‘We Do Not Cook, We Only Assist Them’: Constructions of Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gendered Activity

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Journal of Psychology in Africa

ISSN: 1433-0237 (Print) 1815-5626 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpia20

‘We Do Not Cook, We Only Assist Them’:

Constructions of Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gendered Activity

Kopano Ratele, Tamara Shefer, Anna Strebel & Elron Fouten

To cite this article: Kopano Ratele, Tamara Shefer, Anna Strebel & Elron Fouten (2010) ‘We Do Not Cook, We Only Assist Them’: Constructions of Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gendered Activity, Journal of Psychology in Africa, 20:4, 557-567, DOI: 10.1080/14330237.2010.10820414 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14330237.2010.10820414

Published online: 01 May 2014.

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‘We Do Not Cook, We Only Assist Them’: Constructions of Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gendered Activity

Kopano Ratele

University of South Africa/Medical Research Council Tamara Shefer

University of the Western Cape Anna Strebel

Independent Researcher Elron Fouten

Rhodes University

Address correspondence to: Kopano Ratele, Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit, Medical Research Council, PO BOX 19070, Tygerberg, 7505, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

Masculinity Through Gendered Activity

Ratele et al.

This article discusses how the gendering of activity by boys coincides with, contests or recreates constructions of hegemonic masculinity in the context of South Africa. The study used a qualitative methodology including a series of three focus groups with 14-16 year-old boys across six different schools in the Western Cape, South Africa. A discursive analysis in which particular attention was paid to how participants construct their masculinity in relation to what they may or may not do as boys/men was conducted. The findings foreground how articulations of masculinity by boys are characterised by efforts to gender activity in the process of, amongst other things, counter blushing – meaning not to be regarded as girl-like or a moffie, or other derogatory notions that do not fit with hegemonic masculinity in a particular context. However, resistances and alternative views on what boys/men can and cannot do also emerged, highlighting the contested nature of current constructions of masculinity among young people in South Africa.

Keywords: hegemonic masculinity, gender, activities, practices, performance, discourse analysis, heterosexual, gay, focus groups, femininity

The concept of masculinity has of late inspired a growing body of writing in South Africa (e.g.,Agenda, 1998;Journal of Southern African Studies, 1998; Gibson & Hardon, 2005; Mor- rell, 2001; Reid & Walker, 2005; Shefer, Ratele, Strebel, Shabalala & Buikema, 2007) and other countries on the African continent (e.g., Lindsay & Miescher, 2003, Ouzgane & Morrell, 2005). Disciplined inquiries by scholars of gender and other fields in Africa, which centralise the notion of masculinity, follow earlier interest in regions such as the Western Pacific, Europe and North America (e.g., Carrigan, Connell & Lee, 1985;

Connell, 1989; Hearn, 1987; Kimmel, 1987; Staples, 1982).

The Value of the Concept of Masculinities in Africa The concept of masculinity/masculinities remains elusive to define. Its meanings are multiple and contested. Its employ- ment is not infrequently contradictory. As Clatterbaugh (1998, p. 27) wrote over a decade ago, ‘it may well be the best kept se- cret of the literature on masculinities that we have an extremely ill-defined idea of what we are talking about’. The situation has not changed over time and may have even worsened. In countries which are beset by wars, socio-economic weaknesses, political crises, civil strife from unfinished revolutions such as some in Africa, the concept is often tactlessly employed in what may otherwise be well-intentioned attempts to explain the more immediate objects of concern – males and their relational prac-

tices to the world and themselves. Arguably, the notion of masculinity can never be of lasting use if it does not also assist in elucidating the currents and nature of African societies, besides explaining male and female lives and relations in them.

The confusion around the concept notwithstanding, there are a number of valuable ideas that have emerged from studies on boys and men which have been handy in thinking about Afri- can boyhood and manhood. Researchers have observed that masculinities are shaped by historical conditions and cultural context. Hunter (2004, p. 124), for example, has argued that

‘persistent unemployment coupled with continued agrarian col- lapse … set the conditions for the substantial reworking of masculinities and sexual practices over the last two decades’ in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This he shows in relation to the ideas ofisokaandumnumzana.Isokais a discursive practice found among amaZulu which has undergone changes over time, historically referring to a male who is old enough to com- mence courtship and, in contemporary Zulu society, to a man who is, in a manner of speaking, a hit with the ladies.

Umnumzana, also of Zulu origin, literally means one who heads a homestead, yet more commonly nowadays is used as a form of address for men – irrespective of having a home.

Psychology in Africa ISSN 1433-0237

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Competing Masculinities

Studies have supported the thesis that, instead of a single immobile object, there are competing masculinities in any one situation and period (see Kimmel, Hearn, & Connell, 2005). In this regard, reference can be made to Raymond Suttner’s (2008) work, one aim of which has been to gender the historical underground political activity of the African National Congress (ANC), the current ruling party in South Africa. His work high- lights the existence of several expressions of masculinities, including heroic masculinity, during different historical periods of the national liberation struggle. He states that ‘there are distinct masculinist discourses’, and more interestingly, ‘modes of signi- fying masculinity through dress, discourse, various changing cultural activities, gestures, songs, dances and other forms of conduct, which are generally but not exclusively adopted, re- quired by or attributed to men as emblematic of the masculinity or some of the masculinities at a particular time and of a particular character’ (p. 2). He also contends that ‘in most of ANC history and certainly in the 21st century, there are a range of coex- isting signifiers of masculinity, each manifesting the ways of a range of people, who coexist with men representing other masculinities, within the same organisation’ (Suttner, 2008, p. 22).

On a general note, according to Carrigan and colleagues (1985, p. 598), there are different histories around the world, such as that of women’s struggles, of homosexuality or of national liberation, which ‘oblige us to think of masculinity not as a single object with its own history, but as being constantly constructed within the history of an evolving social structure, a structure of sexual power relations’.

At the same time, theory and research have supported the fact that there is always as it were the “unblushing male”, in Goffman’s (1963, p. 128) words, in a particular cultural situation or during any historical period. The unblushing male corre- sponds to important aspects of what would later be termed so- cially dominant or hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan et al., 1985;

Connell, 1995, 2000; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005;

Donaldson, 1993). Hegemony in this case refers to the embodi- ment of the culturally most valued way of being a man or boy, and against whom all other men and boys measure their practice in a particular place and time. This male represents normative, commanding masculinity, what Ratele (2006) has else- where referred to as ‘ruling masculinity’. Such a boy or man is made of the stuff, colloquially speaking, girls and women want and other males want to have (Connell, 1995; Fouten, 2006;

Luyt & Foster, 2001; Skelton, 1997; Wetherell & Edley 1999).

Therefore, even though there are a variety of masculinities within a society, there are, concurrently, questions that recur in the development of boys and men in very culturally dissimilar societies (Flood, 2005).

Masculinity is a set of Changing, Embodied, Relational Practices

From the ideas above, masculinity is better imaginable as an inconstant configuration of things or practices constitutive of boys and men as a gender (Carrigan et al., 1985). These things are not fixed seeing as they are historically and culturally contin- gent. They are primarily things that males do or do not do as part of group which define them as men or boys. They surface in varying forms in the lives of males (and as such affect females in different ways) in diverse societies and different historical periods. They derive their gender significance from and because they are attached to a range of masculine “power sources” in the particular societies and cultures (see Hoffman, 2001). Most

of all, these are practices whose overriding aim is to produce or reproduce the structural superiority of males over females and of some males over other males in a society (Connell &

Messerschmidt, 2005; Ratele, 2008). Instead of boys and men as a homogenous, unchanging mass, then, these insights about male lives and relations suggest it is more useful to conceive of masculinity as a set of mobile, embodied, relational activities and performances.

Goals of the Study

This article critically discusses articulations of masculinities from a study of boys across different contexts in the Western Cape, South Africa. The article seeks to show that talk of masculinities by boys can be viewed as attempts to counter blushing, through giving gender to their own activities and the activities of others. Doing chores at home, or playing sport, or drinking alcohol, or any other human activity, becomes important not only in itself, but mainly because boys mark these activities as made for one sex and not another. There is evidence to suspect that girls, grown women and grown men, do the same.

In turn, these activities are employed to produce males (and females) as gendered subjects. The study on which the article is based sought to answer a number of questions, but here we focus on one: how does the gendering of activity by boys coincide with, contest or recreate constructions of the ruling masculinity in the context of South Africa?

Central to the descriptions and critical discussion presented here is the assumption that the gendering of activity and accounting of masculinity are contextually grounded. Social context in South Africa continues to be moulded by historical and cultural legacies of gender discrimination, as well as race divisions (which are still for the most part imbricated with household income level) generated by colonialism, racist industrialisation and apartheid. These contexts and legacies then curve back to shape articulations that individual boys in the Western Cape and the country deploy to make sense of their lives and the world.

Method

Study Strategy

It is important to take note of the fact that we were interested in agreement amongst the boys, as much as we were in contestations on the elements of masculinities as articulated by participants. Also important was the age cohort of the boys who participated in the study, between 14 to 16 years of age, tradi- tionally constructed as the period of adolescence in the devel- opmental psychology literature, and as a period characterised by new volatile emotions and cognitive development (see e.g., Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1980). While ideas about inevitable

‘storm and stress’ in adolescence advanced by the American psychologist Stanley Hall were challenged by later develop- mental research and theory, there is nevertheless concurrence that this is a time of transition and potentially great challenge for young people (Moore & Rosenthal, 1993). In the light of the bur- den related to HIV/AIDS and injury evident in many places in Af- rica, but especially salient in South Africa, the challenges for young males, coupled with the powerful associations of masculinity with risk and competition, raises concern for boys going through this period of development.

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Participants and Setting

Data for the study are from focus group interviews with 14 to 16-year-old boys from six high schools in the Western Cape.

For ethical reasons, the boys and the schools will remain un- named. Pseudonyms are used for the participants, and the schools will be identified with different three letter codes:

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School Shi is in a historically white, middle income urban area

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School San is located in a historically black urban area

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School Kla is in a historically coloured urban area

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School Mas is a informal, shack settlement in a peri-urban area

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School Pin is located in a historically coloured urban area with a Muslim majority

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School Hay is in a historically black rural area Data Collection

The focus group interview was the chosen method of data collection. Three cumulative focus groups of approximately one hour in duration each were held by two facilitators with each group of boys. The first author and/or a master of psychology student were the primary facilitators of the group interviews.

The interviews were in the language of choice of participants, which was either isiXhosa, English or Afrikaans. The discussions were guided by a semi-structured interview schedule. The focus group discussions were simultaneously audio- and video recorded once informed consent was gained from participants.

The first focus group interviews revolved around the meaning of masculinity for the participants. Examples of questions asked in the first sessions include: What does it mean to be a boy/young man? What have been/are the influences on your identity as man? What do you like/not like about being a man?

How does sexuality relate to being a man? And what do you find pleasureable/distasteful about sexuality?

The second focus group interviews centred around risky behaviours. Questions that guided the second set of sessions include: What’s risky about being a young man today? What are the attractions of such risky behaviours? What influences you in how you respond to risky behaviours?

The third set of sessions focussed on alternative ways of doing gender and sexuality. Examples of questions asked include:

Are there alternative ways of being male? Are there other forms of sexuality that appeal to you? What would you like to change about the risks you take in your life? How would you deal with pressure from peers / girlfriends?

As part of ascertaining the credibility and trustworthiness of the data and the process, the facilitators of the focus group interviews went over the process and impressions after each session and checked their own understandings of the discussion.

The focus group discussions were transcribed and, where the language used in the focus group was isiXhosa or Afrikaans, translated into English for the purposes of analysis. Following the transcriptions and translation, and before the analysis, the interview transcriptions and video recordings of the sessions were shared with the rest of the research team and discussed at a workshop.

The study, research processes, and storage and uses of the data complied with standard social science ethical procedures.

Procedures

Based on the assumption about the impact of popular music culture in boys’ lives, music videos were used to stimulate discussions. The music videos were played at the start of each focus group session, with the aim of highlighting a different ex- pression of masculinity. The first session was introduced with the video of the rap artist 50 Cents,In Da Club, which depicts men doing physical exercises and in a dance club along with women dressed in lingerie or sleep wear. The second session was introduced withGangsta,another video from the same artist, which portrays men armed with pistols, fighting, drinking and smoking.Sorry Miss Jacksonfrom the group Outkast was employed to introduce the final session. The videos were chosen by the researchers as they include contrasting and diverse constructions of masculinity and male performance, mostly hegemonic but also some more marginal ways of being a man.

Data Analysis

Analysis of data was grounded in both the verbatim transcripts and the video tapes of the focus group discussion. Fo- cusing on both the language used by the boys and their gestures, a cultural studies-influenced discourse analysis (e.g., see Burman & Parker, 1993; Hall, 1981;Levett, Kottler, Burman &

Parker, 1997;Parker, 1988; van Dijk, 1993) was used to ap- proach the transcripts and visuals. The team of researchers read and re-read, viewed and re-viewed the “texts”, trying to understand not only what was said but also tone of voice. The aim was not only who understand who was talking about what, but more crucially against whom or what were the words directed.

Attention was also paid to body language and wherever possible eye movements. All of this was aimed at gaining a fuller and more complex appreciation of ways in which boys perform masculinities through both language and body. We were not con- cerned here so much with individual narratives but more with the argumentation and discussion in the groups, and what sorts of discourses were drawn on by participants to co-create the meanings of masculinity: how they made sense of being a boy and a man.

Results

Take Care of the Wife,Ncedisa(Assist) and Walk Normal:

Boyhood as Activity

One of the things this study found is that boys attach their boyhood to activities. There is not one but rather an array of embodied activities that boys identify as making them boys (and by contrast, as making girls into who they are). Accounts of the boys about themselves are grounded in bodily activities which they conceive of as definitive of masculinity, while simultaneously segregating boys as a group from other boys and girls, and at once defining them as a gender.

Embodied activity means conduct which is attached to and expressed through the body, as well as its appearances, gestures or positioning. Boys who are consciously supportive of or complicit with ruling ideas of boyhood in the specific context learn to steer away from certain activities and to engage in particular activities. Boys who do not fit the stereotype of masculinity, or do not live up to the demands of the ruling ideas, are constructed as shameful and spurned. In his submission to the 49^th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Flood (2005, p. 1) states that ‘certain forms of gender and sexuality are dominant (culturally celebrated and social sanctioned) in any context, while other forms are stigmatized,

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silenced and punished. Boys and young men may live up to dominant forms of masculinity and heterosexuality or may resist and reject them, and they do either in the shadow of collectively structured gender relations (in peer interactions, school cultures and other social institutions) and discourses of gender (in media and popular culture)’.

Though impalpable, then, the set of embodied acts and

‘looking’ and positions that needs avoiding for young males to be seen by other boys as boys materialises inthatway of looking or personality,thatwalk, sitting posture or job,thathand movement, word, voice pitch or way of dressing. But above all, activities that need avoiding are evaded because they are as it were ‘colonised’ by girls and those boys/men who do not fit hegemonic standards of masculinity in a particular context, such as boys and men who are constructed as or who self-identify as gay, as will be unpacked further below. In other words, staying away from or trashing gay and girl activities is what makes growing males real boys and boys real. What gays and girls do are the two points of difference that boys have to guard themselves against, and thus generated the greatest volume of discussion in focus groups.

What are the activities that gays and girls engage in that boys need to keep away from? It turns out there are numerous activities, some obvious and others less so, that make a boy less of boy.

Real Men Don’t Cook, They Assist

In the focus group discussions at the school San there is a long discussion on the dos and don’ts for boys and men that hinge around a classic gendered division of labour:

Interviewer: Let us talk about the men that you saw on the video, there are those who like to exercise and those who like to be at home doing chores. Then what type of men would you really wish to be?

Maxie: I am that guy who likes to do household chores.

Interviewer: Is that a type of guy you like yourself?

Maxie: I also like to do repairs because my mother cannot do them.

Interviewer: Why can’t she do that?

Jabu: She cannot climb up the roof because her duty is to cook.

Interviewer: There are men who can cook, so what do women do while men are cooking?

Jabu: We do not cook, we only assist them.

Interviewer: Ok, do you mean cooking is only meant for women?

(A number of voices):Yes, we cannot cook nice food but they can cook delicious food.

Commenting on the Outkast video where the musicians are trying to fix a leaking roof, Maxie starts off with a non-hegemonic claim that he likes to do household chores. Yet the conversation turns very quickly to claims that a woman can’t fix a roof, and what she can do is to fix food. Jabu’s response is a curious one – mother cannot climb roofs because her task is to cook: two activities set against each other, two activities which separate roof-climbers from cooks, masculinity from femininity, boys from their mothers, and girls from their fathers.

The interviewer then states that “there are men who can cook”. Cooking, the respondent makes a rejoinder, emphati- cally, is female work. He will be adamant enough for this discus-

sion to take some time. He will repeat and fight for his view from different angles, not giving up in his efforts to separate male from female stuff. It is of the essence to make note at this moment of the fact that Jabu’s response is a direct counter to Maxie’s attempt to destabilise the normative gendered division of labour with his opening line that he is ‘the guy who likes to do household chores.” Maxie, while running the risk of being constructed as gay or ostracised for his views, also represents a contestation of hegemonic masculinity that is present in the dia- logues and that pivots around a range of different currencies such as liberal humanist notions of individual choice and human rights discourse.

In answer to the interviewer’s query, the answer offered is

“Asipheki, qha siyabancedisa.” (We do not cook, we only assist them). When pressed further with, “Ok, do you mean cooking is only meant for women?” his answer is, “Ewe, kuba thina sipheka ukutya okubi, bona bapheka kamnandi.” (Yes, we cannot cook nice food but they can cook delicious food.) For this participant at least, the best males can do in the kitchen is to assist females, and an apparently complementary strategy of praise for women’s cooking is used to legitimate men’s avoid- ance of a central role in such domestic labour.

Perhaps this has as much to do with lack of knowledge as with gender stereotypes. In fact, we think what needs further empirical testing is whether, after boys have been exposed to men who cook, in their homes and professionally, they would continue to hold such views. With this it is suggested that masculinity accounts are connected to personal experience of boys, family income levels, national development, and cultural receptivity.

At the same time, we are aware that grown males and females who have been exposed to males who cook in their homes or professionally, continue to decouple cooking from things males do, defining, if not verbally at least in their actions, masculinity by separating it from such an activity. Still, if masculinity is not an essence of persons in male bodies, is it possible that boys’ views about masculinity can be altered with exposure to different experiences of gender practice from the ones with which they are familiar?

In spite of the views just presented, an interesting thing is about to happen in the group, something that, we want to stress, happens quite often. Nevertheless, researchers often overlook its occurrence, set more on showing masculine dominance and less on acknowledging ambivalence, insecurity, and other emotions and cognitions that contradict the cultural positions allo- cated to boys and men over girls and women. In the extract below, the gendering of the activities of cooking and roof-climbing is challenged by another member of the group. An informative exchange ensues, involving fathers, socio-cultural influences, money, changing practices, love relationships between hus- bands and wives, children’s responsibility to parents, which we quote at length:

Maxie: I disagree with him because it goes with the feeling. If you want to cook you can cook and if your mother feels like fixing the roof, she can.

Interviewer: How do you know that anyone can fix the roof?

Maxie: The decision lies with an individual.

Interviewer: But you are not born with that, you acquired it somewhere?

Maxie: That is external environmental influence.

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Interviewer: Do you consider those influences correct or in- correct?

Maxie: For example, a bachelor does all the chores himself.

Jabu: But men have money, they can still hire someone to assist them.

Maxie: Men differ financially, those who do not have enough money to hire an assistant to do the chores, do everything themselves.

Jabu: He can still look for a girlfriend to help him.

Interviewer: Do you think things can be easy when your mother or sister is at home?

Jabu: Yes so that I could assist when necessary.

Zola: I do understand their opinions, but I also want to raise a point that nowadays you will find women playing soccer and there are those who work deep in the mines as we speak so there should be no restrictions.

Maxie: Talking from experience, at home my father buys tripe, cleans and cooks it himself. When he is done then my mother dishes out the food.

Interviewer: Ok.

Zola: It is also pleasing to see parents sharing the chores at home.

Maxie: That is an indication of a good relationship.

Interviewer: Do you appreciate that?

Zola: Yes, it is excellent.

Maxie: It shows love for each other.

Zola: It shows that he cares and there is warmth in the fam- ily.

Interviewer: Do you cook (directed to an individual)?

Loyiso: Yes, I do cook but I have stopped because my sister is around now.

Interviewer: Ok.

Jabu: Men can assist with chores but they are not obliged.

Maxie: It is unfair for women because they prepare three meals a day while you can fix a roof only for two hours and come and watch her doing the routine work.

Jabu: But, children are there to assist their parents.

Interviewer: Do you mean that children are supposed to help their parents?

Jabu: Children’s responsibility is to clean the yard.

Maxie: Regardless of different opinions that we have, I still maintain that parents ought to share chores. For example, if there is a newborn baby in the family, why can’t you help her with the laundry and taking care of the baby?

Jabu:And if you are not employed, she can even leave you to take care of the baby.

Maxie: Supposing you mother is ill, that means you will not help her with the laundry?

Jabu: I can hire someone.

Maxie: So if you cannot help her with the laundry, it means that you would buy disposable nappies. I for one do not have a problem with doing the laundry.

(School San)

Mac an Ghaill (1994, p. 102) argues that there is ‘a complex inner-drama of individual insecurity and low self-esteem’,

among boys that needs paying attention to. The psycho-cultural drama in the lives of boys, we would say, which may be about insecurities of growing up, but having little to do with low self-esteem, is an attempt to reconcile the dichotomy in many boys’

lives of hanging between a projected public confidence and their private anxieties.

Among many other things, what the long exchange above indicates is that these gendered allocation of roles and respon- sibilities are not uncontested, and that they are interwoven with a range of complex and shifting sentiments about boys, girls, parental relationships, and children in relation to adults. A gender equity discourse on equal sharing in households is clearly jostling with traditional divisions of labour and traditional adult-children hierarchies, so that confusion about who should do what, and what that doing might mean for one’s personal po- sition is evident. Financial means are seen as a way of assisting to create some balance without impacting on traditional gender roles – thus men who have money can attempt to assist by hir- ing others to do the labour that public discourse tells us should be shared. The complex interplay of class and material context with gender, highlighted by other local studies with boys and girls (see for example, Bhana & Pattman, 2009) allowing men who have the means a way to ‘save face’ with respect to performing gender, while also performing ‘lovingly’, beingniceand politically correct, is evident here.

The discussion is further revealing of contestations about ruling notions of gender as it moves on to the washing of baby’s cloth nappies. One boy sees this as women’s work, and would come back to it more than once. This is where ilobola gets drawn into the discussion and becomes central.Ilobolarefers to the marriage practices the family of the man enters into with the family of the woman whom he desires to make his wife, practices which hinge around gifts and include blankets, mats, pots, clothes, and whatever items may be reasonably asked for or are believed to be liked by a specified family member of the bride, as well as currency (which used to be cattle but with urbanisa- tion has increasingly taken the form of cash). The family to be given gifts include not just the father and mother, but also the bride’s grandparents, siblings, uncles and aunts.

The respondent claims thatilobolaentitles him to expect a female to work for him, but again note the contestation:

Jabu: She is obliged to do everything because I have paid ilobola.

Loyiso: But bear in mind that whoever you hire can still se- duce you.

Maxie: Helping each other has nothing to do with ilobola but with love.

Loyiso: So if you take ilobola as a priority, it means you do not love you partner.

Jabu: No, I do love her but ilobola equates chores.

Maxie: That is totally not a sign of love but abuse.

Loyiso: You remind me of men who usually complain about soaked nappies because of the unpleasant smell.

Jabu: I will never wash nappies.

Interviewer: What else can’t you do?

Jabu: I do not wash dishes and also do not cook.

Interviewer: What exactly do you do at home?

Jabu: I make up my bed. I can help around the house with other chores but not nappies.

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Interviewer: Why?

Jabu: It is a woman’s duty; otherwise it will cause me a spell.

Maxie: It won’t.

Interviewer: What do you mean by that?

Jabu: It is something that will make you get horrible pimples.

Maxie: That is just laziness; a baby’s dung does not cause anyone to get pimples.

Interviewer: Why don’t you want to wash nappies?

Jabu: I married her so that she can wash nappies.

Interviewer: Did you marry her to wash nappies?

Jabu: No, but it is one of her duties.

Maxie: What if your wife is ill?

Jabu: I can hire someone.

Maxie: What if you do not have money?

Loyiso: What if you are not employed and the only employed person is your wife. Who is going to do the chores?

Jabu: My sister.

Loyiso: What if your sister is married?

Jabu: I think there will be someone who can help me. I still maintain that I would rather do the cleaning than washing nappies.

(School San)

What is taking place here, it would appear, is what might be called the psycho-cultural reproduction of social power. The boys are recalling from their individual lives and reactivating, dramatising, in the social context of the focus groups,sliversof learning and habitual cognitions and emotions about the structure of culture. They arebitsof learning because the lessons being articulated are not – and never even among adult males will be – formal and coherent theories about the relation of males to females.

In that structure of culture, which boys learn and steadily get to inhabit, men and women are unequal. In this logic men’s duty is to take care of the perceived hard stuff of the home, like fixing roofs, and women’s tasks are cooking and taking care of children. Whether this is in fact what is being represented in their own life situations (where the majority of women earn a living, and many are breadwinners and even heads of households) makes little difference in the light of the power of the discursive reproduction of what they ‘know’ about what it means, or should mean, to be a man. They are talking of their fathers and uncles and adult brothers who (should) go out to work so that they can take care of their mothers, aunts and sisters. Coupled with these accounts of gender and activity, boys in the study main- tained that a male has a duty towards and an authority over females. The boys said that a male is born to head a household, and a man must care for his wife:

Jabu: Men are always considered as the head of the house- hold while women are subordinates to men. Therefore a woman is not allowed to equate her husband when it comes to household decision-making.

(School San)

Adiel: He must take care of his wife … You get those men who marry a woman but then tomorrow they divorce her, then they leave her maybe with a baby.

Abdul: When he does his duty towards his wife and his fam- ily and his home.

(School Pin)

There are grounds to assume that a great number of boys around South Africa use more or less the same terms to talk of masculinity, just as surely there are grounds to extend the as- sumptions to the rest of the African continent and other parts of the world (see Silberschmidt, 1999).

What is fascinating in these accounts is that the basic elements that are supposed to make up the unblushing adult man are known by boys from differing backgrounds. When a boy claims that a man ‘must take care of his wife’, he is, first of all, not being original. In this discursive reproduction, he is not defining manhood or masculinity by referring to the biology of the human male – not primarily. Such biological knowledge is rela- tively easier to pin down: having a penis, being on average rela- tively bigger sized than females, and perhaps facial hair. Never- theless, and vitally, human anatomy is a lesson that boys, and girls, do get taught too – a lesson that generally always raises giggles in a class of teenagers such as in this study. When a school boy maintains that masculinity is about a man doing his

‘duty towards his wife and his family and his home’, he has the body of a human male at the front of his mind, but only as crucial foundation to further associations. More importantly, the boy is reporting on social activities which, the argument goes, ‘if you are man, you are supposed to engage in and know’.

Interacting with gender differentiations that boys make is the sexual severing that boys make again and again. Whereas gender differencing is about the social separation of what is female from what is male, heterosexuality is used to distance femininity from masculinity. Many boys, like many men, find it imperative to prove their heterosexuality. In doing this they tend to emphasise what has been called “male sexual drive discourse”

by Wendy Hollway (1989). While there was some resistance to talking too blatantly about sexual practices, the imperative to have (hetero)sex emerges simply and clearly when a respondent said “… the problem with abstinence is that you might go crazy, if you are a man” (School San). In this account boys have to have sex because being sexually inactive is pathologised.

Similarly, in the discussion that follows, when asked “what does it mean to be a man?” the participant would respond, “When you have a girlfriend” (Shi).

Not unlike grown-up men, boys also believe that males more than ‘just’ desire sex. While it is only assumed in the line about abstinence above, the sex a boy desires is with a girl. Ap- parently males, and not females – or at least males more than females – need sex with females on pain of insanity. The male need for heterosexual sex is a maddening potent obligation.

This compulsion for sexual activity is furthermore seen as the centre point of boy-girl relations.

“Hello Doll”

In a previous article (Ratele, Fouten, Shefer, Strebel, Shabalala & Buikema, 2007) we drew the conclusion that a common imperative amongst boys appears to be the drive to differentiate themselves from girls and women, and that a key strategy employed to achieve this separation was to reassert hetero-sexual-normativity, and what we can call, what boysdo, as vital elements of true masculinity. It has now become clear from the above that what hetero-sexuals on the one hand do, and what boys on the other do, are closely tied together but, for greater clarity, must be distinguished from each other.

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Participants clearly needed to differentiate themselves from the homosexual male, or those constructed as effeminate and liking ‘girl stuff’. What girls do as a differentiating line for men is elaborate later. But it was at School Shi where one of the respondents drew the line with respect to gay males for us: “Okay I’m not saying like all gays do that, like some gays you can’t even tell that they gay, [...] among themselves they don’t parade around with it. I don’t mind if they’re like that, but I mean if they walk around going like ‘hello doll’ and that little kiss thingy.” In this boy’s account the problem males have to deal with is ‘camp’

behaviour, with gay acts, with doing gayness openly. Here the boy speaker actually imitated what he took to be the gay behaviour he minds, reinforcing that the gays who are a problem for him are those who ‘speak with their hands’ and ‘parade with it’.

When participants of School Shi were asked how they relate to a student who was singled out for this very behaviour, one of the participants answered, rather wittily, “we try not to”. Another said, “most people put their defences up against people like that’. Yet another simply said, “we don‘t like gays”. And then one of them took it on himself to say, “at least we know everyone here is straight”, as though the researchers might mistake one or all of them for moffies.

In the next extract, which includes the remark on “that little kiss thingy”, the interviewer has just asked “why do you guys treat him differently” (him being the individual at school identified by the boys as gay)?

Interviewer: So why do you guys treat him differently?

Carl: Because of the way he acts. I mean why can’t he just act normally. Why does he have to like put this whole […].

Nathan: I don’t think he has any guy friends. All, all his friends are just girls.

Carl: If he talks normally then he is okay but if he speaks like (swings his hand in front of his chest).

Interviewer: What is act normally, mean? You say he does- n’t act normally. What does it mean to act normal?

Carl: Well I am just saying, like, like act like, I am not saying act like, I act like normal people, or whatever. He like, he like tries to put on a show about this gay kind of […] kind of per- son. Which is stupid! Most, most people just try to, kinda try to put up their defences against people like that, you know?

Byrone: He’s like some […] (group laughs).

Interviewer: Let’s hear from you?

Liam: Maybe that is just how he is. […] he can’t help it. I, I don’t like him personally but maybe that is just how he is, so he…

Evan: Leave him to be.

Liam: Yea.

Clive: […] (group laughs).

Liam: No, shame.

Clive: […]

Michael: Ah no Brad walks like a real girl. I mean he’s like…

(walks in a languorous way, with hands swinging).

Interviewer: So how should he walk? How do men walk?

How do boys walk?

Michael: Normally, just like (walks in the same way as he did before except his hands are in his pockets this time). You walk like you walk, whatever.

Carl: Now Luke, Luke and Brad, both put on the… (swings his one hand).

Nathan: The one has got the hand and the other one walks straight like that.

Carl: Like [...] said I mean a gay guy walks around (swings his hand) like that, like puts on a voice and stuff but, but it’s like, straight people like us we don’t like go ‘look I’m straight and look how I walk properly’ and look, you know.

Interviewer: I’m gonna [...] you on that it’s not true, see it’s not true.

Carl: Okay I’m not saying like all gays do that, like some gays you can’t even tell that they’re gay, [...] among them- selves they don’t parade around with it. I don’t mind if they’re like that, but I mean if they walk around going like ‘hello doll’

and that little kiss thingy …

Nathan: Hey, Carl, don’t speak like that.

Carl: I’m just saying that’s what they do.

A ‘straight’, ‘normal’ boy or man, in other words cannot do certain things, like walking with swinging hands, or doing chores, otherwise he would be gay – which is what makes the idea of queer masculinities something of a conundrum (Ed- wards, 2005). The straight boy or man referred to earlier, the unblushing male, is attractive to males (and females) because he suppresses any queerness and femininity (Phoenix, Frosch &

Pattman, 2003). The body must be disciplined to obey masculine cultural dictates. A boy must watch himself and others constantly, for he cannot afford to be perceived as moffie, sissy, girlish, or he will be, like Luke and Brad the school-boys at School Shi these boys were speaking of, derided and avoided.

The ‘normal’ boy or man it appears is loved by other males, non-erotically, because he embodies the cultural narratives the others must learn to mimic and produce, or, if they are moffies, of which they are the antithesis. In his body, gestures, and speech, this unyielding exemplar life form representsthe thing that other males must inhabit, be, fit themselves to, or otherwise strain against, not-be, disavow. ‘For boys and young men, one of the most significant influences on their social and sexual interactions’, Flood has said, ‘is male-male competition, surveil- lance and discipline. Many boys experience the pressure to prove themselves amongst other boys (and to a lesser extent with girls). Boys can gain status among male peers by demon- strating their prowess in stereotypically masculine traits and pursuits, such as toughness and interpersonal dominance, sporting ability and physical skill, heterosexual achievement and popularity, and humour and banter’ (Flood, 2005, no pages) What we must do to enrich our studies of boys is to return the straight gaze – gather and critically study accounts of ‘a Brad’

and ‘a Luke’ and rub their articulations of queer boyhood against those of ‘straight people like us’ (as one of the boys above says): such a gaze will doubtless broaden studies of boys, simply because the homophobia and hetero-sexualised denigration of boys like Brad and Luke arise from the embodied and expressed questions with which gay boys confront straight boys.

The rejection of the moffie-like gestures, speech acts and activities by one’s body and others’ bodies, was common throughout. The performance of moffie-ness (and ultimately more effeminate masculinity) was what was offensive, rather than gay sexualityper se, highlighting the centrality of activity and appearance in the meaning made of being a boy/man. It seemed important to ‘prove’ yourself as ‘straight’ (and therefore a man) through your behaviour and appearance. As Carrigan

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and colleagues (1985, p. 595) wrote a while back, ‘we would suggest that the evidence about masculinity, and gender relations at large, makes more sense if we recognize that the social practice of gender arises – to borrow some terminology from Sartre – in contradiction to the biological statute.’ It is precisely the property of human sociality that it transcends biological de- termination. To transcend is not to ignore: the bodily dimension remains a presence within the social practice. Not as a ‘base’, but as anobject of practice. Masculinity invests the body. Re- production is a question of strategies. Social relations continu- ously take account of the body and biological process and inter- act with them’.

“Lekker” Girls, Shaped like Coca-Cola, Don’t Drink and Smoke

The gendering of activity in accounting for masculinity by boys is entwined with identities ascribed for girls and women in a society. So in talking about themselves as boys, the boys would be completely lost if they were not able to talk about girls (or non-boys).

It was thus whilst looking for how boys articulate the ways in which individuals turn into men of a particular strain – where we would at the same time hear how, for some of the boys, to be regarded as good-looking a girl or woman needs to have “a pear and Coca-Cola bottle looking shape”, “a nice push-back hairstyle” and “big bum” – that we also picked up this commonsensi- cal yet robust understanding of identities. In so many words, the boys grasp identity as a set of activities. Even while they might not use social scientific language, it was clear to us that some of the participants appeared cognisant of the fact that identities are things people do – in relation to others, imagined or real, with their own and others’ bodies, faces, hair, under their skins, in their inner world. These things individuals do to make identities include how women look – make themselves look, or are pressed or seduced by culture, the media, and manufacturers of goods to look; include what women do to their hair to conform to (or rebel against) normative standards of attractiveness. Doing identity includes accepting that you were born with small but- tocks even though large ones would have been preferable, or having reconstructive surgery, or dressing to appear as if you have a sizable behind. However, it may also include working to change the image of beauty, or otherwise rejecting the preva- lent standards. The main point though is how girls or women look and what they do about their bodies is one of the pegs that mark the borders of masculinity. That is, how girls and women look – having a big bum as one case – is how males should not look if they wish to be considered masculine. Also, evidence of a relationship with those girls and women who fit the ‘correct’ look then shapes the success of the boy or man. More generally, what girls and women are expected to be, according to some of the boys, is physically attractive, whatever the specifics of that may be in any particular culture. Even though it appears to be a positive thing for a girl or woman to be thought of as pleasing to the male eye, there is a serious downside to this, namely, female bodies are turned into objects for male pleasure, and that’s theirraison d’être. These descriptions and contrasts were evident from the beginning in the focus group at School San.

Immediately after the video was shown and the interviewer asked what the group thought of the imagery on the video, the debate is revealing. The respondent makes it known that he loves the beautiful ladies shown in the video “because they carry themselves well”, a formulation that asked to be clarified:

Interviewer: What do you mean when you say they carry themselves well?

Jabu: Like they must not look like boys whilst they are girls.

Interviewer: Ahhaa. How do you describe a girl who you think looks like a boy?

Jabu: Girls with short hair and who do not comb their hair even if it is short and manageable. I like girls with ponytails.

Girls with natural hairstyles do not look attractive.

Good-looking hair needs to be long.

Interviewer: What is your problem about their hair?

Zola: They must have a nice push-back hairstyle.

Interviewer: Are you referring to a ponytail hairstyle?

Jabu: Yes.

Interviewer: What does a ponytail hairstyle do?

Jabu: Or else she must have a twisted hairstyle. In addition they must have a nice female-structured body.

Interviewer: What is your problem about a straight struc- tured looking-body?

Jabu: An attractive body must have a pear and Coca-Cola bottle looking shape.

Interviewer: A bottle of Coca-Cola?

Zola: She must have a big bum, as well.

Interviewer: You want a girl with a big bum?

School San

It is not unexpected that Coca-Cola shapes, a bum, hairstyle, or breasts, biceps or some part of the body or head is an important signifier of femininity, and by contradistinction, of masculinity. It is a well-appreciated fact that in popular, global- ized mass-media driven cultures, beauty and fashion industries trade on these – or rather on the desire for stylized forms of bodies and looks infused into cultures and psyches, in order for the industries to sell products. In the above extract such desire is plainly expressed by Jabu and Zola, and in the focus group discussions at School Kla by Junaid and Jason. As such, it should not be surprising to come across concerns about beauty and appearance in discussions of masculinity.

The same concerns and desires were evident in several of the focus group discussions. The boys at School Kla had their own language to express the same sentiment:

Junaid: The part that I liked in the song was is there in the disco in die jol (in the club or party) in the club with all the women and stuff, that was a kwaai (cool) part. [...]I liked that he was rich. A person could see by the way that he dress that he’s rich and the song was also cool.

Interviewer: What about the women did you like in the video?

Jason: The women were lekker.

Interviewer: Define lekker, explain what is lekker?

Shafiek: They liked the bikinis and stuff.

Jason: The way that they danced.

Achmat: Hulle klouter my hormone.

Interviewer: What did he say?

Abdul: Something about his hormones.

Interviewer: What about his hormones?

Achmat: Hulle klouter my hormones (laughs).

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Interviewer: Say that again, I didn’t hear.

Achmat: Hulle klouter my hormones (laughs).

Interviewer: Klouter hulle jou hormones?

Achmat: Yes (laughs).

Interviewer: Explain that to us, we don’t get it?

Achmat: Na.

Abdul: The women are like an attraction, attraction for him.

Salie: Hulle gee hom lus. They are making him lustful.

Jason: They made him lust after them.

Achmat: Yes the women and the wine (group laughs).

(School Kla)

It seems that beauty or attractiveness is connected not only to bodies but what girls and womendo. Conversely, being a

‘lekker’ girl requires that you ought notto do certain things.

Something that many of the boys in the study had an opinion about was smoking and drinking:

Sipho: Girls who smoke do not look appealing. It is better with boys.

Interviewer: Do you think it is right for a girl to smoke only in the company of other girls?

Sipho: Yes. If a girl smokes in the company of guys, she is putting herself into trouble.

Interviewer: In general terms do you mean she is safe only in girls’ company and not in boys’?

Sipho: Yes, but it is still risky.

Interviewer: Are guys not putting themselves into trouble?

Thabo: It is risky to both groups but guys can control them- selves as compared to girls.

Sibongile: Guys only smoke to soothe their nerves espe- cially when one has five girlfriends.

Interviewer: Do you mean, guys smoke only when they are in deep thought?

Nkosinathi: Girls smoke for fun.

(School Hay)

‘Appealing’ girls are not supposed to smoke or drink. To be very clear, this is not only for reasons of health-risk. Smoking and drinking may be fun but it is bad for your femininity, according to some of the respondents. Boys need to smoke because it helps with soothing their nerves, and they can after all control themselves better than girls, articulating more stereotypic notions that imply male superiority to women.

This theme of girls’ or women’s acts, looks and bodies as a set of contra-distinguishing markers of a ruling masculinity was apparent in other focus groups in other schools. ‘Drinking and smoking is not good forwomen’, one of the respondents at San said. Although everyone drinks in Cape Town, according to one of the boys, indicating that there are equal rights and freedoms for all – which he may have been bemoaning – he could not see himself “engag(ing) in a relationship with a girl who drinks and smokes”. Yet these same activities are acceptable as markers of masculinity.

Conclusion

This article has sought to show that articulations of masculinity by boys are centrally characterised by efforts to gender activity in the process of, amongst other things,counter blushing– meaning not to be regarded as girl-like, a moffie, wuss, wimp or

other derogatory things. The need to counter male blushing is therefore an element in the active repression of appearing gay and girlish. The article argued that the unblushing male is, in other words, a powerful cultural invention within the body of ruling ideas meant to discipline male bodies. However, the unblushing male is not a real person, but rather a set of activities against which boys measure themselves and are measured by other boys. These activities get to be embodied or expressed in forming crucial aspects of ruling masculinity – those things trea- sured by the culture about being a boy or man and against which what is male is weighed up. A boy or man who embodies ruling masculinity is made of the stuff, colloquially speaking, girls and women want, and other males want to have. But does he exist in places in real life, where the sources of masculinities are reduced, societies heavily affected negatively by globalisation, war, disease, epidemic, historical group oppression, hunger, changing traditions, to name some of the sources?

From the contestations in the focus groups it appears that there is not one man or boy, but instead that what is being refer- enced are parts of things many boys or men do. The unblushing male is not so much fabrication as a set of things that are always in-production. These are things the boy or man desires that he will always be able do, or not do, and through these things turn the world into what he wishes it to be. What is understood by boys as masculine should be deemed to be a recurring set of accounts of overt behaviour, cognitions and feelings which at the very moment they are expressed, seeks to gender the very object it speaks of or expresses. At times coercive, but often enough seductive, ruling ideas of boyhood and manhood are deployed by powerful groups and institutions (for example, schools) into the culture to draw or push other groups, institutions and individuals (sports clubs) into the mainstream of gendered power relations (Hearn, 1996). Masculinity self-accounts and accounts about others are thus used to mark a boy who acts in certain ways as real, and another who acts in unac- ceptable ways as less of a boy, or gay or a girl.

On the flipside, these accounts render a girl or woman who is seen as acting in culturally acceptable ways as a real woman, while another who acts in transgressive ways is felt to be manly,

“a ball-breaker”, tomboy, thus less of a woman. Accordingly, parallel to ruling discourses of femininity, dominating accounts of activities as masculine or feminine signal how practices, iden- tification and relations around gender and sexuality within a culture are conceived, while at the same time refracting ongoing contests between females and males as well as amongst males.

While appearing to be a discussion about boys and men, it must be concluded that a discussion of masculinity is, even if not overtly or at times unclear to some of the discussants, always surreptitiously or unwittingly a discussion about ‘gays’ or those marked as gay, as well as about females; is a discussion about the meaning of activities in a culture, including the meaning of gestures, bodies, emotional displays and even thoughts.

Although the discussion the boys in the study had in the focus groups participates in other discussion too – as we have suggested, such as discussions about income, personal experience, national development, and cultural receptivity – a discussion about boy- and girl-hood, man- and womanhood, and straight and gay masculinities is always a debate on what bodies are permitted to do. Boys’ accounts of masculinity, which accounts always freight the way activity is gendered, are thus at-

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