavily relying on participant observation, informal and formal interviews were conducted with the owners of 4 restaurants, 1 barber shop, 1 grocery store and 1 confectioner. Based on the understanding of temporal and geographical contingency of masculinities, it discussed (1) how men positioned/disciplined themselves vis a vis “foreign masculinities”, (2) spatial structures that enabled men’s protector role spilling over into their workplace, (3) homosocial bonds that created continuity and stability.
