What about older men? Towards a critical interrogation of conceptions of masculinities in northwestern Ghana

Abstract

While research on older men’s constructions and experiences of masculinity has gained scholarly attention from the humanistic, medical, and social sciences, much of the debates tend to focus on experiences from contexts in the global North. The current study draws on the everyday experiences of fifteen older men in a rural setting in northwestern Ghana to foreground a critical understanding of the multiple ways in which ageing, and masculinities are experienced, challenged and negotiated on a daily basis. Our findings highlight the links between everyday experiences, gendered subjectivities, and culturally normative constructions of manhood. The participants of the study perceive ageing as a major setback to achieving hegemonic masculine status and based on the limitations it places on them, they conceptualise alternative notions of masculinity. These alternative ways of theorising hegemonic masculinity among older men focus on wisdom, experience and mentorship rather than independence, virility and emotionless as pervasive in contemporary discourses on masculinities.