‘Building a Wail around Themselves’: Exploring Adolescent Masculinity and Abjection with Photo-Biographical Research

Abstract

This study examined the male identity ‘positions’ of South African adolescent boys in relation to the unconscious, dialogical, and discursive construction of masculinities. Multi-method approaches were used within a qualitative methodology to generate triangulated data consisting of 371 photographs, individual interviews, and focus group discussions. The participants were 29 boys aged 15 to 17, drawn from a rural and an urban school in KwaZulu-Natal. Our findings suggested that the male peer group was a crucial context for the construction of masculine ‘acceptability’ that involved performative acts of displayed toughness, risk-taking, and emphasised heterosexuality. Norms of ‘acceptability’ were organised around the visible objectification of girls through ‘non-relational heterosexuality’. Race identities played a significant role in the construction and subjectivity of masculinity, and there were changing constructions of masculine identities in relation to race identities, particularly in the context of a ‘multiracial’ urban school. Adolescent boys sometimes experienced significant distress in response to processes of alienation and homophobic harassment that were enacted in peer-group cultures. Crucial in our discussion of racialised identities and homophobia was the notion of abjection, the social and unconscious process whereby iterated and disavowed otherness becomes the means by which the boundaries of acceptability are policed. Participants in this study situated, negotiated, and defended multiple subject positions at varying distances from an illusory ‘acceptable’ masculinity through social and unconscious processes such as abjection, projection, and denial.