Embodied Migration: In the Context of Iranian Men in Sweden - Toward an Embodied Post/Transdisciplinary Paradigm

Abstract

This thesis is an explorative research about Iranian post-migration masculine identity in Sweden. The aim is to identify and analyse the embodied factors that have affected the Iranian men’s post-migration identity formation. By bringing men’s feelings and sensations to the centre of this work, which has been overlooked in most of Iranian gender and migration studies, the very end is to develop a feminist embodied post/transdisciplinary paradigm to address the issue and fill this gap. My theoretical arguments are anchored on the feminist embodied theories and social anthropology theories that believe in the materiality of sociality and the productive role of body as the foundation of analysis of culture and self. I also use different theories of identity formation such as affect, that relates identity as bodily I to location, culture and place. As a feminist research on post-migration identity formation through an embodied lens and phenomenological understanding of the lived body, my work has a feminist post/transdisciplinary paradigm. I have used intersectionality, ethnographic interviews as well as autoethnography as the main methodologies. I have conducted three ethnographic interviews with well-educated Iranian men in Sweden whereby I have examined and scrutinized how the lived experiences and feelings affect post-migration identities. I concluded that identity is never determined, fixed, or completely secured. The result of this study is a method through which I depicted how the senses such as shame, pain, belonging, or out-of-placeness have affected the participants’ identities. As part of the aim of this project, I have depicted how all these factors, feelings and senses affect each other in quite diverse ways, while they have few common grounds as well.