Masculinities in Africa beyond crisis: complexity, fluidity, and intersectionality

Abstract

Rapidly changing and divergent everyday realities on the African continent call for a more differentiated examination of the complex experiences and representations of men than is offered by the discourse on the ‘crisis of masculinity’, which depicts men as being criminal, violent, dominant, and irresponsible. By contrast, this introduction to the themed section ‘Masculinities in Africa beyond Crisis: Complexity, Fluidity, and Intersectionality’ aims to engage critically with the concept of hegemonic masculinity and argues that multiple images of masculinities co-exist in Africa and beyond. To comprehend new discourses and practices around masculinities, we must consider the question of how masculinities emerge. Discourses and practices relating to masculinities and manhood are situationally and relationally adopted, contested, transformed, and reconfigured. In this special issue, we closely analyse individual’s daily efforts ‘to be “good men”, as well as “good at” being men’ (Inhorn and Isidoros 2018, 2) in times of political, social, and economic transformations. We aim at examining how ideas and practices of masculinities shape individual and collective agency on social, economic, political, and cultural levels. Paying attention to the historical, geographical, and cultural diversities of masculinities in African countries, we discuss how images of masculinities evolve and become manifest in everyday life and analyse how these imaginations circulate within translocal and transnational spaces. We thereby pay close attention to how gender intersects with other identities, such as age, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.