Recently I was at a catered lunch, where one had to queue up to get one’s food. The man ahead of me in the queue took the fish option. I avoided the meat too. The man after me in the queue, by contrast, loaded up his plate with meat. The catering woman, looking on, said so all could hear: “Now there’s a real man.”
That incident would make a good opportunity to analyse the social construction of gender roles. What is the connection between meat-eating and masculinity, say, as perceived in an African context? Why do you have to eat meat to be a real man?
This is the kind of question addressed in African Masculinities, one of a recent range of books touching on gender construction and, more broadly, identity. “Masculinity studies” is the hot new area of academic inquiry, emerging from the broader category of gender studies, which is itself a descendant of the women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in American academe.
Feminism kicked this off, in parallel with the birth of what is now called “African American studies”. The leading American critic Harold Bloom has called this kind of thing “the school of resentment”, the upsurge in study devoted to those previously marginalised; he is not interested in ideas such as “affirmation”, which are often central to women’s and black demands for their own disciplines. But why shouldn’t hitherto marginalised groups come at academic study from a new angle? Why shouldn’t they question the canon of received wisdom, read that canon in a new way or add to the canon of materials deemed fit for study? Bloom himself is clearly resentful because the centrality of the straight white male is now under fire.
Just as feminism asked us to question the “natural” categories of male and female, and to wonder how such categories articulated power relations in society, the new gender studies asks us to consider the ways in which society constructs and delineates gender categories across the board — not just male/female but masculine/feminine (not the same thing!), straight/gay, and even “normal”/”perverse”.
We are now aware that biology is not necessarily destiny, and that much of what societies in the past have seen as natural gender roles, which is to say power relations, are in fact not legislated by nature but by society. It is now possible to speak of “masculinities”, plural, as an acknowledgement that there is no one special way in which men should be or behave, but a range of options — though they may be more or less approved by any particular society at any specific time. History plays a part, too: it is clear that the definitions of masculinity have changed in the past, and can change again. From this basic idea flow a variety of responses, and the flow of such books into the South African market has become a mini-flood.
African Masculinities is subtitled Men in Africa from the Late 19th Century to the Present (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press), and is edited by Lahouchine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell. Morrell is a key pioneer in this area of study in South Africa, having edited Changing Men in South Africa and written From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal 1880-1920. Most of the contributors to African Masculinities work in the United States, but most also have African origins.
The book comes at the issue from a stimulatingly wide range of perspectives, whether the historical view offered by Arthur F Saint-Aubin in “A Grammar of Black Masculinity”, looking at the way racial discourse sexualised black men, or Lindsay Clowes’s examination of changing presentations of manhood in Drum magazine between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s. Some essays take a literary approach, looking at, for instance, the “troubled masculinities” revealed in the writings of Bloke Modisane or Tsitsi Dangarembga, while others are more sociological: Rob Pattman tells of how male students at the University of Botswana divided themselves into rival groups, the “Ugandans” and the “Cats”, based on perceptions of masculine roles, and Deevia Bhana looks at “Violence and the Gendered Negotiation of Masculinity Among Young Black School Boys in South Africa”.
African Masculinities is an academic work, but few of the essays are hard to read for the layperson. It provides a fascinating and thoroughgoing introduction to masculinity studies in an African context, opening up a field that is being ploughed by others in different, but no less interesting, ways.
Men Behaving Differently: South African Men Since 1994 (Double Storey) is edited by Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, both of whom have posts at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser). This book focuses more narrowly on this country, and comes up with some striking contributions to the debate.
Deborah Posel’s essay, “Baby Rape: Unmaking Secrets of Sexual Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, is one of the strongest and most contentious pieces here, an “attempt to decipher how and why the politics of sexual violence have changed in South Africa”. Posel looks at what the phenomenon of “baby rape” says about perceptions of masculinity and the “moral crisis” often seen to be emerging in post-apartheid South Africa; and how those intersect with notions of shame and confession, secrecy and visibility.
Other pieces in the book consider South African masculinity in relation to prison (Sasha Gear), rape (Isak Niehaus), and the gender roles assumed around the practice of hairdressing in Ermelo (Reid). All make for absorbing and informative reading.
Taking such issues further (and often further into turgidity, as far as the writing is concerned), Performing Queer: Shaping Sexualities 1994-2004 (Kwela) is edited by Mikki van Zyl and Melissa Steyn. This volume is part of the Social Identities series edited by the wonderfully named Abebe Zegeye, and, as the series title indicates, is concerned with the operation of identities and sexualities in relation to social norms and changes.
Many of the pieces here are concerned with gay/lesbian identities in post-apartheid South Africa, with what Walker in Men Behaving Differently calls “Constitutional sexuality”. Our renowned Constitution gives us freedom from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but we still have to deal with issues such as race, HIV, sexual violence, and so on. Oh, and being fat — as Van Zyl asks in her essay “fat like the sun”, “What must I, as a middle-aged (fat) white Afrikaner woman in a same-sex relationship, do to become worthy of being an Afrikaan?” Bernadette Muthien, too, in her piece, asks questions about “identities” and how they “interact with race/ethnicity, culture, nationality, sexuality, class and spirituality, in an increasingly globalised world”.
These sorts of autobiographical-polemical pieces demonstrate how the struggle around the formation of identities is being waged in South Africa today, as do the pieces drawing on field work. Both white and black people are trying to work out how their identities place them in society, or how society constructs their identities. Sylvester Charles Rankhotha’s chapter in Performing Queer is titled simply “How Black Men Involved in Same-Sex Relationships Construct Their Masculinities”, going on to discuss precisely that, while the titles of various sections in the book indicate the issues at hand: “Seeking Belonging” is one; “Jostling Hegemonies” is another. It is interesting to note how certain identities seem open to question and inner contradiction while others (“Afrikaan” or African) seem idealised, and that the idea of going “beyond identity” is broached less often than the title’s echo of the identity- deconstructing Judith Butler (or the use of “queer”) would seem to hint.
The birth of “Constitutional sexuality” in South Africa is documented with exemplary fullness and attention to detail in Sex and Politics in South Africa (Double Storey), edited by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin and Graeme Reid. The title makes it sound as though it takes in a broader domain than it does (what about Glenda Kemp?), but what it does is enough. Using analytical and reflective essays alongside indispensable material from the Gay and Lesbian Archives, Sex and Politics in South Africa reconstructs “the weaving of a pink thread in the tapestry of the Rainbow Nation” and the background to that achievement. Its focus is chiefly on the coming into being of the “equality clause” in the Constitution, driven as it was by a gay/lesbian movement that learned to slot itself into the discourse of universal human rights soon after the African National Congress did the same. It does not shy away from detailing internal conflicts among gay/lesbian activists, either, but that makes the overarching story all the more riveting.
On the wider issue of identities and society, into which the sexualities debate must insert itself, a useful and stimulating volume is Under Construction: “Race” and Identity in South Africa Today (Heinemann). Edited by Natasha Distiller and Melissa Steyn, it is wide-ranging in both subject matter and style, combining poetry, fiction and cartoons with analytical pieces. It treats race in the broadest manner possible, which is helpful, while teasing out some of the significant minutiae of the way we see and talk about race. Literature (K Sello Duiker, JM Coetzee), art such as Steven Cohen’s, music such as hip-hop, and the iconic figure of Brenda Fassie all form focal points for discussion.
Still more generally, for some insight into the state of the debate globally, Double Storey have taken on the Keywords series from the Alliance of Independent Publishers in Paris. Their motto is “For a different kind of globalisation”, and the two titles of interest here are Gender and Identity. Making use of contributors from places as far-flung as China, India, the Arab world and indeed South Africa, these texts should help locate the discussion in a global context, while maintaining awareness (and insisting on the usefulness) of the specificity of local insights.
And then, threatening to blow all this social-constructionist theory out the water, and reasserting a connection between biology and destiny, there is Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation by Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman (the former delighting in the wonderful job title: Reader in personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London). Controversial discoveries to do with “the gay gene” or possible mental/cognitive differences between gay and straight people have led to the trumpeting of homosexuality as genetically or hormonally determined, which is a boon to activists who can now tell Christian and other fundamentalists that we are not choosing to be sinful. God, or Nature, or Whatever, made us like that, so how can it be a sin?
At least one leading South Africa academic, Sue van Zyl at Wits, has delivered a paper saying that the new genetic idea chucks all the psycho- babble about sexual identity out the window. Indeed, Wilson and Rahman’s admirably lucid book demonstrates that psychosocial theories of parental “nurture” as the root of sexual orientation (including Freudian developmental notions and the “common-sense” notion of transmission through child abuse) do not sustain scientific correlation.
So there is something to it, as Born Gay argues. But it is all still very confusing, as they also note, and none of this means that social-constructionist theory is no good. If there is a genetic or hormonal base to sexual identity, it may or may not be “switched on” by a variety of environmental factors, and it will in any case emerge in ways appropriate to the society in which it is born. Remember the Native American tribes who allowed people to choose, at puberty, if they wanted to be male or female? Regardless of actual biological gender, they could decide to spend their lives as either, as long as they then fulfilled the social expectations of that gender — men must hunt, women must cook.
We, today, may not feel there is much choice involved in our sexual orientations, and we certainly insist on protection from bigots and equality before the law, but we also know — and these many excellent books show — that we still have the capacity to make and remake ourselves, our societies and our futures, for better or worse.