Fashioning Masculinity, the event we anticipated and prepared for over the last seven months has come and gone. We are hoping the event starts a tradition of thinking about men as men with nuanced and careful deliberation.
In the first of a series of posts, I want to tell you some about the making of the event, and let you into some of the unseen activities that went into this new tradition we are trying to start. Now granted, we borrowed, like most traditions do from elsewhere. Masculinities and the thinking around it and its contestations has a history and we are inheritors and borrowers and also we would like to think innovators in this conversation about the makings of men.
The history of masculinity, as a concept that is good to think with, is tied to feminism of course and the recognition that gender is an organizing feature of society. Feminism, in turn, moves to resist patriarchy and overturn the oppression of women. Thus, the genesis of masculinity studies is aimed at understanding men as men. Feminist masculinity scholars and activists are connected by the desire to uncover how and why men as a gender receive patriarchal dividends from the subjugation of females, de Beauvoir's second sex. Progressive black masculinity studies are provoked by black men's condition as oppressed, suffering from an unformed, deformed or denied masculinity, escaping into alcohol, drugs, rape, unsafe sex and beating black women. (This reality of black women bearing the brunt of black men's anger of course occurs in the world despite the mostly unfounded fears and discourse of white women as the object of black men's insatiable lusts). Right there we can see the ties to Black Studies. And then of course there is Critical Race and Subaltern Studies which make sense of black man's violence through the concepts of alienation and hypermasculinity driven by deprivation and inequality.
Kopano Ratele's innovation in this tradition is to consider black men not merely from their pains and psychic wounds but from their transcendence of their wounds. For every one black man who does not abuse a woman, there are at least three who live in the world with kindness, gentleness, community of spirit and care; this despite suffering the pangs of hunger, want in a world that maligns and wounds them in ways too large to comprehend and so small we barely think it significant. How have these men been fashioned? Which traditions of care and self-love are they drawing upon? And how can we reproduce these traditions to create a kinder, gentler and enabling world for everyone? The stories of the good and nurturing black father, lover, son, brother, friend, colleague and comrade, the ones we can learn from, are largely unwritten, untold and unexplored. Some of these stories are as inspiring as they are common like that of Tyrese Bani and Vuyani Mnyamana, young men who grew up hard but have learned that disciplining the body can be a vehicle to changing oneself on the route to elsewhere. The statuesque Tyrese Bani from Port Elizabeth is a model and budding photographer doing his Bachelor of Arts degree. The articulate science student, body-builder Vuyani Mnyamana, has a low centre of gravity and a cool demeanour. Both are completing their studies at the University of the Western Cape. When they start to talk about working on their bodies at the gym, getting up at 5am before they go to their classes, something else you can't miss is how men are made, not born. You also see and hear what is there, and made possible by other black men, but very much ignored in favour of the tsotsi, skelm and swagerring dominant image of young black men.
 Model Tyrese Bani and body-builder Vuyani Mnyamana, both students at UWC, in conversation with masculinity scholar Kopano Ratele and Kharnita Mohamed (not in picture) of the Institute for Social and Health Science's Programme on Traditions and Transformation, at the Fashioning Masculinity event on 16 August 2011 |
This starting premise, of masculinity of care, is what founded the Fashioning Masculinity event, and the series of events to follow: a critical exploration of black manhood that is not mired in despair. We desire to start a conversation about a black man many of us recognise in our everyday dealings with the men who sit around our boardroom tables, in our offices, at our dinner tables and who share our beds, our homes, our blood. When we stop to think about them, these good black men, we blindly count ourselves lucky and treat them as exceptions and not as a seventy-five percent majority, so as to comfortably hold onto the stereotypes of that other black man raging in a township, a suburb, or a mansion somewhere.
Are we trying to excuse and ignore the pain and suffering caused by the angry black man so wounded he is cannibalising himself and those around him? No! We are trying to make visible the unacknowledged, uncelebrated, everyday and kind black manhoods that already exist. We are trying to surface the kind of masculinities that already exist not in our academic perches but in the same township, suburb or mansion in the tired and yet persevering voice of a man trying to advise another on a better way to live with himself and those who love and/or would love him. These are the masculinities that men like Stephen Mentor, men's programme coordinator at CASE, is also trying to bring to the surface. Working out of Hanover Park on the Cape flats, a place riven by endemic structural, direct, and psychical violence Mentor and his male and female colleagues are trying to heal and change men's relationshisp with other men and women in their lives so as to change the place.
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| Stephen Mentor, men's programme coordinator at CASE, speaking about presenting the organisation's work in Hanover Park at the Fashioning Masculinity event |
In allowing ourselves to rethink traditions of masculinity, we hope to provide space for positive traditions that exist to thrive. One thing that I was reminded of by Nadia Sanger and Melanie Judge at the event is that masculinity is not just tied to having a penis. Disconnecting masculinity from penises brings us to the optimistic realisation that traditions can be transformed to make all of us, men and women, girls and boys, flourish.
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| Feminists Nadia Sanger and Melanie Judge at Fashioning Masculinity event, MRC, 16 August 2011 |
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