A Gendered Return

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

This paper details the life stories of young black men, specifically how they negotiate their masculine identities over time. The researcher tracked a group of young black men over a period of nine years, from when they were adolescent boys (between the ages of 13 and 18 years), until they were young adults (between the ages of 23 to 26 years at the time of the writing). The aim of the study was to explore how the participants spoke about their relationships with their fathers as young adolescent boys and how they were now fathers to their own children as young men. At the beginning of the study the participants were given disposable cameras and asked to take 27photos (the total available on the film) under the theme, "My life as a young black man in the new South Africa". The photos undertaken were used to facilitate semi-structured interviews in which the life stories ofwhatitmeantto be a young black man were shared. Between four to fourteen follow-up interviews were conducted with some of the participants. Key themes in the life stories included relationships with mothers, experiences of growing up without fathers, entering the world of work, and being fathers themselves which encouraged them to also reflect about their own relationships with their fathers. It is clear from their experiences that narratives of being a young black man are not static, but continuously change depending on the context, and time. In conclusion, it is argued that these positive voices of masculinities need to be promoted and celebrated.

Jack London's “Mauki” and the Colonial Pacific

cross American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families. Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society. Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects A

The circadian pattern in levels of serum total testosterone (T) in men becomes blunted with normal aging. However, because T not bound to sex hormone-binding globulin (non-SHBG-T) is felt to be a better representative of biologically available T than is total T, the possibility of a 24-h variation in non-SHBG-T in young men and the possibility that aging is associated with a blunting of that rhythm were investigated. Hourly blood samples were drawn on 10 normal young men (mean age 27.3 years) and 10 normal elderly men (mean age 70.7 years) over a 24-h period and the serum was assayed for total T, sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), and total protein; non-SHBG-T was calculated. SHBG was determined by radioimmunoassay as well as by a steroid-binding assay. Young men had a significantly higher (p less than 0.05) mean 24-h level of non-SHBG-T (1.91 +/- 0.62 nm/l) than did the elderly men (0.86 +/- 0.01 nM/l). Also, each young man showed a significant circadian rhythm in non-SHBG-T, with a group mean daily variation of 1.42 +/- 0.38 nM/l. In contrast, only 60% of the elderly men demonstrated a significant circadian rhythm in non-SHBG-T, and the group mean rhythm was blunted (maximum excursion 0.38 +/- 0.07 nM/l) compared with that of the young men. SHBG and total protein levels demonstrated similar 24-h variations in the two age groups. It was concluded that non-SHBG-T serum levels, similar to serum total T levels, demonstrate a circadian pattern in young men and this circadian rhythmicity becomes blunted with normal aging.

The power of homosociality: how young men “do” masculinity in groups and individuallyUsing young men’s narratives, about other men, friends, dates and girlfriends, this article discusses the following questions: Can the interpretation – the understanding of young men’s collective presentations of masculinity as a surface that hides a more complex masculinity – undermine how we interpret young men’s talk about and interaction with other men, as well as with women? Can this disassembling understanding have an impact on how young men interpret and relive the interactions with other men, as well as with women? Can this disassembling of the homosocially created masculinity from the more individually created masculinity shape secondary gains for the young men, such as e.g. a more flexible and stretchable arena of responsibility, as well as more flexible space of acting?Thomas Johansson, Professor of Social Work social work, states that if we only focus the homosocially created masculinity, this will reshape a less nuanced picture of young men’s way of doing masculinity (Johansson 2005). Thus, young men’s vulnerability and difficulties remain hidden. However, this disassembling of the homosocially created masculinity from the more individually based doings of masculinity could possibly also give secondary gains, such as e.g. a more flexible and stretchable field of responsibility, as well as more flexible space of acting.This article shows that using a fragmentised and situated masculinity, as a way of understanding the complexity and the ambivalence in young men’s project of doing masculinity, makes evident – on the one hand – the vulnerability in young men’s process of doing masculinity. On the other hand, however, this view also makes it possible for young men to avoid responsibility for their actions. Instead the situated context – e.g. if in a peer group or alone, and what kind of relations the young man has – will be significant for how the act will be interpreted.The empirical material consists of six individual interviews and one group interview with four men. The age span of the participants is 16 to 24 years old. The overall theme for the discussions is heterosexual practice and relations.

Frontline Footage

Sugar Glass Brenna Womer (bio) He was a young man and a good man, but an odd man, most would say. And he'd loved another young man for 12 years. They'd been roommates their freshman year of college, assigned by the university. Our young man, he was not odd because he loved in silence, and he was not odd because he was an aspiring stage actor. He was odd, to most, because of his sugar-glass bottles, the bottles he made from sugar he melted and molded and set to dry. The little bottles he smashed with a hammer when they'd cooled to see how they might break; the ones he saved for no particular purpose but for something to exist in this world just for him. The young men were 30 now, and our young man, Dimitrie, was sure the other, Emin, loved him back even after all this time. Emin married a woman when he was 25, and they had a child. But Dimitrie waited. He hadn't loved another man or woman since the two of them had slept, night after aching night, on twin beds in their shared dorm room. They'd kept in touch. Dimitrie had gone to the wedding of his love and the woman he sometimes wished to be. Now, all these years later, Dimitrie was new to Chicago and looking for a break, was offered a job by his friend and his love Emin, taking care of his mother. Our young man moved into the old woman's basement, the old woman who was not old enough for dementia (but what does the body care of shoulds or shouldn'ts); the old woman who smiled often at Dimitrie but didn't mean it when she did; the old woman who could smell the love on our young man's skin for her own son who was weak-willed and too susceptible to love. And soon it was obvious that Emin was too much persuaded by our young man's long-steeped affection. Obvious when Emin stopped coming for afternoon tea with his mother and began, instead, attending nightly beers in her home with Dimitrie when he thought his mother would be already in bed. Obvious, the way he pretended to be fixing the faucet or adjusting the settings on her television when she came to the kitchen for a glass of water in her nightgown. Our young man had set up his sugar-bottle station in the kitchenette in the basement next to his bedroom. He had a small collection of shaped glass with which he was mildly satisfied. Enough so that he had resolved to offer them up as a gift to Emin on his birthday. Dimitrie had been invited to the celebratory dinner by the old woman, but he'd decided he would present his love the bottles—colored with spices and myriad petals and not yet perfect, but stable and enough—later that night, after the meal, when Emin made his late-night visit for cold [End Page 128] beer and talk of days when things were simple as skin and 200-thread-count. But the old woman made use of her time alone in her home while Dimitrie was away for auditions or his weekly improv classes. She'd been tracking his sugar-glasswork, and on the day of her son's 31st birthday she found the wrapped gift box and the card signed with love & longing by our young man on his bedside table. She took up the gift and brought it along to the restaurant, where Dimitrie would be coming straight from an audition for a play that burned of summer in the Deep South. She kept the gift under the table until the drinks were ordered, and then placed the box on the black-linen tablecloth. She did so without fanfare, simply left the package on the table and then reached for the pressed powder in her purse. Making a seat for the open compact in her palm, she dabbed at the corners of her dry mouth and glanced over the lip of the mirror, waiting. She was satisfied a few moments...

A New Take on American Violence? Roger Lane (bio) David T. Courtwright. Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. xiii + 357 pp. Tables, notes, illustrations, and index. $29.95. David T. Courtwright’s latest book should be widely read as a provocative contribution to the ongoing debate as to why the United States has long been the most violent and disorderly of developed nations. He begins Violent Land with a simple syllogism: young men are prone to violence and disorder, America has historically attracted a disproportionate number of young men, ergo America has been a violent and disorderly place. The full argument is a bit more complex. As the subtitle indicates, the book takes us from the nonagricultural frontier, with its demography highly skewed toward young males, to the modern inner city, with a somewhat lesser imbalance in favor of females. But it is above all single young men who make trouble, and the young men of the ghetto are disproportionately single. Stated simply the argument is of course reductive. But Violent Land, anything but unsophisticated, makes it clear that culture and social structure mediate demography in many ways. It may also be objected that like much of “social science” this book simply dresses the obvious in statistics. It is after all not news that young men, especially young men left to themselves in groups or gangs, will strut like peacocks and fight like roosters; professional historians, from Edmund Morgan on colonial Virginia to those of us who have long identified the “bachelor subculture” with urban crime and violence, have hardly ignored this. And Courtwright has indeed drawn on an unusually wide range of scholarly disciplines—his own list encompasses “anthropology, biology, criminology, demography, epidemiology, psychology, sociobiology, and sociology” (p. 7). But he wears his “science” lightly: there is not a word of jargon in the book, which is not merely “accessible” to a wide audience but written with a panache that should make it as good a read for anyone as it was for this (somewhat) admiring reviewer, and his underlying argument is spiced with a wealth of insightful detail. Is this then the “definitive” statement on American violence? Aside from the fact that none of us would recognize such a beast if we saw it, Violent Land [End Page 248] has a number of serious flaws, including one, in my opinion, at its very core. But it is at the very least an important contribution to a wider debate. And if the central thesis appears to belabor the obvious it is stated with style, and in the later chapters its implications are boldly explored along lines not usually familiar among academics. After a brief introduction, Courtwright opens with two chapters that review the relevant scientific and social scientific literature. Thoroughly familiar with the often fatal consequences of dissing one’s peers, whether in the saloons of Dodge City or the streets of Harlem, he is in general gentle with the rest of us. But the statement that the importance of genes and gender “is not yet generally accepted by historians” (p. 270) is a little unfair. Surely we do not dismiss so much as assume the biological bases of young men’s propensity to violence, just as all demographers do not feel it necessary to start with the birds and bees. He himself takes nothing for granted; after running through the relevant worldwide statistics on male homicide, accident, drunkenness, drug addiction, and other forms of disorder, Courtwright provides a lively primer on sociobiology, suggesting that the young man’s tendency toward aggression is countered, as a reproductive strategy, by the fact that women—who in most cases make the ultimate sexual choices—insist on other and opposite qualities, those involving commitment and stability. Chapters 3 to 12 then take us on a selective tour, roughly chronological, of the social consequences of these sociobiological truisms as applied to American history. The list of the ills brought on by an excess of testosterone is a long one: “social disorder” is here defined as everything from chronic ill-health to homicide, all of it exacerbated by the commercialized exploitation...

Palestine: Children Laboring

This article critically examines the employment of male youth workers in the field of youth crime prevention. It focuses on how their relationships with young men involved in violence might (or might not) support young men and promote desistance. It does this via the presentation of a single psychosocial case study that examines the relationship between a Black male youth worker and a young Black man who becomes involved in violence and then falls victim to violence to other young men in his neighbourhood. It illuminates how some male workers’ resources of masculine and street capital may be advantageous in terms of reaching some young men, but may also create barriers to reaching others. The study focuses on how both men in the case struggle to ‘give up the ball’ – a metaphor the article adopts for the act of conceding masculine capital in the street field. I suggest that for the relationship to provide the support this young man needed, it required the creation of a third space between him and his youth worker, that is, a vantage point from where they could both examine their masculinity and how this was related to their respective psychic vulnerabilities. I argue that the two men’s investments in different discourses of masculinity were more significant (in terms of the desistance-promoting potential of their relationship) than the similarity in their racial or class backgrounds. The case highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of youth work relationships and for provision of adequate support and supervision for all male workers that incorporates thorough consideration of their personal and professional identity formation, especially the most heavily gendered aspects.

Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for <i>The Scarlet Professor</i>

Little is known about young suicidal men’s preferences for care. Using a broad interpretive approach, we interviewed 36 formerly suicidal young men in a study addressing the development and provision of mental health services. Our analysis yielded three core categories: widening access and bolstering proactive outreach, on becoming a man, and equipping young men for future challenges. Collectively, these categories suggest key features and processes of appropriate service configuration and clinical care: (a) services that reach out proactively serve to encourage young men’s initial and ongoing engagement; (b) care delivered over the long term ensures a necessary focus on a meaningful future life; (c) mental health professionals (MHPs) are centrally involved alongside significant others, including those with personal experience of suicide; and (d) the development of a vital interpersonal connection is based on MHPs actively communicating their empathy, open-mindedness, and interest in a young man’s unique biography.

The effects of alcohol and cue salience on young men's acceptance of sexual aggression

One quarter of the world's population is made up of 1.7 billion young people aged 10-24, 1.5 billion of whom live in developing countries where HIV/AIDS has reduced their chances of living to the age of 60 by 20%. (1) Despite their vulnerability to HIV infection, young people's needs are often overlooked when national AIDS strategies are designed and implemented. (1) Half of all HIV infections occur among young people, aged 15-24. (2) In 2007, an estimated 33.2 million people were living with HIV, 5.4 million of whom were aged 15-24 years. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are 3.2 million young people living with HIV, with a ratio of three young women infected for every young man. (3) In 2001, governments committed that 90% of young people would be able to correctly identify modes of HIV transmission and prevention by 2005. (4) Yet, by 2007 only 40% of young males and 36% of young females had accurate HIV knowledge. (4) Until recently, these statistics were only used to address youth as a target group for prevention messages, rather than allowing each generation to work through the issues themselves. We are slowly recognizing youth as a resource and actively involving them in finding solutions. Is it too little, too late? One of the great challenges in HIV prevention is that today's young people have never known a world without AIDS; they did not experience the shocking early days of the new disease. Improved (access to) treatment has changed HIV and the image of AIDS from a fatal disease to just a sexually transmitted infection. Many young people are fatigued by prevention campaigns that are out-dated or unrealistic. Not all youth experience the same HIV vulnerabilities. An impoverished young girl in a rural village in Malawi has different needs in terms of effective HIV prevention than emerging gay youth in the favelas of Rio. The key lies in providing young people with the information and tools they need to make safe and healthy choices. But they must be true choices, not based on other people's ideologies. Girls and boys Young women and girls are disproportionately vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS due to biological factors and structural elements of culture, economic and social inequalities. Marriage and long-term relationships do not protect them from contracting HIV and insisting on abstinence is simply not realistic. To address the global feminization of the epidemic, policies, programmes, legislative frameworks and social norms must guarantee women's rights, ensure protection from gender-based violence and discrimination. Despite the numerous references in national and international documents to the rights of women and girls, few countries have actually implemented and enforced policies and laws that protect such rights. While the focus on young women and girls remains necessary, particularly in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa where more than 75% of those living with HIV are female, it risks excluding the very group whose involvement is essential if we are to successfully turn the tide on HIV; namely, young men, particularly those living with HIV. (5) The engagement of young men is also essential to improve their own health outcomes. The importance of directly engaging young men and boys in shaping the response to HIV and AIDS is clearly reflected within the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action. Commitments to ensure special efforts around this have been reiterated in several key international declarations since then. (6) Traditional sex education and HIV prevention often focus (intentionally or otherwise) on young women and do not adequately address the needs of young men. (7) Sexual and reproductive health clinics are often perceived, and indeed sometimes promote themselves, as feminine spaces. Young men often feel uncomfortable visiting these clinics, which frequently lack services catering for their specific needs. …