‘Home but not quite’: Islamophobia and gurbetçi identity in the ‘floating habitus’ of British Turks

Abstract

This article examines how second-generation British Turks negotiate identity and belonging across the UK and Turkey through a Bourdieusian framework of habitus alongside the discursive processes of racialisation and Islamophobia. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews, it shows how participants experience and internalise the UK’s racialised and Islamophobic constructions of Turkey, coded as Muslim, backward and unsafe, while simultaneously navigating classed, moralised and linguistic hierarchies in Turkey that racialise them as outsiders through the low-status gurbetçi label. Participants’ accounts reveal how the dialectical relation between UK-based Islamophobia and perceived self-deficiencies in the Turkish field shapes a floating habitus, which they continuously negotiate and situationally silence. By tracing these dynamics, the article demonstrates how transnational racialisation processes reshape embodied dispositions, extending Bourdieusian scholarship on migrant and post-migrant subjectivities.