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Drawing on a sociological study concerning “recognized” refugees in France and Bulgaria and their search for employment, this article aims at opening a research field about the gender dimension of their relationship to work. The refugees who become manual workers generally experience this transformation as a loss of social and professional status that destabilizes their identity and amplifies the rupture with their habitual world that exile entails. The paper shows that these experiences of loss coincide with transformation in gender identifications (either destabilization or strengthening of “virile” or “feminine” stereotypes). At the same time gender norms can offer resources and enabling strategies that allow individuals to adjust to a new condition generally considered unenviable.