Immigration Detention, Masculinities and Dishonourment

Immigration detention is used across the world to contain and intervene on the mobility of those deemed to lack the legal right to remain within states. Detention centers, including those in the UK, have been shown to be sites in which detainees are subject to a plethora of harms. In the UK, immigration detention is primarily targeted at men, and especially men racialised as brown and black. Yet there is little work that explores the harms of immigration detention through the combined lenses of masculinity, race and harm when considering the impact of these carceral practice. I argue in this paper that the state exerts gendered violence on men through detainment by subjecting them to a process of profound dishonourment.

Given that honor is central to hegemonic contestations of masculinity, and that dishonourment – the evacuation of autonomy, integrity, and wholeness – is posited by Orlando Patterson (1982) as integral to the production of colonial power, I argue that dishonourment via detention intervenes on the production of masculinities, limiting access to gendered repertoires that confer legitimacy, and subordinating racialised men to the violence of the gendered state. This process functions in part produce docile, disposable and deportable men, altering masculinities in the process. Drawing on interviews, artwork, and other qualitative material from an ethnography of male-only immigration detention centres in the UK, this paper explores the ways in which men experience and respond to dishonourment in detention.