Fashioning Masculinity Retrospective 1 - Making Visible Uncelebrated Black Manhoods

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.



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.
  




Feminists Nadia Sanger and Melanie Judge at Fashioning Masculinity event, MRC, 16 August 2011

 

Address by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe during the National Women’s Conference, Boksburg, Gauteng, 03 August 2011

Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe addressing the National Women's Conference, Boksburg, Gauteng, 3 August 2011:

"Changing patriarchal attitudes and practices goes to the centre of democracy and the spirit of the South African Constitution. 

The opportunity is that there is recognition that patriarchy and economic exclusion are the root of discrimination against women and a lot of attempts are being made through policies and legislation at government level, and research and training at civil society level, to change these attitudes.

Policy and legislation are critical in changing practices based on patriarchal attitudes and behaviour but it is difficult to legislate the attitudes away.  For this purpose, there needs to be work that is focusing on attitudinal change.

The global strategy to transform gender relations should also include continuous education and the creation of spaces to debate issues relating to patriarchy, women’s empowerment and gender equality."

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=4583

Update on Fashioning Masculinity event

Fashioning Masculinity, which  we spoke of a few weeks ago, is ready to roll in. The event will take place on Tuesday 16 August 2011, 8h30 to 17h00, at the Medical Research Council in Parow, Cape Town. An interdisciplinary event hosted by UNISA's Institute for Social and Health Sciences  in collaboration with the MRC-UNISA Safety and Peace Promoion Research Unit,  the event is meant to be a stage to kindle some new and less despairing thinking about masculinities and the way in which manhood is fashioned, created, styled, imagined, challenged, enlarged, reworked - you name it. Another set of thoughts I hope will come through is on traditions: what are the traditions of thinking about and fashioning masculinities. After all, this event is part of the Changing Traditions Project. Regardless, the programme so far is highly promising. Proposed topics include 'what defines men'; 'female masculinities'; 'metrosexuality'; 'Zimbabwean masculinities in exile'; 'black rage and Baldwin, Biko, Malcolm, Mbeki, and Malema'; 'masculinities in the police'; 'masculinities in the army', 'rugby'; 'blindess', 'male-biased architecture'. I'm looking forward to some ideas about men and traditions of masculine self-fashioning, representation and stylization coming through. I think there is still space. If you are around Cape Town, then, make contact either with Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0398 or Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535.

Fantasies about the unsettled past at the Apartheid Archives Conference

It turns out that nostalgia is a heck of messy thing. I guess memory itself is always less than entirely reliable, indeed wily. That much was clear at the 3^rd Apartheid Archives Conference that happened this past week, 25 to 29 July 2011, at Wits University, under the theme ‘narratives, nostalgia and nationhoods’. I know that I am part of the Apartheid Archives Project (AAP) network, but this baby was a mind-blowing event.

Nostalgia, since it reflects and restores, certainly isn’t simple sentimental reminiscence. In fact, being often a treacherous fantasy, it can betray memory, fictionalise reality. A painful yearning for home that is no longer there, it is also not just bittersweet memory for the past, pining for lost time. Instead nostalgia, a symbolic return, often coloured by trauma, stages an encounter between history and memory while trying to act as guide for the future that often is coloured by unspoken shame and guilt in the present. To reflect on nostalgia is to encounter the good old bad days, what Professor Leswin Laubscher, member of AAP, referred to as ‘ache for an absent other, or an irretrievable self’.



Leswin Laubscher at 3AAC. The poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon
is in the background (photo: Ratele).

But you probably knew that from Jacob Dlamini’s book. Or maybe not. Or like Eric Miyeni and others dislike the book. Dlamini, a homeboy of mine whom I met for the first time at 3AAC, where he was one of 8 keynote speakers, has been getting a lot of grief from Miyeni, Andile Mngxitama, and others for his book Native Nostalgia for remembering black life in apartheid-era Katlehong the way he does. Mngxitama says it reproduces a white perspective; refers to the book as giving an Oprahesque view of township existence. In Miyeni’s words, Dlamini’s book’s premise is “so sickening I decided never to read it”. How does that work: getting sick from imagining what a book contains? Come on Mr Miyeni, you do your name an injustice. The chutzpah of writing in a column about a book you have not read is admirable; but I think it gives a crutch to the pervasive anti-book reading culture that I want to think a book-writing man like you in a more calmer moment would not support. Read the book, only then you can trash it. Actually, in my reading of Native Nostalgia, which featured so much at the 3AAC, it does not say “we had fun under apartheid”. It illustrates that black people actually had a life even then, despite the inhumanity of the regime. In my book, the book is an uncomfortably fine read (except for the earlier parts when it keeps on promising what it will do later), at once touching and maddening and provocative. I recommend it, precisely because of how he interprets subjects who would say “Things were better under apartheid”. Gutsy, smart writing.  

Jacob Dlamini at 3AAC (photo: Ratele)



Although all this black-on-black skirmish is about what the apartheid past looked like, did to us, what we did and were back then, and how to think about the unsetlled past, I am getting a bit sidetracked aren't I. Back to the AAC. Things were never what they seemed under apartheid, needless to say. In trying to engineer a future white utopia, apartheid turned out to be a pornographic fantasy gone awry, and not just for many ordinary black people. But it didn’t just end there. The regime did not only soil the future for black people (and white people), it would make the past a shameful place for any ethical white person. Anyhow, that’s what I got at 3AAC.



You might not be familiar with the AAP, so here is what it is all about. A loose formation of international group of actors from different fields of enquiry and practice, it’s led by Professors Norman Duncan (in picture below) and Garth Stevens. The main goal is to make sense of South Africans’ stories (but not only South African stories) of racism under the old regime. It is interested in the persisting consequences of the past racist order on personal and collective functioning in today’s society. Yes, indeed, the past is dead, long live the past! The Project “is fundamentally premised on the understanding that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed.” It argues that “it is important for South African society [and doubtless any society which has pasts characterised by racist division, legislated or otherwise] to review, so as to acknowledge and deal with its past, in order to better manage its present and future.”



Norman Duncan, leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)

Zimitri Erasmus and Garth Stevens, co-leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)



With nostalgia and nationhoods added to the foundational theme of narrative then, 3AAC was set to offer a stage “to explore various deployments of nostalgia in personal narratives of the past, emphasising its critical and creative possibilities.” And what possibilities! As a few people said, at the end you were not sure what nostalgia is and what the past wasn’t. Along the way, we lost nationhoods, but that is ok; we had our hands and ears full of memories of the unsettled pasts, nevermind the future. As the organisers had promised, the conference brought “into conversation a diversity of scholars critically engaged with nostalgia as a means to expand social memory, reclaim and reconfigure subjugated knowledge(s) and experience(s), to produce new knowledge(s) and new subjectivities; surface ways in which nostalgia is employed not only as a means of reconstructing historical knowledge and subjectivities but also as ‘a set of resources for the future’”. It did all of that. And how it did it. Then it did some: how did they manage to have Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Chris van Wyk, Hugh Masekela, Zoe Wicomb all there, I ask? Impressive.

I am not sure why I experienced a pleasant feeling seeing the trumpet master Bra Hugh helping the 1991 Literture Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (see a not very clear image below). I enjoyed the work that Kentridge presented. Chris van Wyk talked about township dogs, and he was tears-down-the-cheeks-fall-off-the-chair hilarious. Wicomb, who was generous with her time to the conference, having given one of the keynote addresses and sitting through all of the conference talks, read a new story in progress. She is intriguing, even from her look, Wicomb is. The five artists were brought together for the event moderated by another fine South African, Mark Gevisser, the biographer of Thabo Mbeki. It was unbelievable stuff; perhaps historical. You had to be there to experience it. Make a date to be at the next AAC in 2013 when it is likely to be next staged. 

Hugh Masekela helping Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (photo: Ratele).

Traditions of service

So, off we went to Zambia to present at the 6th African Regional Safe Communities Conference. It was a good conference. A lot of people who are invested in doing the painstaking work of attempting to create a safer, more peaceful, kinder and gentler world for all.

Anyway whilst in Livingstone, I went to the ATM to do my bit for the Zambian economy and of course to buy some commodified tradition to make my Zambian experience authentic. As you get to know me, you will learn I get attached to particular machines in foreign countries. My first meeting with that particular ATM had been spectacularly successful the day before. The next day however though this machine greeted me cordially, it could not assist me. So, off I went to the next machine feeling a little rejected and disappointed (well actually a lot disappointed and rejected). A long queue informed me that it was not merely me that the other machine had refused service to. This cheered me up,  no-one after all, likes to be the sole rejectee of their favorite machine.

One of my fellow rejectees however, was rejected again at the new machine and what was more had just been robbed by the new machine. It had taken his money out of his account without giving him any Zambian Kwachas in return. Aw, I commisserated even though I really didn't care about his plight and was convinced that the new machine would never do to special special me what it had done to him.

Well, I'm sure you know ... do I have to say it? Really, I mean, really? So, the new machine took my money out of my account and did not give me Kwachas to buy more things I don't really need but am convinced I do.

I went inside to the bank. The bank incidentally was inside a Shoprite (a South African supermarket chain). I spoke to the woman behind the counter cordially and told her about the new machine. Was I shocked when she said well, there is nothing she can do. I should take my ATM slip and go back to South Africa and have my bank resolve it. Nothing, she wanted to do nothing. She wanted me to meekly go away and not bother her with the theft of my money by her bank's machine.

Can you tell I kicked up a ruckus and refused to enter the bank to take the scene I was creating out of the public eye. No, their bank had robbed me, I said loudly, and they would not do anything and so forth. Give me some proof to take home, I insisted. No, she said she couldn't do anything. Not check the thieving ATM which was sending in a queue of people behind me to complain about the theft of their money. Eventually one of her male colleagues slipped her a form to give to me about twenty minutes, a lot of loud insistence and a good deal of lost faith in the Zambian banking system later. I filled it in, they stamped it, I asked why they could not have just given me the form in the first place. It was only for Zambian customers, foreigners had to go home and fill in their own countries forms or something responsibility-shirking like that.

I don't know how it works in Zambia but in South Africa when you interact with an institution, you have to follow the tradition of providing a paper trail. I went to my bank, exhausted and saddened, my memory of Zambia now clouded by the machines who would not care for me and the bankers who would refuse to right the wrongs of their machines. I took my bank my little form and told my sad story. My bank official was horrified, that I, a citizen of this wondrous land could be so misused in that foreign place. She cared for me. She called the other banking people and made them care about my sad little story and the twenty minutes she spent with me felt like she was making Herculean banking efforts for me.

And there it was, a tradition of service. I didn't care if I got my money back. I cared that I was cared for by an impersonal institution. Institutions who set down policies, dry, standardised boring to read policies about customer service set traditions of caring or uncaring as the case may be. Although I am with my bank for financial reasons, on the day their traditions and policies of care enfolded me, they now have my loyalty. I did get my money back, in two weeks. Not because my bank is caring but because I had insisted on following authorising traditions by demanding a piece of paper as witness to back up my claim. I broke the tradition of silent consumer who has been cheated in Zambia.

So, what do we get out of that. I do not trust the Zambian banking system, their policies are uncaring of me. South Africa is much much better. And all the machines are my friend.

Public Seminar on Masculinities, Gender-based Violence Prevention and Gender Equality in the Global South

Sonke Gender Justice Network, Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust, and the Women’s Health Unit at the University of Cape Town will be hosting a public seminar under the title: Conversations on Masculinities, Gender-based Violence Prevention and Gender Equality in the Global South. The seminar is to be held on Monday 8^th August 2011, 17h30 to 19h30, at the Lesley Social Sciences Building, University of Cape Town. The speakers are Dr Gary Barker, founding director of Instituto Promundo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Washington, DC, USA who is also founding co-chair of the Global MenEngage Alliance; Mazibuko Jara, Senior Researcher in the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Kopano Ratele, Professor in the Institute of Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa, who is also co-director of the Medical Research Council-University of South Africa's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit and member of Sonke Gender Justice Network board. Professor Diane Cooper, Director of Women's Health Research Unit in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at University of Cape Town will act moderator.

Fashioning Masculinity

Fashioning masculinity is an interdisciplinary event hosted by the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ (ISHS) Programme on Traditions and Transformation (POTT) Changing Traditions strategic project. This event will be focused on men and the ways in which they are fashioned and fashion themselves.

Men fashion themselves every day, through the clothes they wear, the demeanor they inhabit and/or the bodies they build and groom. Men’s clothes and bodies signify social meanings like status, geographic location, race, ethnicity, affiliations, aspiration and generation. Even the absence of ‘conscious’ self-stylization is gendered. Both a mechanic in grease-covered overalls and a male executive in his uniform, the corporate suit express particular kinds of masculinity. Men’s bodies and clothing act as visual symbols of different types of manhood. Clothing and particular kinds of bodies therefore enable and produce articulations of differing masculinities. However, neither clothing nor the bodies of men exist outside of tradition as they are subject to a system of recognition. We assume a man in a suit is some kind of corporate executive and a man in grease-covered overalls is a mechanic as these are their traditional forms of attire. This event will look at this relationship between fashioning, masculinity and tradition.

Fashioning masculinity aims to enable interesting and inventive ideas to emerge about tradition and the traditions, historical and contemporary of masculine self-fashioning, men’s representation and stylization in the streets, media and fashion industry.

Fashioning Masculinity will launch the Changing Traditions Project 2011 theme - Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. It is the first of three events and will culminate in the biennial travelling pitso in Ethiopia in November. Changing Traditions’ is a trans-disciplinary, international and Africa-centered undertaking that focuses on the traditions surrounding the production of wealth, identity, peace, and equality.

You are cordially invited to submit an abstract for Fashioning Masculinity. Please distribute the call for participation widely.

Deadline for abstracts: 25 July 2011

For further information contact:

Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0478

Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535