Poor Young Men Research Articles

Industrious, truthful, upright and manly: Reforming poor young men in the borstal schools of India in the 1920s and 1930s

AbstractThis article analyses the expansion of the borstal system for young male offenders in late colonial India. Based on legislative debates and prison administration reports, it considers the ways in which young adults were defined and treated within the context of these penal institutions. It reveals how institutionalised care for young men was used to reinforce the power of middle class coercive networks; to define and produce particular forms of masculinity among the poor youth of India and to contribute to wider, emerging discourses about the distinctive position of adolescents in Indian society.

Providing to belong: masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi ‘ghettos’

AbstractHustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term ‘hustling’ in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This article focuses on the modes in which poor young men in Nairobi (re)deploy, translate and practise hustling to fit immediate circumstances and imagine possible futures, and on the meanings these men produce in the process. I argue that interrogating hustling as a practice provides insights into gendered experiences of urban life worlds in the underserved and highly policed areas of Nairobi, which may tentatively resonate with young men in comparable positions worldwide. I specifically examine how positions of (junior) manhood are configured by localized hustling practices to elucidate how navigating fear and hope, while facing extreme uncertainty, simultaneously defines and undermines their sense of manhood.

Young men, poverty and aspirational masculinities in contemporary Nairobi, Kenya

Building on recent calls for more focus on street-level optimism about life and the world, we address the question of ‘aspirational masculinities’ among poor urban young men in Kenya. Our data and material come from ethnographic work with young men in two slum communities in the country’s capital city, Nairobi. While acknowledging that, in their neighborhoods, ‘proper’ masculinity is constituted in traditional terms of marriage, hardiness, provisioning, breadwinning and self-reliance, youth in our study aspired to masculinities characterized by ‘abler’ breadwinnerhood, caring, positive emotions, relationality, and the rejection of violence. The masculinity aspirations of poor Nairobi youth are complex; fashioned at the crossroads of structural constraints and agentive projects for a good life, and simultaneously supportive and resistive of traditional hegemonic manliness ideals. These aspirations are limited by and reflect an objective condition of everyday and enduring inequality while also signifying a deep unmet yearning for positive social and livelihood changes.

"Having a Child Meant I had a Real Life": Reproductive Coercion and Childbearing Motivations Among Young Black Men Living in Baltimore.

Despite disproportionate health outcome disparities experienced by Black women, reproductive coercion (RC), a range of behaviors to promote unwanted pregnancy and childbearing motivations among poor young Black men are underexamined in current empirical literature. We aimed to describe perceptions of RC behaviors and childbearing motivations among poor young Black men in Baltimore City. We recruited a convenience sample of young Black men aged 18 to 25 (N = 25). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys. Thematic analysis was guided by Miller's Traits-Desires-Intentions-Behaviors (TDIB) framework. According to survey data (N = 23), mean age was 22 (2.1). Majority of participants reported sexual relationships with one person (74%; n = 17), almost half (48%; n = 12) were biological fathers, and six (26%) participants reported using RC toward an intimate partner; three (13%) reported experiencing RC behaviors from a female partner. According to qualitative interviews (N = 25), participants described perceived women-partner motivations for RC as entrapment. Childbearing motivations were influenced by (a) legacies and bonding and (b) escaping/correcting the past. Childbearing desires included (a) love feelings and intimacy and (b) good father. Childbearing intentions included (a) resistance to medical interventions and (b) preparation. Perceptions of RC and childbearing motivations reflected desires from participants to fulfill cultural expectations for conventional masculinity and enhance personal dreams for fatherhood. Although some perceptions and behavior patterns aligned with previous studies, RC was relatively rare in this sample. Findings demonstrated nuanced antithesis to stereotypical notions of young Black men and fatherhood. Provision of reproductive care for young men and their sexual partners should include discussions about RC, pregnancy motivations, and healthy sexual communication strategies.

Hardwar: Spirit, Place, and Politics

This article describes the narratives and projections that shaped the contested character of Hardwar and the river Ganges as symbols par excellence of the Hindus’ claim to India’s sacred geography over the last two hundred years. It deliberates on the tactics and practices through which Hardwar’s ancient and legendary status has been employed to assert Hindu identity and territorial claims vis-à-vis the colonial administrators, but also to exclude the country’s Muslim and Christian populace. The purifying, divine land of Hardwar enabled the nationalist imagination and struggle for a Hindu India, even as it was instituted as a site for the internal purification of Hinduism itself, to mirror its glorious past. The article describes the contests and claims, based on religion and class, as well as the performance of socio-economic and existential anxieties that the sacred quality of Hardwar and the river Ganges continues to authorize and enable in post-colonial India. For this, we draw particularly on the Kanwar Mela, an annual event in which millions of mostly poor young men carry water from the river Ganges on foot, and often over long distances. We deliberate on the significance of the sacred water, rituals, and the journey in reinforcing these pilgrims’ perceptions of the self, and their moral claims over the nation and its territory.

From Iphigenia Among the Taurians: A New Translation

From Iphigenia Among the Taurians: A New Translation Rachel Hadas (bio) In this excerpt from Euripides’s melodramatic and suspenseful play (more romance than tragedy), Iphigenia, rescued from being sacrificed to the goddess Artemis at Aulis, has (irony of ironies) become a priestess of Artemis in a remote Black Sea outpost, where her duty is to sacrifice any Greek man who ventures into the sacred precinct. Unrecognized by Iphigenia, her brother Orestes and his companion Pylades have been arrested and are now being brought before Iphigenia. Suspense and irony, sharp characterization, wry humor, and a powerful current of homesickness and sheer longing imbue this play, and the section I’ve chosen is no exception. I’ve rhymed loosely. The Chorus speak in a cadenced but fairly free verse; the dialogue is generally iambic pentameter. (Orestes and Pylades, guarded, enter) Chorus: But look—two men are coming near, hands tied together with bonds they share. Fresh sacrifice for the goddess there! Hush. Keep still. A gift from Greece walks toward the temple of this place. What the herdsman said is true. [End Page 86] Take them, lady, if they please you, the victims your city celebrates but our own law abominates: holy here, a horror there. Iphigenia: So. My first care is to safeguard the goddess’s property. Untie these strangers’ hands; let them go free, for they are holy victims. Then go in; make preparations for what must be done. (Attendants unshackle Orestes and Pylades and go into the temple, leaving the two men with Iphigenia.) You poor young men, who was your mother? Who was your father? And if you had a sister, then she too will be bereft of you— of both of you. Who can foresee, who knows the paths that fate may choose? What the gods send is murky and obscure. Where trouble first arose, and how, is never clear; nor is it ever clear where things may go from here. Chance leads us into dense confusion. Miserable strangers, where have you come from? You must have voyaged far across the sea; and even lengthier will be your stay away from home eternally in the world below. Orestes: Woman, whoever you may be, why moan, grieving for troubles that are ours alone? If you plan [End Page 87] to kill someone, it makes no sense to try to ease their dread of death with sympathy. And why, when close to death, when no escape is possible, should anybody weep? Scorned as a fool yet dying all the same, he doubles all the trouble he is in. What will be, will be. So let it be. And do not weep for us. We clearly see and understand the custom of this place. We know that we will be a sacrifice. Iphigenia: Which of you is Pylades? That is my first question. Orestes: He is—if that gives you any joy. Iphigenia: And which Greek city is home to Pylades? Orestes: Why ask us? How does it benefit you to know this? Iphigenia: Did one mother give birth to you two? Orestes: We’re bound by ties of love, not family. Iphigenia: The name your father gave you—what is it? Orestes: “Unlucky” would have been appropriate. [End Page 88] Iphigenia: I ask your name, but you describe your fate. Orestes: You’ll sacrifice my body, not my name. Iphigenia: All the same, why not tell me? Why are you so reluctant, so grudging, so haughty? Orestes: If I die nameless, no one can laugh at me. Iphigenia: So you will not even name your city? Orestes: What good would that do me? I am about to die. Iphigenia: But as a favor to me? Tell me, please. Orestes: Glorious Argos—that’s where I was raised. Iphigenia: Oh god—can there be truth in that claim? Orestes: Mycenae, wealthy once—that was my home. Iphigenia: Oh, your arrival here was longed for so! Orestes: I never longed to come here. Maybe you for some reason longed for me to come. [End Page 89] Iphigenia: So were you exiled from your native land? Orestes: Yes. No. It’s hard to understand. I did choose exile. Also I did...

Wandering in a mall: aspirations and family among young urban poor men in Delhi

In post-reform India, urban spaces have been redefined and reoriented towards the consumer public and are becoming increasingly segregated along class lines. While most of the scholarly attention has focused on the marginalization and segregation generated by anti-poor development in cities like Delhi, which aim to be ‘world-class’, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the poor experience the city and its middle-class consumer-oriented localities. In this article, I explore the ways in which urban poor young men who live in a squatter settlement on the fringes of the city aspire to social mobility as they wander in Delhi’s middle-class consumer-oriented spaces. Wandering (ghūmnā) is evaluated differently by young men and their parents, pointing to generational and gendered distinctions. For young men, such wandering is a means to participate in the consumer culture, while their families evaluate it as a waste of time and useless (bekār) behaviour. By placing aspirations in a temporal perspective, I show how the young men adjust their aspirations relationally, as they take up new roles as carers of their families.

PROVIDING WOMEN, KEPT MEN: Doing Masculinity in the wake of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This paper draws on ethnographic and interview based fieldwork to explore accounts of intimate relationships between widowed women and poor young men that emerged in the wake of economic crisis and a devastating HIV epidemic among the Luo ethnic group in Western Kenya. I show how the cooptation of widow inheritance practices in the wake of an overwhelming number of widows as well as economic crisis resulted in widows becoming providing women and poor young men becoming kept men. I illustrate how widows in this setting, by performing a set of practices central to what it meant to be a man in this society - pursuing and providing for their partners - were effectively doing masculinity. I will also show how young men, rather than being feminized by being kept, deployed other sets of practices to prove their masculinity and live in a manner congruent with cultural ideals. I argue that ultimately, women's practice of masculinity in large part seemed to serve patriarchal ends. It not only facilitated the fulfillment of patriarchal expectations of femininity - to being inherited - but also served, in the end, to provide a material base for young men's deployment of legitimizing and culturally valued sets of masculine practice.

The South African Sexual Offences Act and Local Meanings of Coercion and Consent in KwaZulu Natal: Universal Human Rights?

Abstract:In 2007 South Africa's Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, which had been debated since 1999. The law includes a statutory provision with new legal definitions of rape and consent. Influenced by Western human rights ideology and vocabulary, the Sexual Offences Act represents one form of discourse in South Africa about sexual coercion and consent. By using ethnographic methods, this article examines the wide disparity between some of the state discourses about coercion and consent and local beliefs and practices about the meanings of these terms in the Zulu township of Mpophomeni. Proponents of South Africa's new democracy often ignore poor young women's and men's local understandings of rape and of the violence they encounter on a daily basis. Against this background, the article offers recommendations to improve the current law and its effectiveness.

‘The City Is Ours’: The Temporal Construction of Dominance among Poor Young Men on the Street in a Brazilian Elite Neighbourhood

AbstractThis article explores how young Brazilian men from poorer areas transcend socio-geographical boundaries by inhabiting the streets of an elite neighbourhood. Drawing on several periods of qualitative fieldwork, the article demonstrates the complex and dynamic character of the relationship between the young men and the formal residents and traders. It reveals temporal patterns of day and night, where the young men's social positions shift from subordinate diurnal (as serving workers) to dominant nocturnal positions (as potential attackers). Analysing the interactional patterns between the two groups regarding sentiments of trust and fear, the multifaceted and sometimes incoherent relations reveal social inclusion and exclusion as well as street protection and crime. The article also dismantles some common dichotomies within research on crime and fear of crime, emphasising that these young men are both victims and offenders, fearful and fearsome.

Looking for the one(s): young love and urban poverty in The Gambia

This paper explores the strategic use of sexual relationships in bolstering the economic well-being of young low-income women and men in The Gambia, West Africa. While other studies of sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond have demonstrated the importance of intimate (and often cross-generational) relationships for young women as a means of accessing resources, less is known in this regard about their male counterparts. This study points to the increasingly prominent place of cross-generational relationships, related to international tourism, in the livelihood strategies of young men struggling for employment in a constrained labour market. For poor young Gambian women and men, resource scarcity seems to be associated with a prioritization of the instrumental and material over the affective or recreational value of sexual partnerships, often resulting in multiple, concurrent relations. However, manifold considerations come into play in the relationship decisions of young women and men, indicating the importance of close attention to social and cultural as well as economic factors.

“What are you Representing?” Contesting Identities of Incarcerated Youth

This article explores how incarcerated youth and adult supervisors contest claims to identity via language of “representing”. Comparing how youth and adults “represent” in discussions of their own past and future selves sheds light on the constrained universe of discourse within which both groups work to express identities and on the basis of which we counsel, mentor, and educate young people. Acknowledging these constraints can contribute to understanding what I call exceptionalism—the idea that only exceptional poor and raced young men, through great personal effort and sacrifice, may resist the lure of the “street”. I conclude by discussing implications of this work for education and youth development work both inside and beyond the juvenile justice system as well as for research across lines of difference by committed “outsiders”.

Fatal Transactions: Conflict Diamonds and the (Anti)Terrorist Consumer

This paper brings recent research on the geographies of commodities and the politics of ethical consumption to bear on contemporary spaces of violence. Focusing on the discourse of “terror”, it discusses the tactics and ambivalences of a human rights advocacy campaign seeking to stop the financing of belligerents by the diamond trade. I argue that the campaign successfully reconnected “violent” spaces of exploitation and “peaceful” spaces of consumption and achieved significant trade reforms in the diamond sector. Yet, with its inclusion of racialized images of Africa, its responsiveness to policy compromises and its overtaking by savvy marketing by Western mining companies, the campaign and its mediatization also had ambivalent outcomes: burnishing the “reputable” character of Western industrialized mining interests at the expense of their historical accountability, indiscriminately associating terror with poor young African men, and overlooking state violence.

Gang Violence in the Postindustrial Era

Economic restructuring may have as many implications for today's gangs as the industrial revolution did for yesterday's. In recent decades, there have been increases in the number of male gangs, and probably of female gangs, in cities and towns of all sizes, and there have been large increases in gang violence. Many gangs operate as well-armed economic units inside a vastly expanded informal economy. Gang membership now extends for many males into their adult years. More violence-prone prison gangs may be claiming a new role in the outside community, complicating an already dangerous situation. Finally, the contrast between media images of the rich and famous and limited real-life opportunities may have encouraged many poor young men to abandon conventional norms and sell drugs instead. When combined with the abundance of handguns and the need to regulate the illegal drug business, the emphasis on profits may be changing the way young adult gang members define their gangs and the nature of postindustrial ...

The rise of the modern addict.

In the mid-19th century, most American addicts were genteel women hooked on opiates through medical treatment. Within a few decades, a new group of addicts emerged--pleasure users who patronized opium dens. As local laws closed dens, the pleasure users--most often poor young men in northern cities--began experimenting with cocaine and heroin, causing an alarmed government to launch an escalating campaign to root out the new deviant subculture. Various treatment efforts were instituted, from short-lived clinics to federal narcotics farms. This drug use epidemic peaked in the 1920s and was essentially quelled by World War II. This paper briefly discusses differences between early British and US policies and the contemporary implications of this early drug use epidemic.