Abstract
Using ethnographic data from Los Angeles, this article examines how two distinctive faith-based programs—Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach—drew upon masculine bodily displays and practices to facilitate recovery from gang life. First, recovery’s body projects negotiated masculine bodily displays from gang member to “family man” or “man of God” by reshaping malleable facets of men’s embodiment. Second, leaders protected reformed gang embodiment from the risk of being interpreted as a failed masculinity by emasculating active gang embodiment. Lastly, because some subjects had difficulty overcoming rigid facets of masculine gang embodiment—such as drug addiction—recovery provided bodily practices for reshaping and redirecting rigid facets of embodiment. Whereas emerging research on gang exit has built upon functionalist-oriented life-course and role-exit perspectives of crime desistance, this article suggests that embodied, masculine contests are fundamental to the phenomenological realities of gang recovery. Recovering gang members deepen commitment to exit from gang life not by being passively legitimated as “family men” or “men of God,” but by actively using bodily displays and practices to construct new, masculine moral universes.
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