African Masculinities

Abstract

Operating within dynamic and fluid systems of gender as well as gender blindness, in which anatomical sex (body) neither consistently aligned with social notions of gender nor automatically defined hierarchical relations between male and female bodies, African individuals have nonetheless generated norms, values, traits, and stylistic performances expressing socially cognizant models of masculinity. In embodying or performing certain forms of masculinity, individual men and women invested social, political, economic, religious, and cultural practices, roles, and spaces with differential power and meaning. Over the years, scholarship on African masculinities has come to recognize the need to detach masculinity from biological sex and study it as a nexus of indeterminate power politics, intersecting with the relational categories of age/seniority, youth/childhood, femininity, female power and authority, ethnicity and race, sexuality, and queerness. This has meant distinguishing masculinity from manhood, notions about men’s physiological capacities, and, in particular, male adulthood. Yet there remains the recognition that African gender scholarship must no longer treat men in essentialist terms, must no longer assume the timelessness of patriarchy and the universality of patriarchal dividend, and must interrogate men’s ideas of intimacy and domesticity as much as their public lives. Across various African societies and times, there have been many and competing constructions of masculinities, coexisting in relations of hegemony, complementarity, subordination, and subversion and mediated by the subjectivities and spatial-temporal positionalities of diverse African and non-African individuals—men and women, as well as children, who have brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular models of masculinity. Using multidisciplinary methodologies, the field of African masculinity studies seeks to understand gendered sociopolitical differentiation, historicize the constitution and contestation of patriarchy and heteronormativity, and demonstrate how competing gender norms came to define the modern identities of African peoples. There has been an emphasis on processes of African social identity formation, including kinship and lineage constitution, ethnic citizenship politics, state formation, slavery, colonialism, nationalism and mass movements, urbanization, religious conversion, labor and migration, sports and leisure, and education and socialization.