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This article proposes a comparison between Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (UK, 2017) and Peter Sheridan’s Borstal Boy (Ireland, 2000) to examine the role that masculinities and sexual desire play in the construction, (re)configuration and (re)affirmation of nation-ness. These films depict bodies and their sensations as being able to break down and re-shape a strict and embodied notion of nationhood strongly tied by patriarchal norms. However, they also rely on rigid representations of masculinities and do not attempt to dissolve nation-ness as a corporeal entity, but to re-shape it and re-install it as a valid form of existence. Notions by Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages provide the theoretical approach to observe possible changes and continuities regarding the domestication of male bodies in twenty-first-century Irish and British cinema.