The (in)significance of footballing pleasures in the lives of forced migrant men

Abstract

Based on over three-years of fieldwork with a grassroots football initiative in inner-city Leeds, this paper highlights the different forms of pleasure experienced by forced migrant men within the space of the football sessions. The paper outlines how football can aid and instigate the experience of bodily, cognitive and social pleasures in spite of lives being heavily controlled by the sprawling nature of the UK border regime. Rather than isolating ‘pleasure’ as bodily sensation or mental stimulant, this paper moves these embodied feelings towards examining the social (in)significance of pleasures in the context of everyday lives of forced migrants. As a result, this research paper finds that these pleasures–whether bodily, cognitive, cathartic, convivial - act as a counter to the dehumanising effects of the UK asylum process by providing temporary moments of escape from pains from the past, anxieties of the present, and fears for the future. To this end, engaging in pleasure is seen here as a political act.