Introduction

This chapter explores the link between gender and migration in the development of religious transnational connections. It focuses on the agentive role of Catholic Indian and Filipino men in building religious enclaves in Italy and promoting evangelical activities in their countries of origin, and in Asia more generally. The analysis responds to the need of furtherdeveloping a more relational approach to gender within global flows and better understanding men's highly heterogeneous involvement in migration (Willis & Yeoh 2000; Hibbins & Pease 2009; Hearn & Blagojević 2013). It does so by focusing on how religion shapes specific understanding of masculinity in the diaspora, while also being transformed in its meanings and practices through migrant men's mobility. The chapter aims at understanding how gendered forms of migration do not only reproduce religious tradition in the diaspora, but also creatively and somehow unpredictably transform religion. It does so by interrogating the ways in which transnational mobility leads migrant men to question religion both at home and in the host society, and to discover new religiously informed models and experiences of their masculinity.

In the last two decades, religion has featured with renewed pervasiveness in a growing literature concerned with migrants’ transnational belonging and minority identity politics in the diaspora (Levitt 2003; Werbner 2002; Smith & Grodz 2014; Allievi & Nielsen 2003; Vertovec 1997).