Masculinities Under Neoliberalism 9781350221307, 9781783607662, 9781783607655

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Jane Bristol-Rhys, an associate professor of anthropology, has been at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, since 2001. She has focused on Emirati society, the layers of connectivity that bind migrants to their sponsors in the UAE and migration to the Gulf generally. Luisa Enria recently submitted her PhD thesis at Oxford University’s Department of International Development. Her research focuses on youth in Sierra Leone’s urban informal economy and the relationship between economic marginality and political mobilization. She has also worked as a researcher for various organizations including: Oxfam’s Women’s Collective Action project and International Alert’s research project on youth employment programming in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Joe Hayns is a DPhil candidate in social anthropology at Oxford University. His research is on the various ways that working-class Moroccans respond to massed tourism in Marrakech, where he lived for twenty months during 2013–14. He is particularly interested in how international tourism relates to class, race and gender conflicts, and in developing a politically useful anthropology. Chris Haywood is a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University and has been writing within the field of men and masculinities over the past twenty years. He is a co-author of The Sociology of Men and Masculinity (with M. Mac an Ghaill), Gender, Culture and Society (with M. Mac an Ghaill, Macmillan, 2007) and Education and Masculinities (with M. Mac an Ghaill, Routledge,

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2013). He teaches modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level and is currently supervising PhD students from Thailand, China, Syria, UK, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. Diana Jeater is an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies. She currently teaches African history at Goldsmiths College, London and religious studies at the Open University. Researching on Zimbabwe for over thirty years, her pathbreaking work has covered issues of gender, sexuality, religion, law, language and belief. Underlying all of her work is a concern about the submerged legacies of colonialism, about how power operates in everyday life and about how claims to knowledge about Africans’ lived experience are constructed and validated within the academy. Xiaodong Lin is a lecturer in sociology at the University of York and has been writing within the field of men, masculinities and migration. He is the author of Gender, Modernity and Male Migrant Workers in China: Becoming a ‘Modern’ Man (Routledge, 2013). The book was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2014. He has been teaching in the areas of gender and sexuality, migration and tourism, and culture, society and globalization. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill is a professor of sociology at Newman University, Birmingham. He has published widely in the field of men and masculinities. He is the author of The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling (OUP, 1994) and Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas (ed., OUP, 1996); and co-author of The Sociology of Men and Masculinity (with C. Haywood), Gender, Culture and Society (with C. Haywood, Macmillan, 2007) and Gender and Education (ed. with M. Arnot, Routledge, 2006). He has supervised several PhD students from China, Taiwan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Carmen McLeod is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, working on the Leverhulme Trust funded programme, Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities. She is conducting research on the construction of transparency discourses in relation to animal laboratory research, and also the role of stakeholders and the public

x | Masculinities under Neoliberalism in the regulation of animal use. She is also interested in applying ethnographic methods to explore debates around controversial emerging technologies. Carmen has published on ethics and hunting, and openness and animal experimentation. Jonathan Neale studied social anthropology at LSE doing fieldwork with Afghan nomads, and social history at Warwick writing a thesis on mutinies in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy. Jonathan has recently retired as senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University. His publications include: The Cutlass and The Lash (Pluto, 1985), Mutineers (Redwords, 1998), The American War: Vietnam 1960–1975 (Bookmarks, 2001), Tigers of the Snow: Sherpa Climbers (Abacus, 2003), You are G8, We are 6 Billion: The Truth behind the Genoa Protests (Vision, 2002), What’s Wrong with America? (Fusion Press, 2004) on neoliberalism and Stop Global Warming (Bookmarks, 2008) on the politics of climate change. Jonathan worked for nine years as an abortion counsellor in a feminist collective, and for four years as an HIV counsellor in the NHS. He is international secretary of the Campaign against Climate Change, and the editor of One Million Climate Jobs. Rachel O’Neill is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI) at King’s College London. With an interest in gendered and sexual subjectivities, her work cuts across the disciplines of sociology, psychology and cultural studies to examine contemporary configurations of intimacy and power. Caroline Osella, reader in social anthropology at SOAS, London, has worked since 1989 in Kerala, South India and with Malayali migrants in the Gulf States. Her broadest research interest has always been the ways in which projects of identity crafting are brought back to the body, while socially constructed bodies are differentiated to produce difference and to forge social hierarchies. Several of her publications concern Indian masculinities. Adriana Piscitelli is a feminist social anthropologist, professor at the State University of Campinas Brazil (Unicamp), National Science Research Council researcher, and senior researcher and associate coordinator of Unicamp’s Centre for Gender Studies (PAGU). During

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the last fifteen years she has been engaged in studies focusing on the transnational sex and marriage markets. She is author of ‘Erotics, Love and Violence: European Women’s Travels in the Northeast of Brazil’, Gender, Place and Culture (2015), ‘Transnational Sisterhood? Brazilian Feminisms Facing Prostitution’, Latin American Policy (Vol. 5, No. 5, 2014), ‘Revisiting Notions of Sex Trafficking and Victims’, Vibrant, (Vol. 9, No. 1, 2012), ‘Looking for New Worlds: Brazilian Women as International Migrants’, Signs (Vol. 33, 2008), ‘Tropical Sex in a European Country: Brazilian Women’s Migration to Italy in the Frame of International Sex Tourism’, Estudos Feministas (Vol. 4, 2007) and ‘Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the Northeast of Brazil’, Sexualities (Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007). John Spall is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Sussex, working on a project on masculinities amongst war veterans in Huambo, Angola. Before this he was working as a research and communications assistant on the MICROCON project at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, having previously worked as a researcher at the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre at the University of Birmingham. He has an MSc in development studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and a BA in English Literature and French from the University of Leeds. William Tantam is currently working towards the completion of his thesis at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also an associate lecturer in anthropology. The focus of his thesis is football and aspects of age and migration in Jamaica. Tantam is particularly interested in how the popularity of football intersects with aspects of globalization and social inequalities. Penny Vera-Sanso is senior lecturer in development studies and social anthropology at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on ageing, gender (including masculinity) and poverty in urban and rural India, directed multidisciplinary, international research projects on ageing and poverty and made two documentaries on older people in India, The Forgotten Generation and We’re Still Working. She is currently developing research on older people’s social and economic life in the London Borough of Hackney, UK.

xii | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Charlie Walker is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southampton. His research has explored the production of class, gender and spatial inequalities in Russia and the former Soviet Union, particularly through young people’s transitions to adulthood. His most recent work addresses sources of and barriers to wellbeing amongst Russian men employed in blue-collar professions. He is the author of Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Russia: Vocational Youth in Transition (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Innovations in Youth Research (Palgrave, 2012) and Youth and Social Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2012). Ross Wignall recently completed his DPhil in anthropology at the University of Sussex and is now teaching courses on gender, kinship and economic anthropology. His work focuses on the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), using it as a lens to understand the impact of global processes of morality, religious outgrowth and international development on the lives and identities of young men. His DPhil research stems from several years working in the charity sector, most recently with disadvantaged young people in Brighton, and is based around a course in sports leadership and youth empowerment which he taught at YMCA centres in both the UK and The Gambia, comparing the operations of the YMCA in both locations.

PREFACE

This book began with a suggestion Frank put to Andrea one evening, in the midst of a workshop called ‘Undressing Patriarchy’. Pointing out that Dislocating Masculinity – edited by Andrea and Nancy in 1994 – would be 20 years old in the coming year, Frank proposed an event to revisit the book, convene the original authors and younger scholars who had been inspired by it and reflect on its legacy. Travel, children and busy lives lived in different cities had eaten up the years, and it had been more than a decade since Andrea and Nancy had last seen each other. Frank’s idea drew us back together. Frank had been Andrea’s student, as Andrea had been Nancy’s; there were 20 years between Frank and Andrea, and between Andrea and Nancy. We’d each come of age in different times, shaped by the politics and ideas of the moment. Our intellectual trajectories had taken us along similar paths, but in quite distinct historical times. Those generational differences and our intellectual commonalities brought something especially exciting to the prospect of working together. Dislocating Masculinity has proved remarkably durable. When we checked, we found to our surprise that peak citations had come in 2012 and 2013, with earlier peaks in 2006 and 2001. There was something there that had fostered a lively interest in the book for two decades, and encouraged people to seek it out – it was long out of print by then. Revisiting the book, we resolved, would be about turning again to consider its premises and its commitment to ethnography as a way of understanding the material experience of men’s lives in different cultural contexts. We were not interested in a starchy replay

xiv | Masculinities under Neoliberalism of the original material. Rather, we were keen to take a fresh look at what was happening to men and masculinities globally in a time of economic crisis and rising inequality. Emerging from a particular moment in gender studies and anthropology, Dislocating Masculinity captured some of the spirit of those times. Men’s studies was only beginning. But in gender studies and more widely in the social sciences, post-structuralist thinking had begun to reverberate in the early 1990s, with the publication of Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble and feminist engagement with the work of Michel Foucault. In anthropology, the ‘reflexive turn’ that had paralysed the discipline into a state of chronic introspection was on the wane. There was a growing hunger for a return to biggerpicture structural concerns. Dislocating Masculinity had drawn together anthropologists, sociologists, literary scholars and historians to address this challenge. Ranging across time and space, from ancient Greece to multi-ethnic London, from rural Zimbabwe to urban Syria, it displayed the contribution that comparative ethnographic research could make to understanding the complex, contingent phenomenon posed by relationships between men and masculinities, in all their plurality. Twenty years later, an entire field of scholarship and practice on men and masculinities has come of age. When we began work on Dislocating Masculinity there was barely half a bookcase worth of books to consult, including ‘Men’s Movement’ tracts and self-help literature. There is now an expansive literature running into hundreds of volumes, special issues and journals dedicated to the study of men and masculinities. International development actors, from the UN to local NGOs, are ‘engaging men and boys’ in gender-equality initiatives, especially in combating violence against women. Amidst the kind of intense misogyny that infuses social media, and in the vitriol about feminism spouted by men on YouTube, other men are a lively part of online communities and conversations geared at interrupting and ending male privilege and creating a more equal world for us all. Certainly things have moved on. Yet in many respects, the continuities over the last two decades are also more than evident. And we have seen the playing out of larger-scale social transformations seeded in the decades preceding the publication of Dislocating Masculinity: the

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economic, social and cultural effects of the economics and politics of neoliberalism. By taking a deliberately intergenerational perspective, we were able to model some of the spirit of the original book in the symposium – which we called ‘Dislocating Masculinity Revisited’ – held at the University of Sussex in July 2014. In the event, a number of those who contributed to the original book were unable to join us. We mourn two of them, Peter Loizos and Helen Kanitkar, who sadly passed away in the intervening years. Two of the original contributors to Dislocating Masculinity were there: Chenjerai Shire and David Forrest. Chenjerai was a regular visitor to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in those days, engaged in chiShona teaching then as now. David, like Andrea, was an undergraduate anthropology student at SOAS when Dislocating Masculinity was first mooted. Nancy’s irreverence for hierarchy and generous inclusiveness made it possible for both to contribute chapters, and Andrea to co-edit the book. We wanted to extend this principle to Dislocating Masculinity Revisited. Our call for papers emphasized our desire to include people at any stage of their studies working with new ethnographic material on men and masculinities, and positively encouraged undergraduate and postgraduate students to submit abstracts and take part. For the lively group of participants our call brought together, the two-day symposium was remarked upon for its inclusivity, as for the flashes of insight and the excitement of being part of such a wideranging intellectual exchange. We set out without a clear sense of where the symposium would lead us. We also departed from conference conventions, and this departure proved so successful and productive of intellectual energy and pleasure it is worth a brief description of the process. Pre-circulated short papers pre-empted the need for presentations. Keynotes – by Raewyn Connell and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill – helped to chart the terrain. ‘Hard talk’ sessions, in which two interlocutors addressed the themes of the workshop in conversation, held us gripped. On the first day, Diana Jeater and Jonathan Neale opened the conversation in a dialogue about capitalism and gender that drew on many decades of engagement with issues of class and difference. On the second day, Rachel O’Neill, who was just finishing fieldwork, and Lewis Turner, a PhD student at SOAS who had yet

xvi | Masculinities under Neoliberalism to start work as an ethnographer in Jordan, reflected the salience of elements of the contemporary that could simply not have been anticipated two decades before. Their perspective was global, and bold. They asked how masculinities have changed in a world now seemingly shrunk by the internet and social media while being stretched to breaking point by the widening divisions between rich and poor, and those at peace and war. Filling the spaces in between was lots of small-group discussion. We put people together to create the greatest diversity we could within each group. Group members were asked to read each other’s papers ahead of time – which they did, understanding that they had this obligation to others, if they hoped others would read their paper in turn. Then, when the groups came together, we borrowed a practice from the US civil rights movement. Each member of the group spoke in turn, and then waited until it was their turn to speak again. They could pass if they wanted. For each group we asked people to chair who had not contributed a paper, who understood how difficult it is for academics to keep their comments to two or three minutes. It worked. As the discussion moved around the circles, people listened to each other carefully and thoughtfully, picked up on what had been said before, and then added their own preoccupations and reflections. This practice brought with it a powerful democratizing influence on our discussions. The round-robin format meant that no one speaker was privileged; nor was any listener left passive. Not having any presentations opened up the entire group to engage with each other. In this way, it defused posturing, and disallowed any one individual from dominating the conversation. Each participant, however senior, confident or vociferous, was expected to wait their turn like any other. There was something engagingly subversive about deploying this as a way of bridging hierarchies of age, of race, of class, of gender, and of English-language competence. One non-native speaker reflected afterwards that this was the most inclusive space they had ever been part of after years in the UK. Others spoke about taking the practice back to their own departments. We went into the symposium with the idea of learning about contemporary twenty-first-century masculinities. After reading

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the papers and listening to two days of lively discussion, it was clear that many different field studies had led all the participants to think together about the consequences of neoliberalism. So we left the symposium with the makings of a book about masculinities under neoliberalism. Masculinities under Neoliberalism affirms, twenty years on, the intention of Dislocating Masculinity: to locate masculinities in the plural and to dislocate the naturalization of privilege, disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions about gender and difference to reveal the materiality of inequality in all its manifestations. We believe that this collection reflects the freshness and nuance of contemporary comparative ethnography, and tells compelling local stories that add texture and ‘thickness’ to our understanding of rapid, uncertain economic change and its social, psychical and cultural consequences. This book, like the symposium, has been an exercise in collaboration and co-creation: something frequently devalued in today’s metrics-driven marketized university system. Our aim has been to celebrate the ways in which academics at all stages of their careers can work together to contribute to the development of a field of thinking and practice. It serves as a powerful reminder of the value of placing collaboration at the root of our scholarship, and with it a practice of dialogue and amity, mentoring and cooperation. As a collective project, the book came together in different stages, in faceto-face meetings in Brighton, Izmir and Oxford, and transnational Skypeing. Together, we worked with authors, edited the chapters and drew this diverse collection of contributions together. Selecting the papers was challenging; in deciding what to include, we sought to emphasize the sheer diversity of topics and contexts, as a way of demonstrating the global reach and evoking the specificity of life under neoliberalism. We’d like to thank all of those who took part in the symposium, and each of us has our own personal debts. Andrea would like to thank Jake and Kate for their regular reminders of the perils of lazy thinking about men, masculinities and power, and TC and Herbert for Brightwich, with all its pleasures; it would have been much harder to finish this book without them. Frank would like to thank Amy, George and Nona for all their support, as well as Nancy, Jonathan

xviii | Masculinities under Neoliberalism and Andrea who have been incredible mentors and partners in this endeavour. Nancy particularly thanks Nick Evans, Pablo Mukherjee and Paru Raman for their support and wisdom from the outset, and Fatma Guven and Joe Hayns-Worthington for opportunities to try out new ideas in North Cyprus and Oxford. Last, but not least, we’d like to thank Jenny Edwards for applying her careful eye and red pen to the manuscript, Kim Walker at Zed Books for her encouragement and support, and Sussex University for providing such a beautiful space for our symposium. Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne Brighton, Budapest and Oxford, July 2015

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: masculinities under neoliberalism Andrea Cornwall

Neoliberalism has wrought far-reaching effects on all of our lives. The promise of new freedoms has produced new desires, new identities and new ways of relating and being. The practices that have come with it have brought new forms of abjection and privation, unspeakable inequalities and an insidious precarity that unsettles the very fabric of our communities. Neoliberal economics and governmentality have changed the working, intimate, social and family lives of people all over the planet, in many ways irrevocably. Old certainties have been shaken. Conventions have crumbled. New ways of life have opened windows into ever more uncertain realities, as people fumble in the new order for ways to survive. These changes are profoundly gendered. This book traces the reverberations – and the dislocations – that have come in the wake of waves of economic liberalization and the marketization of the social. It focuses on male lives lived in neoliberal times in diverse locations. From the sites of filial piety in rural China to the Moroccan su¯q, from a Jamaican football field to the prayer meetings of new Christianities in Zimbabwe, from performances of masculinity in Gambian sports to the stylized seduction techniques taught to would-be lotharios in London, contributors run the gamut of contexts in which to explore masculinities under neoliberalism. In this introduction, I begin with a reflection on the key themes of Dislocating Masculinity (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994) and how they inform our analysis in this collection. Casting these themes in an account of contemporary writing on anthropology, masculinities and neoliberalism, I go on to reflect on what the comparative ethnographies

2 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism presented by the contributors to this collection offer us in advancing our understandings of the reconfiguration of masculinities under neoliberalism.

Dislocating Masculinity revisited Over the last few decades, the study of men and masculinities has grown into a vast, diverse field of scholarship, engagement and practice. Several journals are now dedicated to the publication of an ever-expanding body of work, including Men and Masculinities, Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, Culture, Society & Masculinities, Psychology of Men & Masculinity, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, Masculinities & Social Change, and more. Hundreds of books have been published about men and masculinities, including a multi-volume anthology. It has become standard for gender studies courses to include the study of men and masculinities, and for policy-related work on gender to address ‘men and boys’ as part of achieving ‘gender equality’. Witnessing the surge of interest in the study of men and masculinity in the early 1990s, Dislocating Masculinity opened with two questions. Why had masculinity suddenly become so fashionable? And why had the study of men as men attracted so little anthropological attention up to that point? Dislocating Masculinity brought a feminist perspective to the literature on men by men that had begun to proliferate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called ‘New Men’s Studies’. It was informed by a post-structuralist sensibility and sought to address socialist feminist concerns about the materiality of gender inequality, and took its conceptual orientation from the interventions of feminist anthropologists Gayle Rubin (1975, 1984) and Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988). The first feminist and anthropological collection on men and masculinity, Dislocating Masculinity sought to dislocate pervasive associations of men with power and to demonstrate their contingency. We observed that amidst the emergence of fresh definitions of masculinity, old myths were being affirmed. And we sought both to contextualize the study of men and masculinity in relation to logics of feminism, and to demonstrate what the premises

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and methods of an anthropological approach might offer. Our intention in doing this was explicitly critical and political: We want to disrupt the premises which underlie much recent writing on and by men . . . [and] offer a new perspective for viewing gendered identities and subverting dominant chauvinisms on which gender, class, race and other hierarchies depend. (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994: 2) Writing in a period in which works like Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble, Patricia Hill Collins’ (1990) Black Feminist Thought and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’ were reshaping gender studies, we were exhilarated by the possibilities that this new perspective could bring to a discipline that had become stagnant with introspection. Dislocating Masculinity reflected on a literature on men that was curiously insular and, at times, almost self-indulgent (Hanmer 1990; Canaan and Griffin 1990), with little to say about the kinds of bread and butter issues that ignited the women’s movement: the gross disparity in pay between women and men, male bias and sexism in the workplace, the iniquitous and pervasive sexual harassment of women in all arenas of life, sexual violence, the restrictions on women’s reproductive and sexual rights and the inequitable care burdens that so limited women’s opportunities. With some notable exceptions – Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977) and Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien’s ‘True Confessions: Black Male Representations of Masculinity in American Art’ (1994) amongst them – much of the writing on men and masculinity up to that point was by and about straight, white, middle-class men. And it seemed to have very little to say about privilege. As anthropologists, our interest was piqued by what seemed to us a lack of reflexivity and comparative analysis in this field. On the one hand, we noted how a number of those writing on men and masculinity availed themselves of highly specific cultural understandings of masculinity as if they constituted generalized experiences. Michael Kimmel (1987), for example, spoke of ‘real men’ as if such a category were culturally universal; Robert Bly (1990) evoked primordial

4 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism myths of manhood as if they were part of everyone’s heritage; and Victor Seidler (1991) posited a reversal of the dichotomy that lent men ‘reason’ at the cost of emotion, as if such a dualism constituted masculinity everywhere. There was, we knew from our studies of the anthropology of gender in other cultures, no naturalness to the association of men with brute strength, evasion of household or caring work, and lack of emotional intelligence (Ortner 1974; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Rubin 1975; McCormack and Strathern 1980). These characteristics are not only culturally specific. They are also historically specific, as are the terms we use to denote and discuss them (Scott 1986). As feminists, we shared a concern articulated by a number of feminist commentators on the burgeoning men and masculinities field that there appeared to be a pervasive silence, despite ‘profeminist’ nods, about the structural nature of male power. This is well captured by Tim Carrigan, R. W. Connell and John Lee in their 1985 landmark article ‘Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity’. Their comprehensive survey of the literature on men identifies a ‘Books about Men’ genre that, they contend, is not, fundamentally, about uprooting sexism or transforming patriarchy, or even understanding masculinity in its various forms. When it comes to the crunch, what it is about is modernizing hegemonic masculinity. It is concerned with finding ways in which the dominant group – the white, educated, heterosexual, affluent males we know and love so well – can adapt to new circumstances without breaking down the social-structural arrangements that actually give them their power. (1985: 577) The personal continued to mark much of this literature as it developed over the following decades, often without getting explicitly political (Cornwall and White 2000; Cornwall, Edström and Greig 2011). This has begun to shift, more recently, as greater attention has been paid to the structural dynamics of gendered inequalities, including the recuperation of the concept of patriarchy. Jerker Edström (2014), for example, draws on Alan Johnson’s 1997 book The Gender Knot: Unravelling Our Patriarchal Legacy to explore

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male-centredness, male privilege, male supremacy and male order. There were, however, other tracks arising from early writings in the men and masculinities field that engaged more directly with issues of power and inequality. Tim Carrigan, R. W. Connell and John Lee’s 1985 intervention was especially significant, providing us with a powerful conceptual intervention in the form of the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This is further elaborated in Connell’s 1987 book Gender and Power, defined in the same author’s subsequent book Masculinities as The configuration of gender practice, which embodies the currently accepted answer to the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women. (2005: 77) What is hegemonic about certain idealized forms of masculinity, Carrigan, Connell and Lee argue, is not that all or even most men perform them: it is that they have such a grip on men’s – and women’s – sense of what men should be and do that they are virtually unquestioned. Dislocating Masculinity took up this very productive concept and suggested that The experience of hegemony lies in the repetition of similar, but never identical, interactions. This experience is never comprehensive; it changes over time and space. Multiple gendered (and other) identities, each of which depends on context and the specific and immediate relations between actors and audience, are fluid and they are often subversive of dominant forms. (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994: 10) In any given cultural setting, we observed, a number of masculinities may be hegemonic, depending on the social groups coexisting in that setting (see also Coles 2009). The normative power of a particular hegemonic masculinity, we suggested, did not necessarily extend beyond those groups for whom it was salient.1 We focused our attention on ‘subordinate variants’ as well as dominant forms of masculinity, exploring the dynamics of power and difference in

6 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism relation to queer, subaltern and other subordinate masculinities – something that subsequent scholarship was to examine in greater depth (Ashe 2007; Beasley 2014; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Our interest was not only in what Alan Greig has called ‘the masculinity of hegemony’ (2011). Nor was it limited to, in Jeff Hearn’s (2004) words, ‘the hegemony of men’. What drew us to the study of men and masculinity were those questions of inequality, and possibilities presented by the subversion of dominant forms and by the fluidity of gendered performances. We were, in short, far from disinterested academic anthropologists. Our concerns were directly political; we sought to disrupt, to dislocate, the naturalized associations that served to sustain gendered inequalities, with the aim of opening up a space to examine the investments that people of all genders make in representing those contingent associations – and the gender binary itself – as fixed essences. Dislocating Masculinity also sought to offer a methodological resource: a set of comparative ethnographies that exemplified some of the strengths of anthropology’s comparative method, and a set of arguments about the utility of bringing an anthropological lens to bear on questions that hitherto had been the domain of sociologists and psychologists. Our argument was not only that anthropologists could bring to the study of men and masculinities ethnographically informed writing that explores gendered identities and relations in diverse cultures and contexts. We also argued that there were aspects of the anthropological method that could be applied fruitfully to other fields of study. Anthropologists make strange the familiar, taking things that are so much part of our everyday realities that often we are not even directly aware of them, inspecting our assumptions, and looking at meanings and practices from a range of different angles. Applying this to men and masculinities opens up a number of critical questions: We might ask ourselves, for example: what is it that we’ve come to assume makes a man a man – and what would need to be different about such a person for them not to be thought of as a man? It’s a useful thought experiment. We might then wonder: to what extent are our own notions of gender likely to intrude

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in our attempts to understand gender relations amongst others? (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994: 2) Anthropology’s emphasis on comparative enquiry, Dislocating Masculinity suggested, can enable us to examine whether particular meanings and expressions of masculinity travel or can be translated from one cultural setting to another. This process helps to destabilize attachments to universal categories – and to seeing our own categories and meanings as if they were universal. Bringing an anthropological eye to historically and culturally situated masculinities, with studies including colonial India (Kanitkar 1994), Ottoman Turkey (Kandiyoti 1994) and ancient Greece (Foxhall 1994), our intention in Dislocating Masculinity was also to insist on the historicity of identities and relations, challenging anthropology’s attachment to the ethnographic present. A significant part of our historical imagination was a materialist concern with the structural shaping and dynamics of inequalities; with this, we brought to bear a concern with the larger-scale historical and social processes of transformation in which gender relations and identities have come to be reconfigured, an interest in the longue durée.

Masculinity under neoliberalism What Dislocating Masculinity addressed only obliquely, however, were the seismic shifts in the global economy that were gathering pace at the time. The cultural effects of these changes have been profound. Indeed, as Dardot and Laval argue in their compelling book The New Way of the World: Neoliberalism is not merely destructive of rules, institutions and rights. It is also productive of certain kinds of social relations, certain ways of living, certain subjectivities. (2013: x) It is with these relations, ways of living and subjectivities that this book is concerned, as set against a backdrop of neoliberal economics and governmentality. The term ‘neoliberalism’ itself is contentious. For some, it evokes an economic order, one associated with economic

8 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism liberalization, the expansion of free market capitalism, outsourcing and commodification: ‘that grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest well’ (Stiglitz 2008: 1). This point is explored in Lindisfarne and Neale’s essay on neoliberal economics in Chapter 2. Yet for others, it is precisely the ways in which neoliberalism engages the production of accountable, entrepreneurial subjectivities that makes it so insidious and pervasive, and that invite consideration of neoliberalism as governmentality, as in Foucault’s 1979 lectures to the College de France (2008). Neoliberalism is as much about the ‘state’ as about the ‘market’, Dardot and Laval (2013) contend – and, they point out, that very dichotomy is itself highly problematic. It was states that changed the rules, and changed the game. Waquant asserts that what is neo about neoliberalism . . . [is] the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential. (original emphasis, 2012: 68) In a piece provocatively entitled ‘Zombie Neoliberalism and the Ambidextrous State’, Jamie Peck cites Loïc Waquant’s diagnosis of the current conjuncture, highlighting amongst other things ‘innovations in contemporary statecraft’ that reflect an increasingly ambidextrous relationship between the authoritarian and the assistential wings of the state, which between them exert an increasingly tight grip on the (distinctively postindustrial) regulatory dilemmas of labor market flexibilization and advanced social marginality. (2010: 105, citing Waquant 2009: 302) This relationship between the authoritarian and the assistential is significant in reading contemporary masculinities. Talk of a ‘crisis in masculinity’ fails in many ways to address these dynamics, as it

Introduction | 9

focuses attention on questions of identity at the cost of the underlying structural dynamics. Dardot and Laval situate the ‘existential norm’ of neoliberalism as the rationality of contemporary capitalism: This norm enjoins everyone to live in a world of generalized competition; it calls upon wage-earning classes and populations to engage in economic struggle against one another; it aligns social relations with the model of the market; it promotes the justification of ever greater inequalities; it even transforms the individual, now called on to conceive and conduct him- or herself as an enterprise . . . [neoliberal governmentality is] a global normative framework which, in the name of liberty and relying on the leeway afforded individuals, orientates their conduct, choices and practices in a new way. (2013: 3) In ‘Anxious States of Masculinity’, Alan Greig speaks of the anxiety provoked amongst those who have benefited the most from a political economy of gender shored up by patriarchal ideology that naturalizes gender inequalities. Greig draws attention to ‘the ideological work’ that is performed by the gender binary ‘in helping to secure consent to hierarchical social relations’ (2011: 220). And yet it is the very reordering of this binary, its reconfiguration under pressure of the abject failure of millions of men to live up to its injunctions, that is one of the most striking features of contemporary life. The very unevenness of neoliberalism, its evolving nature, its incompleteness – highlighted by Peck, Theodore and Brenner (2009) – make getting to grips with its variegated effects on men’s lives and identities in particular cultural and geopolitical locales essential. A number of recent anthropological studies explore the spatial and temporal anxieties associated with changing labour markets and the disjuncture of gendered expectations provoked by these changes in contexts as diverse as the US, India and China (see for example Broughton and Walton 2006; Jeffrey 2010; Yang 2010). These studies confirm Connell’s (2005) observation that for all that men in general derive benefits from the patriarchal dividend, those embodying subordinated masculinities may suffer disproportionately the costs of existing gender regimes. These tensions and disjunctures have been

10 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism exacerbated by a facet of neoliberalism that has become more and more pronounced in recent years: its emphasis on self-making and self-management, on the neoliberal self as an entrepreneurial self. The pressures of entrepreneurial masculinity are clearly evident in many of the contributions to this collection, notably those by Hayns, VeraSanso, Lin, O’Neill and Wignall. There is another dimension to this individualization of success and failure. Men – and women – are dislocated from the webs of social relations and dependencies in which they live their everyday lives. ‘Empowerment’ has come to hold the promise of self-actualization rather than retaining any semblance of the older associations that the term had with collective action and struggle (Cornwall and Edwards 2014). Srilatha Batliwala and Deepa Dhanraj describe the role carved out for women: The neoliberal rules for the new woman citizen . . . are quite clear: improve your household’s economic condition, participate in local community development (if you have time), help build and run local (apolitical) institutions like the self-help group; by then, you should have no political or physical energy left to challenge this paradigm. (Batliwala and Dhanraj 2004: 13) And, in the neoliberal global economy, it is women rather than men who are cast as the ‘agents of change’ who can ‘lift’ economies once they are primed as a ‘weapon against poverty’, according to development agencies like the UK government’s Department for International Development, the World Bank, IMF and the increasing array of corporates who have come to champion the empowerment of women and girls. Conditional cash transfer schemes transfer to women the responsibility for ensuring their children are schooled and vaccinated in exchange for a cash payment made directly to them; the state becomes in effect a more reliable provider than the husbands who once took on and faltered in their achievement of the position of breadwinner. Micro-enterprise interventions claim to assist women to avail themselves of the new market opportunities created by the expansion of consumerism. The market offers the possibility for liberation from the constraints of marriage, and life ‘under a man’;

Introduction | 11

women’s spending power comes, in some contexts, to magnify men’s ‘uselessness’ (Cornwall 2002). Meanwhile, the authoritarian state punishes as it protects, providing women with some recourse to justice where the men in their lives turn vicious, without ever addressing the structural basis of violence or its state-sponsored manifestations (Waquant 2012). Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, in their contribution to this collection, assess the radical impact that neoliberalism has had on all of our lives. They describe how, in the wake of the decline in industrial profits in the West, neoliberal reforms sought to restore the profitability of corporations, undermining social spending, weakening the capacity of organized labour to protest ever worsening working conditions, shifting capital into industries in low wage countries, and into speculative investment in property, the stock market, bonds, derivatives and other potential bubbles. The commercialization of everything has come to play out in the new entrepreneurial masculinity remarked upon by many contributors to this book. Lindisfarne and Neale give a compelling example of this in a line from a Chinese soap opera cited by Katrien Jacobs: What is love? Love is a gimmick made by men. Screw the shit like ‘I give my heart to you’ or ‘I am yours forever’. These are the words from penniless men, since they can afford nothing but sweet talk, which is totally worthless. If you are a real man and love a woman, say nothing, just show her wads of bills because this secures her; and then give her a house, because that way after you fucked her she has some place to lay down her body. (Jacobs 2012: 44–5) They draw attention to the consequences on ordinary people’s lives of the series of economic collapses and crises that have been felt around the world in the last few decades, arguing that almost across the board there is a naturalization of inequality. So inequality is said to be in your genes, and this is applied to education, mental illness, addiction, personality, gender and in some sense race. By some magic, all your problems are both genetic

12 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism and your own fault. In this situation, ideologies of gender inequality become especially important in justifying new inequalities – and in persuading people to internalize those inequalities. . . . However, the project of naturalization also produces endless struggle as the people being naturalized resist and fight against being labelled ‘less equal’ and ‘inferior’ and treated as if their lives were worth nothing. Drawing attention to the topologies and geographies of neoliberalism, and the micro-practices of everyday life, Lindisfarne and Neale provide a vivid picture of the dislocations that have accompanied economic globalization and its cultural and social effects. And in that process, they point out, gender differences have become more marked.

Everyday life in neoliberal times As the contributions to this collection suggest, men in different cultural contexts are responding to the exigencies of neoliberal economic governance and its cultural effects in ways that defy a simple narrative. Rather, what we see is a more subtle process through which men’s identities and ideals of manhood come to be reshaped as they are patterned by changing materialities. Reflecting on ‘Neoliberal Futures’, Anne Allison and Charles Piot evoke the temporalities of neoliberalism: Embedded in rhythms of truncated work, interrupted life cycles, and the arrival of foreign migrants or military incursions, imaginings are often radically presentist, collapsed or imploded into the immediacy of survival (especially in today’s global peripheries and margins). Such a refiguring of temporality is accompanied by an intensified attention to the materiality of everyday existence, one focused on shelter, food, and body – on an everyday here and now that has become little more than the struggle to survive. . . . As one barters labor for life in an economy in which employment becomes ever more flexibilized and justin-time – continually outsourced to those willing to work the hardest for less – the organization between work and life, and

Introduction | 13

the ecology of existence itself, takes on a kinetic shape with labor often assuming novel forms. (2014: 4–5) The ‘kinetic shape’ of existence in the neoliberal economy is a theme that runs through a number of contributions to this collection, and with it, an insistence upon a refocusing of anthropological attention on the materialities of life in the neoliberal present. A good example of the range of issues involved is Charlie Walker’s account of workingclass men in contemporary Russia. Portraying the inconstancies and dislocations of contemporary working-class masculinities, Walker’s focus is the re-inscriptions of masculinities in the post-socialist context amongst those employed in Russia’s industrial sector. Exploring how new forms of consumption have come to constitute a new ‘corporate standard of hegemonic masculinity’, Walker draws attention to the abjection and lack associated with ‘failed’ working-class masculinity in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Through an ethnographic account of young working-class men ‘learning to labour’, he evokes their despondency and lack of prospects as they are channelled into badly paid jobs. Thwarted aspirations to become breadwinners characterize young men’s frustrations. Amidst this, a growing service economy feeds a new set of aspirations, framed in terms of career growth and instantiated in the idealized position of ‘director’ that, Walker observes, comes ‘to symbolize a kind of effortlessness in the performance of a successful masculinity’. This is evidenced in the words of Vlad, a 24-year-old manual worker, who states: If you’re a director, you’ll be sitting there in an office, giving everyone orders, not doing anything. . . . If not, you’re not in an office, you’re running around somewhere, making something, fixing something. . . . I’m not staying with something in this life that doesn’t bring me any sort of career growth, so that at the end of my life I’ll just be an ordinary worker. I don’t really want that. . . . Walker traces the ambivalence of younger men towards pursuing what they perceive to be dead-end careers through to men who

14 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism have completed the transition to adulthood, and finds processes of accommodation through which these men settle for positions perceived as inferior. Their critique of the vanities of service sector ‘manager’ positions is palpable; he shows how their rejection of the successful masculinities of the new economy embraces a reaffirmation of the value of manual work, and attachments to workplaces and co-workers. This sense of affirmation extends into the spaces of their home lives, where their practical capacities lend them a sense of usefulness and the pride of self-sufficiency. The relationship between these economically subordinate men with dominant expressions of masculinity is, as Walker shows, more complex than might otherwise appear. And yet, as he shows, while men in coming of age might have learnt to live with their own material marginalization and make the best of their circumstances, they remain marginalized by it. As part of these complex processes of reconfiguration of ideals of what it takes to be a ‘real man’, elements of ‘traditional’ masculine identities come to be dislocated and reframed. Xiaodong Lin explores the impact of these dislocations in the wake of post-Mao economic reforms that have transformed labour and social relations in China. Internal migration from the rural areas to the cities is one of the most marked of these changes. This has been accompanied by deepening material inequalities. His focus is on the discursive shaping of male migrant workers by the ideology and values of the neoliberal modernization project. Lin shows how traditional familial gender norms have served as a cultural resource for men to create new identities, and with them new meanings of masculinities that reflect changing relational contexts. He suggests that migrant workers are depicted in state discourse as ‘disadvantaged’ as a consequence of their lack of education, hindered from participating in the neoliberal modernization project’s quest for improvement to the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of their lives, citing Yan’s definition of suzhi as: the somewhat ephemeral qualities of civility, self-discipline and modernity . . . a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy . . . often used in the negative by the post-Mao state and educational elites to point to the lack of quality of the Chinese labouring masses. (2003: 494)

Introduction | 15

Suzhi is in itself emblematic of a quality of neoliberalism that a narrowly economic understanding would obscure, the very cultural enmeshment of governmentality, marketization and its effects on the constitution of citizenship to which Loïc Wacquant (2012) draws attention. Lin’s account refocuses attention on male migrants’ subjectivities and the ways in which they rework ‘traditional’ masculinities, echoing another theme that runs across a series of chapters in the book: situating the making of masculinities in and amidst dislocations of space and time. Lin shows how migrant men’s attachments to and performance of ‘filial son’ provides opportunities for migrant men to reconfigure expectations of masculinity, as in the case of 30 year old Cai Wu, who says: [I think] it is time to build the new house for my family to show my heart of xiao to my parents, otherwise I will let them down and I don’t know where I can hide my face when I go home [embarrassed]. I don’t want to be in the same situation as my cousin. He hasn’t sent much money home to build a house for his family, all the relatives are mourning about him. I don’t want people to say I am mei benshi [useless, incompetent] behind my back. . . . Migrant men’s sense of masculinity comes to be attached to the performance of filial piety through material contributions. Failure to perform reflects their ‘material subordination’ in Lin’s words, as well as rupture with class-based cultural responsibilities, and they come to be blamed as mei benshi – ‘useless’. This echoes the forms of neoliberal subjectivation and the individualization of failure identified by Dardot and Laval (2013). Ultimately, Lin observes, these ‘dislocated familial masculine identities’ are lived out by these working-class men ‘within current material and discursive conditions that operate against them in an increasingly unequal society’. The very spatial dislocations of migration offer on the one hand a respite from the relatively fixed familial expectations associated with rural masculinities, yet on the other also become, Lin argues, a vital cultural resource for the production of ‘dislocated identities’ that enable men to accommodate themselves in the context of a marginalized urban working class.

16 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism

Normative disappointments A theme that runs through many of the chapters is the disappointments associated with normative heterosexual masculinity, and especially the figure – culturally modulated, for all its transnational ubiquity – of man as provider. As Penny Vera-Sanso suggests in her contribution to this collection, the very pervasiveness of the ideology of man as provider reduces available masculinities to a single idealized figure. It situates men within a set of aspirations and expectations that are becoming ever more difficult for them to fulfil in the contemporary economy. Vera-Sanso’s interest is in the ways in which men experience such challenges to the provider identity at different stages in their life courses. She observes how, for men in more straitened circumstances, their journeys into old age are accompanied by progressive feminization as they are simply unable to perform successfully the masculinity of provider, and come to be eclipsed by the women in their households. Her evocation of the identity of the provider resonates with ideals that span many other contexts, with men’s claims to authority and respect deeply bound up with their capacity for material provision. In a context in which patterns of consumption and costs have ratcheted up, being able to achieve the demands of this identity becomes an unattainable aspiration for many men. Joe Hayns discusses how, in Morocco, the ideal of man as provider of material subsistence survives amidst a morass of failure, serving as a source of shame to the marginalized male sellers in Marrakesh’s tourist su¯q. In his ‘study of the economics and the emotions of performing a subordinate masculinity in a globalized world’, Hayns examines the racialized inequalities of the tourist market. He evokes the economic desperation of the men for whom the su¯q becomes a space of ambivalent desire: for sex with white foreign tourists, as much as for the small profits to be made selling them cheap brica-brac. The sellers work unwaged for commission, sometimes on a piece-by-piece basis. Detailing the hours and days spent working for no return, Hayns highlights the constant crises – financial, social and cultural – faced by the men: the shame of not being able to send money home, the instability of tenure in the rooms they share with others, the privations of not being able to afford basic meals.

Introduction | 17

Sex with foreign tourists, female or male, becomes an exit – often all too temporary – from the privations of precarity. Their failure to perform is deepened, Hayns argues, by their effective emasculation in transactional sex with foreign tourists. He observes the soft lament laced with shame (hashuma) at the gendered reversals implied by men’s dependence on the money of female foreigners. Noting that shifts are taking place in the man-as-provider discourse, he reflects that: many of the men I know in Marrakesh understand themselves in terms of a hegemonic notion of proper maleness that is utterly at odds with their material lives. Their relations with tourists are attempts to go beyond the desperation of the su¯q; yet, such relations are in contradiction with that same conception of how to be a real man, as narrated within the rhetorics of shame.

(Dis)locations and discontents The dislocations of migration, so much part of the contemporary global economy, present a particularly interesting site for exploring the negotiation of different masculinities and the interplay of class, race and power in the shaping of masculine ideals. Bristol-Rhys and Osella’s chapter, on male migrants in the United Arab Emirates, offers a fascinating glimpse into the interplay of gendered attributions amongst a multi-ethnic community. They detail the consumption of particular masculine styles through choices of clothing. Multiple notions of masculinity collide; some ethnicities are marked out as ‘not-men’ and accommodated within a residual space inhabited by other not-men, including women; others are marked out by attributes considered too manly to permit entry into these spaces. They describe how the deployment of racial stereotypes by indigenous Emirati and migrant Asians centre on competing masculine ideals, infused with coloniality: for the Emirati, Indians are neutered, cast as effeminate not-men; for Indians, a reified notion of the male breadwinner becomes the measure against which the Emirati are found lacking. Adriana Piscitelli examines reconfigurations in styles of masculinity amongst Brazilian heterosexual men in the context of transnational sexual relationships. Her focus is their encounters with international

18 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism tourists in Brazil and as migrants in Spain. She looks at the styles of masculinity available in the ‘erotic market’, and at Brazilians as objects of a sexualized and racialized gaze in the current global order. Piscitelli explores European women’s fantasies of virile, black masculinity associated with the performance of Capoeira, a martial art with origins in Brazil’s slave past, an eroticism that racialized the capoeiristas, regardless of their skin colour. Migrants and locals alike respond by performing this sexualization, including adopting styles of masculinity associated with black Brazilians. For middleclass migrants, exposed to more egalitarian styles of masculinity, she describes a different process of reconfiguring masculinities in which their incapacity to act as providers can lead to their feminization. And this, in turn, works to undermine the very attribute that lends Brazilian migrants their erotic attractiveness. Piscitelli’s juxtaposition of the economic dimensions of transnational sexual encounters with the racialization and hyper-masculinity that lend Brazilian men their erotic appeal reveals the complex interplay between normative heterosexualities and other dimensions of difference, especially race and class. These dimensions of difference intersect with others. Generational differences surface as especially salient in a number of the contributions, as old life ways give ground to harsh new economic and social realities in which expectations and identities are rapidly changing.

Gender and generation Luisa Enria explores the ‘crisis of youth’ in post-conflict Sierra Leone, looking at how discourses on problematic masculinities contrast with everyday experiences of being young and male. She notes that such discourses predominantly deem young men a security risk. Rarely, she suggests, do they engage directly with young men’s economic marginality. Enria’s ethnography evokes the frustrations experienced by young men about their social status as they struggle to conform with norms of hegemonic masculinity, noting the divergence of their ‘enacted manhood’ with these ideals. She gives the example of Alpha, a young man whose only income was occasional commission earned from sales in a downtown Freetown street market.

Introduction | 19

To beg would be too embarrassing, he argued. But his present condition was far from ideal. ‘I need to stand like a man,’ he argued, referring not to his physical impediment, but rather to his inability to act as a provider. ‘Standing like a man’ is not only about being able to perform the masculine identity of provider, Enria suggests. It is also about being able to enable women’s consumption of consumer goods, in a context where romance and finance are intimately interwoven. As shown in a number of chapters in this collection, the precarity of young men’s economic prospects fuels a host of other insecurities. In Sierra Leone, it plays out in the pursuit of other modes of masculine identification, such as the use of street names that intimidate, membership of gangs and the cultivation of reputations for toughness. This would, at times, erupt into street violence. Enria observes how young men’s threats of violence work to reinstitute the very threat that they are perceived to pose to society at the same time as offering them their ‘only opportunity for leverage’. The economic marginality of ex-combatants in another African post-conflict context, Angola, is the focus of John Spall’s chapter. Spall writes of the clash in ‘embodied masculine styles’ between war veterans and their sons. He contrasts the values of respectability, sobriety and wisdom, melding the ideals cultivated in pre-war rural society and the influence of Christianity, with those geared to the pursuit of money and associated with urban living. Discourses on young men’s ‘delinquency’ highlight the mismatch between their material aspirations and the economic realities of a highly unequal context in which a small elite guard pathways to enrichment. Older men blame ‘globalization’. And yet, for younger men, the lifeways and ideals of masculinity prized by their fathers no longer make sense. Spall evokes the clash of aspirations and expectations that constitute the ‘social fissure’ (Lindsay and Miescher 2003: 21) that claims men of different generations as competing hegemonic masculinities come to shape tensions between them. Diana Jeater offers us a finely nuanced glimpse into a site for such tensions and transformations: the world of Pentecostal masculinities in Zimbabwe. She describes how as men turn to religion in

20 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism desperate attempts to survive the assault of economic decline and household disintegration, they find there a style of masculinity that constitutes both a radical shift from more recent, more egalitarian and entrepreneurial forms, and a return to traditions of inequality and patriarchal control. Locating the unfolding tale of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis historically, Jeater traces the transformations wrought through religious engagement. She shows how local and global economic crises – currency collapse, runaway inflation, acute shortages of consumer goods, and the post-2008 financial mess – have shaped the emergence of new ‘biblical’ masculinities and new marital practices. Whereas the old Pentecostal ‘soft masculinity’ was all about hard work, clean living, monogamy and responsibility – all perfectly in tune with the emergence of a class of middle-class entrepreneurs in the era of structural adjustment – the new Pentecostal masculinity is ‘harder’, more sexualized, more rapacious, promoted by superstar preachers, with their ‘quick fix miracles’. Jeater describes how: it rejects the ‘hard work’ message; encourages polygyny and sexual prowess; encourages men to think of themselves as warriors rather than as salaried office workers; and opens the way to a culture of impunity in cases of sexual violence.

Producing subjectivities The work of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in reshaping the subjectivities of ‘problematic’ young male subjects is the focus of Ross Wignall’s chapter. Wignall notes that ‘YMCA programmes are often explicitly masculinizing, targeting forms of delinquent, disruptive or unproductive masculinity that fail to match the expectations of the neoliberal state’. Through case studies in Brighton and Hove, in the UK, and Banjul, in the Gambia, he shows how the YMCA’s ‘whole man’ approach – which focuses on strength, industry and self-discipline in ways that are consonant with the production of neoliberal subjectivities – comes into tension with other models of masculinity. In Brighton and Hove, ‘tough’ masculinity comes to conflict with the responsibilized subject sought by the YMCA. For

Introduction | 21

Banjul, these frictions manifest in the juxtaposition of the figure of the ‘Big Man’. He explores how the YMCA seeks to ‘recalibrate the set of values through which young men interpret male prestige and masculine behaviour’, and the ambiguities that this produces. In doing so, he problematizes the ways in which development interventions through sports and leadership training can serve to deepen what he dubs the ‘neoliberalization of everyday life’. Echoing themes in other chapters – from Bristol-Rhys and Osella’s characterization of the racial labelling of Asians as ‘effeminate’ to the dislocations of masculinity as lived by marginalized men that are a dominant thread running through this book, and the disciplining of young men as neoliberal subjects described by Wignall – Haywood and Mac an Ghaill turn to the context of inner-city schools in the north of England. Their chapter is part methodological reflection, part ethnographic account of the negotiation of young Muslim men’s identities in this setting. The concept of (dis)located masculinities, they argue, comes to serve as a means of exploring the configuration of masculine subjectivities precisely because it captures ‘simultaneous articulations of power’. They draw attention to the ways in which ethnography permits, as Lin Foxhall put it in Dislocating Masculinity, ‘a consideration of the synchronic, simultaneous, changing contexts in which conflicting (often incompatible) discourses often operate’ (1994: 134). What emerges from Haywood and Mac an Ghaill’s analysis is a finegrained portrait of the navigation of Muslim masculinities in a context where neoliberal governmentality is infusing ideals of masculinity with its values of individualism and entrepreneurialism. Young, economically marginalized Muslim men are faced with normative imperatives to be both ‘the right kind of man’ and a ‘good Muslim’, in a context where securitization and economic marginalization offer them little prospect to realize their aspirations. And, like the Angolan men in John Spall’s chapter and the Sierra Leonean youth described by Luisa Enria, Muslim lads in northern English schools negotiate their masculinities with ‘ambivalence towards generationally specific ways of being Muslim men, based on culturally infused religious identities and their rejections of masculinities underpinned by violence’, redefining in the process what it means to be Muslim.

22 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism

Homosocialities The spatial nature of masculine socialities emerges from many of these studies as another significant element of understanding the production of neoliberal subjectivities. Sports offer a prime space for the construction and expression of male homosocialities, as well as for manifestations of idealized masculinities. As Helen Kanitkar observed in Dislocating Masculinity, ‘class and race values [became] institutionalized on and through the sports field’ (1994: 188) in certain colonial contexts. William Tantam’s chapter focuses on ‘everyday football’ in Jamaica. He describes how, all over the country, patches of green turn into football fields in the hours before dusk, turning into sites for ‘webs of relationships and layers of meaning’. Juxtaposing older and younger players, and the overlapping distinctions of class and age, he explores ethnographically how men’s engagement with football becomes constitutive of masculine subjectivities. He shows how older, wealthier men saw playing with younger, more economically marginal men as a way of creating relationships across economic hierarchies to avoid conflict; whereas, for younger men, football was an escape from boredom and feeling trapped, without the means to migrate in search of a better life. Carmen McLeod’s fascinating exploration of the relationships between duck hunters, ducks and dogs in New Zealand illustrates the range of competing masculinities that are part of this traditionally ‘macho’ sport. She contrasts the solo ‘dedicated’ duck hunter, the ‘blokes only’ hunters whose hunting is laced with drink and homosocializing, and the ‘community’ hunters whose homosociality admits wives and children at mealtimes. McLeod highlights how performances of duck hunting masculinity affirm nostalgia for a rural New Zealand manhood. This comes to be associated with particular modes of consumption, and is under challenge from the reconfiguration of contemporary gendered expectations under neoliberalism. Frank Karioris’s ethnography of male students in an all-male US university residence hall also focuses on spaces of homosociality. Karioris takes us into a site for neoliberal governmentality: higher education. His close observation of a group of first-year white middle-class students as they negotiate the dislocations of a marginal

Introduction | 23

homosociality offers insights into what he terms the ‘business models of relationality’ put into place in the neoliberal US university. Drawing attention to the ways in which amidst a ‘lived affirmation of equality’ the masculinity of these young men ‘confirms a wider structure of inequality between men and women’, Karioris’s ethnography reveals some of the complexities of the shaping of neoliberal masculine subjects in the space of higher education institutions. Rachel O’Neill’s account of the ‘seduction industry’ in contemporary London reveals another homosocial world: one in which men learn to be lotharios. Her interest is in the ways in which neoliberal rationalities are reshaping intimate gender relations, as men’s sexual subjectivities come to be patterned by the pervasive neoliberal cultural tropes of managerialism and entrepreneurship. What is particularly interesting in her account is the close focus on the dynamics of homosociality in spaces in which men are learning techniques of seduction that can better enable them to navigate heterosexual subjectivities. Noting how rituals of sexual storytelling work to affirm a particular version of heterosexual masculinity, she observes that for many of the men attending the seduction classes, motivation lay as much in what more success in seduction might offer their relationships with other men as in what it might do for their relationships with women. O’Neill reflects: Through the language of meritocracy – the contention that these skills are accessible to all – pickup or game promises to empower men. . . . In reimagining the pursuit of sexual access to women’s bodies along entrepreneurial and meritocratic lines, pickup taps into the neoliberal fantasy that ‘anything can be achieved if the correct disposition has been adopted’. (Gilroy 2013: 16) Acquisition of seduction skills thus becomes part of a neoliberal self-improvement project. O’Neill notes that far from contesting entrenched inequalities, including those of race, it is geared to enabling men to work within existing hierarchies to improve their own positions. And rather than just being about the commodification of a particular variant of male homosociality, O’Neill argues, the forms of relationality evident amongst members of the seduction

24 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism community form part of a broader reconfiguration of intimate life with the expansion of neoliberalism in late capitalist London.

Conclusion ‘Never before has the question of neoliberalism’s political, economic and social role – culpability might be a better word – been debated with such urgency, so globally and in such a public manner’ (Peck et al. 2009: 94). The hazards of neoliberalism have become all too clear. The perverse effects of neoliberal governmentality are felt globally. But they are also experienced locally, in the lives of people for whom there is no certainty, no security in an economic order that they experience as ever more capricious and unyielding. And yet, as James Ferguson (2010) reminds us, to cast neoliberalism in the singular and not pay closer attention to its polyvalence would be to do a disservice to the anthropological imagination. It would also mask important dimensions of the diverse and divergent ways neoliberalism plays out in people’s everyday lives in different social and cultural contexts, with all the gendered effects of these dynamics. As Sherry Ortner writes in her essay ‘On Neoliberalism’: Ethnographies . . . provide depth, richness, complexity, humanity, even humour, to bring to life abstract accounts of ‘economic restructuring’ and ‘polarization of wealth’. But most of all . . . ethnographies remind us that people live in worlds of meaning as well as of material conditions. (2011, no page number) The contributors to this book demonstrate powerfully the importance of paying closer attention to the cultural dimensions of the reconfigurations of gender in the current conjuncture. This is the contribution that comparative ethnographies can make to understanding the ripple effects of global economic crisis on everyday lives. What we see from the studies in this book are not only people managing unequal and uncertain lives in contexts of precarity and hardship. We also find moments of resistance, chinks of opportunity in the interstices, and modes of living and being that reclaim a more agentive subjectivity. It is in those acts of resistance – the small acts seen at close range in

Introduction | 25

the ethnographies – as well as in the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties that neoliberal governmentality produces, that exciting new directions for engaged anthropological scholarship lie. Whether with stories of dissent or outright rebellion, with the alternative economic experiments happening in these austere and adverse times and the communities that are being created around them, people are engaging in an active reshaping of the current order at different scales, in different locales. Others are embracing and embodying these new ethics and social relations. What effects are these localized experiences having on the gendered subjectivities of those who engage with them? What new relational possibilities are emerging? And as the hegemony of the man-as-provider discourse melts into oblivion, can its failure be transformed into new lifeways, new moralities and new forms of being that successfully circumvent the strictures of the old? These are questions for a new generation of anthropological research on men and masculinities that the current conjuncture opens up. We hope that the studies in this book can provide some inspiration.

Acknowledgements I’d like to thank Rebecca Prentice, Geert de Neve, Nancy Lindisfarne and Frank G. Karioris for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Note 1 The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been enormously influential, giving rise to many writings – some critical (see, for example, Demetriou 2001), others deploying the concept in ways that diverge sometimes substantially from its original usage. See Connell and Messerschmidt’s useful stocktaking (2005) of how the concept has come to be used, and reflection on what it has come to signify.

References Allison, A. and C. Piot (2014) ‘Editors’ Note on “Neoliberal Futures”’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 3–7. Ashe, F. (2007) The New Politics of Masculinity: Men, Power and Resistance, Routledge, London.

26 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Batliwala, S. and D. Dhanraj (2004) ‘Gender Myths that Instrumentalise Women: A View from the Indian Frontline’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 11–18. Beasley, C. (2014) ‘Caution! Hazards Ahead: Considering the Potential Gap between Feminist Thinking and Men/Masculinities Theory and Practice’, Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 566–81. Bly, R. (1990) Iron John: A Book about Men, Addison-Wesley, Reading MA. Broughton, C. and T. Walton (2006) ‘Downsizing Masculinity: Gender, Family, and Fatherhood in Post-Industrial America’, Anthropology of Work Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 1–12. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, Routledge, London. Canaan, J. and C. Griffin (1990) ‘The New Men’s Studies: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?’, in J. Hearn and D. Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Social Theory, Unwin Hyman, London. Carrigan, T., R. W. Connell and J. Lee (1985) ‘Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 551–604. Coles, T. (2009) ‘Negotiating the Field of Masculinity: The Production and Reproduction of Multiple Dominant Masculinities’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 30–44. Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Connell, R. W. (2005) Masculinities, Polity Press, Cambridge. Connell, R. W. and J. W. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp. 829–59. Cornwall, A. (2002) ‘Spending Power: Love, Money, and the Reconfiguration of Gender Relations in Ado-Odo, Southwestern Nigeria’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 963–80. Cornwall, A. and J. Edwards (2014) ‘Negotiating Empowerment’, in A. Cornwall and J. Edwards (eds), Feminisms, Empowerment and Development, Zed Books, London. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (eds) (1994) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Cornwall, A. and S. White (eds) (2000) ‘Men, Masculinities and Development: Politics, Policies and Practices’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 1–7. Cornwall, A., J. Edström and A. Greig (2011) Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities, Zed Books, London. Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, Feminisms in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Chicago Legal Forum, pp. 139–67. Dardot, P. and C. Laval (2013) The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, Verso, London. Demetriou, D. (2001) ‘Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique’, Theory and Society, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 337–61. Edström, J. (2014) ‘The Male Order Development Encounter’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 111–23. Ferguson, J. (2010) ‘The Uses of Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp. 166–84.

Introduction | 27 Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Foxhall, L. (1994) ‘Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Gilroy, P. (2013) ‘“. . . We Got to Get Over Before We Go Under . . .” Fragments for a History of Black Vernacular Neoliberalism’, New Formations, Vols 80– 81, pp. 23–8. Greig, A. (2011) ‘Anxious States of Masculinity’, in A. Cornwall, J. Edström and A. Greig (eds), Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinity, Zed Books, London. Hanmer, J. (1990) ‘Men, Power and the Exploitation of Women’, in J. Hearn and D. Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Social Theory, Unwin Hyman, London. Hearn, J. (2004) ‘From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men’, Feminist Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 49–72. Hill Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Routledge, London. Jacobs, K. (2012) People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet, Chicago University Press, Chicago IL. Jeffrey, C. (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Johnson, A. (1997) The Gender Knot: Unravelling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Temple University Press, Philadelphia PA. Kandiyoti, D. (1994) ‘The Paradoxes of Masculinity: Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Kanitkar, H. (1994) ‘“Real True Boys”: Moulding the Cadets of Imperialism’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Kimmel, M. (1987) Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, Sage Publications, London. Lindsay, Lisa and S. Miescher (2003) Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, Heinemann, Portsmouth NH. MacCormack, C. and M. Strathern (1980) Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mercer, K. and I. Julien ‘True Confessions’ (1994), in T. Golden (ed.), Black Male Representations of Masculinity in American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York NY. Ortner, S. (1974) ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M. Zimbalist Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Ortner, S. (2011) ‘On Neoliberalism’, Anthropology of This Century blog, Issue 1, http://aotcpress.com/articles/neoliberalism/ (accessed 5 July 2015). Peck, J. (2010) ‘Zombie Neoliberalism and the Ambidextrous State’, Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 104–10. Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2009) ‘Post-neoliberalism and its Malcontents’, Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp. 94–116.

28 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Rosaldo, M. Z. and L. Lamphere (eds) (1974) Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’, in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, New York NY. Rubin, G. (1984) ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in C. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York NY. Scott, J. (1986) ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5, pp. 1053–75. Seidler, V. (1991) The Moral Limits of Modernity: Love, Inequality and Oppression, St Martin’s Press, New York NY. Stiglitz, J. (2008) ‘The end of neo-liberalism?’, Project Syndicate Commentary, July, accessed at http://www.projectsyndicate.org. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, University of California Press, Oakland CA. Waquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Governmentality of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press, Durham NC. Wacquant, L. (2012) ‘Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 66–79. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Ashgate, Aldershot. Yan, H. (2003) ‘Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/ Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 493–523. Yang, J. (2010) ‘The Crisis of Masculinity: Class, Gender, and Kindly Power in Post-Mao China’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 550–62.

CHAPTER 2 Masculinities and the lived experience of neoliberalism Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Introduction Neoliberalism changes everything, but the driving force of neoliberalism is economic. We say this not because we are being reductionist, but because the people who own and run the world put economics first. Neoliberalism has been imposed over the past 40 years through a set of deliberate strategies to increase the share of profit going to capitalists and corporations. And in order to achieve their economic goals, they have changed everything else as well. These neoliberal policies include a whole range of strategies: Keeping wages down; Making people work harder and faster; Tearing up regulations of all sorts; Reducing social programmes and ‘transfer payments’ like welfare and social security which benefit working people; Cutting taxes on the wealth and income of the rich; Cutting corporation taxes; Selling off public utilities, and contracting out public services, so private corporations can profit; And reducing the power of unions. A moment’s reflection on this list makes it clear how radically these neoliberal strategies will have altered ordinary men’s lives over most of the last half century. They and their families have fewer economic choices in a far less caring world. For a minority however – the rich, the capitalists and others close to them – these radical changes have

30 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism allowed them to adopt lifestyles that put them literally far out of reach of the rest. Neoliberalism has wrought great changes to masculinities and to the whole global social order. In this chapter we do three things. First, we explain something of the neoliberal economic system and the way it has come to dominate the world economy since the 1970s. This helps us to understand how and why masculinities, and the lives of men and women, have changed greatly with changes in the economic system. Second, we suggest that to make sense of masculinities under neoliberalism, we need to be bold, and prepared to look for answers to fundamental questions about how societies change and what causes these changes to occur. We draw on Dislocating Masculinity (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994) to describe four premises essential to any study of masculinities. These methodological tools are fundamental to all good anthropology and sociological and historical analyses, and they are of critical importance when our subject – masculinities – is the site of enormous struggle. In the final section, we outline three types of change that are particularly salient and indicative of how neoliberal processes work. All three are areas that invite comparison and theoretical elaboration. The first concerns the naturalization of inequality. The second is about increased gendered marking. The third requires a consideration of the increasing physical and cultural distances between the elite and ordinary people. To get us started, however, we need to cast our net even more widely and locate the intersection of gender and neoliberalism.

Sexism, class and violence Capitalism, of which neoliberalism is one development, is just one of the many forms of class society that have appeared over the last 6,000 years. There has been enormous cultural variety among all these different class societies, but in two things they are alike. They practise economic inequality, and they sustain systematic and enduring patterns of inequality between men and women. This is an extraordinary association between economic and gender inequality. So the big question for any theory of gender is – why?1 We think there

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is a straightforward answer, and it is an answer that it is fundamental to our understanding of masculinities under neoliberalism. In every unequal society, the rich and powerful want things to stay unequal. Elites use violence to make this happen. But elites also need the rest of us to believe that inequality is natural and inevitable, and the most effective way to do this is to encourage the idea that men and women are unequal. Elites enforce gendered inequality at every turn. This means we grow up thinking men and women are fundamentally different, and sexism, and the threat of sexual violence, are a constant feature of our lives. Elites use racism and many other ideologies to divide us and make inequality seem natural. But gender naturalizes inequality better than racism. It is so effective because it is always double-sided: one side is love, the other is imbued with sexism. Love and kindness are aspects of all our closest human relationships – with our parents, our children, our friends and our lovers, straight or gay. But at the same time, our close relationships are riven with gender differences and inequality. So love locks us in, and sexism hurts and angers us. We are simultaneously trapped and divided. This understanding of the naturalizing power of gender ideologies is our starting point. Three further ideas follow and are basic to our approach to masculinities under neoliberalism. First, violence is central to all class societies, because violence is an essential part of what keeps inequality in place. And because violence is central to class society, and gender is central to our being, all violence is gendered and sexualized. This means we need to pay attention to patterns of violence and how they are gendered, and how this relation has changed under neoliberalism. Second, different forms of gendered inequality are used to justify different forms of class inequality. The ruling class project in any era is to manage the economy to keep themselves in power. When something important changes in an economy, such as new technologies appearing, or new people grabbing control of raw materials or taking over established businesses or banks, it is likely to challenge elite power. When this happens, the ruling class move to protect themselves as swiftly and effectively as they can, changing the economy and society in the process. They also try to reshape our lived and intimate

32 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism experience of gender, so that a new form of gendered inequality fits us for a new kind of economic inequality. The process of reshaping gender is, however, full of contradiction, complexity and resistance. Our third point is that ordinary people do not like inequality. So the story of gendered inequality is also a story of resistance. Sometimes the resistance explodes in power and joy. Sometimes we mutter, complain, endure, or look away with tears in our eyes. But always inequality is contested, fought over and negotiated. And so, as we study masculinities under neoliberalism, we must pay systematic attention to resistance.

Neoliberalism as an economic and political system The neoliberal economic regime began in the 1970s and now has a global reach. On the one hand, the technological advances have been extraordinary. Everywhere consumer goods have become ubiquitous. Global mortality rates have improved, and humanity has become predominantly urban. People are linked by communication and transport networks in ways unimaginable in the early 1970s. If they have money, people can travel for a sex-change operation or an IVF baby. Economic migration has also increased: both the poor travelling to richer countries with no option but illegal work, and the middleclass professionals travelling abroad for more work opportunities. Yet with all these changes, the lives of most people have become harder, and their jobs more insecure. Many people have become anxious and fearful for the future. Over the past 40 years, the world has become a much more unequal place. The account of the dynamic of neoliberalism and the crisis of 2008 that follows is our own synthesis, building on the analysis in Neale (2004).2 Our aim is to explain how and why these changes have had a direct impact on the experience and performance of masculinities and all gendered identities across the globe. Neoliberalism came into being as an attempt to solve a problem with profits. Following a period of global economic expansion, from the 1960s onwards the rate of profit – the percentage a company receives for each dollar of investment – began to fall in the rich, industrialized countries. This fall was much more marked in the manufacturing

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industry than the service industries. By 1973 the percentage of profit from industry had fallen by half. The falling rate of profit led to the first serious recession in industrial countries since the 1930s. By 1978 capitalists understood that something was seriously wrong. At this point they began to switch to the economic policies outlined at the beginning of this chapter that are now called ‘neoliberalism’. Since the 1980s these policies have been implemented in varying degrees in many countries. Trade agreements that open public corporations and services in poor countries to investment from rich corporations have generalized neoliberal policies internationally. A global ideological offensive has promoted neoliberalism through the development industry resulting, for instance, in Structural Adjustment Programmes being imposed with devastating effect throughout Africa in the 1980s and Latin America in the 1990s. European countries have been similarly disciplined in the name of austerity following the financial crash of 2008, most notably Greece. Capitalists have adopted other strategies besides neoliberalism as a result of falling industrial profits. These include moving investment into industries in low-wage countries, and making speculative investments in real estate, the stock market, bonds, derivatives and other potential bubbles. To keep economies moving, governments and central banks also encouraged a massive expansion in debt of every kind. Corporations faced a problem because workers were making less money, and so could not buy the things the corporations were producing. So the banks loaned individual workers massive amounts of money on credit cards, auto deals and mortgages. That meant these workers could ‘afford’ to buy from the companies, and it also increased bank profits. Neoliberalism was increasing the total profits companies made by taking from the share of the workers. But the long-term problems with industrial profits were still there. So neoliberalism restored some of the percentage of profits, but did not get it back up to the levels of the 1960s. In consequence, corporations in rich countries invested smaller percentages of the national income from 1980 onwards. And so the rich economies grew more slowly than they had.

34 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism The fall in investment, the fall in long-term growth, the limits of neoliberalism, the expansion of debt, and the expansion of speculation all came together to produce the financial crash of 2008. For just a moment, that seemed to discredit neoliberalism. But neoliberalism was the only strategy the corporate elite had. So in the wake of 2008, the elite doubled down on neoliberalism, insisting on yet more austerity and privatization, and flooding the system with more speculation and more debt (Mirowski 2013). Behind this general picture there lies more detail, ideological complexity, and the history and experience of struggle and negotiation between social classes. Four points stand out as particularly important. First, the introduction and promotion of neoliberalism has faced popular resistance and struggle everywhere. In the US things have gone further than in Western Europe, where there has been more resistance to the top-down imposition of inequality. In Russia the attempted introduction of wholesale neoliberalism and privatization led to economic disaster and widespread suffering in the 1990s. China moved decisively to introduce ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ (Rofel 2007) in 1989, leading to massive development of export industries. This strategy created considerable economic growth, but, twenty years on, there are still tens of thousands of local struggles each year. Second, we need to introduce another level of ideological complexity. So far we have been writing as if neoliberal capitalism was a single sentient individual. But in fact we are describing the actions of millions of managers and politicians (backed by the police and the military, but also teachers, social workers and civil servants who keep the system running) acting collectively and in competition with each other. Moreover, the managers and politicians are themselves trying to make sense of what they are doing as they do it. And they are obliged to make sense of the neoliberal changes in public, which is difficult. They can’t easily admit that they are trying to increase the share of total national income going to profits and the wealth of the rich, which means decreasing the proportion of the national wealth that comes to most of us. This is very hard to say to ordinary people, face to face, or via the media, so what they say instead is that they are trying to change to a ‘free market’.

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Third, neoliberalism did not spring into life full-blown. What happens is that the neoliberal project advances by steps in each country. You can look at these steps in more than one way. You can look at it as the ideas of Freedman, Hayek and the Chicago School going mainstream. Or you can look at the American recession in 1978 as a key moment led by Volker at the US Federal Reserve Bank. Or you can see Margaret Thatcher as a key innovator, or Deng Xiao Ping. Or you can look at neoliberalism as it has emerged through the Washington Consensus. In reality, thousands of tributaries feed this enormous river of reaction. Finally, it is important to remember that neoliberalism depends in practice on one class dominating another, but these unequal class relations are experienced in several different ways at once. This can be confusing. One the one hand, there is the relentless day-to-day pressure at work, from the police, and at the welfare office. On the other, the ideological assault is also relentless, in everything from self-help books to newspaper articles written by Nobel-prize winning economists. Crucially, there are the moments of exemplary victory on a national or global level for the neoliberal project and the ruling class. Naomi Klein has useful things to say about this process in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). Examples include Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, the 1985 defeat of the British miners’ strike, the crushing of Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by the right-wing Hindu nationalists in India in 1992, the 2003 shock-and-awe bombing of Baghdad and, throughout these years, the mass imprisonment of Americans in the ‘War on Drugs’. Though each of these ruling-class victories seems different, each did involve an explicit determination to impose neoliberal policies on a reluctant population. Sometimes this was direct and obvious, as with the British miners’ strike. Sometimes it was indirect, though terrifying, as in the turn to Hindutva in India and the draconian system of incarceration in the United States. Always the balance of power is significant in determining how far neoliberals can go. There have also been signal victories for ordinary people. Perhaps the bravest and most important has been the fight in the US, in Europe and especially in South Africa for access to generic

36 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. The global movement for gay marriage is another. Again we must remind ourselves that inequality can never be understood without considering resistance.

Making sense of masculinities under neoliberalism Masculinities have changed greatly during the neoliberal era. To make sense of these changes, we need to find a methodology which allows us to think critically about how and why social change occurs. We need to consider relations between social classes, between dominant and subordinate masculinities and between men and women, and we need to look comparatively both across cultures and over time. Three premises about method developed earlier in Dislocating Masculinity3 can help us to do these jobs. The first of these is about essentialism, or how to avoid thinking that there are essential ‘men’ and ‘women’. Second, it is important to understand gender as relational between men and women, but also between dominant and subordinate men, and between dominant and subordinate women. Third, we need always to remember that we are not actually unique, bounded individuals. Rather, we are social animals who are fashioned and exist only through exchange and social interaction. Then, with these basic premises in mind, we consider commodification, identities and individualism.

Essentialism Essentialism means there is something fundamental, or of the essence of a person, about being a man or a woman. In any given setting, such essential gender differences are often presented and perceived as absolute and dichotomous. That is, they are ‘essentialized’ and made to seem fixed, in our DNA, and somehow unalterable. Anthropologists and historians have taught us that people are gendered very differently in different times and places. So ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’ is neither fixed nor universal. The paradox is that while many people will recognize that gendered identities are taught and learned (‘socially constructed’), these same people may, in the next moment, describe the world in terms of the labels ‘men’ and ‘women’ as if we all know what these words mean.

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But when the words are used in a categorical way, there is always a power play involved. Someone is trying to put someone else in their place. Gender is marked all the time in those very moments when someone, or something, makes you aware of yourself as a man, or a woman, as straight or gay. Gender marking makes you aware of the boxes and squeezes you into one. And when this happens, it is remarkably difficult to think outside that box. That is why we talk about ‘masculinities’ and ‘gender’ here, not men and women. It makes it a bit easier to escape the box.

Hegemony and subordination The second key is to realize that men are never simply more powerful than women. Always, some men are more powerful than some other men. Some women are more powerful than some other women. And always, some women are more powerful than some men. It can be hard to remember this, because the Western ideology of essential gender differences says that men are powerful and women are yielding. Men are hard and women are soft, as if such dichotomies and contrasts are all that matters. The best way to escape from such essentialisms is to think in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘subordinate’ masculinities and femininities (Carrigan et al.1985).4 In any society, and in any situation, there is never only one type of masculinity, or femininity. Some men will dominate, and subordinate others. In some cases the differences may be fleeting, though still part of a play of power. And in that moment the more powerful man will perform one kind of masculinity, and dominate the other who can only respond in subordinate ways. Age is also an aspect of the relation between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, but other loyalties and alliances typically trump generational differences. And wherever we look, we see that power relations can be more or less permanent, systemic, and bound up with social class, histories of racism and other structural forms of inequality. As class inequalities have increased under neoliberalism, this aspect of relations between dominant and subordinate figures becomes more marked and ugly. But this can be confusing, because we often think of ‘tough guy’ masculinities as hegemonic. When we think of dominant, and dominating, men, we see Bruce Willis in a sleeveless T-shirt. There

38 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism may indeed be plenty of times and places (and films) when such a tough guy will bully others. But if we look at class relations across society, the Bruce Willis style of masculinity is that of a subordinate man, and everything about him is coded working-class. Hegemonic masculinities look different. They are the styles and behaviour of David Cameron or Barack Obama. Everything about them is coded ruling class. Part of our confusion is because dominant masculine styles are usually not ‘marked’. We tend to be very aware of the masculinity of working-class men, while we tend not to mark the masculinity of upper-class men explicitly. But it is there. Ruling-class men are performing masculine power almost all the time. We see it when we watch them on the news, in Parliament, at the economic summit at Davos, or walking into photo opportunities in the Rose Garden. But we also pretend that we don’t see. There is, then, not just one subordinate and one dominant masculinity. There are complex hierarchies of masculinity in play in many situations. If unquestioned, a cultural premise that associates men with power amounts to a mystification. And that mystification will benefit some people and disadvantage most others, both men and women. So it is far better to think of ideologies that privilege some men (and some women) by associating them with particular forms of power as hegemonic. And it helps to remember that hegemonic masculinities and femininities are always relational. Hegemonic masculinities define successful ways of being a man. And in doing this, they automatically define other masculine styles as inadequate or inferior. The same can be said of femininities. That is, there is no dominant, successful style of being a woman which does not immediately also define other female styles as subordinate or inferior in a variety of ways. But with all such relationships, there is of course resistance to inequality. Resistance can take many forms, and sometimes class dominance and hegemonic styles of masculinity are completely overturned by subordinates and by subordinate styles of masculinity.

Partible people If notions of masculinity and femininity, like the notion of gender itself, are fluid and situational, then we must consider how various

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masculinities, and femininities, are defined and redefined in social interaction. A third key idea for understanding gender is about ‘partible people’. Two ideas dominate popular culture today – individualism and identity. They make it easy for us to forget what we know very well from experience: that we are created through social contact with other people. Losing sight of this is a huge political loss, and it is also endlessly confusing. Our physical inheritance is part of who we are: but it is also influenced by other people, as are the culture, language, skills and aspirations we acquire as we grow up. And this process doesn’t stop. Who we are – as a set of feelings and ways of being in the world – is our messy, imperfect response to how other people have treated us in the past, how they treat us in the present, and how we think they are likely to treat us in the future. Because who we are can only be understood relationally, we need a way of thinking how we alter, and are ourselves altered through interactions with others. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988) uses the notion of ‘impingement’ to discuss the effects people may have on each other. This has much to recommend it. It is descriptive, but it’s a word that carries little baggage. Unlike the notion of ‘power’, impingement is not automatically associated with men or social dominance. Moreover it can be used to describe aspects of any social transaction. Another idea from Strathern (borrowed in turn from McKim Marriott) is that of ‘dividual’ people. This is a way of thinking of human beings as having permeable, changing boundaries that alter in response to different kinds of social interactions and in different social settings. Think for a moment about gendered essences and the partible bits of people: scent, taste, touch, thoughts, emotions and substances such as breastmilk and semen and the psychic and material conditions of wellbeing and misfortunes. We are changed when we catch a whiff of perfume, when we are touched by another person, when we are fired by a new idea, when we hear another person cry, or when we ourselves are physically harmed. And, vice-versa, of course, we change others – when we’re happy, when we’re anxious, when our feet smell bad. There are real, bodily changes: an orgasm is real, semen is real, pregnancy is real, and breast-milk is real and helps boy and girl babies to grow. And

40 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism the chemical changes in our noses and brains are real when we smell something pleasant, or noxious. So too do our eardrums vibrate when someone speaks to us, or shouts, or tortures us with white noise. So too do our bodies respond to soft stroking, but they also bruise, and break, and other people can easily kill us.

Ideologies of gender inequality What, then, do these three concepts – essentialism, hegemonic/ subordinate masculinities and partibility – mean for our understanding of masculinities under neoliberalism? To answer this, we need a further step: to understand the role of ideology in the processes of shaping gendered identities and inequalities. Ideologies of gender inequality are complex. They jumble and mix up different kinds of explanation and often leave us confused. There has also been a radical reconfiguration of dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities to support economic changes that have been imposed. For example, earlier styles of subordinate masculinity encouraged men to be breadwinners, and allowed subordinate men to dominate subordinate women. Often working-class men were said to be responsible for gender differences, and for the suffering of women. Certainly many working-class men benefit from sexism; this is how the system of gendered inequality works. But this explanation is at the same time an ideological con. It is most sharply articulated in the ‘what’s wrong with black men’ discourse – a neat example of how class and racial ideologies are often linked. There is another, contradictory model for changes that follow when women go out to work. This model says as women become more powerful, men become emasculated by their failure as breadwinners. The idea of men as ‘bread losers’ treats gendered relations as a zerosum game in which there is only a fixed amount of power or selfrespect to go around. This oft-heard argument is an ideological con. If you look at class relations across the board, it is clear that over the past 40 years, working- and middle-class men, and working- and middle-class women, have all lost out, while members of the ruling elite, both men and women, have gained from the stringent economic policies they have deployed. This has meant that in almost all countries

The lived experience of neoliberalism | 41

the share of national income going to wages and salaries has fallen, and the share of wages and salaries going to the top 10 per cent has risen. A third ideological con is the way commodity logic disposes us to be fascinated by the attributes of things and their power. Most often, we seek a one-to-one relation between such things and ourselves. We expect and want to be transformed by the connection. And because, inevitably, these commodities are gendered, we are in effect re-gendered by our choice of clothing, the car we drive and the paraphernalia of our lives. When we diet, work out, work on our bodies, or find ways to express sexual desire, we are of course changing ourselves in this process – often by spending money. And always others are watching us and find what we are doing more or less plausible. And of course while things can become parts of ourselves, the converse is also true: people can become part-objects in social exchanges. This is what dowries, prenuptial agreements and trophy brides are all about. And it is what all work is in a capitalist society, whether waged or unwaged, whether in an office, down a mine or in a bar. And that is what zero-hour contracts, serfdom and slavery are about, too. Previous subordinate masculinities required physical toughness to do manual work. A successful working man was expected to be strong and able-bodied. This has changed with the shift in jobs, skilled work and pay. Now dominant masculine styles are those which celebrate fitness and strength. Being a tennis buff, a keen cyclist or a mountaineer is often a competitive hobby, expensive and now mostly a pursuit of the rich. Seen from the outside, this is a reconfiguration of masculinity. Physical fitness has become an elite gain. For many working-class men the change is experienced from the inside simply as loss. And it is indeed a loss, but it is also part of how people are construing new selves to fit their new positions. So subordinate men, many who now work as carers or in the service industries, are themselves more caring, more sharing and more subservient. There are many ways we all experience ourselves as ‘dividuals’, but these remain largely unmarked because of the Western emphasis on the unitary person, the individual, and the increasing importance of ‘commodity logic’ in our search for identity under neoliberalism. But from the outset it is important to also hold onto the idea that

42 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism commodification is only one logic of partibility and exchange. Partibility also offers the possibility of equal exchanges, and of liberation.

How masculinities have changed under neoliberalism The neoliberal project over the last 40 years has created a much more unequal world. There is inequality between the top and bottom, and increasing inequality at every level – strongly driven by the increasing income of the top 1 per cent. This inequality is also a lived relationship at work, on the street, at the welfare office, in the hospital, and on the telephone to the call centre. This involves all of us, in all aspects of our lives. This makes us who we are, how we are gendered, and how we see ourselves as individual sites of resistance and struggle. The central dynamics of capitalism have also eroded the old ideological controls, and old ideas about work, religion and family. Neoliberalism has accelerated this process in at least three quite distinct ways. The first concerns the naturalization of inequality. The second is about increased gendered marking. The third requires a consideration of the increasing physical and cultural distances between the elite and ordinary people.

The naturalization of inequality The neoliberal elite has worked to change several things from the top down. First, almost across the board there is a naturalization of inequality. So inequality is said to be in your genes, and this is applied to education, mental illness, addiction, personality, gender and in some sense race. By some magic, all your problems are both genetic and your own fault. In this situation, ideologies of gender inequality become especially important in justifying new inequalities – and in persuading people to internalize those inequalities. To see how this works, only consider the endless reiteration of the popular self-help idea that men are from Mars, women from Venus. But this relentless naturalization also produces bad science, as in much of socio-biology and experimental psychology, because the people managing neoliberal change also need to naturalize suffering.

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Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009) is one of the most important pieces of sociological research in the last decade. They demonstrate a direct statistical relation between illness, shorter life spans and personal suffering and inequality of income in the 50 US states and in rich countries of the OECD. They show how even the wealthy have a harder time in societies where incomes are unequal. Their statistics contradict usual assumptions and they may be explained by the anxiety, fear and loneliness associated with being disproportionately wealthy in a society where incomes are very unequal. In short, neoliberalism produces more suffering. It does this directly by making work harder, increasing unemployment and shredding social safety nets. These processes create anxiety that something – anything – might go wrong. This destroys confidence in the future. However, the project of naturalization also produces endless struggle as the people being naturalized resist and fight against being labelled ‘less equal’ and ‘inferior’ and treated as if their lives were worth nothing. But resistance is not easy, not least because there are the secondary effects of suffering. When adults fail, they blame themselves and each other and marriages and families crumble. In an increasingly uneven world, there is less help from your equals. Friends have less time. They too are dealing with money and work pressures, and with damage. And when people are damaged, they go on to damage each other, and that creates yet more damage. They buy into the ideologies about individual rights, about having ‘me-time’ and being ‘worth it’, which at once offer consolation and yet distance them further from the support of others. And people are actively chastised for their failure to maintain the idea that ‘failure is always one’s own fault’; people are punished and blamed for drinking, taking drugs, becoming depressed or going mad. There is more suffering and more people are desperately searching for an explanation of why they are suffering, and for a way of coping. The people who manage the suffering at the front line of the state – the police, teachers and social workers – also themselves need a justification. It is an overdriven process that unites several different kinds of ideas and practices. The first are the increasingly commonplace ideas that naturalize inequality. Second are the ideas and practices

44 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism that blame the victim. And third are the ideas and practices that place the emphasis on individual identities and individual rights. Again, however, we are writing as if ideological production is done by a single, sentient individual. In fact the process is very complex. And that means the ideology has to be negotiated all the time. Ideologies are only useful to the elite if they are accepted and internalized by the oppressed. For that to happen, the ideology on offer has to take some account of our experience, and in this case, our lived experience of neoliberalism.

Masculinities and increased gendered marking As inequality has increased, it seems that gender differences, and gendered relations across the board, have become more marked. However, this marking is not a single process, nor is it simple or unidirectional. Rather, this process seems generic. So, for instance, it is not just differences between men and women, or between subordinate and dominant men, that become more marked. But it is also the case that gendered identities, however they are construed, may become more salient than differences associated with age, or race or class. That is, gendered culture, and thus of course all kinds of masculinities, has become more evident, more emphasized and more debated. To take one instance, in the 1960s, before the strategies of neoliberalism were deployed, identities and cultural styles like unisex clothing for children and adults was in fashion. But since neoliberal consumerism has taken hold, the pink/blue divide between girls and boys has been almost impossible to escape, no matter where you shop in the world. And when gendered differences are treated in this rigid, either/or mould, it becomes harder to find a place in-between: to be boyish in some ways and feminine in others. The rigidity can make life difficult for children and parents. And of course such rigidity invites resistance to the personal, and systemic, tyrannies it implies. Indeed, as supporters of gay marriage have discovered, the logic of such an extreme dichotomy is inexorable, absurd and wide open to challenge. The speed and impact of the movement for gay marriage has been particularly striking. But while recognition of gay identities

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and gay rights has proceeded apace, this has not slowed a return to punishing debates about abortion, contraception and women’s rights to control their own bodies. Meanwhile, issues of identity and parenthood have become important aspects of IVF and other fertility treatments, while the potential and practice of foetal femicide are now widely known. There are a great many examples of an increase in gender marking. Consider how the early sexualization of girls is now marked in many parts of the world, and the consequences that such marking has for boys, at play, in school, and at home. Or consider how sexting among teens is now the subject of a mainstream moral panic in Britain. And in an example of a new discourse of gendered marking, Mahdavi (2013) writes about how sex trafficking and terrorism have become linked in the past decade in ways which focus on ‘rescuing women’, while ignoring men and women who move as political refugees or economic migrants, and ignoring even those choosing to do sex work. The details of gendered marking may differ in unexpected ways in different places, although many of the changes have a global character. Dating practices and wedding rituals offer a laboratory for social comparison. So, for instance, the film Bridesmaids suggests how and why hen and stag parties have become particularly popular in the US and UK in recent years, often among people who are well-educated, economically secure and choosing to make companionate marriages. Jonathan Trigell describes the exaggerated gender marking at a British stag party in France in a novel about rape culture: The posh rugby boys are constantly calling each other ‘poof’ and ‘bender’, as if this is the most unarguable assertion of their own manliness. Though as the evening progresses it becomes clear that they think nothing of drinking beer from each other’s arsecracks and other acts that many hardened homosexuals might shirk from. (Trigell 2008: 18) Heightened gender marking seems often to be directly linked to an increasingly explicit commodification of social relationships.

46 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism In Assad’s Syria in the 1980s and 1990s, where elite status was often something recently acquired, more precarious, and more imbricated in neoliberal competition, wildly dramatic, and mind-blowingly ostentatious wedding rituals were a way of converting new and often dirty money into social, or political, capital (Lindisfarne 2000). This is not that different from the debates Katrien Jacobs (2012) describes for popular culture in China. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television banned, ‘Woju’ – a popular TV soap opera about a wealthy man and his mistress or ‘second wife’ – and caused an uproar among fans. One online survey targeted young single women, and asked them: ‘Which one would you choose: a young guy who loves you but has nothing or an old guy who also loves you and has everything?’ Nearly half the young women opted for the wealthier old man, many of them saying that they admire the new entrepreneurial masculinity, and desire to be partnered up with a ‘Big Bucks’. Or as one of them put it: What is love? Love is a gimmick made by men. Screw the shit like ‘I give my heart to you’ or ‘I am yours forever’. These are the words from penniless men, since they can afford nothing but sweet talk, which is totally worthless. If you are a real man and you love a woman, say nothing, just show her wads of bills because this secures her; and then give her a house, because that way after you fucked her she has some place to lay down her body. (Jacobs 2012: 44–5) In another variation on these themes, Iranian women are now as well educated as Iranian men, but are far more likely to be unemployed. This imbalance has been complicated by economic sanctions and the rigid gendered order of the Islamic Republic. In this situation the desperate competition between young women to marry well has become linked with political dissidence, an epidemic of premarital and extramarital affairs, group sex and mass defiance of the morals police. Mahdavi (2009) describes an incident which inspired in her both ‘hope and laughter’. Coming upon a traffic jam in a busy Tehran street, she saw

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A woman was standing on the top of the hood of her car, taking off her clothes. ‘You accuse me of the crime of bad hejáb just because it slid a few centimetres back; I’ll show you bad hejáb!’ She screamed, taking off first her hejáb and mänto and then her shirt, bra and belt. As the two komite [morals police] officers who had tried to arrest her made their way to her car to grab her, other people ran out of their cars and attacked the officers. Thirty men outnumbered each komite member, with women standing on the sidelines cheering and yelling insults at the officers. (Mahdavi 2009: 6)

Masculinities, migration and social distance The neoliberal reconfiguration of class relations and increasing class inequality have also meant there are literally greater physical distances, and a greater cultural gulf between the elite and others. One such frame concerns embodied experience and the management of personal space. Racially zoned cities, gated communities and cultures of fear are part of this story. So too are the practices which control bodies, emotions and the threat or experience of violence. Changes in the labour market, physical movement and migration are important as a second distinct frame for analysis. The expansion of industries goes with the expansion of cities. In the last 40 years billions of people have moved to the cities for work and the excitement of urban living. The most important of these changes in the neoliberal era are the mega-cities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Istanbul, Beijing, New York and Cairo. In these cities there are places to hide parts of your life. People in these cities can, and do, come together as crowds of two or three million on the streets in moments of great change. Increasingly, these are the places where decisive moments of social struggle are played out. One fundamental way of thinking of these global changes in masculinities is to reconsider the way capitalists benefit from the reserve army of the poor. Under neoliberalism, as the pressures on capitalists to increase profits have accelerated, workers have been forced to work for less in more dangerous and less secure conditions. And these pressures have in turn created urgent new gendered

48 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism imperatives. Thousands of young men and women migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in recent years in their attempt to reach richer countries, and many other millions have fought and often died in neoliberal wars for minerals and oil. The patterns of movement of political refugees, and of economic migration, are well known. Far less familiar are the effects of these global processes on experiences of masculinity, on health, dignity and self-respect. In another migration narrative, movement and deprivation are framed in terms of jobs ‘outsourced’ and gone elsewhere, ‘to Mexico, or China’. This explanation of framing economic and social changes excites racism, and hatred of those people who are even poorer and have fewer choices than the speaker himself. Again and again, we see elite men creating new masculinities, and we see other men trapped in new circumstances where they can no longer measure up. But we also see men, and women, in new and straitened circumstances constructing alternative subordinate masculinities. These are often fragile and lived with ambivalence, but they are much needed. There is much more to say about neoliberalism and masculinities, but this is a start. The striking changes in masculinities over the past 40 years require us to get to grips with the ways in which neoliberalism works as an economic and political system. The scale and depth of these changes also require us to look again at gender theory, and consider what other tools for analysis it might offer us or push us to develop. What is clear is that, by combining the two, we open vast new areas of social relations to ethnographic description, theoretical consideration and, we hope, some practical ways of better understanding the shape of our own lives.

Notes 1 We write about this association, and the startling contrast between class and non-class societies, at length elsewhere (see https://sexismclassviolence. wordpress.com/2015/01/31/sexual-violence-and-class-inequality/). There was and is also great cultural variety in non-class societies, but in two ways nonclass societies are all alike. They practise economic equality, and there are no consistent or enduring patterns of inequality between men and women. On the rise of class societies and the state, see, for example, The Creation of Inequality by Flannery and Marcus (2013).

The lived experience of neoliberalism | 49 2 For other accounts of the economics of neoliberalism see Mirowski (2013); Klein (2007); Callinicos (2010) and Harvey (2005). For the Marxist literature on neoliberalism and the rate of profit, start with Brenner (2002), (2005); Neale (2004); Harman (2010); Kliman (2011); and the articles in Historical Materialism, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1999. Michael Roberts’s blog at www. thenextrecession.wordpress.com is always useful. 3 The set of ideas outlined here draw on the introduction and first chapter of Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994). Our debt to Marilyn Strathern’s Gender of the Gift (1988) is also great. 4 This important idea comes from a 1985 paper by Carrigan et al. It was subsequently developed by Connell (1987) and in many other publications.

References Brenner, R. (2002) The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy, Verso, London. Brenner, R. (2005) The Economics of Global Turbulence, Verso, London. Callinicos, A. (2010) Bonfire of Illusions, Polity, Cambridge. Carrigan, T., B. Connell and J. Lee (1985) ‘Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 551–604. Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (eds) (1994) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Flannery, K. and J. Marcus (2013) The Creation of Inequality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. Harman, C. (2010) Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, Haymarket, Chicago IL. Harvey, D. (2005) A Short History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Historical Materialism, Vol. 5, No. 1, Brill, Leiden, Netherlands. Jacobs, K. (2012) People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet, Intellect, Bristol. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin, London. Kliman, A. (2011) The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, Pluto, London. Lindisfarne, N. (2000) Dancing in Damascus: Stories, State University of New York Press, Albany NY. Mahdavi, P. (2009) Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Mahdavi, P. (2013) From Trafficking to Terror. Constructing a Global Social Problem, Routledge, London. Mirowski, P. (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso, London. Neale, J. (2004) What’s Wrong with America? How the Rich and Powerful have Changed America and Now Want to Change the World, Vision, London.

50 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Rofel, L. (2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture, Duke University Press, Durham NC. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift, California University Press, Berkeley CA. Trigell, J. (2008) Cham, Serpents Tail, London. Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, Allen Lane, London.

CHAPTER 3 In search of ‘stability’: working-class men, masculinity and wellbeing in contemporary Russia Charlie Walker

Introduction: reinscribing working-class masculinities In 1977 Paul Willis published his celebrated ethnography, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, in which he explored the processes through which a group of young men (‘the lads’) made transitions from a Midlands comprehensive school to the factory gates. With apparently secure forms of low-skilled manual employment awaiting them after school, the lads were able confidently to reject the ‘educational exchange’ (of subservience for qualifications), and valorized manual over mental labour. There have been many other such examples of working-class male subcultures featured in the sociologies of gender, class and youth over the decades, any of which would support the notion, developed most recently by Coles (2009), that subordinate masculinities may themselves have claims to hegemony. Taking issue with Connell’s argument that hegemonic masculinity by necessity subordinates and marginalizes other forms of masculinity, Coles argues that ‘hegemonic masculinity may have a marginal impact upon the lives of men who choose to disassociate themselves from the mainstream and operate in social milieux where their masculinity is dominant in relation to other men’ (2009: 30–1). Arguably, however, the economic and cultural transformations associated with neoliberalism have made the occupation of a subordinate-hegemonic position such as that held by ‘the lads’ an

52 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism increasingly difficult prospect, as working-class men, and young men in particular, are both materially and symbolically marginalized. With the collapse of employment opportunities in the industrial sector and the growing flexibility of employment relations, many have been demoted either to unemployment or to forms of ‘hyphenated’ and feminized work in the new service sector, while those able to remain in skilled manual labour have often found themselves worse off than their fathers had been relative to the rest of the workforce (Roberts 2013). Alongside these employment shifts, working-class men have come to be portrayed as incapable of participating in the self-making projects demanded by modern labour markets, such that forms of ‘laddish’ masculinity that were once tolerated become stigmatized as backward, a block on the modernity of others (Skeggs 2011; Reay 2001; Francis 2006). This chapter explores changes taking place in the lives of workingclass men in post-Soviet Russia, where de-industrialization has taken a somewhat different form. In contrast to the gradual economic shifts that have taken place in most Western societies, the undermining of old forms of employment dominated by men has resulted from the catastrophic collapse of a state-led economic system. The dislocations engendered by this collapse, which precipitated what has been described as the worst recession in human history (Clarke 1999: 1), led not to widespread unemployment, but to an impoverishment of prospects for those employed in the industrial sector, where poverty wages, unsafe working conditions and extended periods of unpaid leave became the norm during the 1990s (Yaroshenko et al. 2006: 134).

Russian workers: from heroes to zeroes While the Putin period has brought some semblance of economic stability, employment in the industrial sector remains highly problematic (Walker 2011). In addition, transformations of class and class politics taking place in Western neoliberal contexts have been mirrored in Russia and elsewhere in post-socialist Eastern Europe, as working-class communities and forms of employment are repositioned at the bottom of the symbolic economy (Stenning 2005;

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Kideckel 2008; Walker 2015). While not stemming from a backlash against ‘welfare dependency’ (Russia’s welfare state is not developed enough for such a narrative), there are similar roots in shifts towards self-governance and individualization, which identify the apparent backwardness of the working class in its lack of entrepreneurialism and seeming dependence on parts of the old Soviet economy. These class transformations are most evident in the ways in which masculinities have been reinscribed in the post-socialist context. As well as placing a strong emphasis on men’s material status (Ashwin 2000), constructions of masculinity in Russia have come to place growing importance on a range of cultural and symbolic distinctions marking out ‘successful men’. Chernova (2002), for example, describes the features of what she terms the new ‘corporate standard of hegemonic masculinity’, describing how new forms of consumption have come to constitute a uniform signifying the rationality and leadership qualities of successful, ‘real men’. Items such as business suits, glasses, mobile phones and watches, for example, symbolize men’s control over information, time and social space. By contrast, working-class men, not only in Russia, but also in other parts of post-socialist Eastern Europe, are positioned as lacking and abject, occupying a ‘failed’ masculinity. As Kideckel (2008: 30) argues in relation to Romania, for example, the symbolic position of miners and industrial workers has shifted ‘from veneration to denigration’, such that ‘workers either disappear from national media altogether, or appear only as unrecognizable caricatures’. In their Russian variant, such caricatures have emerged on ‘hate websites’ delighting in the portrayal of working-class young men as gopniki – a pejorative term which constructs working-class young men as a backward, illiterate mass inhabiting outlying districts of provincial towns (Stephenson 2012). Thus, having occupied a position of relative dominance in the Soviet hierarchy of prestige, working-class masculinity is now clearly subordinated to and delegitimized by the emergent, dominant masculinities of the post-Soviet period. Against this emerging class politics, the academic literatures addressing working-class men in Russia have presented a mixed set of portraits. For example, studies of the lived experiences of

54 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism blue-collar workers in Russia have often presented working men as pragmatic, embedding themselves in homosocial activities both at work and in their leisure time, and taking pride in manual skills and resourcefulness (Morris 2012; Meshcherkina 2002). By contrast, Round (2012) presents the middle-aged, working-class men in his research on the informal economies of Moscow and St Petersburg as a marginalized, excluded group, without realistic routes back into formal employment with statutory benefits, and with no assistance from third-sector organization. Similarly, studies of working-class men’s experiences of employment change and related changes in their position within the household largely point to narratives of loss and marginalization (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004; Kay 2006; Kiblitskaya 2000). These portraits of exclusion and loss echo the demographic and health literature, which has pointed to workingclass, working-age men as those most vulnerable to psycho-social stress and alcoholism during the health and mortality crises of the 1990s (Bobak et al. 1998; Pridemore 2002; Pietila and Rytkonen 2008).

Learning to labour in post-Soviet Russia While the existing literature on blue-collar workers has tended to focus on the experiences of older men, including those who had grown up during the Soviet period, my own work has concentrated on the experiences of working-class men in youth and young adulthood. The first study in a wider programme of research was undertaken in 2004, and examined the changing shape of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young men and women in Ul’yanovsk, a mature industrial town situated in the Volga region of European Russia.1 The study focused on young people graduating from vocational training colleges (profuchilishcha) within Russia’s Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET) system, which traditionally has trained students from working-class and rural backgrounds for manual occupations in local industries. At the institutional level, the study was concerned with the ways in which colleges had been able to re-orient themselves towards the emerging education and labour markets their graduates would face. In

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Ul’ianovsk, as elsewhere in provincial Russia, a lack of restructuring and general dependence of the local economy on keeping nearobsolete enterprises going meant that the young men in the study faced difficult prospects on entering the labour market as colleges continued to channel them into low-paid, low-prestige jobs in the ailing sectors of the old Soviet economy: There’s nothing to like about working there. They don’t pay you, they pay you nothing, neither workers nor students training there. What’s the point of staying at your workplace? It’s just for people who’ve got nowhere to go, they just work for kopecks year after year. (Sergei, 18, metal worker/repairer)2 Sergei’s perspective on working in the enterprise connected to his college – a manufacturing plant where both of his parents had been employed for most of their working lives – was indicative of both the material and the symbolic impoverishment of manual labour faced by the young men in the study. Materially, the young men perceived employment as manual workers in these enterprises as being incapable of supporting wider transitions into adulthood – most notably, housing and family transitions – and thus of being incongruent with the role of breadwinner that they were expected to take on. On a symbolic level, as Sergei’s narrative indicates, the young men recognized wider discourses positioning the working class as dependent on a dying economy and therefore immobile, incapable of reinventing itself as something else. By contrast, the young men were looking to the newly privatized higher education sector, new forms of employment in the service sector, and migration to Moscow and St Petersburg as alternatives to the ‘transitions to nowhere’ offered by the IVET system. A similar story emerged in St Petersburg in a follow-up study undertaken in 2008, in which the more buoyant economic environment provided by a thriving metropolis was expected to underpin more successful transitions into work amongst graduates of IVET colleges (Walker 2012a; 2012b). However, as in Ul’yanovsk, the young men interviewed in colleges around the city were similarly ambivalent about the prospect of careers as manual workers, and were focused on

56 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism acquiring jobs much higher up the occupational ladder. In particular, some of the young men spoke of their desire to become directors, a position that appeared to symbolize a kind of effortlessness in the performance of a successful masculinity, while the manual worker remained fixed, and incapable of realizing himself beyond his physical labour: If you’re a director, you’ll be sitting there in an office, giving everyone orders, not doing anything . . . if not, you’re not in an office, you’re running around somewhere, making something, fixing something. . . . I’m not staying with something in this life that doesn’t bring me any sort of career growth, so that at the end of my life I’ll just be an ordinary worker, I don’t really want that. (Vlad, 24, machine operator) Nevertheless, both in St Petersburg and Ul’yanovsk, the young men did not appear to possess the social, cultural and material capital necessary to realize their aspirations. Indeed, the forms of capital available to the young men more often than not embedded them in precisely the more limited opportunities they were attempting to escape – networks that were oriented towards ‘getting by’ rather than ‘getting on’ (Walker 2010). In addition, social class disadvantages shaping the young men’s futures were institutionalized within the education system, as army conscription focuses on working-class youth leaving college at the age of 18, and would scupper plans for further study for most: After the army I reckon you’d lose the desire to study, because you’d already have forgotten everything. . . . I mean, you’re in a different set of circumstances after the army . . . everything’s different. . . . You wouldn’t want to start all that up again . . . so you’d just end up working somewhere, and that’d be it, you’d just work there. (Vanya, 18, car mechanic) Thus, despite their ambivalence about the prospect of employment in manual labour, the young men in both of these studies were unlikely to find themselves doing anything else in the future.

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Working-class men in young adulthood: in search of stability Given both the ambivalence felt by the younger men about pursuing careers in what were essentially emasculated forms of employment, and the difficulty they would face in carving out alternative pathways, I wanted to examine the experiences and subjectivities of older men who had reached an ‘end point’ in their transitions to adulthood. Between 2010 and 2013 I conducted interviews and participant observation amongst 60 men aged between 25 and 39 who were working in a range of manual labouring occupations in the cities of Moscow and Ul’yanovsk. The aim of the project was to explore sources of and barriers to wellbeing – subjective, physical and material – amongst the men, in a period of comparative economic stability. The research thus explored the men’s experiences across a range of life domains, including family, work and leisure. Of particular interest were the experiences and subjective mechanisms through which the workingclass men’s ambitions were ‘cooled out’, as they learned to live within social positions constructed as somehow inferior and lacking in value. From the beginning of the research, the men’s awareness of the lack of social respect afforded to workers was a continual theme – that ‘labour is not valued’ (trud ne tsenitsya) and that ‘workers are not respected’ (ne uvazhaiut rabochikh). One of the men, a 37-year-old factory worker in southern Moscow, had even taken to pretending to be ‘some manager’ when he was flirting with women on a night-out: even though a ‘manager’ can be just, like, a shop assistant and earn less than I do . . . but they think it sounds cool. I’d never tell them I work in a factory. (Stefan, 37, machine operator) Some of the men had had experience of the further- and highereducation courses the young men in the earlier research had been drawn towards, and had found them to be roads to nowhere. Mikhail, for example, who divided his working life between building sites in Moscow and taxi driving in Ul’yanovsk, had obtained a qualification as ‘some sort of service sector manager’ that had been ‘a waste of money’ (dengi na veter):

58 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism there are so many of these ‘managers’ now, but they’re of absolutely no use to anyone . . . the market is saturated with them. (Mikhail, 32, construction worker) Few of the men declared that they ‘liked’ their jobs, preferring instead to say that their employment ‘suited’ them (mne ustraivaet). However, unlike the younger men, they were able to construct and uphold a range of subjectivities around their employment that shored up a sense of subjective wellbeing in their everyday lives. As such, the men both recognized and at the same time rejected the dominant symbolic represented by the successful masculinities associated with the new economy. Most typically, constructions of value surrounding manual labour focused on its usefulness, in contrast to the seeming pointlessness of office-based employment: Office work is just bits of paper and not knowing where these bits of paper go or what they’re for or if there’s any point to it . . . we actually create something that’s useful. (Maks, 29, machine operator) Sales work was also heavily criticized by many, some respondents even expressing a scepticism about the nature of capitalism as it seemed to be played out in the post-Soviet context, which was characterized as simply the buying and selling of goods produced elsewhere, and thus reduced to nothing more than the ‘speculation’ so vilified during the Soviet period (Herzberger 2007: 246). Some of the men also constructed notions of moral worth in connection with their employment, as service sector workers could be seen as those with their ‘fingers in the till’. As well as constructing non-manual forms of employment negatively, the men were positively oriented towards their workplaces, with many of them describing a deep sense of attachment to a particular workplace and group of co-workers (kollektiv), thus echoing the Soviet notion of the enterprise as one’s ‘second home’ (Clarke 1999). Although these enterprises did not provide any of the services that they had extended during the Soviet period – childcare, holidays, healthcare and even waiting lists for apartments – such attachments

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nevertheless still ran deep. Indeed, some of the men even talked of returning to ‘their’ factory (svoi zavod) after having earned a living in informal employment of various kinds during the more chaotic 1990s. Furthermore, echoing Abramov (2012) and Vanke’s (2014) ethnographic research with foundry workers and factory workers respectively, many respondents valorized the physical skills demanded by their work, one miller (frezerovshchik) even likening the ability to operate his machine to playing table tennis, which required similar alertness and precision. While most of the men were thus able to find value in their work, few were satisfied materially, and were engaged in a variety of forms of secondary employment, most of which drew upon the forms of social capital available to them. These ranged from handymen working in municipal services taking advantage of their position to tackle a wide range of cash-in-hand work for residents in their buildings, to far more elaborate schemes – with higher risks, but bigger rewards – such as money lending. In the latter case, Sergei, a car mechanic, had managed to generate enough profit from making short-term loans of large sums of money to be able to upgrade the flat he had inherited from his grandmother, pointing out that this type of strategy was easy, as long as you knew the right people to be able to get the money back if someone didn’t want to pay it. Homosocial networks were also key to the men’s domestic lives, with many of them depending on their wider circles of extended family, friends and acquaintances to acquire the tools and assistance needed to complete domestic renovations and car repairs. Indeed, it was in this aspect of domestic life that the men’s performances of masculinity were at their clearest, taking the form of the umelets – a man in possession of the practical knowledge necessary to be self-sufficient in maintaining and upgrading one’s home – or even building it from scratch. There was thus an overlap between men’s homosocial activities surrounding the domestic sphere and their role as provider, kormilets. Similar overlaps could be seen in the men’s leisure activities, central amongst which was fishing. Again, practical skills and knowledge were paramount – and took the place of the fetishism over equipment evident in more middle-class sporting activities – but what also marked this homosocial activity was the

60 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism way it acted as a gel not only for groups of men, but also for wider social networks. On returning from a fishing trip with me and his father, for example, Artem showed me pictures of the spoils of a more successful expedition – dozens of herring that had been dried out on a clothes line and subsequently distributed amongst family, friends and colleagues – and explained that his main source of pleasure was being able to give them out as presents. As well as drawing on resources of cultural and social capital in their work and leisure practices, the men were able to make use of the bodily capital they had available to them, and did so in a number of ways. Artur, for example, had come to Moscow as an illegal immigrant from Moldova and worked on building sites for a number of years, living in dire conditions and with no prospect of improving his living situation. However, being an attractive man – tall, broadshouldered, and slim – he was able to use an internet dating site to find a wife who owned her own flat: I deliberately looked for one who was a bit older and overweight, as long as she had a flat. (Artur, 39, handyman) Sasha’s use of his bodily capital was less instrumental, but central to his performance of an alternative successful masculinity. Employed as a foreman in a car parts factory in northern Moscow, Sasha had four mistresses at the time of the research, two of whom had wealthy husbands: but they don’t like their husbands, they prefer me, because I’m a handsome bloke (muzhik). (Sasha, 40, section foreman) The men were thus able to shore up a sense of subjective wellbeing, and achieve a degree of material wellbeing, through their subjectivities and the forms of cultural, social and bodily capital available to them. However, at the same time, the men were under significant and ongoing pressure in relation to expectations of them to act as providers in a context in which their primary incomes were not sufficient to allow them to do so. Such pressure was especially severe in relation to the housing question (zhilishchnii vopros), which was

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almost insurmountable for those who had not inherited a property or land to build on. While mortgage finance is increasingly accessible in Russia, few of the men felt that they earned enough in their main job to be able to afford it, and, despite the greater stability they had experienced in recent years, many felt that this could not be taken for granted. A number of workers at the Ul’yanovsk Motor Works (UAZ), for example, were wary that their wages could be significantly reduced as and when orders dried up – something that took place towards the end of the research period. In this context, most of the men talked about stability – stabilnost – as something that had arrived in a small measure, but remained elusive. As already noted, many of the men were involved in forms of secondary employment, and it was largely through this that they strove to overcome the pressures they were under to be successful providers. This was commonly referred to through the term krutitsya, the need to ‘spin around’, constantly looking for new sources of ‘work on the side’ (shabashki, podrabotki). While, as in Mikhail’s case, some were very successful at this, such strategies carried significant risks, and not only the more lucrative amongst them. Many of the men appeared to see their youth and their health as resources with exchange value, working sometimes ten or twenty additional hours per week on evenings and weekends in physically demanding and sometimes clearly harmful activities. Vlad, for example, sustained a serious back injury while doing some heavy lifting work out-of-hours at his primary workplace, citing the forthcoming arrival of his first child as the reason for doing so. Despite having undergone a serious operation, he stated that he was looking for a job to work from six until twelve, as his main job was only eight until five. Clearly this way of working is unsustainable, as Valera’s case shows. Valera had worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for two years, before he had been able to buy a flat on credit for himself, his wife and their new-born baby. However, shortly before I interviewed him he had split from his wife after having quit his second job. He said he was physically incapable of carrying on with it, but that his wife had become used to the money: ‘When a person gets used to eating, they develop a strong appetite, right?’

62 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism A second way of dealing with demands that are impossible to meet was simply to ignore them, and this strategy was best exemplified by Oleg, a 40-year-old factory worker in Moscow who had resigned himself to never being able to have his own flat. Oleg felt that the housing question had effectively prevented him from having a family, as he and his brother were forced to live together in a two-roomed flat they’d inherited from their parents – indeed, his brother’s wife had already left, having found it impossible to get on with her brother-in-law in such a small space. So, although finding sources of pride, enjoyment and companionship in his job, Oleg found it difficult to see the point in working, if he could never have a family: It’s shameful, the fact that I have to share a flat with my brother. . . . I want to have a wife, children . . . my brother’s family left . . . I mean, why are we working? What are we working for? (Oleg, 40, machine operator)

Conclusion Looking across the experiences of the men who have participated in the wider programme of research drawn upon for this chapter, the relationship between men occupying subordinate positions and cultural constructions of dominant versions of masculinity appears to be more complex than has been suggested elsewhere (Coles 2009). Clearly, the working-class young men interviewed in this research recognized both constructions of hegemonic masculinity tied up with new strands of the post-Soviet economy, and, relatedly, the symbolic impoverishment of the manual labouring classes of which they were a part, and from which they were trying to escape. By contrast, older men shored up a sense of subjective wellbeing through the construction of identities and narratives valorizing manual work as useful and noble, and through a range of other practices, including homosocial leisure activities. This contrast across age groups, in a context in which social mobility is heavily constrained, indicates a ‘cooling out’ process, rather than a smooth insertion into hermetically sealed masculine subcultures of the type once described

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by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (Stahl 1999). The older men’s experiences also indicate that we should be wary of interpretations that posit men’s subjectivities – their claims to power – as a form of agency. Indeed, a lack of agency in material terms, especially in relation to the family, ultimately undermined or threatened to undermine any sense of subjective wellbeing they may have established in their working and leisure lives. The men learned to live with the material and symbolic marginalization they faced, but they could not insulate themselves from it.

Notes 1 The Ul’yanovsk study led to a number of publications, including: Walker 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011. 2 All respondents’ names and other indicators by which they may be identified have been changed.

References Abramov, R. N. (2012) ‘Metallurgi na Mashinostroitel’nom Zavode: Ocherk Professional’noi Subkultury’ (‘Metal Workers in a Machine Parts Factory: Features of a Professional Subculture’), in P. Romanov and E. Yarskaya-Smirnova (eds), Antropologiya Professii: Granitsy Zanyatosti v Epokhu Nestabil’nosti (The Anthropology of Professions: The Boundaries of Employment in an Era of Instability), Variant, Moscow. Ashwin, S. (2000) ‘Introduction’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, Routledge, London. Ashwin, S. and T. Lytkina (2004) ‘Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization’, Gender and Society, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 189–206. Bobak, M., H. Pikhart, C. Hertzman, R. Rose and M. Marmot (1998) ‘Socioeconomic Factors, Perceived Control and Self-Reported Health in Russia: A Cross-Sectional Survey’, Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 269–79. Chernova, Zh. (2002) ‘Romantik Nashego Vremeni: S Pesnei Po Zhizni’ (‘A Romantic of Our Time: From Songs about Life’), in A. Oushakine (ed.), O Muzhe(n)stvennosti (On Masculinity), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow. Clarke, S. (1999) New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies in Russia, Institute for Comparative Labour Relations Research/Centre for Comparative Labour Studies, Warwick. Coles, T. (2009) ‘Negotiating the Field of Masculinity: The Production and Reproduction of Multiple Dominant Masculinities’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 30–44.

64 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Francis, B. (2006) ‘Heroes or Zeroes? The Discursive Positioning of “Underachieving Boys” in English Neo-Liberal Education Policy’, Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 187–200. Herzberger, L. (2007) The Rise and Fall of a Thermidorian Society: Why the Soviet Union Came Apart, 1917–1991, Xlibris, Dartford. Kay, R. (2006) Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change? Ashgate, London. Kiblitskaya, M. (2000) ‘“Once We Were Kings”: Male Experiences of Loss of Status at Work in Post-Communist Russia’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, Routledge, London and New York NY. Kideckel, D. (2008) Getting by in Post-Socialist Romania: Labor, the Body and Working-Class Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN. Meshcherkina, E. (2002) ‘Bytie Muzhskogo Soznaniya: Opyt Rekonstruktsii Maskulinnoi Identichnosti Srednogo i Rabochego Klassa’ (‘The Essence of Male Consciousness: Experiences of the Reconstruction of Identity amongst the Middle and Working Class’, in S. Oushakine (ed.), O Muzhe(n)stvennosti (On Masculinity), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow. Morris, J. (2012) ‘Unruly Entrepreneurs: Russian Worker Responses to Insecure Formal Employment’, Global Labour Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 217–36. Pietila, I. and Rytkonen, M. (2008) ‘Coping with Stress and by Stress: Russian Men and Women Talking about Transition, Stress and Health’, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 327–38. Pridemore, W. A. (2002) ‘Vodka and Violence: Alcohol Consumption and Homicide Rates in Russia’, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 92, No. 12, pp. 1921–30. Reay, D. (2001) ‘Finding or Losing Yourself?: Working-Class Relationships to Education’, Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 333–46. Roberts, K. (2013) ‘Education to Work Transitions: How the Old Middle Went Missing and Why the New Middle Remains Elusive’, Sociological Research Online, Vol. 18, No. 1, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/1/3. html>10.5153/sro.2650. Round, J. (2012) ‘Russia’s Forgotten Middle-Aged Men’, in S. Salmenniemi (ed.), Rethinking Class in Russia, Ashgate, London. Skeggs, B. (2011) ‘Imagining Personhood Differently: Person Value and Autonomist Working-Class Value Practices’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 496–513. Stahl, G. (1999) ‘Still “Winning Space”?: Updating Subcultural Theory’, Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, No. 2, www.rochester.edu/in visible culture/issue2/stahl.htm (accessed 1 September 2015). Stenning, A. (2005) ‘Where Is the Post-Socialist Working Class? WorkingClass Lives in the Spaces of (Post-)Socialism’, Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 983–99. Stephenson, S. A. (2012) ‘The Violent Practices of Youth Territorial Groups in Moscow’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 69–90. Vanke, A. (2014) ‘Telesnost Muzhchin Rabochikh Professii v Rezhimakh Truda I Privatnoi Sfery’ (‘The Bodily Praxis of Men Employed in Manual Labour in Work Regimes and the Private Sphere’), Laboratorium (Laboratory), Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 60–83.

Contemporary Russia | 65 Walker, C. (2006) ‘Managing Vocational Education and the Youth Labour Market in Post-Soviet Russia’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 17, No. 8, pp. 1426–40. Walker, C. (2007) ‘Navigating a “Zombie” System: Youth Transitions from Vocational Education in post-Soviet Russia’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, Vol. 26, No. 5, pp. 513–31. Walker, C. (2009) ‘From “Inheritance” to Individualisation: Dis-embedding Working-Class Youth Transitions in post-Soviet Russia’, Journal of Youth Studies (special issue on ‘Youth, Class and Place’), Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 531–45. Walker, C. (2010) ‘Space, Kinship Networks and Youth Transition in Provincial Russia: Negotiating Rural–Urban and Inter-Regional Migration’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 647–69. Walker, C. (2011) Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Russia: Vocational Youth in Transition, Routledge, London. Walker, C. (2012a) ‘Re-inventing Themselves? Gender, Employment and Subjective Wellbeing amongst Working-Class Young Russians’, in S. Salmenniemi (ed.), Rethinking Class in Russia, Ashgate, Burlington. Walker, C. (2012b) ‘Class, Gender and Subjective Wellbeing in Russia’s New Labour Market: Experiences of Young People in Ul’ianovsk and St Petersburg’, Journal of Social Policy Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 521–38. Walker, C. (2015) ‘“I Don’t Really Like Tedious, Monotonous Work”: WorkingClass Young Women, Service Sector Employment and Social Mobility in Contemporary Russia’, Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 106–22. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Ashgate, Aldershot. Yaroshenko, S., E. Omel’chenko, N. Goncharova and O. Issoupova (2006) ‘Gender Differences in Employment Behaviour in Russia’s New Labour Market’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Adapting to Russia’s New Labour Market: Gender and Employment Behaviour, Routledge, Abingdon.

CHAPTER 4 ‘Filial son’, dislocated masculinity and the making of male migrant workers in urban China Xiaodong Lin

Modernity, marginalization and rural–urban migrant men in China Since the late 1970s, the ‘reform and opening up’ modernization project in China has transformed the country from a ‘planned economy’ to a ‘market economy’. This has had a major impact on Chinese society. Rural–urban labour migration is one of the most discussed social transformations resulting from the economic reforms, with impacts on both urban industrialization and the economic modernization of the rural household.1 Yet it has been accompanied by a deepening of the material conditions of inequality and the attendant social tensions affecting this mobile population. Gender is becoming a major category in understanding Chinese rural–urban labour migration and the issue of social marginality (Pun 2005; Jacka 2006; Yan 2008). The major public narratives of migrant workers are gendered, projecting images of a group of socially and politically ‘marginalized’ men since the period of post-Mao economic reform.2 The dominant representation of male migrant workers is discursively shaped by new ideology and associated values marked by the neoliberal modernization project. This chapter draws on an ongoing qualitative study of male migrant workers in China (Lin 2013), involving men aged 17–48 years and living in a southern coastal city of China. In the study, a life history approach illustrates that the construction of identity is an ongoing process in relation to the movement of rural men into urban spaces. The primary focus is on changing social relations within the family

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from the perspective of migrant workers as sons. Men’s narratives paradoxically recount how traditional familial gender norms have become a central cultural resource in forging new identities, involving the construction of new meanings of masculinity in adjusting to emerging social relations and geographical locations. The men’s active negotiations in the process of identity formation, as highlighted in their narratives below, enabled me to move from an overly structuralist perspective on the social stratification and integration of Chinese male migrant workers, developed at an earlier stage of the ethnographic fieldwork, to an investigation of the dynamic interplay between structure and agency in producing a broader understanding of their identity formation within the context of familial practices.

Migration and marginalization In the Chinese government’s current political discourse, migrant workers’ assumed inability to engage positively with the modernization project constitutes a major problem. More importantly, the discourse of post-Mao neoliberal modernization and rural/urban divisions has strengthened the ideological formation of the dichotomy of the urban and the rural, which has gained new meanings in relation to the associated concepts of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’. Such a geographical dichotomy is also accompanied by unequal power relations that are seen to have intensified since the introduction of the government’s uneven regional development policy, as well as imaginary differences of space existing among urban residents and migrant men. What is significant is the explanation of such geographical differences, as a result of neoliberal economic modernization, in helping to construct Chinese male workers’ migrating masculinities through the representation of them as ‘dysfunctional others’ in their move from rural villages to cities. For example, the Chinese State Council launched a report in 2006, deploying superlative adjectives to describe migrant workers’ lives: (Migrant workers) get the lowest salary, working in the heaviest, hardest, dirtiest, most tiring, most dangerous job; meanwhile, they are wearing the cheapest clothes, using the cheapest goods,

68 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism eating the cheapest food, living in the cheapest houses. (Chinese State Council 2006) (my emphasis) Nonini (2008) argues that some social groups, such as migrant workers, are excluded from the market economy system because they lack the resources to build up interpersonal relations required in gaining socioeconomic status. Hence, the pursuit of modernization may have led to a disconnection between the state and its people, in terms of the implementation of the modernizing ideology. In contrast to the success of the cadre-capitalist class, migrant workers are discursively portrayed as ‘disadvantaged’, particularly because lack of education denies an improvement in the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of their lives that would enable them to participate in the modernization project. Suzhi, according to Yan (2003: 494), refers to the somewhat ephemeral qualities of civility, selfdiscipline, and modernity . . . [suzhi] marks a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy . . . it is often used in the negative by the post-Mao state and educational elites to point to the lack of quality of the Chinese labouring masses. This resonates with a major theme to emerge within my study of male migrant workers: dislocated masculinities resulting from migration (Yeoh and Willis 2004; Popoviciu et al. 2006; Donaldson et al. 2009). Research on men and migration – Boehm (2008) and Cohen (2006) on Latin American male migrants to the USA, or Osella and Osella’s (2000) study on male migration in Kerala – illustrates the significance of studying men’s accounts of migration (Donaldson et al. 2009). Such studies have moved away from an economic determinist to a cultural anthropological approach. Migration is seen as ‘a primary stage on which expressions of male subjectivities are performed’ (Boehm 2008: 21). Within a Chinese context, men’s absence from rural families means their masculine identities –emanating from their being fathers, sons, husbands/partners and/or brothers within a patriarchal familial culture – are being dislocated. Traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations.

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Migrant men, filial sons and changing families One of the main motivations for migrant workers in moving from the rural to the urban is to support their rural family financially by sending money back home. There is a strong connection between them and their rural families. In my fieldwork, an important manifestation of the urgency and immediacy of maintaining familial connections was expressed in participants’ narratives about reconstructing their performance as a son. More specifically, the men spoke of the shifting meanings and practices around filial responsibilities. These included traditional values and practices of being a filial son, such as establishing their own families, bringing through the next generation, and looking after the elderly. For example, in terms of establishing their own families (that is, via heterosexual marriage), some single migrant men in my study found they had to delay fulfilling this duty, or find alternative ways of meeting these responsibilities. Their predicament was due to migration and the situation of economic inequality within society as a result of economic development and modernization. One of the migrant men in my study was Xiao Mao. As a single man, he challenged the heteronormative gender norm and cultural values. He felt embarrassed in not being able to fulfil his responsibilities: to be married and establish his own family. At the age of 36 he was one of thousands of unmarried migrant men who were struggling to find a (heterosexual) relationship. Xiao Mao: My parents said there should be an order to get married within the family. As I am the oldest son, I should be the first. Relatives keep asking and introducing girls to me. Once or twice is fine. It is quite embarrassing when they ask too many times. They asked my parents: ‘Your son is quite capable, why doesn’t he quickly find a wife? Urge him to marry and give birth to a grandchild for you’. Interviewer: What did your parents say? Xiao Mao: They were embarrassed too. After all, they live in the same village . . . it is inevitable that people gossip. Xiao Mao’s feeling of embarrassment revealed the issue of ‘face’ (mian zi or lian) and its role as a central attribute in the formation

70 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism of masculine identity. His emotional state can be located specifically within the heteronormative cultural context within which he lives out being a son. Traditional gender practices associated with filial responsibilities are being challenged by emerging trends in economic development accompanied by demographic movement to urban China, bringing material opportunities for male Chinese migrant workers to support their rural families. Within this context, the symbolic meaning of filial piety has been refocused on social practices outside rather than within the family. Wang Hai, aged 32, told me: I went back home last year to move into the house I built for my family and the family and relatives were very pleased to see me back. They thought I had a successful business here in the city. Of course I wouldn’t tell them how tiring and difficult it is. People tell the happiness but never mention the worries. Some people asked me through my father to introduce their children to jobs in the city . . . people respect you when you come home from the city. In this narrative about his changing status from urban working-class migrant to high-prestige rural returnee, Wang Hai suggested that his shifting identity was based on his being able to demonstrate filial piety by bringing honour to his parents in supporting his extended family, thus fulfilling his traditional duty as a Chinese man. Within narratives like Wang Hai’s, a continuity emerged of familial, relational, gendered socialization with a strong sense of Confucian hierarchical gender relations. His narrative corresponded with accounts of overseas Chinese masculinities (Da 2004; Hibbins 2005) that illustrate their cultural distinctiveness. For example, in Hibbins’s study on Chinese male skilled immigrants in Australia (2005: 173), he maintains that ‘Chineseness’ in the formation of his informants’ gender identity is centrally marked by ‘responsibility for family as sole provider, guardian and protector; an emphasis on hard work and education; respect for older people and hierarchy, as well as other family members; non-expression of feelings and emotions and a de-emphasis on sport and recreation’. This is captured by a dominant model of Chinese interpersonal relationships, the ‘Five Cardinal Relationships:

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between ruler and minister, between father and son, between husband and wife, between brothers, and between friends’ (Ho 1998: 13). ‘Respecting and caring for the aged’ is a traditional Chinese moral duty. Such a traditional ethic plays an important role for Chinese male migrant workers like Hui Ying in making sense of their relational male identity as a filial son. Hui Ying (33 years old): I can’t say I am a filial son as I am away from home. . . . They are getting older and sometimes getting ill because of their age. Nothing serious, but a lot of small diseases, like sometimes there is something wrong with the nose and joints when the season changes, high blood pressure. . . . I have the will but don’t have the ability to take good care of my parents [because I am away]. . . . I call them every week and ask them to take good care of themselves. . . . Really I hope nothing serious happens to them. As in this case, being a young man in the family means you will take care of your parents when they are old. Fei’s anthropological research on peasant life in China acknowledges that an essential characteristic of the family is that ‘married sons do not always leave their parents, especially when either father or mother is dead’ (2008: 29). However, rural–urban labour migration is challenging this gender norm of what it means ‘to be a son’ and ‘to be a man for the family’. This ethic of responsibility is a traditional imperative for young men, for whom filial responsibility is codified in highly prescribed ways. It is performed and enacted within the everyday dynamics of extended family life. Within the context of rural multi-generational families, one of the most significant cultural apprenticeships is that of the ‘passing on’ of filial duties and obligations from father to son. These duties and obligations form part of an intricate pattern of parental expectations underpinned by rural men’s close geographical location to their parents and grandparents (Hwang 1999). During my research fieldwork, I found that many male migrants are developing ways of performing their filial responsibility that differ from the traditional practices of their parents’ generation. For example, providing a better material life, such as building a house for their

72 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism parents and other family members, has gained significant symbolic meaning in this regard. Initially, when analysing the ethnographic data, I had assumed that there would be major generational differences among the male migrant workers. I soon realized that in my earlier analysis I was underplaying the generational continuities in terms of values, obligations and responsibilities. For example, Song Shan’s narrative below illustrates his role as a sensible son sharing financial responsibility with his parents for his sister’s education. Song Shan (20 years old): My sister is still at school. She is going out to work too when she has finished middle school. Before that, it is my little wish and responsibility to send home some money to share the care with my parents. From an early age, the younger generation had different expectations of rural–urban labour migration, and currently have a different generational encounter with urban life. This includes a more individualized sensibility and accompanying modern values. However, at the same time, their narratives about family responsibilities exemplify a maturity that I had not expected. Partly this may be explained in terms of the interplay between internal material social stratification, family responsibility, and the practice of migration. These young men might have had more personal choices than their fathers’ generation to develop their lives ‘without the traditional burden of feeding the family’, as one older male migrant worker suggested. However, traditional gender norms were passed on and have been reconstructed in their urban practices in relation to their families. In this process, they are reworking what it means to be a ‘man’ in the city. While staying at home, taking care of the parents as a traditional symbol of being a filial son is no longer a viable option for them, leaving home to work in the city to ensure a better future for the family is now understood as a central means of performing masculine domestic responsibility. Through interaction with family members, their masculine identity is (re)constructed and traditional familial values are reclaimed within the context of shifting geographical spaces. Urban living is full of excitement and opportunities for the young men that I met. Ah Fu was a 19-year-old male migrant worker who

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started working in Shantou a year after he graduated from high school. He was actively participating in and embracing aspects of a modern urban lifestyle such as going to the internet café for leisure. But he never forgot to send money home every month. His narrative suggests the continuity of tradition through family practices between a son and his parents. Ah Fu: They (parents) ask me not to blow money away and that I should save the money for my marriage in the future. Interviewer: Do you send your salary to your parents? Ah Fu: I keep 200 yuan (20 British pounds) for daily expenses and send the rest of the money to my parents. . . . They (my parents) asked me not to send money home as they said it’s expensive to live outside. They said they will save the money for my marriage. . . . I am happy that I can send money back home because they have been supporting me for nearly 20 years. It is time for me to repay them. . . . If I were them, I should have got married and have a child and let them enjoy ‘Tian Lun Zhi Le’ [family happiness with extended generations living together]. For some of the male migrant workers, leaving their families was the first time away from home ‘in the outside world’. For them, the practice of sending home money had a symbolic meaning, marking a transition to maturity as a responsible adult man. More specifically, for the young Chinese migrant workers I interviewed, as indicated above, it was a transition that included reworking the meaning of being a filial son. The men were aware that their need to reinvent the meaning of a ‘good son’ was breaking a long tradition that they had witnessed in their early lives, which had been lived out by their fathers, uncles and grandfathers. Sometimes, it was a challenge for them to find a way to become a filial son within current material conditions, as a new urban working class who were experiencing low wages, poor working conditions and other constraints. Gender identities, constructed in the process of daily interactions within familial relations, are an important lens for disclosing the subjectivities expressed in these urban narratives. For example, it was

74 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism significant for Ah Fu to be a financial provider for the family, as a symbolic practice of being a filial son, but still to aim at having his own happy family with extended generations in a traditional Chinese family way. For migrant men like Ah Fu, their break with the past is accompanied by the continuity of intergenerational gendered practices. As he reported, Ah Fu’s parents were worried about whether he would have enough money for his future marriage. Hence, they saved the money Ah Fu sent them to enable him to marry so that he could carry out the traditional obligation as ‘the man in the family’ to pass on the family name. Hwang maintains that ‘in addition to the authoritarian moralism of respecting the superior, filial piety also consists of an affective component emphasizing the intimacy between parents and children’ (1999: 179). Such a family practice – a son sending money home and the parents saving the money for his future marriage – becomes meaningful within a contemporary context of spatial and social changes. As Jamieson maintains, The significant dimension of intimacy in many parent–child relationships may not be being close by ‘knowing’ and talking to each other. A sense of unconditional love, trust and acceptance may be sustained with caring actions and relatively few words. (1999: 489) In the negotiation of traditional gender values, such as a son’s role and responsibility, marriage was reinforced and lived out in this mutually reflexive process between Ah Fu and his family, within the material conditions of modernization and development. This practice of sending remittance to their ‘left behind’ and separated families is common among rural men to demonstrate, as indicated above, their ability as a filial son. Hwang (1999), referring to Yang’s (1988) review of ‘Chinese Familism’, suggests that the culture of the family remains unchanged despite the changing power relations within the four aspects of the family: ‘the father/son axis, hierarchical power structure, mutual dependence, and dominance of family interaction’ (Hwang 1999: 179). Similar accounts also emerged in other male migrant workers’ narratives regarding their feelings on the issue of benshi (capability).

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Cai Wu (30 years old): [I think] it is time to build the new house for my family to show my heart of xiao to my parents, otherwise I will let them down and I don’t know where I can hide my face when I go home [embarrassed]. I don’t want to be in the same situation as my cousin. He hasn’t sent much money home to build a house for his family, all the relatives are mourning about him. I don’t want people to say I am mei benshi [useless, incompetent] behind my back. . . . Lao Ding (36 years old): The more relatives you have, the more cost it will be. Once anything happens, for example, my cousin was getting married, I needed to send some money for his marriage . . . you need to send as much as you can as people [family members] were comparing and competing. My parents would have mianzi3 in front of our relatives if I have given the most. Liu Hai (35 years old): My first and second children are girls, and the last one is a boy. To be honest, I did not want to [have] another two children after the first one . . . [but] to my parents, I am their only son. It is my duty to have a son to carry on the family name. They always phoned me and asked me why I didn’t want another child. I told them I can’t afford to have another child it costs a lot to raise a child here in the city, everything including education in particular. . . . They could not understand me. They said when they were young, they also had several children, some families even had eight girls before they had a boy. They said they came through the difficulty of raising me and my sisters. . . . All my family members urged me to have another child in case it’s a boy. But my second child was a girl too. I was so embarrassed. . . . My father said in very strong language that our family might end in my generation. It means my family is over. For migrant men like Cai Wu, Lao Ding and Liu Hai, their sense of masculinity is attached to being able to demonstrate their filial piety to their parents in various ways, such as making their parents proud, as Lao Ding suggested. Mac an Ghaill notes that different masculinities are constructed in the ‘complex interconnections of

76 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism different sets of power relations in the production of sex/gender subjectivities’ (1996: 122). For example, being a son carries a certain ambiguity, as it is located within a traditional ‘son-preference’ culture, while simultaneously the son is governed by the cultural norm of filial piety. Such emotional insights regarding the embarrassment of not being able to demonstrate their capability reflected the participants’ material subordination in urban spaces, which are of importance in understanding their identity as urban working-class migrants. For example, Liu Hai felt embarrassed when his parents urged him to have a boy. His embarrassment or shame at not being able to carry on the family name illustrated that such a cultural heritage, with its burden of gender responsibility, continued to play a vital role in the formation of his daily practices. Unlike the emerging urban middle class (Tomba 2004) or new rich (Goodman 2008) – with their display of conspicuous consumeroriented lifestyles – Chinese male migrant workers were constantly worrying about the welfare of their family members within the context of their limited economic capital and class-based cultural responsibilities. At the same time, such emotions (Barbalet 2002; Sayer 2005) or emotional capital (Reay 2004) are historically and geographically specific, emerging within the conditions in which the traditional cultural responsibilities of being a man within the family have to be played out within the urban modern discourse of progress and development in terms of ‘getting rich’. In other words, these working-class men must live out their dislocated familial masculine identities within current material and discursive conditions that operate against them in an increasingly unequal society.

Conclusion This chapter specifically focuses on dislocating masculinity as experienced by male migrants in the performance of being a son (Liu 2009), in order to understand their identity formation within the context of fast-changing urbanization and economic development in China. The male migrants’ narratives regarding the issue of being a filial son highlight the central role of the changing family in making sense of their emerging masculine identities (Osella and Osella

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2000; Donaldson et al. 2009). For example, they talked about the obligations of being as well as becoming a filial son, thus highlighting the significance of this role in the ongoing construction of rural male migrants’ dislocated masculinities. The men are aware of far-reaching changes in terms of the material conditions of their lives as a result of rural–urban migration, as masculine identities once embedded within relatively fixed familial gender roles need to be negotiated and reworked in urban spaces ‘away’ from their family. Migration from rural areas to cities has not weakened the men’s gendered familial responsibility, as some Western research has suggested when focusing on changing intergenerational relations (Whyte 2003) and the autonomy of the self (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996) within ‘the extended modernist’ framework (Adams 2003). Rather, in their discussion of the deployment of resources and strategies within urban spaces, the men’s narratives suggest that traditional familial gender norms are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities. They have enabled rural men to accommodate themselves within urban spaces in response to their marginalized material living conditions as part of the urban working class (Chan and Pun 2009), while acting as an important inherited resource in making sense of their social position in their new living conditions.

Notes 1 The 2000 Census reported that there were about 121.07 million internal migrants up to the year 2000, among whom, 88.4 million were rural–urban migrants, which accounts for about 73 per cent of the total. There are currently over 260 million migrant workers living and working in urban cities but this may be an underestimate as a large number are yet to register. From a macroeconomic ‘push-pull’ perspective, people tend to move from poor areas, located mainly in the north, west and inland regions to the better-off south, east and coastal areas, where surplus labour is in demand. For example, places in the south and the east of China, such as Guangdong, Shanghai and Zhejiang, are the most economically developed regions and also the most popular destinations for rural migrants. 2 For example, they are described by the Chinese State Council (2006) as a ‘new labour army’ for China’s economic development and urbanization. 3 Mianzi is literally translated as face, which means self-esteem, pride and respect in this context. It can be defined as ‘the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim for himself from others’ (Ho 1976: 883).

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References Adams, M. (2003) ‘The Reflexive Self and Culture: A Critique’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 221–38. Barbalet, J. M. (ed.) (2002) Emotions and Sociology, Blackwell, Oxford. Beck, U. and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1996) ‘Individualization and “Precarious Freedoms”: Perspectives and Controversies of a Subject-Orientated Sociology’, in P. Helaas, S. Lash and P. Morris (eds), Detraditionalization, Blackwell, Oxford. Boehm, D. A. (2008) ‘“Now I Am a Man and a Woman!”: Gendered Moves and Migrations in a Transnational Mexican Community’, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 16–30. Chan, C. K. C. and N. Pun (2009) ‘The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China’, The China Quarterly, No. 198, pp. 287–303. Chinese State Council (2006) ‘Zhongguo Nonmingong Diaoyao Baogao’ [‘Research Report on Chinese Peasant Workers’], Shiyan Publisher, Beijing. Cohen, D. (2006) ‘From Peasant to Worker: Migration, Masculinity, and the Making of Mexican Workers in the US’, International Labour and WorkingClass History, Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 81–103. Da, W. W. (2004) ‘A Regional Tradition of Gender Equity: Shanghai Men in Sydney, Australia’, Journal of Men’s Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 133–42. Donaldson, M., R. Hibbins, R. Howson and B. Pease (eds) (2009) Migrant Men: Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience, Routledge, London. Fei, H.-T. (2008) Peasant Life in China, Hesperides Press, London. Goodman, D. (ed.) (2008) The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives, Routledge, London. Hibbins, R. (2005) ‘Migration and Gender Identity among Chinese Skilled Migrants in Australia’, Geoforum, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 167–80. Ho, D. Y. F. (1976) ‘On the Concept of Face’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 867–84. Ho, D. Y. F. (1998) ‘Interpersonal Relationships and Relationship Dominance: An Analysis Based on Methodological Relationalism’, Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–16. Hwang, K. K. (1999) ‘Filial Piety and Loyalty: Two Types of Social Identification in Confucianism’, Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 163–83. Jacka, T. (2006) Rural Women in Urban China, M. E. Sharpe, London. Jamieson, L. (1999) ‘Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the “Pure Relationship”’, Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 477–94. Lin, X. (2013) Gender, Modernity and Male Migrant Workers in China: Becoming a ‘Modern’ Man, Routledge, London. Liu, Q. (2009) ‘To Become a Filial Son, a Loyal Subject, or a Humane Person? On the Confucian Ideas about Humanity’, Asian Philosophy: An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 173–88. Mac an Ghaill, M. (ed.) (1996) Understanding Masculinities, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Migrant workers in urban China | 79 Nonini, D. M. (2008) ‘Is China Becoming Neoliberal? Critique of Anthropology’, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 145–76. Osella, F. and C. Osella. (2000) ‘Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 117–33. Popoviciu, P., C. Haywood and M. Mac an Ghaill (2006) ‘Migrating Masculinities: The Irish Diaspora in Britain’, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 169–87. Pun, N. (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London. Reay, D. (2004) ‘Gendering Bourdieu’s Concepts of Capitals? Emotional Capital, Women and Social Class’, in L. Adkins and B. Skeggs (eds), Feminism after Bourdieu, Blackwell, Oxford. Sayer, A. (2005) ‘Class, Moral Worth and Recognition’, Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 947–63. Tomba, L. (2004) ‘Creating an Urban Middle Class: Social Engineering in Beijing’, The China Journal, No. 51, pp. 1–26. Whyte, M. K. (2003) ‘Introduction: China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations’, in M. K. Whyte (ed.), China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations, Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI. Yan, H. (2003) ‘Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/ Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 493–523. Yan, H. (2008) New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China, Duke University Press, Durham NC. Yang, C. F. (1988) ‘Familism and Development: An Examination of the Role of Family in Contemporary Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan’, in D. Sinha and S. R. Kao (eds), Social Values and Development: Asian Perspectives, Sage, New Delhi. Yeoh, B. and K. Willis (2004) ‘Constructing Masculinities in Transnational Space: Singapore Men on the “Regional Beat”’, in P. Jackson, P. Crang and C. Dwyer (eds), Transnational Spaces, Routledge, London.

CHAPTER 5 Taking the long view: attaining and sustaining masculinity across the life course in South India Penny Vera-Sanso

Introduction Masculinity and femininity are terms that hold enormous power, not because they are descriptive of traits inherent in actual male or female bodies – they are not – but because they are metaphors attributing hierarchically structured values to ways of being, doing and relating. These metaphors are used actively by a range of actors to create and discipline subjectivities and dispositions and to naturalize and legitimate relations of inequality. They have been applied to deprecate and control nations, as in colonial discourses that positioned British men as masculine and Indian men as feminized (Nandy 1983; Sinha 1995), and to politicalize Hindu subjectivities, as in Hindutva’s generation of a Hindu resurgence by evoking a masculine Hindu nationalism and framing Hindus as feminized by non-violent Gandhian nationalism and Muslim hyper-masculinity (Hansen 1996; Banerjee 2005).1 Yet these metaphors are malleable and open to contestation, especially by women who reject the feminization of women and claim the mantle of masculinity for themselves. For example, female Hindu nationalists claim masculinity by identifying themselves as heroic mothers and celibate warriors (Banerjee 2005), in contrast to the framings offered by masculine nationalism that typically constitute women and the nation in terms of an ‘exalted motherhood’ that needs protection by the nation’s sons (Nagel 1998; Vera-Sanso 2006).2 The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that even at the prosaic level of domestic units, attempts to shape gender and generational

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relations by tying adult masculinity to men and breadwinner roles are constrained by the interaction of social and labour market factors and by the potential for reversal that discourses have. If we accept that masculinity and femininity are not tied to bodies in an essential or enduring manner, but are socially and discursively constructed, context-specific schemas for being, doing and relating, we need to ask: under what circumstances do specific formulations of masculinity and femininity apply? In addition, if we take a relational life-course perspective, it becomes clear that masculinity is not about being male, nor even a male adult, but is, instead, about attaining and sustaining a social status that is valued over that of a deprecated, feminized other; consequently the markers of adult masculinity are necessarily social, performative and relational. This is derived from the difficulty of ascertaining a clear transition from boyhood to manhood; the markers being more a becoming (deepening voice, broadening body, growing hirsutism) than the incontestable crossing of a boundary that menarche provides (Chrisler and Zittel 1998).3 So while the transition into womanhood is predicated on the assumed capacity to bear children and manhood is marked by meeting social criteria, masculinity and femininity are predicated on relations with others – and it is this that exposes men’s masculinity to challenge; that can make it difficult for young men to transition into what is locally accepted as adult masculinity; and that opens the door for women to claim masculinity for themselves. In India adult masculinity is widely defined by the provider role. This can be seen in legislation on husbands’, fathers’, and adult sons’ obligations to wives, children and parents; in court judgements; in Indian cinema; and in media, political and every-day discourses (Osella and Osella 2006) in which unmarried men, irrespective of their age, are called ‘boy’. In Tamil, the language of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for example, unmarried men are called payyan (literally boy, with the masculine ‘an’ ending which has no connotation of respect), while married men are called veettukarar (literally ‘house man’ and used to mean husband and ‘house owner’, with the respectful masculine ‘ar’ ending). In Meerut, a city near Delhi, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, young men are facing a marriage squeeze caused by the inability to secure the necessary precursor to

82 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism marriage, permanent government employment in urban areas (Jeffrey 2010), and in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh young men are unable to secure the kinds of work that families consider acceptable for a groom in an arranged marriage system (Chaudry, forthcoming). Discourses which tie adult masculinity to marriage and household head roles are underpinned by social and economic arrangements that make it very difficult for men to live and, in some occupations, work outside a married context, and this forces young men into an economic and social ‘limbo’ of time pass (passing time), returning defeated to their father’s home (Jeffrey 2010) or securing brides through deception and/or from much poorer regions (Chaudry, forthcoming).4 Young men are caught in an extended period of limbo: until they are able to secure employment, they are unable to marry and to realize the local masculine ideal of being the head of a household (Jeffrey 2010) – or, as in Africa, the lack of acceptable work results in an open-ended period of ‘waithood’ between boyhood and adulthood (Honwana 2012; Mains 2007). If we take the long view, a life-course perspective, we can see that the attaining of adult masculinity, the transition from payyan to veettukarar, is not the end of the story but merely the beginning. A life-course perspective demonstrates how labour market factors make the provider role particularly difficult to sustain for the vast majority of Indian men caught either in low-wage formal employment, or insecure informal work. This is especially the case in mid-to-later life, when age discrimination spurs men’s slide into the socially constructed ‘sub-adult’ and feminized stage of old-age dependency: as a result, the social markers of a man’s masculinity are more open to challenge by women and children and through competition between men. Drawing on over two decades of research in South India, this chapter examines how one definition of adult masculinity prevalent, and still currently dominant, in India – the capacity to provide for dependants or, to use the local terminology, ‘to feed’ the family – plays out in South India, focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on people living at the lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy.5 It is set against a backdrop in which few people in India are benefiting from economic growth as inequalities deepen (Corbridge et al. 2013). By taking the long view, we can see that in South India men typically

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follow a trajectory in which they attempt to achieve, and sustain, an adult masculinity, based on a socially enforced role as provider and head of the family, eventually declining into a feminized status as an aged dependant. Ironically, it is their masculinity that forces men of poorer households into dependence on their working wives: it prevents them from visibly taking on the low-status work open to older women.

India, adult masculinity and the right to provide Adult masculinity is relational. It is not achieved independently; rather, it is measured in relation to the masculinity of others, to femininity and to children. In India adult masculinity is linked to the provider role and femininity to being provided for. In South India these relations are wrapped up in the concept of feeding: the provider ‘feeds’ and their dependants ‘simply sit and eat’. Being dependent, they are ‘answerable’ to the one who feeds. By feeding, the provider has the right ‘to question’, ‘to be listened to’ (direct), ‘to be respected’ (feared), and ‘to shout’ (be angered). Those fed must be ‘fearful’ (not provoke), ‘respectful’ (not ask questions), ‘quiet’ (not answer back), and ‘listen’ (obey). The provider, as head of the family, is expected to be knowledgeable, and it is his right (urimai), duty (kadamai) and responsibility (poRuppu) not only to provide for the family but also to ‘keep the family on the right track’ (Vera-Sanso 2000a). In practice, this domestic hierarchy frequently rankles: young men wish to escape the authority of their fathers, wives claim to be providers, and older people complain that they are made to feel like beggars. It is through a man’s capacity to fulfil these duties that his masculinity is judged; this judgement compels men either to conform to social norms or to present their circumstances as fitting those norms as closely as possible in the circumstances (Vera-Sanso 2000b). In South India, most men are highly protective of their provider role precisely because what counts as fulfilling it is open to comparative assessments and is difficult to achieve in a context where 93 per cent of workers are in the unorganized, informal economy (Planning Commission, undated). Men claim their right to feed in much the same terms that Connell critiqued sex role theory (2005: 21–7) – as

84 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism rooted in their biology and the complementarity of sex roles between husbands and wives, as socially expected, natural, and for the good of all. Just as the provider role discourse sets out the grounds for married men being the head of the family, the veettukarar (house man), it also establishes the grounds for women and children to counter individual men’s authority. In other words, the discourse is deployed by men and women, irrespective of age and marital status, and by children to secure their goals in contexts where interests diverge, resources are constrained and domestic hierarchies are underpinned by labour market inequalities and a paucity of social and physical infrastructure. For children, in particular, the provider role discourse is their most effective tool for challenging their father’s authority, as a woman living in a Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board tenement explained to me in 1990. Their 13-year-old daughter reversed her husband’s decision to pull the daughter out of school with the question ‘Why did you have me if you can’t pay for my education?’ The question instantly impugned his capacity to provide, compared him to other more capable fathers, and asserted education as her right. Through her questioning she inverted the gender and age hierarchies, thereby shaming her father and reminding him that his authority lay in his duty and capacity to provide. In the 1990s men deployed commonplace strategies to protect the strategic potential of their provider role and they did so by preventing women from working, by keeping women on a short financial lead that drew regular and demeaning requests for money, and by denigrating women’s financial contributions to the household.6 In addition, if they had their affines (wife’s or married daughter’s relatives) living in the same household, the men classified them as ‘paying guests’ thereby foreclosing any implication that the affines might, or should, be providers and decision makers in the household (Vera-Sanso 1997). Men would take control of family members’ earnings while also ensuring that they did not receive the money in face-to-face exchanges, thereby avoiding acknowledgement of the transfer. They claimed not to know what family members earned, in order to give the impression that they had no need of the money, and blamed their wife’s need to work on factors outside their control – poor health, an accident, old age or having customers stolen by a former apprentice (Vera-Sanso 2000a).

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Since the 1990s, when India began its programme of economic liberalization, anticipation of rising living standards has kept men tumbling in a cycle of expanding expectations. While educating children, arranging their marriages, providing ‘potlatch’ weddings, establishing sons in work, maintaining a wife’s domesticity and parents’ wellbeing were always measures of a man’s masculinity, today these measures are magnified. Existing demands have intensified: children now expect not to work and to remain in education longer as a prelude to better jobs; marriage costs have escalated; and securing good jobs for children, often through the payment of a substantial fee or bribe, is increasingly difficult (Vera-Sanso 2007; Caldwell et al. 1988). Electricity, televisions, shampoo, toothpaste, and a host of other basic consumption items now define a minimum standard of living (Vera-Sanso 2007). In addition to these new minimum standards, the measure of masculinity is now more material in nature than it was before, more measured against other men’s visible success as providers and consumers (Osella and Osella 2006: 80). Despite men’s attempts to provide, among the poor the capacity to support the family without help from wives and other family members is undermined by a labour market dominated by informal work and the lack of social and worker protection (sickness pay, safety equipment, pensions). The pressure has deepened as a result of constrained work opportunities in rural areas, expanding informalization and a growing youth population (below the age of 30). All of this has swelled urban labour markets, placed a downward pressure on wages, increased the number of male migrants in India’s cities, including street-dwelling migrants who avoid renting in order to send more money home (Mander 2009), and made it increasingly difficult for men over 40 to secure work. The difficulty of meeting the provider role is shaped not just by the low wages and insecurity of the informal economy but also by the sex- and age-segregated nature of the labour market. For instance, in Chennai, India’s fourth largest city, young men are taxi drivers, middle-aged men drive autos, and older men pull cycle rickshaws; younger and middle-aged men drive lorries, older men drive bullock carts or pull hand carts; young men work on large building sites while older men wait on street corners for days for someone to select them

86 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism for a small job, often repair work as plasterers, electricians, painters and so on. The age-segregated labour market translates into lower wages, where younger men earn on average a third more than older men, and middle-aged workers become relegated to the category of men defined as frail and less able.7 Changes to production systems have further undermined opportunities for work. Sankar, a man in his 50s who had, against his family’s wishes, taken up carpentry – an unusual trade for his caste – explained the consequences of a shift from carpentry workshops to casual work: Design work used to be kept by the carpenter masters from the young people, and especially from me. Because I was outside the caste they used to send me to fetch tea when they were doing the design work. Slowly I learnt all their secrets by pretending not to be paying attention. . . . Carpenter work is heavy – I’ve even seen people have strokes while sawing. The work should be divided up but isn’t. [Older] people like me should be given the design work, but will anyone hire me for the design work? They just see an old man, not a master carpenter, and think they will get better work from a young man even if he knows little. It is a defining feature of competitive masculinity that the vast majority of men experience their masculinity as under threat or in crisis. Two life stages are particularly difficult: the transition into adulthood, and later life when opportunities for work and wages decline. In contexts where the dominant definition of adult masculinity requires men to be married breadwinners, and yet they are unable to find the employment that will make them marriageable, young men can be caught in an extended period of ‘time pass’.

Achieving and sustaining masculinity Adult masculinity, when predicated on the breadwinner role, necessitates two things. First, it entails being the head of a family, for which marriage is the first step. Yet one of the most noticeable changes in contemporary India is the extension of the time between completing education and getting married – a liminal life stage in

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which men are neither child nor fully adult. This generally fraught period, during which families first seek appropriate employment or livelihood and then an arranged marriage, is brought to an end by becoming a married man.8 In Tamil Nadu, once a man is married, he expects to be treated as ‘a man’ by his parents, particularly his father, which means a degree of respect his unmarried siblings are not accorded – here respect includes not being questioned. Second, adult masculinity involves ‘standing on your own leg’. It is this that drives married men to establish independent households with separate household budgets (‘eating separately’), even if they continue to share their parents’ home – though usually a subdividing wall is constructed (Vera-Sanso 1997). From a young man’s perspective, this is an escape from patriarchal authority and, in establishing his own household/fiefdom, the realization of adult masculinity. From the father’s perspective it is experienced as a successful challenge to his masculinity, a demonstration that he cannot control his family. This is not to say that all divisions of the household are initiated by married sons; where a son does not take up his responsibilities as a married man, but relies on the joint family to provide for his wife and children, he will be asked to move out in order to force him to take on the provider role (Vera-Sanso 2005). Some short ethnographic vignettes illustrate the underlying theme of tension between patriarchal control and adult masculinity. The first of these amply demonstrates the position of fathers who are keen to sustain joint family relationships. I had known Nataraj, a farmer, and his family for many years. In 2013 I was asking after his family, including his son’s family who were living with him and his wife in a joint family household. He confided that he was deeply concerned that his five-year-old grandchild had no siblings, so I asked him whether he had spoken to his son, the child’s father, about it. He replied with emphasis: I can’t – he’s a married man now and a father too. He would never accept that from me. I must keep quiet. His mother can talk to him – mothers can talk to sons but fathers must keep their distance. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it, not even my wife . . . if you talk to him my name must never be mentioned in this matter.

88 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Nataraj was expressing here his recognition of the tensions and sensitivities that occur between fathers and married sons; the latter feel that once they have married, and especially once they have become fathers themselves, they have attained a status that should be respected and they should not be questioned by nor deemed answerable to their fathers as they were when still a payyan. Nataraj recognizes that these affronts to a son’s masculinity might drive him to set up an independent household, so he keeps his concerns to himself, not even sharing them with his wife. The second vignette further demonstrates the contrasting position of son and father in the patriarchal relationship, as revealed by a 73-year-old man, Ravi, in recounting his youthful escape from his own father’s control and his contemporary efforts to keep his married son within the joint household. In 2000 Ravi was the head of a household that included his wife, his younger married son and family, his widowed daughter, her children, and an unmarried daughter. His first son had moved out after marriage and his younger son had his own shop, hence an independent income, and lived in the joint household – where Ravi was clearly very anxious to keep him. This was important to Ravi’s position as the head of a viable household, and particularly critical while trying to arrange a marriage for his still-single daughter. This anxiety was expressed in stern statements about sons respecting fathers by remaining in the joint household and doing what is asked of them. Yet, during the same interview, his face lit up and his mood lightened when remembering his own escape as the eldest of four children. In 1947, aged 19 and unmarried, he outwitted his father by signing up for the army – an irreversible commitment. When asked if he told his father that he was going to sign up, Ravi said: ‘Oh, no, I didn’t tell him. He would never give his permission.’ And, smiling broadly, he added: ‘I signed up for 15 years.’ Fieldwork in rural Tamil Nadu in 2000 revealed the tensions at the bottom of the caste hierarchy where age discrimination, landlessness, disability, lack of pensions and severely constrained economic opportunities produced diverse outcomes. Palan, a frail Dalit man in his mid-60s, whose wife was disabled through poor health and age, told me that his recently married son asked for permission to set up

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a separate household, adding, ‘I said no. How can I say yes?’ When I visited the village two weeks later, Palan was worried: ‘Now he’s trying to cause arguments . . . to create a problem between us’. For Palan there was more at risk than just his masculinity – he had already faced the ignominy of doing women’s work and receiving women’s pay (Rs35 per day as against Rs60), which he tried to pass off as ‘I have to help my wife with her work, she’s too weak to do it by herself’, though in truth his and his wife’s work options had narrowed to depending on farmer charity. With no access to health care or a pension, Palan was already facing an accelerating decline into death for his wife and himself, which would only be compounded by an alienated son. By contrast, Maaran, a Dalit man in his late 50s, asked his married son, Kannan, to set up a separate household because, despite marriage and parenthood, Kannan was continuing to keep his earnings for his own use, as was common for unmarried adolescents. Kannan’s failure to take on the adult masculine role of provider – and thus contribute to the household budget – was leaving his father and, in practice, his mother struggling to provide for the whole family, including their unmarried children. By moving Kannan (and family) into a lean-to construction against his own home, Maaran was hoping to sustain an outward façade of family oneness, as a joint family, while forcing Kannan to ‘stand on his own leg’, thereby reducing Maaran’s economic burden. This would enable Maaran to demonstrate greater success in providing for his family, which, in turn, might lead to successful alliances for his unmarried children. The importance of wealth in the evaluation of a man’s masculinity, even at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in a context of significant poverty, was fully demonstrated by Chellan, a 72-year-old Dalit widower with no sons, who lived alone and complained that his cow, which he had been given by a non-governmental organization, did not produce much milk and was costing a lot in vet bills. When I asked why he kept it, Chellan replied: It’s for my daughters. I have to have something in my hand. I can’t face their in-laws owning nothing; my daughters would be taunted – ‘See your father has nothing’.

90 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism In this impoverished rural context of extremely limited work and no pensions, Chellan demonstrates the way even older men, who have the least capacity to provide for, or protect, their families, persist in trying to do so. What is also revealed is that evaluations of a man’s masculinity impinge on their relatives’ wellbeing; that this is even the case when they do not live in the same household demonstrates the importance of male relatives’ masculinity to women. These vignettes also illustrate how the predicating of adult masculinity on marital status can create new tensions within father/son relations, and less willingness on the part of sons to adjust (a term meaning to acquiesce that is regularly addressed as advice to young wives), which may in turn lead to the break-up of families into smaller units. A man who leaves his father’s household is thought to be ‘standing on his own leg’, providing for his family, as quite literally a veettukarar or house man; for the father, each son’s departure represents a challenge to his masculinity and can impinge on his capacity to meet his responsibilities to other family members.

Contesting and claiming masculinity: female providers and male dependants By taking the long view of attributions of masculinities and femininities over the life course, the dissociation of biology from particular masculine and feminine frameworks is clearly revealed. In this section we will see how masculinity, when framed as a provider, and femininity, when framed as a dependant, can associate men with a feminized dependent status and women with a masculinized breadwinner status. Older men in India, across class, caste and location, admit that once they no longer earn an income that compares well with the earnings of other family members ‘no one listens’ to them, meaning no one obeys them. They effectively lose their role as head of the family, even if they retain that status in relation to outsiders (demonstrated by representing the family in encounters with officials and professionals and at weddings). Their placing slips on the scale that ties masculinity to the provider role and femininity to dependency. And while entanglement with competitive provider roles is not a comfortable

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place for any man, it is the poor who find it most difficult to defend and, amongst them, older men are in the worst position, especially those in rural areas where work opportunities are particularly limited (Vera-Sanso 2007). In 2000 I had a discussion with a group of older male agricultural workers who said: We are never called for (casual) work and we never go. . . . If we go the younger men are asked by the landowner, ‘Why did you bring this kilavan (old man) with you?’. . . Why should we follow the younger men (to the fields) only to be insulted by others? This age discrimination against men and the consequent dependency on younger wives starts in middle age, leading one middle-aged agricultural worker to reply, in response to my question on parental support, ‘How can I ask my wife to feed my parents when she is feeding me!’ The situation in low-income urban households is similar, despite the wider economic opportunities cities potentially provide. With a few exceptions, work patterns for these households start with men being the only earner as the young women who do work are pulled out of the workforce in preparation for marriage. From the age of 40 men’s capacity to earn declines, constrained by age discrimination in the labour market as well as the incursions of alcohol use, accidents, and poor health (often arising from harsh and unsafe working conditions), and leading to rising female workforce participation from the age of 30. This continues until, by later life, women have become the main providers for their ailing older husbands – and may well become the main or sole providers for adult children and grandchildren in their households if the men of the generation below have died, deserted or are unable to provide for the family (Vera-Sanso 2012). In this context women, particularly older female heads of households, describe themselves in masculinist breadwinner terms, saying ‘If I don’t feed my family, who will feed them?’ In my experience, at the transition point when men’s contributions to the household budget decline and women’s increase, women are often unsympathetic to men’s difficulties in finding work and also to their health needs. It is during this transition period that women

92 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism will, in a safe context, claim for themselves the masculine traits that go with a successful provider role and do so with a strong sense of personal achievement in bucking the association of femininity and women with incompetence in the public sphere and with dependence (Vera-Sanso 2000a). However, claiming the mantle of masculine ‘boldness’ (tunivu) that provides the courage (thaiyaram) to face the world and earn an income has its dangers. It suggests that a man has lost his capacity to control his family, particularly his women, and this can jeopardize the family’s status within a moral economy that anchors the many exchanges of information and resources essential to a family’s negotiation of life in the city. Women attempt to offset the threatening effect of bold and courageous assertiveness by claiming what is defined as a masculine trait, kudumbam poRuppu, a sense of family responsibility, as driving their participation in the workforce – most commonly with reference to feeding the family, but also in paying for children’s education or redeeming pawned items. It is, perhaps, the non-standard domestic arrangements that best convey the depth of association between feeding and household headship, and between being fed and subordination, as well as the disassociation of masculinity and femininity from biology and its location in the social realm of performance, social valuation and control. In South India’s low-income settlements, sisters may set up house together, either as widows or as a consequence of men marrying their wife’s unmarried sister – an arrangement initiated by the women or their families to ensure that all daughters are married. In these circumstances one sister takes on the housework (vitle vele) and the other earns an income, either alone or with the husband. The power relation that develop between the sisters is revealing – provider sisters reproduce the masculine discourse of being ‘bold enough to face the world and earn’ and of ‘feeding the family’ while the others are deprecated as ‘she simply sits and eats’, despite the heavy burden of domestic and caring work in contexts where public infrastructure (ranging from water, sanitation and drainage to health care) is extremely inadequate. Similarly, older women can move into, or visit, a deserted or widowed daughter’s or son’s home to perform a range of roles: including what

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is locally defined as the wife’s domestic and caring work, as the unrecognized worker in a family business, where they may be classed as ‘simply sitting’ or ‘passing time’, or, less commonly, as the main or sole provider. In the cases where women are undisputed providers it is notable how stressed older women can become, reflecting the deep insecurities of life at the bottom end of a socioeconomic hierarchy marked by no income security. Older women are anxious about how much the family’s wellbeing falls on them, and about not being able afford the time off for their health needs. ‘How can I have the cataract operation?’ was the question asked in 2012 by Kaniammal, a 73year-old seller of spinach and other greens, whose widowed son is disabled. ‘Who will feed my (grand) children for a month (while I’m recovering), who will earn for their school fees?’ While older women providers are able to voice these concerns, because they are seen as stepping outside the norm for women and must justify their working, men of the urban poor must tread a discursive fine line: that of the provider role as being ‘difficult’ (kashtam), requiring courage and boldness, and more difficult than it is for men poorer than they are, whom they describe as having no self-respect (maanam), and also more difficult than it is for wealthier men, who have ‘all the facilities’ (education, inherited wealth or contacts).9 Older men’s work opportunities are possibly more constrained than older women’s. They are disinclined to be labelled as ‘helping out’ or ‘passing time’, so tend not to work in family businesses that are defined as belonging to a younger generation, and, barring rare exceptions, will not do ‘women’s work’. Women’s work is the most under-capitalized work – selling small piles of vegetables, flowers and fruit on the road from cane baskets, thin wooden boxes or gunny sacks laid on the road. For men there must be some ‘prestige’ element to the work – for example, men are happier to work as one of several employees of a large flower stall (made of wood with wheels, awning etc.), selling elaborate, high-cost garlands used for formal occasions (weddings, funerals, honouring guests), than as the sole trader of a small flower business selling flowers or simple garlands for domestic use from a basket or gunny sack on the pavement. Here it needs to be remembered that it is not just the men who require the element of prestige but also their families – to have a feminized ‘family head’

94 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism exposes the behaviour and status of family members to greater social scrutiny and negative commentary. Again, the person that goes against the grain is the most enlightening about normative expectations. As part of a photo essay on older people’s work that I have displayed as a pop-up exhibition in India, I have a photograph of a man who is stringing a simple jasmine garland, supporting his wife who is stringing and selling simple garlands beside him on one of Chennai’s main roads. Stringing jasmine garlands is a quintessentially female activity, learnt by most girls in South India to decorate their hair; where it is done to support someone else’s business, it is seen as the work of particularly impoverished, unskilled women. Inevitably in a photo essay of over 40 pictures of older workers, people in India single this man out for the depths he has plumbed – ‘Paavam, (poor thing) he’s even had to learn this.’ Conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity provide frameworks for understanding ways of being, doing and relating that are not tied to biology. We have seen that provider women claim masculinity for themselves and dependent men are seen as feminized. Interestingly, we have seen that in contexts where the lack of physical and social infrastructure requires heavy time inputs, as occurs in India’s rural and low-income urban settlements, women providers reproduce the discourse of male providers by positioning their sisters as ‘simply sitting and eating’ while they are ‘bold enough to go out and earn’. We have also seen that with age men are caught in the vice of being insulted, shamed or pitied by employers, community and the public, or becoming dependent on their wives.

Conclusion When taking the long view, that of a life-course perspective, it becomes clear that where masculinity is predicated on a provider role a number of processes are put in motion in order to attain and sustain adult masculinity in a system of competitive masculinity. It forces young men into finding the work that will improve their prospects in the marriage market and can leave many in a social limbo of ‘waithood’ or ‘time pass’ that stalls their transition into the socially defined category of adult masculinity or pushes them into other strategies for

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securing wives, including deception and importing wives from other, poorer areas. The relationship between father and son becomes more difficult to tread as sons’ wish to establish themselves as the head of a household and this is likely to spur household division. Depending on the timing of the division this can impact on fathers’ capacities to provide for their families, not just as breadwinners but also in terms of providing suitable spouses for unmarried children. The capacity of men to provide, to sustain the valued marker of adult masculinity, is determined by the labour market and by expectations of rising standards of living. The latter demonstrates that what counts as providing is socially determined and exposes men to comparative estimations of masculinity. Labour markets, the shortage of work, and age and wage discrimination, as well as illhealth and disability, can feminize men by forcing them to rely on women’s incomes or to become entirely dependent on them. Research amongst low-income families in rural Tamil Nadu in 2000, and in urban Tamil Nadu in 2007–13, found that a shortage of work was feminizing middle-aged and older men. To mitigate this feminization men attempted to shift the blame for their dependence to factors that were outside their control, including age, farmer insults, disability, and age discrimination. Others admitted that the dependence forced them to shed their responsibilities to provide for aged parents; in other words, the shortage of work had resulted in their slippery decline into the sub-adult, feminized status of dependant, a status discursively shared with the normative categories of ‘woman’ and ‘child’. By taking a life-course perspective we can see that notions of masculinity and femininity are disciplining and constraining, enforcing social conformity or what passes for it; yet we can also see that it provides the discursive grounds to challenge domestic hierarchies, not just between men and women, but also between women, between adult and child, and between adult child and older parents. It is evident that at a societal level it shapes the extent of work that individual men must put in, irrespective of their own physical needs and capacities, in order to sustain their provider identity in a competitive system driven by family, and a society that demands ever greater engagement in the economy as producer and consumer. Because India fails to provide the social and physical infrastructure – as well as a social floor – that

96 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism would mitigate the failings of the labour market, it is inescapable that many women need to enter the workforce and take on the provider role.10 In doing so women challenge the discourse that ties men to masculinity and breadwinner, and women to femininity and dependent, demonstrating that these are nothing more than metaphors used by a range of actors to create and discipline subjectivities and dispositions, and to naturalize and legitimate relations of inequality.

Notes 1 Hindutva is made up of the political parties Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena; a militarized volunteer organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); the militant cultural organization, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), which has an international presence mobilizing Hindu identities; and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal. Both the RSS and Bajrang Dal provoke and take part in communal violence, and both have deeply conservative women’s wings, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti and the Durga Vahini. The BJP formed a majority national government in May 2014 and holds power in a number of states, sometimes in conjunction with the Shiv Sena. 2 For an example of the widespread nature of the resistance to dominant constructions of masculinities and femininities, see Schippers (2002). 3 In the United States menarche parties, more often called ‘first moon parties’ or ‘red tent parties’, are becoming more common to celebrate a girl’s ‘passage into womanhood’ (Castiglia, undated). 4 The most readily available work for unskilled young men is in a brick kiln, but to do this they need a wife, as they are hired as a pair – thus leaving young unmarried men unable to work and yet unable to secure a wife without work except by lying to the prospective bride’s family (Chaudry forthcoming). 5 The research has received funding from the University of London (1989, 1990– 3), five UK Research Councils (ESRC, AHRC, MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC) through the New Dynamics of Ageing Programme (2007–10) and the ESRC Follow-On Fund (2012–13). The 2007–10 project was conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies, Chennai, with a team comprising V. Suresh, M. Hussein, J. Henry and Arul George, with Barbara Harriss-White, and the 2012–13 project with V. Suresh, M. Hussein, Swathi Priya and Jacqueline Longina. 6 In safe contexts women, as indeed do older dependants, rail against having to ‘ask for every single paisa (penny)’ – including justifying its use. 7 This figure is drawn from our 2007–10 study in Chennai where we compared wages for men below and above age 60. However, by putting all men under age 60 in one category, this figure is likely to under-estimate the level of age discrimination in wages, for a survey of wage differentials in the registered slums of four Indian cities in 2006-7 found that people under the age of 25 and over the age of 59 receive markedly lower average incomes than do people in the age band 25-59 (Ghosh et al. 2010).

South India | 97 8 The stressful experiences young women and their families face in arranging a marriage (locating a suitable family, viewings and dowry demands) are well known. Less well known is the anxiety young men feel about both their position in the marriage market, which reflects their expected capacity to provide, and a protracted period of sub-adult status. 9 Even in the slums men always position themselves as ‘middle-income’, having poorer men (‘low-income’) below them and richer men (‘high-income’) above them – confirming the pervasive scaling of oneself in masculine competition (Connell 1987: 183–99; Osella and Osella 2006). 10 Domestic work generally gets passed on to other women, including older relatives not living in the same household.

References Banerjee, S. (2005) Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India, State University of New York Press, Albany NY. Caldwell, J., P. Reddy and P. Caldwell (1988) The Causes of Demographic Change: Experimental Research in South India, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI and London. Castiglia, C. (undated) ‘Make Your Daughter’s First Period “Special” with a Red Tent Party’, http://www.babble.com/mom/make-your-daughters-first-periodspecial-with-a-red-tent-party/ (accessed 7 July 2015). Chaudry, S. (forthcoming) ‘“Now It Is Difficult to Get Married”: Contextualising Cross-Regional Marriage and Bachelorhood in Rural North India’, in S. Srinivasan and S. Li (eds), Scarce Women and Surplus Men in China and India: Macro Demographics versus Local Dynamics, Springer, New York NY. Chrisler, J. C. and C. B. Zittel (1998) ‘Menarche Stories: Reminiscences of College Students from Lithuania, Malaysia, Sudan, and the United States’, Health Care for Women International, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 303–12. Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power, Polity, Cambridge. Connell, R. W. (2005) Masculinities: Second Edition, University of California Press, Berkeley CA. Corbridge, S., J. Harriss and C. Jeffery (2013) India Today: Economy, Politics and Society, Polity, Cambridge. Ghosh, N., B. N. Goldar and A. Mitra (2010) ‘Population Ageing and Its Implications on the Labour Market: The South Asian Experience’, in M. Alam and A. Barrientos (eds), Demographics, Employment and Old Age Security: Emerging Trends and Challenges in South Asia, Macmillan, Delhi. Hansen, T. B. (1996) ‘Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence, and the Exorcism of the Muslim Other’, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 137–72. Honwana, A. (2012) The Time of Youth: Work, Social Change and Politics in Africa, Kumarian Press, Sterling VA. Jeffrey, C. (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting, Stanford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Stanford, CA. Mains, D. (2007) ‘Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 659–73.

98 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Mander, H. (2009) ‘Living Rough: Surviving City Streets – A Study of Homeless Populations in Delhi, Chennai, Patna and Madurai’, City Reports, Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. Nagel, J. (1998) ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 242–69. Nandy, A. (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Osella, C. and F. Osella (2006) Men and Masculinities in South India, Anthem Press, London. Planning Commission (undated) ‘Labour Laws and Other Regulations’, Government of India, New Delhi, http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/ committee/wrkgrp11/wg11_rplabr.pdf (accessed 13 July 2015). Schippers, M. (2002) Rockin’ out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ. Sinha, M. (1995) Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Vera-Sanso, P. (1997) ‘Household Composition in Madras’s Low-income Settlements’, Review of Development and Change, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 72–97. Vera-Sanso, P. (2000a) ‘Masculinity, Male Domestic Authority and Female Labour Participation in South India’, European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 179–88. Vera-Sanso, P. (2000b) ‘Risk Talk: The Politics of Risk and Its Representation’, in P. Caplan (ed.), Risk Revisited, Pluto Press, London. Vera-Sanso, P. (2005) ‘They don’t need it and I can’t give it: Filial Support in South India’, in P. Kreager and E. Schroeder-Butterfill (eds), The Elderly Without Children, Berghahn Press, New York NY. Vera-Sanso, P. (2006) ‘Conformity and Contestation: Social Heterogeneity in South Indian Settlements’, in G. de Neve and H. Donner (eds), The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India, University College London Press, London. Vera-Sanso, P. (2007) ‘Increasing Consumption, Decreasing Support: A MultiGenerational Study of Family Relations among South Indian Chakkliyars’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 225–48. Vera-Sanso, P. (2012) ‘Gender, Poverty and Old Age, in Urban South India in an Era of Globalisation’, Oxford Development Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 324–40.

CHAPTER 6 Desperate markets and desperate masculinities in Morocco Joe Hayns

Introduction Many representations of the Middle East and North Africa region in the West today suggest that men there are ‘atavistic’, ‘misogynist’, and with ‘hypersexual masculinities’ (Amar 2011: 38). Such fantastic depictions are just that – fantasies – as I saw whilst living amongst men in Marrakech, Morocco. Men in the city are men in various ways; have various relations with women and other men; and inflict hurt through, and are hurt by, male dominance as much as men are in Europe and America. As in Europe and America, the ‘hegemonic’ way of being a man in Morocco involves violence against others and one’s self, and, as in Europe and America, these ways of being men relate to class and money. The majority of Moroccan men that I know work in shops in the tourist market (al-Su¯q al-Siu¯h., ‘the su¯q’), selling brica-brac to European tourists. In response to the desperate circumstances of the su¯q, many men working there have come to view those tourists as more than one-off customers: potentially they are also patrons, lovers and, even, a means to leave the su¯q. Such relations, whilst they promise deliverance from the desperation of the su¯q, often entail only further desperation, as narrated by Moroccan men through the idiom of h.ashu¯ma (shame). To use Cornwall and Lindisfarne’s terms (1994), this chapter is a study of the economics and the emotions of performing a subordinate masculinity in a globalized world.

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Globalization Every profitable tourist destination has to be planned, developed, and ordered. It was the French colonial state and various commercial groups that together first made Marrakech into a tourist destination (Rabinow 1989; Hunter 2007; Gauthier 2009). Following formal independence, the Moroccan state continued to shape it as a destination (Lee 2008). This continuation is part of a wider ordering, whereby the Moroccan regime works with European institutions to maintain Morocco as an exporter of primary products, of cheap labour as and when required, and as an importer of tourists (Aksikas 2007; Sepos 2013). Such historical processes are the foundations of Marrakech’s tourist su¯q today. It is a market comprised of hundreds of shops staffed exclusively by Moroccans that are focused, almost entirely, on selling relatively low-value commodities to predominantly white, more or less wealthy Europeans (the most common vernacular word for white European in Morocco is gaorri, the feminine is gaorria). Many workers in Marrakech see contemporary tourism as a neo-colonial institution. One phrase I heard many times in the su¯q, ‘ma¯za¯l ma¯kharaju¯’ (‘they never left’, ‘they still have not left’), perfectly expresses how the tourist present is seamlessly related to the period of formal colonialism. Other industries in the country – the extraction of fish and phosphates, say, or major construction – are similarly premised. Yet, tourism differs from these other industries in that it brings a great number of working-class Moroccans into dayto-day contact with planeload after planeload of white Europeans. In the su¯q, poor brown people are at work, rich white people are at leisure, face to face with the racialized inequities between core and periphery. Moroccan workers find it ever more difficult to leave the su¯q. On the one hand, Europe’s borders are ever more brutally policed, precisely in order to keep working-class Moroccans and others out; on the other, more and more Europeans visit countries like Morocco on holiday (see Juntunen 2009 and Bachelet 2014 on undocumented migration from Morocco).

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Desperate market Tourist shop proprietors in the market are not wealthy men. Many only rent the shops they run, and few shops have more than five workers. Many of the workers do not get paid a basic wage. Rather, shop owners demand that workers sell their commodities at as high a price as possible, with commission decided on a day-by-day and even piece-by-piece basis. I asked one seller: Me: ‘What’s the minimum you make in a day?’ Seller: ‘Wa¯lu¯, nothing. Do you get that?’ His ‘nothing’ is by no means an understatement. Indeed, the best terms of employment that I am aware of for su¯q workers demand working from 10 a.m. until roughly 9 p.m., six days a week, with limited time off for religious observance, and with a weekend off each month. For that the worker received seventy dirhams (€7) per day, enough money to afford a small room shared with two other men, modest daily consumption, and to send a little home periodically. Such contracts are unusual. Often, selling to tourists involves hours and even days working without pay. Many of the male workers are from the rural working-class, and are without the means to acquire either education or vocational training. Yet, whilst tourism has come to offer – or seem to offer – the chance of wealth, it is often as badly paid as agricultural labour in Morocco. Those that have heard of labour unions are in the minority. There is, of course, much ‘foot dragging’ by su¯q workers (Scott 1985); many men furtively sleep, drink and smoke hashish when they ought to be selling. However, the extremely high rates of under- and unemployment in the country mean that such behaviour is easily countered by the employer class; if workers are ‘lazy’, bosses can easily replace them (see Boudarbat and Ajbilou 2007 and Gatti et al. 2011 on unemployment). Stealing, too, is common. I know one polyglot young man who emigrated from the Amazighphone desert to the city, and was fired from a first, then a second, and then a third shop in as many weeks, each time for stealing. Few other sellers were that footloose, and few found it as easy to get new jobs. His

102 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism desperation to make money, however – to eat, to send home, for dignity – was quite usual. Since many low-stratum workers in the su¯q find it very difficult to make money from their formal jobs, many also engage in illegal practices such as fugiding,1 whereby boys and men– without a licence, and with various degrees of mischief – guide tourists through the city. This practice, as with stealing from tourists and drug dealing, invites violence from the brigade touristique, a police force that deals specifically with crimes against tourists. After recounting that he had been imprisoned ‘countless’ times for fugiding, one man asked me: ‘Where do I live, Iraq? Or Palestine? No! I am son of the Old Town.’ If work for the sellers is desperate, then so is leisure time. In the New Town’s Moroccan-only bars men slowly drink fifteen dirham ($1.50) beers. Boys and men selling to tourists, though, tend to split the cost of 20 centilitre bottles of mah.ia (low-quality alcohol) and drink it rapidly, shot-after-shot. As I spent more time socializing with the sellers at work and during leisure time, I began to see that many of the boys and men selling to tourists constantly faced financial, social, and cultural crises. Not being able to send money home, as was expected of them as men, caused a deep sense of shame. Not being able to pay rent for a place in a three-to-a-room bedsit entailed visits from tough landlords and fifteen minutes’ notice evictions. Indeed, by the time of my second Ramad.a¯n in the city, I wasn’t surprised that the men I socialized with simply could not afford a decent al-fat.or (breakfast) to mark the end of a day of fasting. Ramad.a¯n, as I observed it in 2013, is supposed to be a time of shared self-discipline and of excess, and a time to express piety to God and to one’s family and friends. The generosity of hosting seemed to redouble. On two occasions, as the final call to prayer ended, men stopped my hurried walk home to ask if I would like to break the fast with them. On other occasions I was gently chastised for bringing a little food to the evening’s ‘breakfast’, since a guest should bring only their appetite. The period of Ramad.a¯n can be a costly time for working-class Moroccans; the evening meal (al-fat.or; ‘break fast’) is often quite elaborate, and the cost of travelling to see family can be onerous. Some men selling in the su¯q can spend the evening meal with family

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in the city. But many I knew had to stay in Marrakech for the sake of work, and so were without the means to pass a comfortable month. For this reason, they would invite European tourists (including me) each night to defray or even entirely cover the costs of al-fat.or; indeed, I saw that on several occasions tourists would not only pay for the food and drink, but that the sellers would furtively retain small amounts of change following the transactions. This situation was an exact reversal of the usual host–guest relationship during the month, and was emblematic of wider circumstances in which sellers don’t so much relate to Europeans as potential customers as court them as patrons, whether the Europeans know it or not. I will now discuss this courting in terms of masculinity and shame.

Desperate masculinities Attempting to attract the attention of Europeans is a substantial part of many sellers’ day-to-day effort. I spent hour after hour outside the shops where seller friends worked, smoking cigarettes and chatting in various languages with the European tourists that passed by. In Marrakech certain misogynist tactics are common, from catcalling and other forms of verbal abuse, to (I was told by European and occasionally Moroccan women) stalking, groping, and exposure. Such tactics are not, of course, peculiar to Morocco. As one white European woman said, after a man exposed himself to her, ‘it doesn’t happen here as much as London’. Whilst some men in the su¯q renew their manliness through the abuse of women in the street, others attempt to relate romantically with white European women not as an end – to firm up their male privilege, as with catcalling – but as a means. The times that those workers spend flirting with gaorriat are not in the least idle, despite the bosses’ accusations of indolence.2 I became aware that several of my friends were acquiring both money and commodities from European lovers, men and women. One would write messages about fictitious troubles with the police in the hope that a past lover would send a few hundred euros. Another would meet Europeans, befriend them, and then propose a tour of the country, taking in a series of hotels that would secretly give him 15 per cent commission on the rooms. Such schemes, which varied in

104 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism ambition, were fairly common amongst male su¯q workers. Some men were entirely frank in private about the primacy of moneymaking over attraction. One friend showed me the itinerary of a trip that he and a new European girlfriend were planning together. He moved his finger down the list of places and activities, saying ‘Who’s gonna’ profit? Me. Who’s gonna’ profit? Me’. Moroccan men and white Europeans do meet together in the street (al-Zinqa), though they also use Facebook and Couchsurfer to flirt and arrange rendezvous. I know one su¯q worker who, through developing propitious profiles on each site, was able to leave his job selling each day, and make sufficient money meeting tourists online and then guiding them across Morocco. Whilst he is in one sense unusual, in another he is quite typical of younger su¯q workers. Such subaltern male strategies are based on the assumption that all Europeans are rich, and that a few days spent with a European woman or man will result in money earned throughout the affair, and possibly even after the tourist’s return to Europe. Indeed, I was surprised, and remain so, at how much money sellers would sometimes receive, via Western Union, from former week-only partners. Such strategies seemed at first to involve only flirting and frivolity, yet I came to see that ‘fucking tourists’ (to use Bowman’s 1989 phrase) entails far more than easy sex and gifted money. Some men I knew suffered a degree of emotional hurt from being acted upon (and acting ) as embodiments of European fantasies. One friend, for example, occasionally needed me to explain the amorous messages of white Europeans. He was one woman’s ‘Berber nomad’, and another’s ‘Aladdin’. A third woman wished he would fly to Europe ‘on his magic carpet’. My friend, like other men I knew, sometimes performed these stereotypes – he ‘cooned’ – with wide smiles, and other times with gritted teeth. Certainly, he was not unusual amongst such men in suffering acute periods of grief. Despite this grief, there was discussion amongst some male su¯q workers of romance with European women as a means to emigrate to Europe. To give an example of such rhetoric, some friends and I were joined, as we stood outside the shop they worked in, by a young teenager (‘Hicham’), who, seemingly excited to be amongst senior men, began talking of his plans to be a singer (‘the biggest in Morocco,

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Algeria, France’). As two white European women passed by, Hicham, still giddy, said, to the group’s amusement, ‘Joe brother, tell me how I’m gonna’ marry some of these white women (gaorriat)’. However, most European sex tourists appeared to want to consume their notion of Moroccan sexuality at an exciting (if safe) distance from home, and to return to Europe with little extra baggage (the later chapters in Hussey 2013, are interesting in this regard). Many friends had stories of missed opportunities to marry gaorriat: perhaps their English was not sufficiently good, or they didn’t have enough time to seduce or be seduced, or the woman was, in fact, a whore. Such stories appeared to restore fleeting hope in almost hopeless situations. As to relations with European men, I found that there was not so much an aversion to homosexuality per se – no more, at least, than amongst many English men – as there was contempt for male European sexualities. There is a widely shared suspicion amongst Moroccans that many European men visit the country for morally errant reasons. Indeed, there has been case after case of white European men using their wealth and power to abuse Moroccans, with children as recurring victims. There have been three national scandals involving male European paedophiles in Morocco since I first visited the country in 2012 (see Tel Quel 2012; Al-Monitor 2013; and La Vie Eco 2013).3 In my experience Marrakechis do not regard these high-profile cases as isolated or unconnected. Rather, they are considered as prominent examples of a common type of sex tourism. This view was best exemplified by a play I watched in a suburban secondary school that featured a character named Monsieur Philippe. As the entire audience seemed to know, Monsieur Philippe was that familiar figure, the egregiously sexual white man.

Shame One dominating conception of masculinity in Morocco (and, of course, elsewhere) is that men – if they are indeed men – must make money and with it provide women, usually their wife or girlfriend, with material subsistence. Feminist scholars have shown that this enduring ideal continues to be demanded by Moroccan law (Mernissi 1987), a canon that obliges husbands to be the ‘breadwinners’ within

106 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism the marriage unit (Elliot 2014: 4). And, indeed, some ethnographic data suggest that this model of patriarchal gender relation continues to be supported, at least rhetorically, by some men in the country (Elliot 2014: 5; Crivello 2008: 47–53). Like any hegemonic demand, it is frequently attacked –many men and women relate to others in entirely divergent ways4 – and ruthlessly defended (for critiques of this hegemonic conception of manliness, see Mernissi 1987, Dialmy 2004, and Boutouba 2014). Most male workers in the su¯q are emphatically unable to perform this version of masculinity for want of money. In this they are not alone (see Cohen and Jaidi 2006: 70). Yet, if their class position means that they are not real men, their efforts to make money from tourists are only more emasculating according to hegemonic demands. Taking money from gaorriat is something that both the male su¯q workers and others criticize using the idiom of h.ashu¯ma, shame. One relatively educated, wealthy petit-bourgeois Moroccan man said of male su¯q workers that, ‘Everyone knows that these dra¯rı¯ (male youth) leave school and look for gaorriat like dogs in the su¯q, you’ve seen them. Take care of yourself, they’re thieves, they don’t shame [‘ma¯kaih.ishamu¯sh’]’. ‘They don’t shame?’5 In fact, this is not the case. Everyday male talk in the su¯q shifts from boisterous and even cacophonous squabble to soft lament at personal and social tribulation. And, indeed, it was both through listening to such arguments and noticing periods of grief that I came to better appreciate the men as men. To begin with the former type of discussion, men would often discuss their relations with gaorriat, and tourists more generally, in terms of ‘bisnis’. Such discussions involved numbers – kilometres, dirhams, ratios of commission – and, often, a degree of machismo. Conversations centred on how the men have or will court women to their financial benefit. They want to be believed about the amounts of sex and money that they have realized, and there is little obvious selfdoubt during such periods. There are other periods, though, when sellers are far more reflective about their circumstances, and their shared responses to them. It was during one such self-critical discussion that I first heard reproach of their relations with women tourists. It was this criticism

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that led to my realizing that other phenomenon – the self-effacing alcohol habits, recurrent periods of acute despair, and so on – were related not only to their class position, but were also gendered. In a seller’s rented room, late one night, a seller chastised another with the line: ‘Always this guy, this one, is taking [money] from gaorriat. 6 H . ashu¯ma, buddy, h.ashu¯ma.’ He said this with disdain, which was met with charges of hypocrisy, because of course he too took money from tourists. In this case, shame was thought to derive from the man’s reliance on European women’s money, a reliance that is in stark contradiction to the hegemonic notion of how men ought to relate to women and to money. For these men, real men provide for women. Even though they were in no way able to be men according to this notion of manliness at that period of their lives, they nevertheless understood themselves by this notion. The notion of man-as-provider is shifting within certain parts of Moroccan society. Many of the men I know in Marrakech understand themselves in terms of a hegemonic notion of proper maleness that is utterly at odds with their material lives. Their relations with tourists are attempts to go beyond the desperation of the su¯q, yet such relations are in contradiction with that same conception of how to be a real man, as narrated within the rhetorics of shame.

Conclusion Contemporary tourism is nothing but the consumption and production of commodified movement through the unfamiliar during leisure time. Tourism involves different classes differently relating to this process; some make money from others’ labour, others from wages, and others again through picking through the industry’s leftovers. It is easy enough to appreciate that this industry entails the creation of new spaces, often with an aura of spurious authenticity. This essay has argued that tourism is also productive of sexualities and gender relations, and that these relate to class and power. In Morocco, amongst a particular stratum of the working class, certain related concepts and things (whiteness, European-ness, wealth) are desired together. Such desires are born of desperation. Conversely, Morocco has become for some Europeans a place where they can enact racist

108 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism fantasies (about brownness, poverty, and so on), the fantasies of the powerful. Sexualities and gender relations are amenable to emancipatory struggle. Indeed, there have been several ethnographic studies of the everyday contest that (perhaps) constitutes sex and gender relations in Morocco (Ossman 1994; Baker 1998; Newcomb 2009). Appreciating and learning from the politics of such micrological struggles – one might call them the ‘foot dragging’ of patriarchy – is vital. Building on such studies, critical scholars of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region might also follow Amar (2011) and look further into the institutions – militaries, development regimes and, I submit, tourism – that create dominant and dominating masculinities, and also ask what kinds of institutions resist or might resist these styles. Finally, there are still many questions to be asked of h.ashu¯ma. Scholars have noted that it is often invoked during periods of indeterminacy, ‘when situations are muddied by the presence of competing ideologies’ (Newcomb 2009: 157). Whilst amongst men in the su¯q it appears to be a rhetoric used in the service of patriarchal norms – norms that have nothing to do with the realities of workingclass life – it may yet serve as a potential means for change.

Notes 1 There is little ethnographic writing on either the ‘lumpen proletariat’ or the urban working classes in Morocco. Nabil Ayouch’s films, Ali Zaoua, Prince de la Rue (2008) and Les Chevaux de Dieu (2012), though, do give some sense of the lives of people in the jobless socioeconomy of the country. See also Ilahiane and Sherry (2008) for a celebration of ‘informal’ commercial practices from the perspective of capital. 2 The plural of the feminine gaorria. 3 On the rise of European paedophilia in Morocco, see EPCAT UK (2004) and UNICEF (2003). 4 As Carrigan et al. argue, ‘(t)he culturally exalted form of masculinity, the hegemonic model so to speak, may only correspond to the actual characters of a small number of men’ (1985: 594). 5 Newcomb (2009) records a similar sentiment – that the poor don’t experience shame – in an account of how prosperous Moroccan women conform to and transgress dominant ideals and uses of public space. Newcomb recounts having seen a beggar begin to breastfeed her child whilst in the street, and the reaction of her wealthy interlocutors to this seeming transgression of gender norms: ‘Most stated that the woman’s actions . . . indicated that she was “beyond shame” to begin with’ (2009: 147). Indeed, being ‘able to feel shame’ is for Newcomb’s

Morocco | 109 interlocutors a positive trait: one said, ‘I might lead a modest existence, but at least I have shame’ (2009: 148). 6 ‘Dima ha¯d sid ha¯da taia¯khu¯d min l-gaorriat.’

References Aksikas, J. (2007) ‘Prisoners of Globalization: Marginality, Community and the New Informal Economy in Morocco’, Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 249–62. Al-Monitor (2013) ‘DanielGate Sparks Moroccan Political Unrest’, 7 August, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/08/morocco-pedophilerelease-king-backlash.html# (accessed 11 September 2014). Amar, P. (2011) ‘Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of “Men in Crisis”, Industries of Gender in Revolution’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 37–72. Bachelet, S. (2014) ‘Cynical and Macabre “Politics of Migration” at Morocco’s Borders’, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/16584/cynical-and-macabrepolitics-of-migration-at-moroc (accessed 25 February 2014). Baker, A. (1998) Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women, State University of New York Press, Albany NY. Boudarbat, B. and A. Ajbilou (2007) ‘Youth Exclusions in Morocco: Context, Consequences, and Policies’, Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper, No. 5, Wolfensohn Center for Development, Washington DC. Boutouba, J. (2014) ‘The Moudawana Syndrome: Gender Trouble in Contemporary Morocco’, Research In African Literatures, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 24–40. Bowman, G. (1989) ‘Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem’s Old City’, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 77–93. Carrigan, T., B. Connell and J. Lee (1985) ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 551–604. Cohen, S. and L. Jaidi (2006) Morocco: Globalization and Its Consequences, Routledge, New York NY. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (1994) Dislocating Masculinities: Comparative Ethnographies, Verso, London. Crivello, G. (2008) ‘Negotiating Honour and Shame in the Contempoorary Rif: A Review of Concepts and Literature’, Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 38–56. Dialmy, A. (2004) ‘Masculinity in Morocco’, Al-Raida, Vol. XXI, Nos 104–105, pp. 88–98. ECPAT UK (2004) ‘Child Sex Tourism in Morocco’, End Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, www. ecpat.org.uk/sites/default/files/morocco05.pdf (accessed 17 September 2014). Elliott, K. Z. (2014) ‘Morocco and Its Women’s Rights Struggle: A Failure to Live up to Its Progressive Image’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 1–30. Gatti, D., D. F. Angel-Urdinola, J. Silva and A. Bodor (2011) ‘Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa Region’, World Bank Middle East and North Africa Human Development Department Quick Notes Series, No. 49, World Bank Group, Washington DC.

110 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Gauthier, L. (2009) ‘Jemaa el-Fna ou l’Exotisme Durable’ [‘Jemaa El-Fna or Sustainable Exoticism’], Géographie dans Cultures, Vol. 72, pp. 117–36. Hunter, R. F. (2007) ‘Promoting Empire: The Hachette Tourist in French Morocco, 1919–36’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 579–91. Hussey, A. (2014) The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, Faber & Faber, London. Ilahiane, H. and J. Sherry (2008) ‘Joutia: street vendor entrepreneurship and the informal economy of information and communication technologies in Morocco’, Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 243–55. Juntunen, M. (2009) ‘Laughter at Risk: Men, Migrant Smuggling and Joking in a Northern Moroccan Translocality’, in J. Repic and A. Bartulovic (eds), Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School (MESS), Vol. 7, University of Ljubljana. La Vie Eco (2013) ‘Philippe Servaty, le Pornographe d’Agadir s’en sort avec 18 Mois Seulment’ [‘Philippe Servaty, the Pornographer from Agadir gets just 18 Months’], 18 February, http://www.lavieeco.com/news/actualites/philippeservaty-le-pornographe-d-agadir-s-en-sort-avec-18-mois-seulement-24686. html (accessed 11 September 2014). Lee, J. (2008) ‘Riad Fever: Heritage Tourism, Urban Renewal and the Medina Property Boom in Old Cities of Morocco’, e-Review of Tourism Research, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 66–78. Mernissi, F. (1987) Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN. Newcomb, R. (2009) Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA. Ossman, S. (1994) Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City, University of California Press, Santa Barbara CA. Rabinow, P. (1989) ‘Governing Morocco: Modernity and Difference’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 32–46. Scott, J. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven CT. Sepos, A. (2013) ‘Imperial Power Europe? The EU’s Relations with the ACP Countries’, Journal of Critical Power, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 261–87. Tel Quel (2012) ‘Pédophilie. Le Scandale de Trop’ [‘Paedophilia. Too Much Scandal’], 18 October, http://telquel.ma/2012/10/18/Pedophilie-Le-scandalede-trop_540_4608 (accessed 16 July 2015). UNICEF (2003) ‘L’Exploitation Sexuelle de l’Enfant: Cas de Marrakech’ [Child Sexual Exploitation: The Case of Marrakech’], UNICEF Etudes et Recherches, http://www.unicef.org/morocco/french/Exploitation_Sexuelle1.pdf (accessed 17 September 2014).

CHAPTER 7 Neutralized bachelors, infantilized Arabs: between migrant and host – gendered and sexual stereotypes in Abu Dhabi Jane Bristol-Rhys and Caroline Osella

Introduction The UAE is home to over 200 nationalities. Emirati citizens are the minority group representing roughly 13 per cent of the population (World Population Review 2014). In this highly cosmopolitan, multinational, multi-ethnic context, multiple masculinities are being defined, perceived, and acted upon. We became interested in pursuing the various definitions and aesthetics of masculinity as part of broader team-based research work on Emirati–Indian relations, where we share an interest in the nature – and indeed the degree of intensity – of the Emirati–Indian encounter within a host–migrant relationship; and a methodological conviction that we might raise interesting material and bring out fresh questions and perspectives when taking a single issue and tracking it through both populations. Our research continues as we explore questions of gendering and ethnic stereotyping as they are inflected through ethnographically specific masculinities. One specific ethnographic issue initially prompted us to trace how Emiratis perceived male migrants and how, in turn, those migrant men described and defined Emirati men. Emirati society is extremely gender-conscious; it is genderized and segregated accordingly. Public schools are segregated, as are nationally funded universities such as Zayed University where Bristol-Rhys lectures. There are, in most government offices, hospitals, and banks, women-only lines for

112 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism queuing and separate waiting rooms for women, men, and, in some instances, a special area marked for families, indicating that men are allowed if accompanying the women of their family. Zayed University female students preparing to undertake internships, and those looking for a job, frequently preface their description of a good place to work with ‘It is a women-only place’, or ‘My father wants me to work in a place with only women’ (Bristol-Rhys 2008: 104). When presented with the reality that even HH Sheikha Fatima’s General Women’s Union has men in the building on a daily basis, and that Islamic banks too will have males doing all sorts of work, students normally amend their original statement by adding ‘Emirati’ to the equation. ‘My father doesn’t want me to work with Emirati men’. Bristol-Rhys’s research respondents are very clear that all of the male office staff – from tea boys to accountants – are not considered to be men, only Emirati males are ‘men’ (Bristol-Rhys 2010a: 85). A women-only working environment or establishment in Abu Dhabi typically includes several men who might clean, serve tea, do the books, do computer systems work, or even give university lectures. In Emirati society, these foreign migrants are not perceived to be men because ‘they don’t count’ as such. How and why various different nationalities of migrant/foreign men don’t count or, rather, have been rendered that way, is a very complex issue and so we will discuss it here using ethnographic data collected about South Asian men specifically.1 Bristol-Rhys’s research has made it clear that for Emiratis, only Emirati men are perceived to be men while the hundreds of thousands of ‘bachelors’, as male migrant workers (as distinct from migrant manual labourers) are called in the English-language media, have been effectively neutered and so are not considered sexually viable subjects, and therefore not seen to be socially dangerous. There were also analytic angles that drew us into this project. First, we wanted to understand the strands that are making up this neutralization of migrant males and begin to map out how many genders and forms of gendering, and what processes of gendering, are at work among Emiratis. For example, in our research it has emerged that one criterion being used to identify men (versus notmen) is whether or not they are marriageable. This is significant because given the UAE’s very asymmetrical family laws that deny

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rights and entitlements to the children born of non-Emirati men, foreign men are not viewed as marriageable for women who wish to keep their status (social and financial). Also significant is the family preference given to intra-tribal marriages for daughters. Emirati society is tribally organized and, given Muslim laws of patrilineal inheritance, the children are members of the father’s tribe, and so an Emirati woman thinks twice about marrying someone from another tribe, and would have an incredible amount of pressure put upon her if she suggested marrying someone from no tribe, or, worse still, a non-Arab. These considerations do not apply to Emirati men who, according to both law and religious tradition, can marry whom they like and pass both tribal affiliation and belonging on to their children without question. Second, we wanted then to explore the widespread Emirati discourse claiming that migrant males are perceived to be neither dangerous, masculine nor, indeed, ‘dangerously masculine’. We were interested to know if this is simply a question of marriageability and availability as a sexual object, or if there are other strands to this Emirati neutering of migrant men. This led us towards our third analytic entry point. Emirati practice and public discourse appear to stand in contrast to what Andrew Gardner described for Doha, where both the press and the Qatari public seem to be prone to ‘bachelor panic’ (Gardner 2010). How could the situation be so different in the UAE? Unravelling this question involved talking about who are bachelors, and specifically what category of migrant male is placed in the ‘dangerous bachelor’ representation. As Bristol-Rhys has discussed elsewhere, in Abu Dhabi public discourse ‘bachelor’ very plainly does not refer to manual labourers who work on sites and in areas segregated from the wider society, and who live in labour camps that are hidden away in the peripheries of the city. It applies, however, to those unaccompanied male migrants who live in the city, closer to Emiratis, and who work in service and technical jobs (Bristol-Rhys 2010b). There is no Arabic term for ‘bachelor’ that is used to speak of male migrants, and it always appears in discourse, most commonly in the media, as an Englishlanguage term. This alerts us to be careful about its provenance, and we will return to this point.

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Of men and masculinity Our ethnographic interviews quickly made it clear that in technical terms what we are dealing with in the idealized consumer outlets, colleges, and workplaces sought out by Emirati women and their protective menfolk is not a ‘women-only space’ but, rather, a ‘space with no men’. This then raised several questions. What does ‘man’ mean? Who is a man? What performative actions contribute to a public persona of masculinity? If we identify those who are ‘not men’, then how many genders are people identifying?

Emirati men: dress and behaviours We turned first to masculinity as it is measured and judged by Emirati men. Through interviews and discussions with Emirati men aged from 18 to 65, it became clear that physical presentation was paramount. How a man presents in public is key: he must be in national dress and it must be perfect. An Emirati man’s kandoura must be immaculate and, unless in winter, it should be gleaming white. His ghutra and agal must be worn correctly and he should not ‘fiddle’ with it as if it were an unusual accessory.2 A beard is mandatory and it should be trimmed perfectly (in fact, we were told that a man should have his beard trimmed professionally at least three times a week).3 What a man wears on his feet is important as well, and it is unacceptable to wear trainers or sports sandals. There are several acceptable styles, even Birkenstocks are considered ‘aady (normal), but the sandals should be white leather in summer. During winter, darker sandals are acceptable and, if a Western-style sports coat is worn over a kandoura, then loafers or brogues, worn with socks, are also appropriate. This critical scrutiny of attire might indicate the success of the nationalist project of Emirati, indeed Khaleeji, dress (cf. Al-Qasimi 2010). It was the importance placed on the ‘correct kandoura’ and the ‘correct sandals’ and the ‘proper way of wearing the ghutra and agal’ that was emphasized, stressing the cultural competence necessary to negotiate the performative demands of ‘correctness’. Cultural competence was stressed again and again throughout our interviews with Emirati men. ‘A man recognizes a man by how he enters the majlis,’ said one of our interlocutors.4 Another man

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carefully listed the behaviours that are noted in a majlis. ‘We watch how a person enters and then greets the people in the majlis. Does he know whom to greet first? Does he recognize those men like the sheikh of his tribe, younger sheikhs of the ruling family, and the men who are important to his father and uncles?’ In addition to knowing who is who, and the order in which important men must be greeted, the greeting itself was also critically assessed. ‘Does the man use the correct religious phrases in his greetings? Does he know when to touch noses and when only to shake hands?’ And a man’s knowledge of his society is judged as well. ‘In conversation with the men in attendance at the majlis, does he know his tribal history and lineage? Does he know how his tribe connects – or not – to the other tribes? All these things must be known well for a man to be thought a man.’ All of these behaviours require knowledge – gendered, culturally specific, and highly exclusive knowledge – in order to perform them adequately. Outside of the majlis, in more informal situations and in the public spheres of malls and universities, we learned that a man is measured by how he acts, and by those people with whom he is seen to associate in public. According to our Emirati interlocutors, clothing is still important in public spaces because there they are judged not only by Emiratis, but also by foreigners. ‘We must dress and act appropriately in public because of the image, the image of the Emirati man.’ The young men at the university where Bristol-Rhys teaches have a hierarchy of dress with which they judge each other and establish boundaries between cliques of friends. First, there are the men who wear only kandoura and gutra/agal to classes. They describe themselves as ‘pure Emirati men’. Then there are those who wear kandoura with an American baseball cap or nothing at all on their heads: these are considered ‘okay Emirati, but too casual’ and assumptions are usually made that, ‘their mother is not Emirati’. The third group is made up of those who wear jeans, t-shirts, and shorts to university; they are scorned by the pure Emirati and are only grudgingly accepted by the group who wear baseball caps. They describe themselves as ‘trendy’, but others use words such as fake, wannabe American, or zaalamat, the pejorative term for Levantine Arabs, that has, for lack of a better term, sleazy connotations in Emirati society. ‘They try too hard to be seen, and that is not the Emirati way. We are always supposed to be

116 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism at ease, we don’t show anxiety, in fact, the best is if you can looked bored.’ In addition to dress, an Emirati man is supposed to have a culturally specific skill, a proficiency that requires both patience and steadfastness to cultivate and determination in order to excel. Common examples given were writing Nabati poetry, training a falcon, raising a camel for racing, and becoming an accomplished performer in ayala or harbiya dances. As with clothing, the range of skills marked out by respondents suggests the success of state projects of identity making (see for example Khalaf 2000).

Non-men: the abjected others Among the host of abjected others who serve as a foil to those identified and identifiable as ‘men’ stand: women, the beardless youth (see Najmabadi 2005), boya¯t (boyah singular ) or masculine-styled, female-bodied people (see Al-Qasimi 2012), and migrant males. Asian males take up one specific space of abjected masculinity. They are fully feminized: stereotyped by respondents as small, weak, compliant, dependent, and ‘whiny’. Males who wear shorts and t-shirts, or who build muscle at the gym, are associated with another abjected category, that of zalamat, an ethnic slur referring to men from Lebanon and Syria. Such males often appeared in Emirati discussions as not-men, by virtue of being immature. As Osella and Osella note (2000), aspirations to being a man require not only masculinity but also maturity. For our respondents, there are culturally specific aspects of masculine adulthood like insider knowledge, poise, and presence, which mark the man from the boy, the youth, and the failed wannabe. Bristol Rhys found considerable ambivalence among her Emirati respondents towards Indian migrants generally. On the one hand, they were spoken about as an unwelcome and all-too-visible presence because of the significant numbers of South Asians in the country: as whiny, insincere flatterers, and beggars endlessly demanding favours and material returns. On the other hand, they were also spoken about and acted towards as the poor, masaskeen (Arabic ‘unfortunate’) who need help. Most Emiratis respond with charity and concern towards these masakeen migrants, while at the same time deploring their presence and ‘pushiness’.

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For Emiratis, we found that ‘Indian’ or ‘Hindi’ covers Nepalis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and so on, with no differentiation in the gross working category of class or region. While all ‘Indians’ were classed as effeminate, an exception among South Asians was that of Pakistani Pathans. Pathans are not allowed to work near the family home: they are on farms; drive big trucks across the country; install pipes and irrigation; and do roadwork, always out in the countryside, away from cities and families. When we asked why, we were told that they are dangerous men and it is evident that they count as men in ways that ‘Indians’ don’t. First, they are typically taller and more robust than the average ‘Indian’. Emiratis refer to Pathans as koliya because they are ‘big and strong’ and so do the heavy lifting. This term must come from ‘coolie’, a colonial category encompassing manual labouring and dangerous animalism in one (Breman 1989). As one respondent told us, ‘They have been kept in the countryside from day one; we need them to work but we don’t want them around our sisters.’ On pressing the question of Pathan exceptionalism within the South Asian ‘Indian’ category, it seems it is not just height or strength that separates the Pathans; there is a perceived major difference in attitude and demeanour as well. ‘If a local yells at a Pathan, he yells back! He doesn’t care if you threaten to fire or deport him – he yells back because he has pride.’ What about ‘Indians’, we asked? ‘They tremble with fear, they plead and act like women, wringing their hands with worry. They always look afraid when a local man is around and we like that; it is as it should be. An Indian can be trusted, because he is afraid; and because he is afraid, he is not a man.’

Being a man: the Indian perspective What then, of the many male-bodied people accorded the status of man in their own communities but who do not count as men for Emiratis? When Osella went to speak to Kerala and Gujarati female migrants about these issues, she found that most Indian respondents appeared unaware of the degree to which their menfolk are de-gendered. Migrant men themselves seemed generally (perhaps thankfully) oblivious, and attributed their presence in women’s spaces to a high degree of trust on the Emirati side. Often, Indian migrants

118 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism seemed to imagine themselves as actually able to assimilate with, and anticipate what Emiratis wanted, and to be trusted confidants. They tended, overall, to overestimate the positive in Emirati perceptions. What for Emiratis was safety on the basis of gender neutrality was, for Indians, safety presumed on the basis of quasi-kinship and trust, or long relationship and depth of knowledge and familiarity, or obvious morality and respectability (as for example, when compared to the behavioural norms of European expats). Some Indian respondents recounted stories going way back to imagined first-encounter spaces in pre-colonial port cities that stressed successful joint Indian-Arab trade deals and a resultant high degree of trust and familiarity. Other stories drew on more recent moments of intimate encounter, such as the office manager who stressed that his Emirati boss buys chicken kuboos every Thursday evening for his workforce and sits to eat together with them, by hand, from the same plate. From an Indian perspective, where food sharing is highly codified and circumscribed, this gesture is one of extreme familial intimacy and is read as a sign of closeness and trust (Osella 2008). Other respondents pointed to the simple fact of the longstanding nature and ubiquity of the Indian presence in Emirati worlds of work, leisure, and home, and argued that this alone proved that Emiratis know, like, and trust Indians (see Vora 2013). Indian respondents often broke down the national stereotypes into regional ones, unlike Emiratis, who generally failed to differentiate beyond the grudgingly admired but potentially dangerous ‘Pathans’ and a mass of effeminized ‘Indians’. We don’t have space here to discuss strategies for managing face and reputation by means of effecting a split-self, but we note that this strategy did occasionally appear, as for example when Kerala Muslims acknowledged the ‘effeminate emasculated Indian’ but attributed it to Hindus, while supporting Emirati assertions that certain South Asian men, notably Pathans, were exemplary and atypical in their attachment to some recognizable norms of masculinity.5 Most often, Indian men would respond to charges of effeminacy with an interesting set of counter-charges: several men presented their own version of hegemonic masculinity, which was very familiar to Osella from her previous work in India (see for example, Osella and

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Osella 2006). In this competing set of norms, it is active performance as breadwinner, worker, and familial provider that stands at the centre of adult masculine status – and here, our Indian interlocutors pointed out eagerly, Emirati men fail dismally, while the migrant man is the very exemplar of the cash-earning family man. Another strand of charges which linked back into broader discourses of Emirati men’s dependency and failure as breadwinners, was to point out that the UAE was built, maintained, and serviced entirely by migrant labour. In a refrain which we have heard many times down the years, South Asians recounted the days when the Gulf was poor and empty, and reminded us that it was South Asian expertise, labour, and entrepreneurship that made it what it is, and maintain it to this day (Osella and Osella 2007; Vora 2013). Several of the Indian migrant respondents with whom Osella has longer-term and close relationships also offered interesting anecdotes and opinions, which expressed not only simple resistance to Indian emasculation by means of a different scale of values, but a strong (and unexpected) counter-discourse that characterized the UAE’s ethnocracy, the powerful and wealthy dominant group, the Emiratis themselves, as decidedly un-masculine. At the centre of this representation stood the question of self-control. Emirati men were said, in various ways, to lack patience, to be impulsive, to be overly emotionally expressive, too easily swayed by emotion rather than reason, to have no foresight, and so on. We also heard – from Indian men who work alongside or for Emiratis – several stories which pointed towards the charge that Emiratis always expect things to happen right now, and are unable to be patient because they simply do not understand the complexities of business practice, manufacturing, import regulations, postage and shipping timings, or some other technical-bureaucratic field. Here we get a hint of an implication that, beneath the laundered kandoura and the expensive watch and cologne, Emirati modernity is superficial, lacking the long familiarity and competence with more substantial aspects of contemporary life that Indians claim for themselves as post-colonial subjects. Among Indian respondents, a combination of Emirati males’ dependency, alleged technicalorganizational incompetence, and incomplete exposure to modern norms, failure to be family breadwinners, and an attributed child-like

120 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism emotional immaturity all conspire then to render the Emirati an utter failure as a man by Indian standards.

The ‘bachelor panic’ What we have found is that when two different gender regimes encounter each other, the Emirati one appears to win out in terms of public discourse and practice, permitting the emasculation of migrant males and their entry into segregated spaces, with the Indian one remaining a muted internal discourse. We now take up a related and interesting point. In contrast to Gardner’s work in Qatar (2010) and some UAE media discourse, we find that, on the ground, there simply does not seem to be a ‘bachelor panic’ among Emiratis. We return here to the term ‘bachelor’ – which, as we noted above, appears only in the English language and within media representations, and never as an Arabic term, nor on the ground among our Emirati respondents. The ‘bachelor panic’ reported in the English language press might – we are beginning to think – itself be an artefact of the Indian moral panic produced by the safely respectable Indian middle class. UAE media are serviced and consumed by Indian journalists and residents, those who typically have family visa status and who are extremely anxious (as Vora records for Dubai, 2013) to distance themselves from the less-skilled ‘bachelor’ migrant. Far from being a pan-Gulf Khaleeji anxiety about Indian male migrants, the ‘bachelor’ might turn out to be – at least in Abu Dhabi – an Indian-English concern inherited and transmitted since the time of empire, imported to the Gulf by Indians themselves and mostly relevant within the wider Indian migrant community. For Emiratis, unaccompanied South Asian male migrants are not even men, and do not begin to approach the sexualized predatory bogey figure that is evoked by the term ‘bachelor’. The only South Asians grudgingly accorded a degree of manhood – Pathans – are reined in by the derogatory coolie tag and kept well segregated from family and public space. But by virtue of their specific ethnicity, lack of cultural and tribal embeddedness, and status as impoverished men of labour, as much as by their self-presentation, even the Pathans are not thought to be as potentially dangerous as Emirati men.

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Locating gender regimes Our ethnographic and analytic work has been two-stranded. The first stage involved engaging with our research respondents around questions of masculinities, sexuality, and marriageability to question how such a perception of safe and de-masculinized migrant males came to be held seemingly across Emirati society. We then asked about the counterview. To what extent do Indian migrant males know about the stereotypes and value judgements being made about them by Emiratis? If Emirati neutering discourse is known, is it contested? And then, how do migrant workers view Emirati men and styles of masculinity? What happens, in short, when different regimes of gendering meet each other in an uneasily plural society? The second stage involved connecting the research to comparative ethnographic literature. Here we review work on the ways in which race and gender co-constitute each other, producing effects such as racial castration (Eng 2001) or hyper-masculinization (Mercer 1994). We also consider historical work on the production and afterlife of British colonial stereotypes (Sinha 1995; Pandian 1995; Dimeo 2002; McClintock 2013) as we try to understand the degree to which Emirati representations might be partial echoes of that notorious British stereotype, the ‘effeminate Indian’. At the same time, the unexpected counter-claims of many Indian respondents that characterize Emiratis as unmanly on the basis of a lack of rationality and self-mastery also uncannily remind us of another set of charges laid at the door of the colonized during the days of empire: the stereotype of the ‘impulsively emotional Arab’ (Massad 2008; Allouche no date). This last point prompts us to wonder whether we should be paying more attention to the colonial legacy, in terms of thinking more carefully about the long circulation around the Gulf of South Asians and thereby of specifically post-imperial South Asian colonial knowledge, practices, and resonances. Are the ‘emotional Arab’ and the ‘feminized Indian’ both colonial hangovers? This takes us outside regional studies frameworks and beyond nationalist historiographies and reorients our focus to South Asia and the Gulf as one tightly entangled space under the sway of British imperial discourse and haunted by it still (Onley 2007). This is why it is important

122 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism methodologically for us as researchers and authors to work together and to allow our work to speak to the work of others. There are of course other actors within this story, such as the South-East Asians, often reduced to ‘Filipinos’ just as all South Asians become ‘Indians’; the specific figure of the Egyptian male school teacher; and the British and American expats.6 We have only just begun to trace out some specific ways in which colonial stereotypes continue to circulate and haunt present-day relations between the Emiratis and the ‘Indians’ in what is arguably, in the ex-Trucial States, a post-colonial situation. In our project, we have noted some projections of gendered fantasies, and of disavowed characteristics, onto racialized others. We encountered the passion and impulsivity which, purged from postcolonial nationalist versions of Indian mature manliness (Srivastava 2004, 2007), has been projected onto Arabs; and we also stumbled over aspects of the abjected feminine that is carefully removed from Emirati versions of what makes a man and is projected onto migrant others, in an all-too-familiar dynamic. Our research shows the ways in which race and gender come together right from the outset within this dynamic, such that we can never unpick the two as intersecting axes. Rather they form an endlessly recursive raced-gendered force that plays out in a far more Byzantine set of entanglements of fantasy, projection, desire, and terror. We understand this not as something that happens in states of exception, but as fundamental from the outset to the ways in which subjects get raced/gendered. Talking about this process with respondents and thinking about it for ourselves is the difficult space in which we are working right now.

Acknowledgements We thank ESRC, Zayed University, and SOAS for funding our project and acknowledge the help of our Emirati and Indian research respondents, all of whom choose to remain anonymous. The research presented here is drawn from Bristol-Rhys’s work among Emiratis and Osella’s work among Indian migrants, and spans decades of interviews and participant observation.

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Notes 1 The ‘nonce taxonomies’ (following Sedgwick 1990) of identifiable and publicly legible genders in Abu Dhabi would run into more than ten on our quick count, including Filipina cross-dressing women, Emirati boya¯t, and, the male-bodied beardless youth. 2 Emirati male clothing consists of long-sleeved, ankle-length garment that has no collar (distinguishing Emirati men from others in the Gulf who wear a variety of collar styles). The kandura can be any color but is most commonly white. Colours, usually blues and browns, are worn during the cooler winter months. The head is covered by a cloth, usually white, called the ghutra, which is secured by an agal, a heavy black cord that is coiled. The ghutra is also worn without the agal but then it is wrapped up around the head in what is called the Hamdanniyya. This is favoured by young men but is considered to be inappropriate for work and formal settings. 3 An Emirati man who does not have facial hair – at the very least a moustache – is frequently thought to be homosexual or from a tribe that eschews facial hair, and that too marks him as an abjected minority. 4 The majlis is a gender-segregated space set aside for receiving visitors or consulting with associates. The rulers and members of the ruling families hold regular maja¯lis (plural) to receive petitioners, hold discussions with tribal leaders, and host lectures. 5 In later work developing from this chapter we will present more of this ethnography and an analysis of strategies of ‘split-selves’ (following, for example, Nandy 1983). 6 We have material from Emirati men and women speaking about the styles of masculinity among other groups in the ethnocracy that render them unfit to be considered properly masculine, or in some instances actually illegible as men. Here our focus is only on Emirati–Indian encounters.

References Allouche, S. (no date) ‘Western Media as “Technology of Affect”: An Affective Reading of the “Angry Arab Man” as Stereotype’, unpublished manuscript. Al-Qasimi, N. (2010) ‘Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ‘Abaya-as-Fashion in the Arab Gulf States’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 46–74. Al-Qasimi, N. (2012) ‘The “Boyah” and the “Baby Lady”: Queer Mediations in Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid Al Gharaballi’s Wawa Series (2011)’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 46–74. Breman, J. (1989) Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in South-East Asia, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bristol-Rhys, J. (2008) ‘The Dilemma of Gender Separated Higher Education’, in C. Davidson and P. M. Smith (eds), Higher Education in the Gulf States, SOAS Middle East Issues, London: Saqi, pp. 99–109. Bristol-Rhys, J. (2010a) Emirati Women: Generations of Change. Hurst and Co., London. Bristol-Rhys, J. (2010b) ‘A Lexicon of Migrants in the United Arab Emirates

124 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism (UAE)’. Middle East Institute. Washington DC, http://www.mei.edu/content/ lexicon-migrants-united-arab-emirates-uae (accessed 10 December 2014). Dimeo, P. (2002) ‘Colonial Bodies, Colonial Sport: “Martial” Punjabis, “Effeminate” Bengalis and the Development of Indian Football’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 72–90. Eng, D. L. (2001) Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, Duke University Press, Durham NC. Gardner, A. (2010) City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY. Khalaf, S. (2000) ‘Poetics and Politics of Newly Invented Traditions in the Gulf: Camel Racing in the United Arab Emirates’, Ethnology, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 243–61. Massad, J. A. (2008) Desiring Arabs, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL. McClintock, A. (2013) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Routledge, London. Mercer, K. (ed.) (1994) Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York NY. Najmabadi, A. (2005) Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press, Berkeley CA. Nandy, A. (1983) The Intimate Enemy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Onley, J. (2007) The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Osella, Caroline (2008) ‘Introduction’, special issue on ‘Food, Memory, Community: Kerala as both “Indian Ocean” Zone and as Agricultural Homeland’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No.1, pp. 1–9. Osella, C. and F. Osella (2000) ‘Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 117–33. Osella, C. and F. Osella (2006) Men and Masculinities in South India, Anthem Press, London. Osella, F. and C. Osella (2007) ‘“I am Gulf”: The Production of Cosmopolitanism in Kozhikode, Kerala, India’, in E. Simpson and K. Kresse (eds), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean, Hurst and Company, London. Pandian, M. S. S. (1995) ‘Gendered Negotiations: Hunting and Colonialism in the Late 19th Century Nilgiris’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 29, Nos 1–2, pp. 239–63. Sedgwick, K. E. (1990) Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, Berkeley CA. Sinha, M. (1995) Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Srivastava, S. (ed.) (2004) Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia, Sage Publications, New Delhi. Srivastava, S. (2007) Passionate Modernity, Routledge, Delhi. Vora, N. (2013) Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, Duke University Press, Durham NC. World Population Review (2014) World Population Review, http:// worldpopulationreview.com/ (accessed 22 August 2014).

CHAPTER 8 Windsurfers, capoeiristas and musicians: Brazilian masculinities in transnational scenarios Adriana Piscitelli

This chapter explores reconfigurations in styles of masculinity among Brazilian heterosexual men, in transnational scenarios marked in Brazil by the growth of international tourism, and in Spain by the entrance of foreign migrants. In 2000, I began what became a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) that sought to understand the growing insertion of Brazil in transnational sex and marriage markets. For 36 months I conducted fieldwork in north-eastern Brazil and in various cities of Spain and Italy (Piscitelli 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012).1 In this chapter, I analyse how the styles of masculinity present in Brazil are reconfigured in these transnational scenarios. My main argument is that, in the realm of these unequal relationships in which ethnosexual frontiers are delineated (Nagel 2003), the intersection between gender and notions of sexualized and racialized nationality constrains the ability of these men to incorporate new defining elements of masculinity.2

Incorporating ‘Brazilianness’ in transnational scenarios I carried out the first phase of the fieldwork in Ceará, one of the poorest states in the country (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada 2012), where the beautiful beaches with turquoise sea and white sands attract a growing number of international tourists (Governo do Estado do Ceará 2009). When I began to explore the effects of this tourist flow on the sexual and romantic choices of the local population, I met Elvis, a 28-year-old man, who earned money

126 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism as a tourist guide. On perceiving my surprise at the high prices that he expected to receive for the services that he offered the gringos,3 he told me: ‘Foreigners have to be exploited. Brazilians have already suffered 500 years of domination.’ And he told me stories of his relationships with foreigners, while hugging a young German woman who, without understanding Portuguese, wanted to join the conversation: You can attract them by the forró (a typical dance from the region), by the dancing, windsurf, capoeira (a martial art with African roots) . . . what these girls are looking for is something that they don’t have there, something exotic. There they have that guy who treats them well. . . . Here they find a different type of man. And this fascinates them. . . . They are more reserved . . . and here they go wild. . . . I had an English girlfriend, after one month I walked down the street with my hand on her bottom. That’s what they want. They don’t do this in Europe because of the family, society. . . . In bed, with a Brazilian girl, she makes love to you. With these girls, no. You lead. . . . You have the knowledge, you know what to do. . . . And you take the initiative, control . . . sometimes they pay more because they have money. But, although I stay in great places with them, I don’t gain much advantage in this economic sense. (Interview, Fortaleza, February 2002) Elvis’s perceptions drew my attention. In these tourist circuits marked by male heterosexual ‘sex tourism’, foreign women were comparatively scarce. Nevertheless, according to local narratives, they also sought sexual and romantic relationships. But they usually chose mulatto men, who are hyper-sexualized in the local imaginary and considered to be poor and with little schooling. In parallel, I frequently heard stories about the economic exploitation and violence to which female visitors from wealthy countries were subjected. Elvis, however, was a middle-class man, who had taken some college-level courses. He is considered white and arrived two years earlier from immense, cosmopolitan São Paulo in Brazil’s southeast, the richest city in the country. In Brazil, a nation of 190 million inhabitants with marked regional differences, sharp social distances

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and clear distinctions in lifestyle and in the gender dynamics of these different social classes, there are different styles of masculinity. In Elvis’s report, the sexualization, aggressiveness, control and attempt to balance the relative inequality in relation to European visitors through power attributed to sexual knowledge created a dissonance, bearing in mind the styles of being a man generally perceived to be a middle-class man from São Paulo, who, as in the other large urban cities, tend to be considered comparatively modern and egalitarian. Some of the attributes highlighted by Elvis reappear in stories of migrants from various Brazilian states and from different social classes whom I met years later in Barcelona. In this city, which until the deepening of Spain’s economic crisis drew one of the largest communities of Brazilians, the women were particularly visible in the sex markets. In parallel, they became the main source of foreign wives chosen by men in Spain. Brazilian men were not one of the main nationalities chosen by Spanish women for marriage. I realized, however, that as in the tourist circuits in Ceará some Brazilian men were to be found in the erotic markets and at times also in the marriage market. They were men with ties to music, dance, water and nautical sports, and capoeira. In Barcelona, the styles of masculinity of these Brazilian men were also sexualized. Except that, unlike the reports that I heard in Ceará about Brazilian migrants in Spain, this sexualization was integrated either within a style of aggressive, violent and controlling masculinity, or within a much gentler modality linked to domestic tasks and child care. The men who came to embody this latter style, however, appear to lose their value in the erotic market in Barcelona.

Styles of masculinity in Brazil As in other Latin American and Caribbean countries marked by a slave past, Brazil has been the object of sexualized and racialized gazes, which are recreated in the new global order (Appadurai 1996). Some social scientists believe that these notions have been internalized by the Brazilian population. They affirm that a sexualized perception of Brazilianness, based on literary and scientific writings of European visitors to the country since the nineteenth century (Holanda 1994)

128 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism and recreated in various historic periods (Alfonso 2006), is part of how Brazilians perceive themselves (Heilborn and Barbosa 2003; Parker 1991). These ideas led the Brazilianist Richard Parker to formulate the idea of the existence of a ‘Brazilian sexual culture’. According to Parker, sexuality and sensuality are celebrated in the country, and at the deepest level are related to what it means to be Brazilian (Parker 1991) – a self-image presented not only by Brazilians to themselves, but also by Brazilians to the foreign world. This notion is anchored in an analysis of carnival, basically Rio de Janeiro’s carnival, perceived – with its sexual symbolism and mixture of European, indigenous and mainly African traits – as an authentic expression of the basic ethos of Brazilian life. The two central personalities of carnival, the mulata and the malandro, synthesize the association of carnival with pleasure and sensuality. The mulata is taken to represent the erotic ideal in Brazilian culture, embodying tropical warmth and sensuality (Corrêa 1996). The malandro is a type of popular hero, who lives for pleasure not for work, and skirts the rules of the established order. In the literature that addresses the origin myths of Brazilian society, the erotization only relates to the mulata. In recent decades, however, in contrast with white men, considered superior in terms of gender and race, black men have also come to be eroticized, and the idea of sensual and joyful malandragem was racialized (Moutinho 2004). In the notion of a ‘Brazilian sexual culture’ these symbolic figures were produced in the realm of a gender system anchored in a patriarchal tradition, in which notions of masculinity are associated with ideas of virility and potency, strength, power, domination and violence. The characters of the machão, of the father and the husband, would be equally relevant in the construction of the popular definitions of masculinity. This symbolism coexists, however, with a diversity of styles of masculinity, not necessarily sexualized, in Brazil. Without denying the inequalities that affect Brazilian women in a distinctive manner, for decades the patriarchal tradition has been destabilized as part of the country’s modernization and re-democratization – a process in which social movements, including the feminist movement, have stood out. Over the past ten years, during the tenure of a progressive, leftist government, efforts have intensified to reduce economic and social

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inequalities, including a broad range of policies aimed at the equity of gender. The broad effects of this process – while differing by region, urban–rural contrasts and distinct social sectors – destabilize received ideas about hegemonic masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Recent studies show these effects are differentiated in articulations between notions of masculinity, region and social class. In the urban middle classes of the Brazilian south-east, new standards of masculinity, also found in large urban cities in other parts of the country, are distant from the idea of the traditional macho. They involve codes of gender and sexuality that emphasize more sensitive masculinities, respect for feminine autonomy, intimacy and care for children (Ribeiro and Siqueira 2007). This modernization reaches, albeit with less intensity, the working classes of the south-east, expressing itself in factors that relate to a growing egalitarianism and a relative blurring of the masculine and feminine spheres (Bruschini and Ricoldi 2012). In Brazil’s north-east, the working classes appear to be more traditional (Bustamente 2005). There, race is articulated in different styles of masculinity. Although race does not change standards of masculinity in other contexts, in the north-east young working-class blacks have appropriated cultural themes from the African diaspora and embodied new elaborations of hypersexualized and violent racialized masculinity in this frame (Pinho 2005). This diversity should be kept in mind in order to consider the trajectories of the men I interviewed, who were quite heterogeneous. The factor they shared was having established sexual and romantic relations with women from other countries, mainly from Europe.

Diversity and exoticization Amongst the tourist circuits of Ceará, some men came from the middle classes of the capital Fortaleza, a centre of industry and tourism with more than two million inhabitants. Others, from the lower classes, were born and raised in small fishing villages, which, 30 years ago, had neither electricity nor running water, and where the economy was largely based on exchange (Molina 2007).4 Beyond class, the main differences between them reside in the differentiated effects of

130 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism having grown up in the capital or in the fishing villages. The impact of tourism on gender, sexual and emotional codes was more intense for the residents of the villages, where, as they grew older, some came to exchange local partners for foreign ones. Most of these men were considered brown-skinned. They were not, however, AfricanBrazilians, but caboclos, a mixture of indigenous and Portuguese descendants that is not highly regarded locally in aesthetic and erotic terms. In Spain, most of those interviewed were from the urban middle classes, from different Brazilian states.5 Only one considered himself to be brown-skinned, according to racial classifications in Brazil, and the others as white, but all saw themselves racialized as Brazilians, particularly under cultural terms in Spain. The question is how are styles of masculinity of men of this diversity reconfigured in transnational scenarios? The circulation across borders of images marked by racialized, ethnicized and nationalized gender in the realm of the post-colonial processes of globalization (Nagel 2003) has contributed to thinking about these movements. It is important to recall recent advertising by the European Union, called ‘Growing Together’ (2012), in which a feminine figure, representing Europe, is lost in an abandoned train station and threateningly surrounded by three fighters from the emerging BRIC economies: China, India and Brazil. The representative of Brazil – the only one of the three with his torso bared – is a tall, black man with long dreadlocks and large, well-defined muscles. He is a capoeira fighter, a martial art whose practitioners are often presented as a synthesis of intensely sexualized and racialized virility, both at home and abroad (Lewis 2000).6 Some of these notions were present among the European women who were fascinated by Brazilians within the tourist circuits of Ceará, and saw the men who performed capoeira as embodying the black, Brazilian, intensely virile masculinity with a ‘manly scent’. These women connected eroticism to an idea of blackness that was not necessarily evident in the players’ bodies, but associated with capoeira. They sexualized and racialized the capoeiristas, regardless of skin colour. These ideas were echoed by Spanish women who, in Barcelona, also included dancers and musicians in the range of materializations of this Brazilianness.

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Reconfigurations In these scenarios, in a relational interplay incorporating these exoticization processes (Machado 2003), the men interviewed here performed the sexualization of which they were an object for the European women. Thus, in transnational spaces, capoeiristas and musicians, ‘whites’ and caboclos, came to incorporate the attributes linked in Brazil to mulattos. These performances, however, are integrated in a broader reconfiguration of the styles of masculinity. Brazilian men related to foreign women in unequal relationships. In the tourist circuits of Ceará, these inequalities were connected to the structural privileges of the European women – articulated by nationality, race and social class – that materialized in the women’s ability to travel and open tourist businesses in Brazil. The Brazilian boyfriends, mainly those from the lower classes, obtain material benefits from these women through transactional sexual relationships (Hunter 2010; Cabezas 2009; Kempadoo 2004). In parallel, they react to the threat presented by the changes in the hierarchies of gender brought about by these relationships, enacting violence on foreigners who abandon their status as tourists and remain in these tourist places. Among the Brazilian migrants in Spain, an analogous movement is perceptible among men from the working classes in Brazil. Maria, a Catalan woman who was married for four years to a Brazilian musician, reports: He is mulato, tall, very handsome . . . he was my great sexual pleasure. Until today I have not found a companion in bed that can compare . . . it’s the way of understanding the form of pleasure of Brazilian men . . . sex is much more a part of daily life. . . . A Brazilian man knows he has a woman between his hands . . . and this is beautiful. I married him, he needed the papers. . . . But in the end we had significant differences. I don’t know if it was because he was from Bahia, or because of his social origin. . . . I knew what poverty is when I visited his home. . . . He controlled me, isolated me and began to repeat family patterns . . . and when I realized, it was too late . . . it came to physical abuse, he

132 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism began to use cocaine regularly and became aggressive. . . . I spent three months without eating. He threw me down the stairs. . . . I left the relationship quite damaged, physically, psychologically and emotionally. And basically I supported him. He contributed very little economically. In Spain – for male immigrants from Brazil’s urban middle class, who had experienced more egalitarian styles of masculinity in their own country – the process of reconfiguration of masculinities is different. In this migratory context, the inequalities between the nationalities are also expressed by locating in inferior positions of social class men who in their own countries would have a status analogous to the women with whom they relate in Spain. Within these inequalities, the emphasis on erasing hierarchies of gender causes an inversion. Given the limited capacity the men have to be providers in a migratory context, in which their activities yield low pay, by becoming the main carers of home and children, and depositories of sensibility and emotion, they appear effeminated. This feminization neutralizes their singularity, which is anchored in an erotic potential based on the peculiar sexualization of Brazilianness. This process is described by José Antonio, a musician who is separated from his Spanish wife, with whom he had two children: She approached me with a sexual interest, because I was Brazilian. . . . I always earned less, and this was a problem . . . I cared for the children, I always did. . . . She went to work early, then I would wake up, take the children to school. She is an economist. I was in music groups, but I worked more in the summer. And it was always that: ‘Find something to earn some more money,’ and so on. . . . I was very comfortable, I took care of the children, I rehearsed during the day, got the children at school, did everything, cleaned the whole house. . . . Today she must earn about 3,000 euros and I earn about 500. She earned about four times more than me, more or less . . . and this wound up being important . . . we began to stop having sex. Now I have a Brazilian girlfriend.

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Conclusion In Brazil, gender, including notions of masculinity, operates as a language for alluding to inequalities of social class and to racial distinctions. Associated with a distinction between tradition and modernity, gender also alludes to regional inequalities, between the richer and more modern and the poorer and more backward parts of the country. In relation to European countries, Brazil, albeit an emerging economy, is still linked to the Global South. And the notions of gender which in discourses between North and South are frequently used to allude to differentiated degrees of civilization or of Westernization, attribute to these Brazilian men a totalizing, sexualized, racialized and hyper-masculine identity. The analysis of the reconfigurations of styles of masculinity that take place in the transnational scenarios considered here shows how the ethno-sexual borders do not prevent experimentation with new styles of being a man. Intimately connected with the inequalities that permeate the relationships with Europeans, however, these borders do also limit these experimentations, annulling the principal value conceded to these men: their erotic attraction.

Notes 1 In Brazil, the ethnography was conducted in the state of Ceará – in Fortaleza, the capital city, and at some beach locations – at different times over an 18month period spanning several high seasons from 2000 to 2008. The fieldwork combined participant observation, unstructured conversations and in-depth interviews with 94 people, including foreign and local men and women involved in transnational sexual and romantic relationships, and people working in the tourism sector and the sex industry. The majority of the interviews were recorded digitally or on audio tape, while informal conversations and observations were recorded in my field diary. The interviews with Brazilian men were conducted in 2002 and 2008. In Spain I conducted research over 11 months at different times between November 2004 and January 2013 in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Granada. I conducted in-depth interviews with 33 Brazilian women, 11 men and 5 Brazilian transgendered individuals all of whom had sexual/romantic contacts in the framework of the sexual or marriage markets with Spanish citizens. Most of my interviews were tape recorded with the consent of the interviewees. 2 This text is mainly based on the narratives of 21 Brazilian men, 10 of whom were interviewed in Brazil and 11 in Spain, but I also consider narratives from European women who, in these different scenarios, had long-term relationships with Brazilian men.

134 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism 3 A native term used to refer descriptively and at times pejoratively to foreigners, particularly those from the Global North. 4 In this context, the men I interviewed were 23–40 years old and natives of the municipalities of Canoa, Jeri and Fortaleza in Ceará. Most of them had gone to high school, and three had higher education. 5 They are migrants aged 19–39, with 3–11 years of residence in Spain. 6 Later, other feminine figures appeared, who, holding hands, surrounded and neutralized the fighters and converted them into stars on the flag of the European Union. The advertisement, presented in Brazil as an example of racism, concluded with the following phrase: ‘The more we are, the stronger we are’. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E2B_yI8jrI (accessed September 2014).

References Alfonso, L. P. (2006) ‘Embratur: Formadora de Imagens da Nação Brasileira’ (Embratur: Forming Images of the Brazilian Nation), Master’s dissertation, IFCH, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN. Bruschini, M. C. A. and A. M. Ricoldi (2012) ‘Revendo Estereótipos: O Papel dos Homens no Trabalho Doméstico’ (Reviewing Stereotypes: The Role of Men in Domestic Work), Revista Estudos Feministas, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 259–87. Bustamante, V. (2005) ‘Ser Pai no Subúrbio Ferroviário de Salvador: Um Estudo de Caso com Homens de Camadas Populares’ (To Be a Father in the Railway Suburb of Salvador), Psicologia em Estudo, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 393–402. Cabezas, A. (2009) Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Temple University Press, Philadelphia PA. Connell, R. W. and J. W. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, Vol. 19, No. 6, p. 829. Corrêa, M. (1996) ‘A Invenção da Mulata’ (The Invention of the Mulata), Cadernos Pagu, Nos 6–7, Unicamp, Campinas. European Union (2012) ‘Growing Together’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9E2B_yI8jrI (accessed September 2014) Governo do Estado do Ceará (2009) ‘Secretaria de Turismo: Conjuntura do Turismo no Ceará: Janeiro a Dezembro de 2009, Balanço do turismo, Janeiro de 2010’ (Tourism Secretariat: Annual Report on Tourism in Ceará, January to December 2009, Tourism Balance, January 2010), http://www.setur.ce.gov. br/categoria1/copy4_of_estudos-e-pesquisas/document_view (accessed 6 March 2010). Heilborn, M. L. and R. Barbosa (2003) ‘Sexuality Research Training in Brazil’, in D. Mauro, G. Herdt and R. Parker, Handbook of Sexuality Research Training Initiatives, Social Science Research Council, New York NY. Holanda, S. B. de (1994) [1959] Visão do Paraíso (Vision of Paradise), sixth edition, Brasiliense, São Paulo. Hunter, M. (2010) Love in the Time of Aids: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN.

Brazilian masculinities | 135 Instituto De Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (2012) Situação Social nos Estados, Ceará (Social Situation of the States, Ceará), IPEA, Brasília. Kempadoo, K. (2004) Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor, Routledge, New York NY. Lewis, L. (2000) ‘Sex and Violence in Brazil: Carnival, Capoeira and the Problem of Everyday Life’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 539–57. Machado, I. J. de R. (2003) ‘Cárcere Público, Processos de Exotização entre Imigrantes Brasileiros no Porto, Portugal’ (Public Prison, Exoticization Processes among Brazilian Immigrants in Porto, Portugal), PhD thesis, Unicamp. Marcus, G. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 95–117. Molina, F. S. (2007) ‘Turismo e Produção do Espaço – O Caso de Jericoacoara, Ceará’ (Tourism and the Production of Space – Case of Jericoacara, Ceará), Master’s dissertation, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geografia Humana, FFLCH, University of São Paulo. Moutinho, L. (2004) Razão, ‘Cor’ e Desejo (Reason, ‘Colour’ and Desire), Editora da Universidade do Sagrado Coração (EDUSC), São Paulo. Nagel, J. (2003) Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, Oxford University Press, New York NY. Parker, R. (1991) Corpos, Prazeres e Paixões: A Cultura Sexual no Brasil Contemporâneo (Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil), Editora Best Seller, São Paulo; Beacon Press, Boston MA. Pinho, O. de A. (2005) ‘Etnografias do Brau: Corpo, Masculinidade e Raça na Re-Africanização em Salvador’ (Ethnographies of Brau: Body, Masculinity and Race in the Re-Africanization in Salvador), Revista Estudos Feministas, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 127–45. Piscitelli, A. (2007) ‘Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the Northeast of Brazil’, Sexualities, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 489–500. Piscitelli, A. (2008) ‘Looking for New Worlds: Brazilian Women as International Migrants’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 784–93. Piscitelli, A. (2011) ‘Actuar la Brasileñidad? Tránsitos a Partir del Mercado del Sexo’ (Acting Brazilianness? Transits from the Sex Market), Revista Etnográfica, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 5–29. Piscitelli, A. (2012) ‘Revisiting Notions of Sex Trafficking and Victims’, Vibrant: Brazilian Virtual Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 277–310, Brasília, http:// www.vibrant.org.br/issues/v9n1/adriana-piscitelli-revisiting-notions-of-sextrafficking-and-victims/ (accessed September 2014) Ribeiro, C. R. and V. H. F. Siqueira (2007) ‘O Novo Homem na Mídia: Ressignificações por Homens Docentes’ (The New Man in the Media: Resignifications by Male Teachers), Revista Estudos Feministas, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 217–41.

CHAPTER 9 ‘I must stand like a man’: masculinity in crisis in post-war Sierra Leone Luisa Enria

Introduction Following ten years of devastating civil conflict, Sierra Leone began a long process of reconstruction framed around attempts to understand why the war had happened and how relapse could be avoided in the future. There have been a multitude of interpretations of the war and its root causes. Analysts have pointed to the role of regional dynamics, opportunities for loot and control over natural resources, as well as decades of state decay and political exclusion (Keen 2005; Reno 1998; Richards 1996; Bangura 2004). Despite the diversity of insight into what precipitated the country into a decade of war, the question of who the perpetrators of violence were has found most observers in agreement. Stories about violence have focused primarily on male combatants. All combatant factions were made up of a similar demographic: they represented Sierra Leone’s marginalized, un- or underemployed young people. In the aftermath of war, accounts that emphasize a ‘crisis of youth’ have formed the ‘master-narrative of post-war reconstruction’ (Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010: 256), one that is characterized by fears that young people may once again destabilize peace (Mitton 2013). In the post-war configuration, economically marginal male youths embody the ‘security risks’ posited by reconstruction narratives. As is increasingly recognized, gender is a key lens through which conflicts are understood and thus a key component in blueprints for post-conflict recovery. The predominance of young men in conflicts

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across the world has facilitated an ‘association between masculinities, or the socialization of boys into rigid gender norms, and violence and conflict’ (Barker and Ricardo 2005: vi). Expansions in what is understood as peacebuilding to include a focus on gender have by and large perpetuated this association (Saferworld 2014). The consequent securitization of young men in post-war states is thus based on what are often monolithic interpretations of masculinity that rely on a reductive dichotomy between women as victims and men as perpetrators (MacKenzie 2009). This chapter first analyses how young men have come to be designated as a security risk in postwar Sierra Leone in the context of the emergence of new paradigms about what it means to establish peace in war-torn states. Then, reflecting on ethnographic research amongst unemployed young men in Freetown, the chapter contrasts these discourses on problematic masculinities with everyday experiences of being young and male in the post-war city. This contrast reveals a chasm between young men’s economic realities and their aspirations to fulfil patriarchal gender norms, as consumption-based definitions of status are foreclosed. In addition, the chapter shows that as mainstream avenues of respect are barred by economic exclusion, young men attempt to establish alternative forms of recognition.

The ‘crisis of youth’: constructing problematic masculinities The silencing of the guns in 2002 that marked the end of Sierra Leone’s conflict occurred in the midst of global shifts in thinking about war. Institutions like the United Nations (UN), for example, were undergoing significant restructuring in terms of how they engaged with war-torn countries, shifting from a focus on the ending of hostilities towards understanding in more depth why wars happen in the first place (Caplan 2005; Chesterman 2004; UN 1992; von Billerbeck 2011). The term ‘peacebuilding’ became an umbrella term for all those activities undertaken beyond the achievement of ceasefire to address root causes and avoid relapse (Barnett et al. 2007). The most striking example of how notions of what it means to establish peace have been expanded is the incorporation of development into peacebuilding

138 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism efforts. Scholars and practitioners alike have pointed to the dangers posed by underdevelopment, suggesting that widespread poverty can lie at the heart of insurrections, whether because it provides economic incentives to rebel or by acting as a grievance for fighters (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change 2004; Suhrke 2012). As development and security become increasingly intertwined, particular aspects of development are brought to the fore as especially salient for maintaining peace in different contexts. What is significant is that in expanding the notion of peace, these new approaches have also widened the pool of what is seen as a threat to stability in post-war states (Duffield 2001; 2007). Gender, as MacKenzie (2009: 259) notes, is ‘one of the political forces operating on the selection of security concerns’. The portrayal of unemployment as a threat to stability in Sierra Leone offers the starkest example of the intersection between development, securitization and gendered representations that rely on the association of masculinity with violence. In Sierra Leone, unemployment has been at the centre of analysis of the war’s structural causes. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, noted that: As the conflict arrived, youths used brutality not to prop up the political elites, but to accumulate resources and power that had been denied to them previously, attacking the very foundations of the elites’ society. (2004: 345) The nature and process of young people’s engagement with the war has been at the centre of heated academic debate (cf. Abdullah 1998; Bangura 2004; Peters 2011; Richards 1996). Despite disagreements, all scholars of the conflict have chronicled how progressive state decay in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the exclusion of a large proportion of young Sierra Leoneans from education and jobs. Different stories, consequently, focus on various exacerbating factors contributing to an explosive situation that made combat an appealing option for the country’s alienated youth. Factors ranged from the exploitation of young people in the country’s rural areas by gerontocratic power structures to the curtailing of political voice under the one-party state ruled by the All People’s Congress.

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In reconstruction processes, official narratives on both government and donor sides have centred on the young and unemployed, portraying them as a ‘security risk’ (UNDP 2007: 6) and focusing on job creation as a key conflict-prevention strategy. Young people, as a government official put it, are ‘ticking time bombs’. Job creation, in this framework, is a way to pacify and control them. The narrative is undoubtedly reductive, not least because we know very little about the actual mechanisms that link unemployment to the potential for violence (Cramer 2011). Nevertheless, the portrayal of jobless young people as a potential threat to stability has proved persuasive; arguably, it is precisely its simplicity that has allowed actors from all sides of the intervention spectrum to rally around the necessity of job creation in fragile settings (Enria 2012). The gendered nature of the youth-as-threat narrative is often obscured by the apparently gender-neutral term ‘youth’. The association of young men – in particular young African men – and violence has a long history rooted in colonial tactics of control. In its current manifestation, the depiction of the youthman dem, as youths are locally known, stems from interpretations of the war that have tended to ignore women’s participation as perpetrators. In Enloe’s incisive summary (1998), narratives of war perpetuate a false dichotomy that ‘all men are in the militias, all women are victims’, a simplification with important consequences for the association of masculinity with violence. Macdonald (2008) has eloquently exposed how, despite the fact that girl soldiers formed a significant part of all fighting factions, they are often erased from accounts of the Sierra Leonean civil war. She argues that the ‘construction of the girl child is integral to maintaining the myth of the young aggressive African male and the “white saviour”, both essential for the “new wars” and the humanitarian industry’ (2008: 135). This, as Macdonald acknowledges, is part of the longer-term trajectory whereby colonial authority was maintained through the construction of African predatory masculinity. The practical implications of this erasure were immediately evident in the Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) process in Sierra Leone as young women were largely excluded on the grounds that they were not recognized as soldiers (MacKenzie 2009). Rigid

140 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism representations of war thus leave little room for the possibility of women’s involvement in violence or for the multiplicity of masculinities that exist in conflict and post-conflict settings. The stories that are told about the war thus contribute to the reification of a violent masculinity that underpins the blanket securitization of young men in post-war Sierra Leone. In the post-conflict context the notion that unemployed youth may pose a threat to the reconstruction process reflects a deep-rooted concern with what we might call problematic masculinity, a fear of the dangers posed by economically excluded young males. As is often the case with official discourses, the concern with problematic masculinity rarely engages directly with the everyday realities of being a man on the margins of Sierra Leone’s post-war economy. The social implications of young men’s labour market exclusion, however, are an essential lens through which to understand both unemployment and its relationship to violence. The reflections below are based on interviews, participant observation and life histories carried out amongst young men in Freetown. Entering foreign spaces as a researcher is always a fraught exercise, and one that requires contemplation of how who we are and our relations with others affect the outcome of the processes of research and analysis (Caretta 2015). This was undoubtedly the case as I began my work with Freetown’s youth as a white woman from an elite university. Masculinity was not the primary focus of my study, which focused more broadly on the relationship between unemployment and political violence, yet the challenges faced by young men and their understandings of what it means to become a man in the post-war city emerged organically from our conversations. Being conscious of my identity as a woman and an outsider meant acknowledging that while my position made it at times easier for young men to discuss feelings of shame and failure, I was also designated as a particular kind of audience for performances of masculinity. Deciphering ethnographic data on masculinity as a woman, in other words, means understanding how gender is produced through the research encounter as well as how it is represented in interviews and informal discussions.

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Being male in the post-war city I: consumption and masculinity White House is a site of frenetic informal business in Freetown populated by young people ‘chasing commission’. A visitor passing through the White House area will undoubtedly be struck by the overwhelming number of young people crowding the streets, perched on railings and sitting on street corners. An almost exclusively male space, the street is where Freetown’s young men inscribe their existence: here livelihoods are made, identities are created and moulded, and social networks are built. The chasing of commission is a widespread survival strategy characterized by the sale of secondhand, sometimes stolen, goods: from mobile phones to clothes and even furniture. A key distinction amongst the White House sellers is between the capitalists or investors, who own the goods, and those who chase commissions. Commission chasers either sell the goods for the investors or they buy business from people who come to White House to make some extra money through their unwanted items and sell it on at a higher price. The reality of Sierra Leone’s post-war political economy means that being completely idle is not an option in the absence of social security. The majority of the capital’s poor are engaged in some form of informal business. The security risks depicted by official discourses, then, are in practice those who are engaged in marginal work: those whose livelihood strategies not only keep them in poverty, but are also considered to be inadequate forms of economic activity and as such fall into the grey area of ‘unemployment’. What falls within the confines of unemployment in a context where inactivity is not an option is thus contested and to some extent arbitrary. It tends to be demarcated by a combination of external legitimation processes (the funding of certain informal activities over others, for example) and young people’s own aspirations. Young informal traders did not consider their commission chasing to be work, and tended to categorize themselves as unemployed. Abdul, a 27-year-old seller, referred to his time on the street as ‘sitting down’, a temporary activity necessary to survive while waiting for employment. He arrived at White House approximately ten years

142 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism ago, but argued that he developed what he called a ‘business brain’ at an early age when he borrowed a pair of trainers from a friend and came to White House to sell them, telling his friend they had been stolen when he went for prayers at the mosque. After observing the sellers making their transactions, he brought business a few times and the sellers started sharing their commissions with him, encouraging him to join them. These sellers had become close friends and his only support network. White House had become a reliable source of income, albeit a meagre one. Vigh’s notion of navigation as a process whereby ‘agents seek to draw and actualize their life trajectories in order to increase their social possibilities and life chances in a shifting and volatile social environment’, is useful here as it emphasizes processes at the ‘interface between agency and social forces’ (2006: 4). Young sellers’ navigational tactics are seen as undesirable in the long run for objective reasons – they are precarious and low-income – but also for more subjective reasons relating to the status accorded to different types of economic activity. Abdul reflected on the fact that, regardless of how much commission they brought in, commission chasers were seen, unjustly in his eyes, as ‘idlers’ and ‘thieves’: Some pass and curse us, say we are criminals and thieves. Then some, when they see how we operate, then they see. Because you can say we are thieves but then when you come close to us you can say, these are not bad people. We are all the same in the end; it’s the commission that made us come to White House. This bad reputation, regardless of whether it is accurate or otherwise, meant that for young men like Abdul becoming ‘somebody’ had to involve leaving the street for a respectable job, in an office or in the increasingly coveted mining jobs. Encouraged by his ageing father, Abdul periodically undertook the expensive and tortuous journey to the northern mining fields to look for work – until, with no success, he landed back in White House after each attempt. Abdul and his colleagues thus saw the present as a period of waiting, one characterized by a lack of social status associated with economic marginality, but also by daily struggles to forge a path towards becoming a man.

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Becoming a man in Freetown’s streets was made especially difficult by economic marginality. Young men’s frustrations regarding their lack of social status were intimately connected to their struggles to conform to ‘hegemonic masculinity’, those norms defining what it means to be a man. Connell (1995, 2000) suggests that work plays a central role in the construction of this dominant masculinity. This often diverges from the ‘enacted manhood’ of everyday life. Yet it influences identity formation by creating a gap between what is and what is expected. The struggles created by this gap were vividly articulated by Alpha, a young man with polio who lived in a compound near the White House area and occasionally headed to White House to chase commission. To beg would be too embarrassing, he argued. But his present condition was far from ideal. ‘I need to stand like a man,’ he argued, referring not to his physical impediment, but rather to his inability to act as a provider. The imperative to ‘stand like a man’ was in fact a recurrent refrain in young men’s narratives of frustration at their exclusion from formal labour markets. Standing like a man was often given as a reason why finding a good job was important. Becoming employed would increase one’s status, as finally aspirations would have been fulfilled. It would enable one to provide for a wife and children as well as extended family. More specifically, the ability to stand like a man was premised on enabling women’s consumption, as young men felt that women expected a potential partner to buy consumer goods, such as items of clothing or mobile phones. Precarious, low-income and devalued livelihoods made it difficult to do this, and young men’s thoughts on their experiences with women reflected a conviction that maintaining a lasting relationship in the absence of a steady income was impossible. As 22-year-old Rahim argued, it was better to be single while waiting for a job to come along, rather than having to endure the humiliation of being abandoned because one is unable to provide: A woman is money, so if you don’t have money, if you engage yourself there will be problems. Because if you don’t have money to buy her clothes, buy food for her every day, definitely she will have to find another man, and you will just be there. . . . No, I just need to maintain myself now.

144 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism The demands of hegemonic masculinity in the Sierra Leonean context thus revolve around expectations that equate manhood with the ability to act as breadwinners and gatekeepers to women’s consumption. These expectations were often so deeply internalized that some young men empathized with women who had rejected them, expressing understanding of their choice, given the circumstances that women in similarly difficult economic circumstances were facing. Alhaji, for example, discussed the break-up of a relationship because of his material situation in a fairly resigned manner, accepting the reality that he would not have been able to provide for her, and was even complicit in his own abandonment: I know a lady who now lives in Australia, she was my former girlfriend, I met her on the streets, she was wild but very pretty and we fell in love. . . . I was the one that took her off the streets where she was prostituting herself. . . . As time went by, it was evident she found favour with wealthy men. We agreed because I was poor, for her to marry a rich man if the chance came. So, I asked her to bring the man so I can approve her hand in marriage to a rich man. Women’s rejection and the shame attached to being unable to support a partner highlight the chasm between young men’s realities and their aspirations to fulfil patriarchal gender norms, and how their status in the labour market is central to the creation of this disjuncture. Mbembe’s (2006) emphasis on the ascendancy of money’s social value in the context of complex socioeconomic change, creating what he calls a ‘new economy of persons’, is a useful analytical lens for understanding the role of monetary exchange in reconstructing patriarchal norms in post-war contexts. Inability to accumulate resources paralleled by a rise in the social value of consumption makes the sustenance of transactional relationships both essential to the achievement of hegemonic masculinity and increasingly impossible in practice.

Being male in the post-war city II: performing marginal manhood Marginal livelihoods such as commission chasing in White House, then, are associated with both material hardship and frustration

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at one’s inability to achieve consumption-based markers of status. Savage, a notorious White House dweller, for example, expressed his fear of becoming stuck in his temporary livelihood strategy. He said: ‘I am just too close to forty, and a fool at forty is a fool forever, with no achievement, only God can help now, free this guy out of stress.’ However, a singular focus on the struggle to achieve manhood risks obscuring the ways in which young men engage with a present characterized by marginality. One example of this is found in everyday forms of sociality, whereby young men embody and perform their exclusion in an attempt to forge alternative paths to recognition, such as through the creation of parallel street cultures or the assertion of authority through violence. For commission chasers, the creation of a distinctive street culture is an important means to respond actively to marginalization. Accordingly, these cultural practices often entail the performance, reinterpretation and reclaiming of marginality. In White House, this performance is powerfully premised on existence in the street and on notions of poverty and tough living. The separation between the street, as both physical and symbolic space, and mainstream society is embodied, for example, through particular types of fashion influenced by what Diawara (1998: 237) calls ‘homeboy cosmopolitanism’. Boima, for instance, spoke of how he ended up in White House as his family rejected his ‘Rasta lifestyle’, characterized by dreadlocks and clothes inspired by American hip-hop artists. The street is also both where chasers found their commissions and where they established forums of sociality. In these spaces White House youth congregate to drink, dance and converse, while also consuming drugs and gambling. Here, it is possible to achieve status and authority, something denied to these young men outside the confines of their microcosm. One way to do this is through the use of street names, both to intimidate and to emphasize one’s strength and ability to withstand hardship. Young commission chasers identified themselves as ‘street representers’ or ‘street soldiers’ as well as taking on the names of artists such as 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur. In Freetown one’s identity as a street guy, identifiable by reliance on the street for survival, appearance and the associated forums of sociality, denoted toughness against adversity and could therefore be a source of pride

146 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism in contrast to the shame of not having yet become a man. A lively discussion amongst a group of young men gathered together to drink palm wine by the sea one evening cast light on some of the criteria for achieving these parallel markers of status. After having debated the current President’s achievements and failures, the discussion turned to community gossip, and in particular to a young man known as ‘Junior’, who was not present in the conversation. Ibro, who had been quiet until then, became animated as soon as Junior’s name was mentioned. He argued that Junior should not call himself a koro, a term used to refer to those who had grown up in the street. Unlike Ibro himself, Junior had not been born and raised in the street. His reputation came from his current toughness in White House, regardless of his background, so he should instead call himself a Tango, the trademark name of a popular football, meaning somebody with a tough skin. Junior, in other words, may not have always been a street soldier but through his survival in the White House area he had demonstrated enough strength to be respected as a Tango. Alongside the creation of a parallel street culture, however, countering shame and exclusion in this environment was also occasionally manifest through the performance or threat of violence. Two dynamics are especially interesting from this point of view. The first is the role of interpersonal violence as a way to gain respect within the White House community. Alongside street names, violence was often interpreted by the commission chasers as simultaneously undesirable and necessary. Despite the constant frustration with their community being labelled as dangerous, a place of idlers and thieves, and the consequent attempts to emphasize sellers’ commitment to ending fighting within White House; when violence did take place, it was explained as an understandable response to humiliation or as a way to maintain order on the street. Specific motives for fights varied, ranging from disputes over women to the punishment of suspected thieves. Junior, the Tango introduced above, for example, was involved over a period of time in a dispute with some of White House’s investors that revolved around embezzlement accusations. He was known around White House for often engaging in quite theatrical physical fights, and soon

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enough the dispute escalated into violence that landed Junior at the police station. In recalling the motives for his behaviour a few days later, Junior argued: ‘Sometimes shame makes you do things you regret.’ This suggested that when provoked or humiliated by others, he had to respond, while also acknowledging the undesirability of his acts. Violence, then, can be understood as a meaningful practice within White House as a sort of parallel society, whereby order, authority and respect can be achieved internally while being excluded by society at large. A second form of performative violence links White House as a selfcontained microcosm to the broader society within which it exists and, more specifically, to the Sierra Leonean state. White House sellers’ reflections on their exclusion from formal labour markets, or proper jobs, frequently revolved around the perception that government officials, whose job it was to create work, ‘don’t care about us’. The potential for violence was consequently highlighted as one way of expressing why the politicians ought to take their concerns seriously. In anticipation of the 2012 elections, for example, men like 28-yearold Mohamed argued that: ‘If they do not find jobs for us, there will be trouble!’ Significantly, the threat of violence was often paralleled by claims for meaningful democratic inclusion that took many forms, such as emphasizing that they too were Sierra Leonean citizens, or emphasizing the political significance of youth as a salient constituency. In addition, threats were rarely followed up with practical organization of autonomous violent protests. However, the intimation that violence might be an outcome if their struggles were not acknowledged and addressed is significant because it shows how young men appropriate the language of threat officially associated with unemployment and economic marginality to contest that very exclusion. In a sense, young men’s perception that their voices were not being heard forced them to leverage the very language that excludes and criminalizes them. If emphasizing state responsibilities towards their citizens did not work, threatening violence might. This appropriation of language is simultaneously potent and disempowering; it confirms young men’s image as ‘ticking bombs’ but also increases their chances of being heard and of becoming recipients of pacificatory youth employment schemes.

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Conclusion The problematic masculinity posited by post-war policy discourses, which envisions marginal males as a threat to Sierra Leone’s fragile peace, fails to engage with everyday experiences of being a young man in Freetown’s streets. These stories must form a crucial first step in future endeavours to unpack the complex mechanisms that in practice link labour market experiences to the potential for violence. Listening to young men’s voices reflects that the crisis of masculinity must be understood in terms of struggles to achieve social standing in the context of socioeconomic exclusion. The problematic masculinity discourse ignores the creative ways in which marginal masculinity is embodied. Not only that, but it cannot capture the fact that while distinctive types of sociality and the achievement of respect and voice through violence (or its threat) reinforce young men’s marginality, they may also offer the only opportunity for leverage in the present context.

References Abdullah, I. (1998) ‘Bush Path to Destruction: The Origin and Character of the Revolutionary United Front Sierra Leone’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 203–35. Bangura, Y. (2004) ‘The Political and Cultural Dynamics of the Sierra Leone Civil War: A Critique of Paul Richards’, in I. Abdullah (ed.), Between Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War, CODESRIA, Dakar, Senegal. Barker, G. and C. Ricardo (2005) ‘Young Men and the Construction of Masculinity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for HIV/AIDS, Conflict, and Violence’, Social Development Papers: Conflict Prevention & Reconstruction, No. 26, The World Bank, Washington DC. Barnett, M., H. Kim, M. O’Donnell and L. Sitea (2007) ‘Peacebuilding: What’s in a Name?’, Global Governance, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 35–58. Caplan, R. (2005) International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caretta, M. (2015) ‘Situated Knowledge in Cross-Cultural, Cross-Language Research: A Collaborative Reflexive Analysis of Researcher, Assistant and Participant Subjectivities’, Qualitative Research, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 1–17. Chesterman, S. (2004) You the People: the United Nations, Transitional Administration and Statebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collier, P. and A. Hoeffler (1998) ‘On Economic Causes of Civil War’, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 563–73. Connell, R. (1995) Masculinities, Polity Press, Cambridge. Connell, R. (2000) The Men and the Boys, Polity, Cambridge.

Post-war Sierra Leone | 149 Cramer, C. (2011) ‘Unemployment and Participation in Violence’, World Development Report 2011 Background Paper, The World Bank, Washington DC. Diawara, M. (1998) In Search of Africa, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. Duffield, M. (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, Zed Books, London. Duffield, M. (2007) Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Polity, Cambridge. Enloe, C. (1998) ‘All the Men Are in the Militias, All the Women Are Victims: The Politics of Masculinity and Femininity in Nationalist Wars’, in L. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds), The Women and War Reader, New York University Press, New York NY. Enria, L. (2012) ‘Employing the Youth to Build Peace: The Limitations of United Nations Statebuilding in Sierra Leone’, Human Welfare, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 42–56. Fanthorpe, R. and R. Maconachie (2010) ‘Beyond the ‘Crisis of Youth’? Mining, Farming and Civil Society in Post-War Sierra Leone’, African Affairs, Vol. 109, No. 435, pp. 251–72. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’, A/59/565, UN, New York NY, http://www. un.org/secureworld/ (accessed 20 January 2015). Keen, D. (2005) Conflict & Collusion in Sierra Leone, James Currey, Oxford, and Palgrave, New York NY. Macdonald, A. (2008) ‘“New Wars: Forgotten Warriors”: Why Have Girl Fighters Been Excluded from Western Representations of Conflict in Sierra Leone?’, Africa Development, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 135–45. MacKenzie, M. (2009) ‘Securitization and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’, Security Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 241–61. Mbembe, A. (2006) ‘On Politics as a Form of Expenditure’, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL. Mitton, K. (2013) ‘Where Is the War? Explaining Peace in Sierra Leone’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 321–37. Peters, K. (2011) War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone, Cambridge University Press, International African Institute, Cambridge, New York NY and London. Reno, W. (1998) Warlord Politics and African States, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder CO. Richards, P. (1996) Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone, James Currey, Oxford, and Heinemann, Portsmouth NH. Saferworld (2014) Masculinities, Conflict and Peacebuilding: Perspectives on Men through a Gender Lens, Saferworld, London. Suhrke, A. (2012) ‘The Peace in Between’, in A. Suhrke and M. Berdal (eds), The Peace in Between: Post-War Violence and Peacebuilding, Routledge, London. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004) Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRC, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

150 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism United Nations (UN) (1992) An Agenda for Peace. New York NY: UN. UNDP (2007) ‘Youth Employment Project Proposal’, United Nations Development Programme, Freetown. Vigh, H. (2006) Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in GuineaBissau, Berghahn, New York NY and Oxford. von Billerbeck, S. 2011. ‘Whose Peace? Local Ownership and UN Peacebuilding’, Paper presented at conference on ‘The Future of Statebuilding: Ethics, Power and Responsibility in International Relations’, University of Westminster, UK, 9–11 October 2011.

CHAPTER 10 Fatherhood and intergenerational struggles in the construction of masculinities in Huambo, Angola John Spall

Introduction As in many contexts around the world, many older men in Huambo, a city in Angola’s central highlands where I lived for a year conducting ethnographic research with middle-aged male war veterans, strongly disapproved of certain aspects of their children’s gendered styles and aspirations. José, a 42-year-old market seller and a veteran of Angola’s protracted civil war, summed up his feelings about a style of dress he associated with kuduristas:1 They’re fools! I won’t let my children have tattoos or weird haircuts, or have their belt hanging below their arses. This is inhuman, they’re behaving like animals if they do this, if they show their arses. You have to study, and afterwards you have to get a job. None of the bosses have their trousers down below their arse. A tattoo might be OK if it’s on your shoulder, but it can’t be down your arm or on your hand, because then people will think, ‘this person is suspicious’. And if this generation starts wearing their trousers below their arse, what will happen in the generations that follow them? Their children will react against this style in more extreme ways, and in one or two generations, people will be walking around naked! When you grow up to be an elder, you can’t have your trousers hanging around your arse – that’s not the way to get respect, through superficial things. You have to show that you have wisdom.

152 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism As so often when these men spoke about their relations with their children, José’s statement expressed an anxiety for the consequences of his children’s actions for future generations. He also harked back to a quality that many of these men admired in their own fathers and aspired to themselves: wisdom. When discussing their struggles to perform the subject position of a successful father, rather than focusing on a landmark achievement such as marriage, the everyday work of bringing up children and the long-term temporal aspect of these struggles was often foregrounded: many veterans saw themselves as trying to play their part in an intergenerational process of ‘development’ and ‘evolution’, where each generation was more ‘educated’ and ‘organized’ than the last. They felt a duty to the values of their forebears, to the wellbeing of contemporary Angolan society, and to future generations. These projects, and the successful performance of a style of senior masculinity that depended on them, were therefore seen as ‘exceeding [one’s] inception and demise’ (Butler 2004). One’s own gendered life projects were situated in the flow of a longer collective history, and a lineage of men that one was both formed by and should seek to continue. These were not gendered discourses that these men were simply ‘done’ by, as Butler puts it, as an imposition of norms on a docile subject. They were also the grounds for gendered agency. However, rather than seeking to ‘undo’ them, these men sought to ‘inhabit’ them (Mahmood 2011). Such inhabiting was not simply a matter of symbolic identification, as José’s objection to young people’s embodied style makes clear. As Pierre Bourdieu noted (Bourdieu 1977: 94), the refusal to abide by certain circumscribed bodily observances can signal a challenge to a whole social system. Accordingly, the clash in embodied masculine styles between these veterans and their sons seemed to signal the difficulty encountered by many men in accommodating themselves to the results of warinduced social change, and particularly to two contrasting clusters of masculine values and routes to masculine status. One was based on respectability, soberness and the acquisition of wisdom, which partly echoed the gendered values and age hierarchies of pre-war rural society, and was heavily influenced by a variety of Christian denominations. The other put greater emphasis on the acquisition of

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monetary wealth as a marker of masculine status, and more readily embraced and domesticated cultural forms associated with globalized and urban referents. Though most masculine styles drew to some extent on both clusters of values, since masculine styles were not necessarily mutually exclusive or clearly hierarchically organized (cf. Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994), young male performances predominantly influenced by the latter cluster seemed – to many middle-aged men – to threaten licentiousness, social chaos and destructive social conflict that imperilled the future of Angolan society. Beyond this, the successful performance of a respectable senior masculinity involved being a father who produced children who would not become what people called ‘confusionists’, those without respect for their elders and for traditional and Christian moral values. Thus their vision of their own masculinities as fathers was bound up in a historical vision that was also a gendered identity project constructed in the present, and requiring the continual exercise of gendered power over their children. Literature on soldiers and veterans in Africa has often addressed intergenerational relations, focusing mainly on fighters as junior men, and especially on their aspirations for adult male status and how military service might advance or delay this transition. Research in Liberia and Sierra Leone has found that an important motivation for young men joining armed rebel groups was asymmetric intergenerational patterns of marriage in which older men married several younger women, thus blocking routes to marriage, and to adult male status, for younger men (Richards 2006; Humphreys and Weinstein 2004). The struggle of veterans to find a livelihood after demobilization that is sufficient to pay bride-price is also a theme in literature from various parts of the continent (see Schafer 2007 on Mozambique and Sommers and Uvin 2011 on Burundi and Rwanda); and Gregory Mann notes Malian veterans’ efforts to achieve religious seniority, given the time wasted in this respect during their military service (Mann 2003). Less attention has been paid to African veterans as they age, however; in particular, little work has focused on veterans as fathers and on their relations with their children. This is the topic I address in this chapter. I will seek to link the experiences of Huambo veterans as fathers to the consequences of their military service, whilst

154 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism also locating these experiences in the broader transformation in social and gender relations occasioned by Angola’s long civil war.2

Visions of progress During a discussion about the division of housework with a 49-yearold veteran named Tiago, I asked him how his attitude to it would differ from his father’s. He replied, It differs a lot. Each generation keeps getting more knowledge than the last. The IECA [Congregationalist] and Adventist missionaries brought the light of knowledge – meaning that our minds are broader. My father had more knowledge than my grandfather, I have more knowledge than my father, and my children will have more knowledge than me. [My grandfather] lived in the kimbo [a rural village], and he always lived there. My father worked as a stevedore, unloading imports and putting them in the warehouse, and moved first to a small town to do this, and then to the big city of Huambo. So he already had more knowledge and a different way of life than my grandfather. Most of the veterans I spent time with had a concern with the proper development and social evolution both of themselves and their families, and of broader Angolan society. They often discussed what genuine social progress should look like. These visions, as Tiago’s statement suggests, were heavily influenced by church narratives. Since colonial times these have emphasized the ‘darkness’ of the pre-missionary past and the light of progress that a combination of biblical knowledge and Western science and organization might bring (Ball 2010; Péclard 1999) – visions strikingly echoed in accounts from veterans of all denominations. However, although such ‘organization’ was counterposed to the darkness of a distant tribal past, it was also contrasted with the more recent ‘confusion’ and destructive, violent conflicts of the civil war – seen by many to be motivated by an antisocial lust for money and power that continued to afflict Angola at all levels. Various other sinful practices were also seen by the veterans I worked with as potentially bringing about socially destructive conflicts

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in the post-war period, particularly the excessive consumption of alcohol, the use of illegal drugs, sex outside a monogamous marriage, and the jealousies and sexual disorder thought to result from it. This vision of proper progress did not by any means discard all that was constructed as Umbundu tradition. Rather, it tended to single out supernatural beliefs and practices for condemnation. Other aspects of Umbundu tradition, particularly the authority of older men and the respect owed to them, continued to be valorized. In particular, the institutions of the men’s house (ondjango) and the circumcision ceremony (evamba), and the values they were said to inculcate (of deference to older men and of solidarity and mutual help) were viewed with nostalgia. With the undermining of such gendered hierarchies through urbanization and the monetization of subsistence, the churches were a rare space in which older men could access official positions of respect and authority over younger men and most women. Older religious men did continue to command respect in the contexts where I socialized with them. Indeed, their vision was the one I came to know best since, as a white man, I often seemed to be thought of as a high-status visitor and was often principally directed towards older men. The churches’ vision of progress and the ethic of respect for older men were by no means espoused by older men only. Many younger men were also committed churchgoers and similarly rejected the ‘delinquent’ and/or ‘confusionist’ ways of young people who led un-Christian lifestyles. As Tiago’s statement makes clear, personal development and evolution was also tied up with urbanity (despite the challenges urbanization had brought) and with occupation and social mobility. One’s social evolution and acquisition of knowledge also implied ‘rising up’ in terms of social strata, particularly from informal commerce to formal salaried employment.3 However, many veterans considered that their own ability to rise up had been sabotaged by their forced recruitment into the army during their adolescence. Alexandre, a 49-year-old market seller, made a comment that was typical: ‘[The army] strangulated my life and my plans for the future, it destroyed my education, it took away my time . . . it exhausted me. Principally in the part of my studies.’ As a result, for many, securing a better future for their children took on an added significance: as José,

156 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism quoted in the introduction, put it, ‘my principal challenges for the future are: to survive, educate the children to have a better future. But for me, no, I don’t think there’s [a better future] coming for me.’

Delinquency Soon after I arrived in Huambo, I noticed that in the media and in everyday conversations there were discussions of the problem of delinquency, as a hazard to public order and a supposedly pervasive problem amongst young people. Raising this problem with middleaged veterans seemed to touch a nerve, with most of them discussing frustration and bemusement at the behaviour of young people, and fear at the prospect of their own children becoming full-blown delinquents. According to these men, the lifestyles of the very rich in Huambo, coupled with opulent lifestyles in other parts of the world – now made visible on satellite TV, ubiquitous since the end of the war – meant young people were not satisfied with what they had. ‘They are in a hurry to have everything, they are in a hurry to do everything,’ José told me. There was, in the view of many veterans, a serious mismatch between young people’s aspirations and an economic context where avenues to enrichment were guarded jealously by a small elite, and even access to the modest salaries of state employment could depend on networks and the payment of bribes. Young people might turn to crime, assaulting people to obtain the consumer objects they craved, and becoming both a problem for society and a source of shame for their families – especially their fathers, who were thought to have the main responsibility for disciplining and educating their children. Pessimism and despair for their futures might also lead young people to alcohol and drug abuse, seeking to forget their poor prospects, particularly if they fell in with bad company. Especially worrying was the apparent waning of fathers’ authority over errant youth, and their failure to convert young men to their vision of a senior masculinity to which it was worth aspiring. Alexandre complained: There’s a lot of difference between our generation and my children’s generation. . . . [B]ecause of globalization there is a lot

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of difference. They adapt themselves to different customs, things from outside the house. . . . Traditional institutions helped a lot in discipline – when you said in those days that something’s bad, or that you shouldn’t pass in that place, they would put it in their conscience. But now they say, ‘That guy just talks rubbish, that guy is crazy, can’t you see that this is outmoded?’ As Alexandre suggests, veterans’ children often had a contrasting idea of what social evolution and authentic modernity might look like, influenced both by non-kin and foreign cultures through globalized media. Yet José implied, in the comments quoted in the introduction, that some children expressed a vision of development that, far from delivering liberation from a backward past, seemed to threaten a return to animalistic, primitive behaviour. While the burden of nurturing children was taken on by mothers and older, especially female siblings, fathers in this context were considered to be particularly responsible for educating and disciplining children. Indeed, fathers’ responsibility for their children seemed to be growing, with the influence of maternal uncles declining in the face of state legislation limiting inheritance to spouses and children (rather than siblings, nephews and nieces) and churches preaching against matrilineal inheritance. Therefore the raising of an anti-social child was seen as being especially a failure of fathering. Alexandre spoke, for example, of his fear that his orphaned nephew and adoptive son, Makassi, might become a delinquent: Makassi, this kid is really good at playing football: he can play with both feet, and in any position. He just wants to play football all day, but at a certain point he stopped going to school. This made me really nervous, because like this he will end up being a big problem for society in the future. . . . When kids end up doing this then you have to tie them up, to grab them, you have to whip them. Other veterans spoke with great disdain of parents who allowed their children to become delinquents, and some were extremely sensitive to gossip that one of their children might be going off the rails. An errant child threatened a serious loss of respect for older

158 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism men, as they were seen to be failing as fathers, and to be producing offspring who imperilled the development of wider society through the bringing of ‘confusion’ in the form of drunkenness, violence and theft. It was said that such fathers had failed to talk to their children properly; perhaps they were having affairs with other women, or had multiple wives who distracted them from their fatherly duties. Or maybe the father had failed to provide properly for his children, who were forced to turn to crime to scrape a living for themselves, successful breadwinning being a key aspect of both husbandly and fatherly duties in this context (Spall 2014). Indeed, sons who dropped out of education and failed or refused to find a gainful occupation could endanger their fathers’ plans to ‘grow old fat’, since they might be left struggling to support children and wives that their sons could not or would not support. Middle-aged veterans also said that a delinquent lifestyle seemed to naïve children to promise prosperity, but would inevitably end in great suffering. Accordingly, for these men as fathers it also represented a distressing failure to ensure the wellbeing of their children, to whom they of course had a powerful affective attachment that should not be ignored.4 José cited the potential suffering of his children as one of the main reasons he would never take up arms again. Another veteran I got to know would never spend more than two weeks out of Huambo out of fear that his children might go hungry in his absence. Grief at the loss of children to illness, something that many of the veterans I spent time with had experienced, was often one of the defining events of their life histories.

Making men from boys As alluded to above, the traditional institutions of the ondjango and evamba had great importance in the upbringing and education of young men when these veterans were growing up. The waning of these institutions, coupled with the influence of school peers and of satellite television and popular music, had considerably loosened the control of elder male kin on the upbringing of their sons, who were now presented with a broader range of possible masculine identifications. Young men increasingly looked beyond the family

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for masculine respect and role models – to their friends, and to a local youth culture that seemed more up to date and connected to the globalized youth culture, increasingly visible since the end of the war. Their fathers’ more deferential style of masculinity held little appeal for some younger men, who aspired instead to own the commodities that symbolized monetary wealth and an alternative model of modern, cosmopolitan masculinity. When combined with the despair over future prospects that some young men felt, this seemed to older men to present a particularly difficult environment in which to raise sons. They spoke anxiously of how sons might be made to grow into men who were respectful of male elders and were respectable beyond the family in terms of making an honest living, avoiding drunkenness and crime, dressing properly, and abiding by standards of sexual morality. The process of making such men, despite some tensions and contradictions, had seemed generally to follow a controlled and healthy course in the youth these veterans remembered, but now seemed baffling and uncontrollable. In their discussions of this problem, these men probed what made boys turn into the types of men they became. In their attempts at controlling their children, they debated how or whether this process could be controlled, and by whom. In many ways, these discussions were redolent of academic and policy discussions of masculinities: to what extent does a boy’s socioeconomic context and his position in it determine what sort of man he becomes? To what extent is it possible for him to avoid the pitfalls and become a more moral and more successful man than his context would suggest he will become? Fathers employed a range of strategies to try to produce the kind of sons that they wanted, ranging from attempts to reason with them, to direct coercion. ‘Talking’ to boys and ‘exhorting’ them were often cited as solutions, but also often failed. A 49-year-old veteran, João, put it like this: They might look at you when you’re talking, and so you think that they’ve understood, but then they go and do the same thing all over again. They come back late. They drink; they might steal. José suggested that the answer could be schools starting to teach young people ‘the ways of the elders’ that men of his generation

160 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism learnt, the inculcation of old values through contemporary state institutions. Several men suggested that churchgoing was the answer, one saying that ‘it is unlikely that someone who goes to church does evil to others’. Another anxious father suggested limiting their contact with friends and changing the dispositions they developed through habitual practice: ‘If you’re not lucky he’ll pay more attention to his friends than to you. . . . To avoid this you have to arrange occupations [which would teach them the value of hard work].’ Several noted the role of the material conditions of upbringing in forming young men’s characters, arguing that the comparatively comfortable conditions of post-war Huambo made them less disciplined. As João put it: We didn’t have our own room or anything like that – there was a room for the parents and the other room was where the kids all slept. . . . Now, you work really hard to provide for your kids, to give them a good life, and . . . nothing. They still turn out to be lazy, they’re ungrateful, and they don’t care what you do for them. They get their own room, and still they act worse than before. Since ‘spoiling’ boys with the comforts they asked for seemed to have no impact on some, others had tried beating them. Several men said that this had caused more problems than it solved, though, particularly as boys got older and could fight back. Faced with a particularly intractable son, João expressed his bafflement at the unpredictability of bringing up children, and the imponderable fact that some boys misbehaved no matter what: It can be [just an adolescent phase], but it can also be the opposite. They can follow the rules and work hard, but then when they get to 16, 17, 18 they go off the rails and they start drinking and then it’s really complicated – then they don’t grow out of it. . . . It’s really luck – parents need to be lucky and get children that listen. The differing models of masculinity aspired to by fathers and errant sons were, therefore, bound up with each other, and constructed

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intersubjectively in a relation of power. For fathers, the definition of their own masculinity as senior men depended crucially on their sons’ masculinities. Having a son who was considered anti-social or immoral reflected badly on the ability of fathers to exercise the expected authority over their sons. For some sons, escaping this authority was essential to performing the masculinities they desired, and indeed these masculinities were partly constructed in explicit contrast to the sober, deferential model of their fathers. The difficulty parents encounter in trying to make adolescent offspring behave as they would wish is, of course, perennial in many contexts. In post-war Huambo, however, this was not simply a question of masculinities performed at different stages of the life course coming into conflict with each other; rather, it seemed to represent a break between generations, marked by the consequences of the social transformations of war. The masculinities of fathers – who grew up partly before the civil war in predominantly rural areas, and who had invested in certain masculine subject positions given the economic possibilities available in Huambo during the war – no longer made sense to sons who had grown up in a postwar urban environment, where the value of monetary wealth as a marker of social status, and the symbols of a globalized youth culture undermined the older, age-based masculine hierarchies.

Conclusion Most of the children of the war veterans with whom I spent time during my fieldwork in Huambo seemed to be following the path that their fathers envisaged for them, of formal education followed by an attempt to enter formal state employment, and did not become delinquents. These young men clearly aspired to possess the consumer goods that signalled economic success, combining such referents of globalized modernity with a respectable, Christian lifestyle. Indeed membership of Christian churches also signalled a style of cosmopolitan modernity, since it implied membership of a global and powerful fellowship of believers, and this was not incompatible with the acquisition of wealth and consumer goods. However, children drinking to excess, taking drugs or getting involved in petty crime, or otherwise bringing their families and fathers into disrepute was

162 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism not an uncommon occurrence. Alexandre’s adoptive son Makassi, for instance, started smoking marijuana with friends shortly after I left Angola. After Alexandre beat him, he ran away to Luanda, leaving his identity card behind, and was not heard of again. The failure of some of these fathers to exercise effective control over their children seemed to be related to the effects of military service. Several mentioned that their time in the army had prevented them from finishing their education, and so had limited their professional options and delayed their progress in their businesses – thus limiting the sort of lifestyle and prospects they were able to offer their children. However, their situation marks a contrast with the struggles of young veterans in the period shortly after demobilization, where military service has a strong influence on their struggles to achieve seniority. To maintain that seniority in the long term, the broad effects of war-induced social change were more important, and particularly the marked difference in upbringing between the two different generations and the demands of the urban economic environment. To put it back into the temporal terms of these men’s historical imaginaries, the material bases for the vision of intergenerational progress through history that they espoused had been undermined by the social transformations effected by the civil war. The consequent loss of control over some of their own children threatened both the loss of control over the definition of their own masculinity, and the flow of family history in which it was embedded. Their attempts to inhabit the gendered discourses they had, in Butler’s terms, been ‘done’ by, were threatened by their children’s behaviour, and they faced the threat of becoming ‘undone’ as senior men by their inability to control a gendered historical narrative that exceeded them. As in many other contexts in Africa (Lindsay and Miescher 2003), it was not obvious to men in veterans’ families which style of masculinity was hegemonic, or if any was. This was perhaps particularly true given the speed of social change during the civil war, and the uncertainties faced by men building lives in its wake, still unsure of where the social forces set in motion by the war would take them. This illustrates the value of looking at masculinities in postwar settings, where the consequences of the social transformations of war are often played out in the struggles of everyday life. An

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analysis of the negotiation of masculinities between generations can identify the points of ‘social fissure’ (Lindsay and Miescher 2003: 21) opened up by social change, where generations of men brought up in different environments and investing in masculine subject positions under contrasting socioeconomic conditions have to find ways to live together, to decide which allegiances to forge, neglect, or break apart. How gender interacts with age, seniority, social stratification and religion can thus teach us much about the nature of war-induced social change itself.

Notes 1 Kuduro is a genre of music that emerged in Luanda’s musseques (neighbourhoods outside the asphalted city centre) in the 1990s, with a characteristic dance style and associated with flamboyant, unconventional embodied styles. 2 The Angolan civil war had several phases but lasted overall from 1975 to 2002. It was principally waged between two political movements and their allies: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). 3 I use ‘strata’ rather than ‘class’ since it is difficult to identify clearly defined classes in Angola outside the party-state elite and its clients (Rodrigues 2007). 4 Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, for example, criticize the tendency of Western academic writing on Africa to implicitly assume that because sexual relationships are entangled with material interests they do not also involve affection, part of the persistent depiction of Africa as the ‘other’ of Europe (Cole and Thomas 2009).

References Ball, J. (2010) ‘The Three Crosses of Mission Work: Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Angola, 1880– 1930’, Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 331–57. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, Routledge, New York NY and London. Cole, J. and L. M. Thomas (2009) Love in Africa, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (eds) (1994) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Humphreys, M. and J. Weinstein (2004) What the Fighters Say: A Survey of ExCombatants in Sierra Leone, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York NY. Lindsay, L. A. and S. Miescher (2003) Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, Heinemann, Portsmouth NH.

164 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Mahmood, S. (2011) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. Mann, G. (2003) ‘Old Soldiers, Young Men: Masculinity, Islam and Military Veterans in Late 1950s Soudan Français (Mali)’, in L. A. Lindsay and S. Miescher (eds), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa, Heinemann, Portsmouth NH. Péclard, D. (1999) ‘Amanha Para Ser Homem: Missions Chrétiennes et Formation Du Sujet Colonial En Angola Central Au XXe Siècle’ (To be Human Tomorrow: Christian Missions and the Development of the Colonial Subject in TwentiethCentury Central Angola), Politique Africaine, No. 74, pp. 113–29. Richards, P. (2006) ‘Young Men and Gender in War and Postwar Reconstruction: Some Comparative Findings from Liberia and Sierra Leone’, in I. Bannon and M. C. Correia (eds), The Other Half of Gender: Men’s Issues in Development, The World Bank, Washington DC. Rodrigues, C. U. (2007) ‘From Family Solidarity to Social Classes: Urban Stratification in Angola (Luanda and Ondjiva)’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, p. 235. Schafer, J. (2007) Soldiers at Peace: Veterans and Society after the Civil War in Mozambique, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Sommers, M. and P. Uvin (2011) ‘Youth in Rwanda and Burundi: Contrasting Visions. United States Institute of Peace’, Special Report 293, United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC. Spall, J. (2014) ‘“Money Has More Weight than the Man”: Masculinities in the Marriages of Angolan War Veterans’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 11–19.

CHAPTER 11 Masculinity, marriage and the Bible: new Pentecostalist masculinities in Zimbabwe Diana Jeater

This chapter takes a new look at what is happening to ideas of masculinity within Pentecostal prosperity churches in Zimbabwe. I want to see what light they throw on the current political, religious and economic conjuncture, and the ways in which the present conjuncture is gendered, and situated within a matrix of violence that is both local and global. As Stuart Hall put it, around about the time the original Dislocating Masculinities was published, ‘These moments . . . have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with the other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never the same moment. And the combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only the specificity of the moment but the specificity of the question’ (1993: 104). I hope to show how the current moment draws on the past, but how much has changed over the past twenty years in the world of Pentecostal masculinities in Zimbabwe. There are multiple sites on which masculinity is being challenged in contemporary Zimbabwe. The basic grounds for these challenges are the massive economic crisis that affected men’s ability to support families during the 2000s; the failure of the economy to recover enough to provide formal-sector work for young men; and the upheaval in household power relationships as economic-migrant women become more successful earners than men (Kufakurinani 2012; Zhira 2014; Pasura 2014). I want to look, in particular, at transformations in attitudes towards polygyny, paternity, work and consumption, and violence. I use the phenomenon of the new Pentecostal superstars as the lens through which these transformations are revealed.

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Historical background From the earliest days of the white occupation, churches in Zimbabwe, regardless of denomination, were upset by polygyny and wanted it eradicated (although the state didn’t share this concern). A case study of Mt Silinda, a Congregationalist outstation of the American Board Mission Society, demonstrates how the missionaries condemned polygyny amongst the Africans living on land that the mission had seized and claimed to ‘own’.1 The missionaries linked the physical environment, marital status and morality: they created moral discourses out of brick huts and female dependency. Changes in the moral environment could not be disassociated from changes in the physical environment. The ‘good life’ was both physical and moral, and the proof of the missionaries’ moral superiority was their material superiority. This should not be confused with the ‘prosperity gospel’ of a later era, however – of which more later. Certainly, material benefits provided the carrot for conversion: ‘If we cannot put before them the possibility of a better physical life than they will find in the kraals about them, there is little use of striving to incite them to a better spiritual and mental life.’2 But the material improvements were not, in themselves, evidence of divine blessing. The missionaries wanted local people to aspire to ‘a better physical life’, but these material aspirations had to be accompanied by spiritual changes. Converts who merely wanted to better themselves materially were treated with condescension bordering on contempt. The most important lifestyle change was in marriage relationships. Evidence of rejecting polygyny, pledging, or bridewealth payments per se, was treated as a matter of utmost seriousness. Conversion was therefore a big step for a senior man, and it is not surprising that the bulk of converts were among younger men and women who had more to gain and less to lose. Nonetheless, the African evangelists, employed by the mission at outstations to convert people throughout the mission’s hinterlands, seemed to have their own ideas about what ‘the Christian life’ might entail. The 1900s were punctuated by crises in which it was discovered that senior evangelists had acquired additional wives. This was not so much a breakdown in morality as

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a breakdown in agreement about what ‘morality’ meant. There were no shared conceptual grounds for compliance. Masculinity in church leadership was one of the concepts that was blurred in translation. The missionaries espoused an idea of servant leadership and assumed that it was shared by local evangelists. However, there is evidence to suggest that the African evangelists saw their role as warrior, rather than servant (an image to which we will return later). Ndau preachers drew on imagery that had resonance for local people. In 1906, a man named Ndhlondhlo was appointed as an evangelist by Chikore Church. In June 1907, he made the opening address to the Native Annual Meeting at Chikore. Interestingly, despite the Pentecostal theme, the report of his sermon does not suggest that he talked overtly about spirit possession. Nonetheless, he made vivid use of an Nguni battle ritual, which apparently made a strong impression on his audience: He said that as a boy he attended a gathering of Gungunyana’s braves who met to be doctored for war. He saw a prisoner killed and roasted and strips of his flesh strung on poles. At a signal the lined-up soldiers rushed at the meat and the bravest tore it down with their teeth and ate it. Then they were as men possessed and it was dangerous to cross their path. But the apostles, said he, did not come to get power to kill, but power to give life through Jesus Christ’s salvation.3 The parallel with the Eucharist – the body and the blood – as a source of martial power was readily appreciated by the mission’s star evangelist, Tom Mapangisana, who, after the meeting, went to Wilder, the mission head, and, Referring to Ndhlondhlo’s illustration said, ‘Well, I have partaken of the body and blood of Jesus Christ yesterday. Now I must go out and fight his battles. Where shall I go?’4 It is, therefore, no surprise to find that African converts also had a different understanding of polygyny. Missionaries were trying to root out polygyny at the same time that they were asking Africans

168 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism to respect the Christian bible. In that bible, polygyny was presented as an important ancient institution of the ‘chosen race’, and ‘with unanswerable logic the Natives point to this fact as a confirmatory proof of the inherent excellence of their own institutions’ (Posselt 1935: 114, describing an earlier generation). However, as the economy of the white state began to transform, the missionaries’ insistence on monogamy and female dependency began to provide economic benefits for the emerging African middle class. As many historians of Zimbabwe have demonstrated (see Ranger 1992; Barnes 1999; West 2002), Christian monogamy created households in which wealth could be consolidated, rather than being diffused along lines of kinship networks. It produced intangible goods such as ‘respectability’ – the basis for middle-class solidarity and mutual-help groups between wives – and it provided the possibility of church advancement. So, across the course of the twentieth century, changing social and economic conditions began to change monogamy from being a cost for a man, to becoming a benefit. The connection between the white-dominated churches, monogamy, and increasingly cash-based and proletarianized production relationships began to produce advantages for a steadily-growing, albeit tightly constrained, monogamous African middle class.

Pentecostalism and ‘soft masculinity’ Meanwhile, there was a rise in African independent churches, stemming not least from among those evangelists who rejected the marital conditions imposed by the white churches. These independent churches were particularly attractive to women excluded by the strictly monogamous morality of the mainstream churches. Even so, by the end of the twentieth century, some of these churches had also become closely associated with monogamous marriage and middleclass respectability. Scholarly interest in Pentecostalist churches of Southern Africa was inspired in the 1990s by the claims of Paul Gifford (Gifford 1994; Gifford and Brouwer 1996) that these churches, perhaps with CIA backing, were spreading a form of US hegemony through their ‘prosperity churches’ message. The ‘prosperity church’ message

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suggested that poverty was a function of inadequate faith in God’s grace, and that global inequalities and injustices could best be addressed by greater individual protestations and demonstrations of faith. Scholars looking at the Pentecostalist ‘prosperity churches’ in Southern Africa concluded that there was much greater local agency than Gifford’s model suggested, and that involvement in the churches helped middle-class men, in particular, to survive and flourish during the difficult economic conditions brought about by economic restructuring. David Maxwell spent much of the 1990s working on the ZAOGA evangelical Pentecostal church. He concluded that it was propounding a strongly monogamous message, based on what Ezra Chitando (2007) and Adriaan S. van Klinken (2011), among others, have identified as a ‘soft masculinity’ characteristic of Southern African Pentecostalism in the post-AIDS world. Maxwell argued (1998) that: the young male is a particular object of re-socialization. Violence, domestic or extra-familial, is scorned. Marital fidelity is taken as fundamental. The consumption of tobacco and alcohol is viewed as sinful. Wife beaters, drunkards, smokers, fornicators and adulterers are subject to church discipline. . . . The new pentecostal male becomes less predatory, more able to care for the children of his marriage. (1998: 353) Maxwell suggests that this was a religious dispensation particularly suited to young men struggling to establish urban middle-class households during the 1990s World Bank-imposed economic structural adjustment and the first encroachments of neoliberalism’s growing structural inequality. On the one hand, church members were exhorted to reject and repudiate claims from their extended kin networks: pentecostals are not supposed to participate in family and community rituals, or provide resources for them. Possession rituals, rain-making and first-fruit ceremonies, funeral rites, sessions of divination and beer parties are seen as wasteful, and the spirits involved are believed to be demonic. Acts of

170 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism traditional commensality are avoided. The church becomes the believer’s extended family and ties with the extended networks of kin diminish as energies are refocused on the nuclear family. (1998: 354) On the other hand, believers were encouraged to develop small entrepreneurial activities, initially to donate the benefits to the church, and then to develop as ‘indigenous businessmen/women’ (the recommended World Bank response to structural adjustment). The rural kinship rituals were associated with the ‘Spirit of Poverty’ and their repudiation ‘frees the believer from the exactions of kin and community, thus enabling personal accumulation’ (1998: 354). Conspicuous consumption was part of this ‘prosperity church’ message, focusing on household goods and comfort. In a time of growing inequality between rich and poor, the Pentecostal churches made consistent efforts to inculcate a ‘soft masculinity’ for clean-living monogamous (and thereby HIV-free) husbands, who shared economic responsibilities with their middle-class wives while reserving spiritual and household headship (parsed as a form of ‘servant leadership’, according to van Klinken 2011) for themselves. It was, in Maxwell’s view, a form of spirituality perfectly in tune with the needs of the emerging middle-class entrepreneurs of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) years (Maxwell 1998). I now want to suggest that the economic crises both locally (currency collapse, extraordinary inflation and acute shortages of all consumer goods in the 2000s in Zimbabwe) and globally (the post-2008 financial mess) have changed the cultural contexts for the churches and for marriage. I argue that new forms of marriage and new forms of ‘biblical masculinity’ are in the process of emerging, which owe something to earlier forms of polygynous Christian masculinity, while carrying new meanings and new consequences in this new global conjuncture.

The new Pentecostalism and new ‘hard’ masculinities While the ‘prosperity churches’ have been part of the Zimbabwean religious landscape for many years, a new form of Pentecostalism

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has emerged from the economic devastation of the 2000s, which is influenced more by other African prophetic movements than by Gifford’s American evangelicals. In particular, it is clear that the Nigerian ‘prophet’ and televangelist, T. B. Joshua, provides both a role model and a source of competition for the new Pentecostal preachers. The new evangelists are all male, although they may include their wives in the act. The three most notable in mid-2014 were Emmanuel Makandiwa (United Family International Church), Brit-Zim Uebert Angel (Spirit Embassy) and Passion Java (Kingdom Embassy). They are characterized by massive superstar status: huge wealth, enormous followings, pop star entourages and lifestyles. All attract tens of thousands of worshippers to their rallies every week. They are unsalaried entrepreneurs, depending upon mass followings for their wealth. Drum magazine, in South Africa, reported of Angel that: The congregation on any given Sunday is a mix of politicians, top executives and ordinary people who are desperate for financial gain, healing of a variety of diseases, and many more miracles that Prophet Angel is reputed to be able to deliver. At least a thousand are international visitors, which prompted Zimbabwe Minister of Tourism Walter Mzembi to say, ‘He brings more tourists to this country every week than Victoria Falls attracts in a month.’ (Drum 2013) This Pentecostalism is moving away from the ‘soft masculinity’ identified by Maxwell during the 1990s. It rejects the ‘hard work’ message, encourages polygyny and sexual prowess, encourages men to think of themselves as warriors rather than as salaried office workers, and opens the way to a culture of impunity in cases of sexual violence. For the thousands of Zimbabweans who have remained destitute despite all their best efforts, the popularity of the superstar preachers lies, in part, in encouraging the belief in ‘quick fixes’ to problems. Hard work is seen as an irrelevancy, as was shown in notes taken by novelist and lawyer Petina Gappah of Makandiwa’s address at a huge rally on Good Friday 2012:

172 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism ‘You ask me, but Prophet, how can the whole nation get rich? I say to you, not the whole nation will get rich. I mean just you who have come here. Big as the country is, why would you not have your own stand? Why should you not have your own home when baboons have homes?’ Also present was Prophet Uebert Angel. He had this to say to a despairing high school drop out. ‘Without even one subject that you pass, usina subject one rako rauno pasa, uchasumuka neJudgement Night. You will profit because God has sent you a prophet called Makandiwa. With Makandiwa you shall rise.’ (Gappah 2012; also Gappah 2013) The preachers are best known for their miracles, and, in particular, their ‘miracle money’ messages. Even otherwise sensible people, faced with chronic destitution, are beginning to attend the rallies, on the grounds that it’s worth a try. Miracles are central to the rallies, with an escalating competition between the preachers for claiming the most extreme miracles. Java is best known for a ‘miracle abortion’ (although this claim was subsequently retracted when it collided with those elements of the Christian churches that don’t hold with abortion). Makandiwa has apparently made the lame walk; changed the status of people who are HIV positive; assisted infertile couples to conceive; enabled the miraculous appearance of diamonds and gold to rain down on a New Year’s Eve rally on the cusp of 2013; and perhaps most notoriously performed a ‘manhood miracle’ that saw ‘a congregant who had travelled from Namibia having his reproductive organ grow’ (Zimbabwe Mail 2014) Angel has the raising of 29 people from the dead attributed to him, along with at least one ‘miracle baby’ (which subsequently died) and a reputation for filling people’s pockets with ‘miracle money’. The general mindset of ‘quick fix miracles’ as a way to address chronic problems has undermined the traditional ‘prosperity gospel’ message that hard work is the way to prosperity. The government is ambivalent about this doctrine. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial preachers are valuable to the political elite, and vice versa. Moreover, the government is not beyond encouraging a ‘bread and circuses’ distraction from the real problems faced by the economy (including the

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bizarre episode in 2009 of the ‘diesel n’anga’, who briefly appeared to persuade senior government members that she could make unlimited processed diesel flow from rock). Nonetheless, in January 2014, Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa felt it was necessary to make a speech at the Mandel/Gordon Institute of Business Science ‘Economic Outlook Symposium’ in Harare, reminding Zimbabweans that ‘only hard work and commitment would spearhead the turnaround of the country’s economy and people should not bank on miracles like those performed by UFIC leader Emmanuel Makandiwa’ (Mandizha 2014). The established churches, too, express similar disquiet. At the ‘Judgement 2 Rally’ in April this year, attended by many senior government officials, Makandiwa prophesied that ‘Zimbabwe was on the verge of a major economic and industrial boom that will bring back the good times and people will be able to move around the city and go shopping “even during the night”’ (Karimakwenda 2014). In response, a lecturer at the Domboshawa Theological College challenged the theological grounds for prophesying in this way, and told the press that, ‘I am very concerned about giving people hope which is not based on industriousness, which is not based on hard work, but which is based on an expectation that things can just happen supernaturally’ (Karimakwenda 2014). While the new Pentecostals have a strong prosperity message, then, it is a long way from the prosperity gospel associated with the ‘soft masculinity’ message of the early ESAP days.

Wives, children, and ‘spiritual bling’ Another notable feature is a growing emphasis on the morality of polygyny, in preference to the well-established practice of having an ‘official’ wife and then a collection of ‘small houses’ where unofficial wives are maintained. The lead comes from the top, with President Mugabe, who in late 2013 regularly used his appearance at highprofile weddings and funerals to make speeches lambasting the practice of ‘small houses’ in favour of polygyny. His argument was that this gave respect and recognition to the wives and their children, and protected them from abandonment and destitution.

174 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism The return to respectability of polygynous households has had widespread support, particularly in some Pentecostal circles. Interestingly, in what appears to be a return to the discourses of the early twentieth century, the socioeconomic justifications for polygyny are routinely supported by biblical authority. Speaking at an Apostolic gathering, Mugabe observed, ‘We will not force people into monogamous marriages. It’s there in the Bible; Solomon wasn’t only given wealth but many wives too’ (Mananavire 2013). The matter was widely debated when the wealthy, albeit not superstar, leader of the End Time Message Church, Robert Gumbura, was arrested for rape in late 2013 – and found to have, in addition to his other signs of wealth, eleven wives. Women as well as men from his church expressed support for this polygyny, and used biblical authority to reinforce their view: ‘Polygamy is there in the Bible. Outstanding men of God like Solomon and his father David had more than one wife,’ said one female congregant (Mbanje 2013). The argument that polygyny was both moral and enjoyed religious sanction was picked up widely in the press, on social media, and in comments on newspaper stories. ‘[T]he issue of small houses is caused by the stigma of polygamy,’ one reader wrote. ‘During the early biblical times some had many wives and were proud of that; now we look at those men with accusatory fingers so they end up having small houses’ (‘Maita Manyuka’ 2013). In these grassroots observations, however, the emphasis seems to be not only on morality but also on the sexual prowess implied by multiple wives. Polygyny suggests a man is not only wealthy but also virile and fertile. Solomon and David were cited as examples of ‘big men’ who could satisfy their wives sexually. Gumbura’s lawyer observed, ‘The accused is married to 11 wives. Even David and Solomon in the Bible had many wives. . . . He has a duty to sexually satisfy his wives so he uses sex enhancement drugs. There is nothing wrong if he is able to satisfy them sexually, financially and socially’ (Chidavaenzi 2013). An online commentator added, ‘So let Gumbura marry as many as he wants. He obviously is of the David and Solomon blood line’ (‘Truth’ 2013). This sense that polygynists are men who can satisfy many women was reinforced by a string of statements from Gumbura’s wives, one of whom insisted that, ‘We

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are not being abused by the pastor at all, and we will never be. He is such a loving husband and we all love him. There are few men who know how to love their wives in the manner that the pastor does’ (Laiton 2013). The public discourses on polygyny appear, then, to focus on morality and virile masculinity. Nonetheless, the Gumbura case reveals how closely the return to polygyny is linked to another issue: the neoliberal emphasis on male wealth and conspicuous consumption. After a long period in which respectable wealth was closely associated with hard-working urban monogamy, the old link between polygyny and wealth, which seemed self-evident to the early twentieth century evangelists, has returned. However, the reasons for the link could hardly be more different. In the early twentieth century, multiple wives enabled more extensive cultivation and greater income for households. In the early twentyfirst century, multiple wives – like multiple children – are valued not as a source of wealth, but as a visible sign of disposable income. We have seen how Mugabe observed that ‘Solomon wasn’t only given wealth but many wives too.’ In the press coverage of Gumbura’s wives, their conspicuous wealth was a topic of great discussion, much encouraged by the wives themselves. Inviting the press into their luxurious multi-residence compound in Harare, they boasted of their wealth: We want the country to know that we are a united family which lives large, as you can see. Each and every one of us owns a house and a car. It is for this reason that some former members of our church are jealous and have decided to blackmail our husband and our family. (Laiton 2013) Their children were in private education and, in addition to the opulent housing in Harare, the women also owned houses in various provincial cities, as well as assisting their husband in the management of his gold mine and farm in Chinoyi. Despite initial press attempts to present the wives as victims of a controlling man, the ‘Gumbura wives’, as they quickly became known, seemed rather to represent a culture of conspicuous consumption. Internationally, the flaunting of excessive wealth has lost its normative tag of vulgarity since the 1990s,

176 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism as the super-wealthy within the neoliberal dispensation struggle to find enough ways to spend huge sums of money – sums that have been generated largely through financial investments rather than industrial manufacture. Celebration of celebrity culture (which translates broadly into super-rich culture), which has long afflicted Western media, is now becoming established in Zimbabwe via South African magazines and the shameless daily tabloid ‘newspaper’, Metro. A large part of Metro’s content involves reporting improbable miracles and following the lives of the super-rich, including the great superstar preachers, whose extraordinary personal wealth is presented as a guarantee of the legitimacy of their claims to be able to create ‘miracle wealth’ for others. A multiplicity of wives provides a more respectable way of flaunting such wealth than a multiplicity of ‘small houses’ (as ‘flamboyant businessman’ Philip Chiyangwa found to his cost, when the press posted photos of him with a range of women during his divorce proceedings). If having many wives provides a good way for a man to display his wealth, it seems that having many children is as good, or even better. Whereas the ‘soft masculinity’ of earlier forms of Pentecostalism encouraged smaller families, the more aggressive miracle-based Pentecostalism takes the injunction to ‘go forth and multiply’ rather more seriously. The quantity of conspicuous wealth in people seems to be valued above quality of human relationships. In part, this is because children provide another way of flaunting wealth. Moreover, in the Gumbura household, the link between children and wealth was explicit. As one wife, who had good A Levels, explained, having children had proved more lucrative for her than a good job in a bank: I resigned from Founders Bank (now Intermarket) in 1997 when I had my first child. My husband promised greener pastures by doubling my salary each month in addition to taking care of me and the child. . . . I consider my marriage with him as greener pastures. The more children I bear the more money I get. I have five children and want more. (Mupangi 2013) However, for the End Time Message Church, children represent a form of spiritual bling, too. It seems that maximizing paternity represents a path to spiritual glory. One of Gumbura’s male rural devotees was reported as saying that:

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What hurts him most is that his leader was arrested before he could fulfil his dream of siring 100 children. ‘If not arrested, he was going to be a great man. . . . He was [really] arrested for polygamy, not rape. He has given me courage. I want to surpass the number of his wives and children.’ (Sachiti 2014) This clearly suggests a link to older forms of spirituality, in which descendants guarantee the wellbeing of ancestors. Nonetheless, perhaps surprisingly, there are also links to some of the ‘harder’ elements of the ‘soft masculinity’ identified by Maxwell, in that the extended family is not included in the magic circle of the blessed. Gumbura showed a systematic disrespect and distancing from his rural cognates, reinvesting his surplus wealth back into his businesses (including the church) and cultivating his wives’ families, as a ‘big man’ to whom he was the patron. His cognate relatives blamed his arrest and conviction for rape on that failure, since it had attracted the wrath of his father’s spirit.

Sexual violence and the return of the warrior evangelist The superstar pastors are, of course, aware of the difficult conditions that their devotees find themselves in. Their response is to encourage them to be harder and more ruthless. Rather than offering a message of love, they offer a message of hate. Petina Gappah reported from the huge Makandiwa/Angel rally on Good Friday 2012: It was really a frenzy of hatred. Pray for your enemy, I say to your enemy die, said Makandiwa. Die said the crowd. Die said Makandiwa, die said the crowd. Do you think God is happy to see your enemy drinking tea while you suffer? asked Makandiwa. That tea will choke him! People say love your enemies. But where in the Bible does it say that? The Bible says love your neighbour as you love yourself. . . . It says pray for your enemies. But it does not say how you should pray for your enemies. It does not say you should not curse your enemy. Even if you bless them, your blessing will kill them. (Gappah 2012; 2013)

178 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism In October 2013, in an echo of Mapangisana, the 1900s ‘warrior evangelist’ inspired by tales of Gungunyana’s impis, Makandiwa and Angel promoted their ‘Manworld’ rally with military imagery and the strap line, ‘How to become strong men in tough times’. In a recognition of how men are challenged in these ‘tough times’, they add ‘Fear is Real. Faith is a Choice’. It is perhaps not surprising that this image of the strong man who is ready to do violence is emerging alongside a significant rise in domestic violence. Statistics from the National Anti-Domestic Violence Council in Zimbabwe show that reported domestic violence cases increased from 1,940 in the whole of 2008 to 2,655 between January and April 2013 (Chidavaenzi 2014). As Beatrix Campbell argued in Soundings

http://zimbay.com/fevent/177/manworld-convention-with-prophetse-makandiwa-and-uebert-angel/ (accessed 2 October 2013)

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journal in May 2014, a global culture of impunity has developed for men who commit violence against women. Women are on the bottom rung of cheap labour internationally. There is a global interest in the increasing exploitation of women, routinely accompanied by violence. Sexual violence has been normalized in warfare and in the growth of trade in drugs and guns, to the point where in Latin America the right of men to abuse women has become known simply as ‘the impunity’ (Campbell 2014). In Zimbabwe, this impunity is linked to religion. A stream of accusations of rape against pastors exposes a perception of masculinity that attempts to justify these crimes in biblical terms, in both Pentecostal and Apostolic churches. In the words of local newspaper The Standard (22 June 2014): These ‘lower-end churches’ which tend to be a mix between traditional religion and Christianity thrive on intimidation and twisting of scriptures to keep women and children in check. . . . They believe women are born to serve men, born for the sexual gratification of the male species and to give them big families. In other sects, a man will marry a big number of women so they can compete for his attention. (Mabasa 2014) The issue has become politically controversial. At the end of May 2014, members of the Apostolic Johane Masowe Church, which is suspected of rampant sexual abuse of women and children, violently beat off a police-backed attempt to ban it. Despite the suspicion of child abuse, the church has been defended by prominent civil rights groups, who have presented the skirmish as evidence of popular resistance to an oppressive police state. The peculiar logic of Zimbabwean politics sees the government attempting to oppose sexual violence, while human rights activists defend some of the worst offenders (Mathuthu 2014; ZLHR 2014).

Conclusion What we see, then, by looking at masculinity in contemporary Zimbabwe through the lens of the new Pentecostalism, is that many

180 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism men are turning to religion in a desperate attempt to find a solution to economic crisis and household disintegration. The image of masculinity that they find there is very different from the ‘soft masculinity’ of 1990s Pentecostalism. Instead, there is a strong message of the ‘hard man’ who is encouraged to hate his enemies; who hopes only for ‘quick fixes’ to his problems rather than reward for hard work; who prefers the conspicuous consumption implied in overt polygyny over the convenience of supporting ‘small houses’; who understands his masculinity and status to be rooted in his control over women and children; and who finds biblical justification for all of this. As the super-preachers become increasingly influential and their concerns come to dominate popular representations of wealth and religion, this is a hard time to be a ‘soft’ man.

Notes 1 See my 2007 book, Law, Language & Science, for a detailed account of the material, spiritual, epistemological and linguistic foundations of this mission. 2 Rev. F. W. Bates, Mt Silinda Mission, personal communication to Judson Smith, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, 1899. 3 Rev. G. A. Wilder, ‘Report on Bible Study Conference and Native Annual Meeting, 24–26 June 1907’, National Archives of Zimbabwe, ref. UN 3/20/1/2/1. 4 Rev. G. A. Wilder, ‘Report on Bible Study Conference and Native Annual Meeting, 24–26 June 1907’, National Archives of Zimbabwe, ref. UN 3/20/1/2/1.

References Barnes, T. (1999) ‘We Women Worked So Hard’: Gender, Labor and Social Reproduction in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–56, Heinemann/Greenwood, Portsmouth NH. Campbell, B. (2014) ‘After Neoliberalism: The Need for a Gender Revolution’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Vol. 56, pp. 10–26. Chidavaenzi, P. (2013) ‘“Rapist” Pastor Trial Opens: “Victim” tells Sordid Rape Tale’, Daily News, Harare, 10 December. Chidavaenzi, P. (2014) ‘Rights Activists Hail Serial Rapists Sentences’, Daily News, Harare, 10 February. Chitando, E. (2007) ‘A New Man for a New Era? Zimbabwean Pentecostalism, Masculinities and the HIV Epidemic’, Missionalia: Southern African Journal of Mission Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 112–27. Drum (2013) ‘I resurrected 29 people – Angel’, Daily News, Harare, 30 September. Gappah, P. (2012) Facebook post, 8 April, https://www.facebook.com/ petinagappah (accessed 12 February 2014).

Pentecostalist masculinities in Zimbabwe | 181 Gappah, P. (2013) ‘Your God is a God of Silver & Gold: Preaching Prosperity in Zimbabwe’, Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, 20 June, http:// www.osisa.org/openspace/zimbabwe/your-god-god-silver-and-gold-preachingprosperity-zimbabwe (accessed 14 July 2014). Gifford, P. (1994) ‘Some Recent Developments in African Christianity’, African Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 373, pp. 513–34. Gifford, P. and S. Brouwer (1996) Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism, Routledge, London. Hall, S. (1993) ‘What is this “Black” in Popular Culture?’, Social Justice, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 104–14. Jeater, D. (2007) Law, Language & Science: The Invention of the ‘Native Mind’ in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) 1890–1930, Heinemann/Greenwood, Portsmouth NH. Karimakwenda, T. (2014) ‘Zim Economy Needs More than Makandiwa’s Prophecy’, SWRadio Africa, 22 April, http://www.swradioafrica.com/2014/04/22/zimeconomy-needs-more-than-makandiwas-prophecy/ (accessed 2 May 2014). Kufakurinani, U. (2012) ‘Narratives of Those Left Behind: The Impact of Migration on Gender and Family in Zimbabwe 2000–2011’, paper presented at ‘Zimbabwe and the Region’ conference, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 16 June. Laiton, C. (2013) ‘“Rapist” Pastor’s Wives Speak Out’, Daily News, Harare, 6 December. Mabasa, C. (2014) ‘The Faithful under Siege from Religious Leaders’, The Standard, Harare, 22 June. ‘Maita Manyuka’ (2013), online comment on B. Mananavire, (2013) ‘It’s Okay to Have Many Wives’, Daily News, Harare, 16 December, http://www.dailynews. co.zw/articles/2013/12/16/it-s-okay-to-have-many-wives (accessed 27 February 2014) Mananavire, B. (2013) ‘It’s Okay to Have Many Wives’, Daily News, Harare, 16 December. Mandizha, T. (2014) ‘“Don’t Follow Makandiwa”: Chinamasa’, Newsday, Harare, 16 January. Mathuthu, M. (2014) ‘Zimbabweans Celebrate Police Bashing’, SWRadio Africa, 2 June, http://www.swradioafrica.com/2014/06/02/zimbabweans-celebratepolice-bashing/ (accessed 18 June 2014). Maxwell, D. (1998) ‘“Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?”: Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 350–73. Mbanje, P. (2013) ‘End Time Message: Doctrine of Fear’, The Standard, Harare, 15 December. Mupangi, S. (2013) ‘Zimbabwe’s Sister Wives’, The Herald, 10 December, article comment from ‘Truth’, http://www.herald.co.zw/zimbabwes-sister-wives/ (accessed 12 March 2014). Pasura, D. (2014) ‘“Do You Have a Visa?” Negotiating Respectable Masculinity in the Diaspora’, paper presented to ‘Politics, Culture and Identity in Zimbabwe’ conference, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 21 June 2014. Posselt, F. W. T. (1935) Fact and Fiction, Government of Southern Rhodesia, Bulawayo. Ranger, T. (1992) Are We Not Also Men?: The Samkange Family & African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64, James Currey, London.

182 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Sachiti, R. (2014) ‘Gumbura: The Untold Story’, The Herald, Harare, 8 February. ‘Truth’ (2013) Online article comment on S. Mupangi, ‘Zimbabwe’s Sister Wives’, The Herald, Harare, 10 December, http://www.herald.co.zw/zimbabwes-sisterwives/ (accessed 12 March 2014). van Klinken, A. S. (2011) ‘Male Headship as Male Agency: An Alternative Understanding of a “Patriarchal” African Pentecostal Discourse on Masculinity’, Religion & Gender, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 104–24. West, M. O. (2002) The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis IN. Zhira, M. (2014) ‘Are Women the “New” Husbands? Emerging Gender Roles and Norms among Zimbabwean Migrants in South Africa, 2000–2010’, unpublished paper, March. Zimbabwe Mail (2014), ‘Prophet Makandiwa performs miracle ‘manhood’ enlargement’, 5 January. ZLHR (Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights) (2014) ‘A Caution against Mob Justice and a Call for Police Professionalism’, press statement, 3 June.

CHAPTER 12 From Big Man to Whole Man: making moral masculinities at the YMCA Ross Wignall

Introduction A renewed focus on studies of masculinity has so far failed to account for the growing importance of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and faith-based organizations (FBOs) in the gendering process, even as they reshape and resituate gender norms, relations and subjectivities, particularly in the context of a neoliberalization of everyday life. This chapter seeks to address this issue through a cross-cultural case study of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the familiar but under-researched FBO that claims to be the largest youth organization in the world. YMCA programmes are often explicitly masculinizing, targeting forms of delinquent, disruptive or unproductive masculinity that fail to match the expectations of the neoliberal state. To model success, the YMCA relies on a relatively static form of masculinity based around a ‘holistic’ trinity of mind, body and spirit, a secularized version of Protestant subjectivity with its associations of strength, industry and self-discipline known historically as ‘The Whole Man’. Following Connell’s (2012) call to understand the implications of masculinity in its global context, I analyse the Whole Man in the contrasting contexts of Brighton and Hove (aid donor, secular public sphere, Global North) and Banjul, The Gambia (aid recipient, Islamic public sphere, Global South). Through my own experience, I explore how the Whole Man creates tense and ambiguous interactions with forms of ‘tough’ masculinity in the UK and ‘Big

184 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Man’ masculinity in The Gambia. Through these tensions, I suggest that only by examining the roles of men working in development can our understanding of the underlying power dynamics structuring male-to-male dependencies be mapped onto global systems of inequality and post-colonial control.

The Whole Man and the masculinization of development One route to understanding processes of masculinization is through the targeting of young men as development objects, in both the Global North and the Global South (see Chant 2008: 177; Chant and Gutman 2002; Cornwall 2000; Cornwall et al. 2011; Edström et al. 2014). This comparison is important because many of the modes of engagement used by development agencies have gestated through the ‘civilizing’ missions of the rich towards the poor in the Global North (Chant 2008; Cornwall et al. 2011). This feeds a lopsided bias towards young men being viewed as dangerous or potentially destructive, and disproportionately representative of wider societal breakdown, a discourse which is both gendered and skewed towards particular groups such as working-class boys or ethnic minorities (Cornwall et al. 2011; see also Barker 2005; Edström 2007). Emerging out of a nineteenth-century evangelical focus on the body as a site of spiritual discipline, ‘The Whole Man’ is a phrase the early YMCA movement used to describe ways of working with young men holistically, on mind, body and spirit. Today, the circulation of these ideas in local centres and programming is much more implicit, represented in a more nebulous recognition of the need to support young men holistically and to teach them the liberally defined values of equality, fairness and compassion that fit in with broader ideals of good citizenship and personhood; a civilizing mission for the twenty-first century. For the purposes of comparison, this chapter focuses on an engagement programme (Sports Leaders) targeting young people having difficulty in school in the UK and having difficulty finding employment in The Gambia. Located on the UK south coast, the city of Brighton and Hove (population circa 300,000) is an important

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transport, tourist, commuter and administrative hub in the county of East Sussex. Founded in 1919, Sussex Central YMCA struggled through much of the twentieth century as a local community centre before developing in the last 20 years to become a leading organization in homelessness and youth development. The Gambia’s history is structured by its relations to global interconnections and global inequality; its colonial history has transitioned into a reliance on aid and tourism (Wright 2004). Founded in 1979 as an educational and training institute, The Gambia YMCA gained support from English missionaries and other YMCAs, growing with the Gambian economy. Today the YMCA plays a leading role in the region, advising the government directly on development issues and cementing its position of power within local and regional politics. I situate an understanding of Whole Man masculinity in an increasing theoretical focus on both the plurality of masculinity and the construction of masculine models through social relations (see Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; Cornwall 2000) and social imaginaries (Warren 2003). Masculinity is viewed as divergent, multiple and constantly in construction through performance and practice, defined only by its instability and divorced from biological notions of the body and sexuality (Butler 1990; Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). On the global stage, therefore, masculinities need to be understood in diverse fields of public and private performance, veering in and out of subordinate and dominant versions of manhood and intersecting with multiple realms of social being (Pype 2007; Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). In the following section, I present two ethnographic scenes of masculine performance, set against wider societal notions of manliness and adulthood, using them to trace the frictions between the moral form of masculinity on offer inside the YMCA and the multiple modes of masculinity available outside.

Rituals of manhood: muscular masculinity on the Sports Leaders course For many staff members at the Sussex Central YMCA the opportunity to ‘do sport for work’ is why they attend the YMCA and it helps them bond with their sometimes wayward students. Today I have been

186 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism training with the young people. In the morning session, the students have been working on today’s worksheet: ‘good leader/bad leader’, where they identify the qualities of a good leader and apply them to their coaching work. Now, in the afternoon session they are being rewarded with physical activity. Some students have gone swimming with a colleague and some have been to the gym with me, where the students and I have been trying to outdo each other on the bench press. In good spirits, I have offered to do ‘padwork’ with two of the students who are interested in boxing and MMA (mixed martial arts). Aiden, tall with curly brown hair, and Liam, shorter with close cropped black hair, are lively young men who came to the course with trepidation. Many of our students are required to come by a support worker who is trying to get them back into school. As we have done more and more physical work, both Aiden and Liam have relaxed on the course and begun to trust us. As we have encouraged their MMA work, they have responded enthusiastically and we have used these sessions as a progressive reward. As we begin our session, the boys get increasingly aggressive, trying outrageous roundhouse kicks and impressive jumping manoeuvres. Impressed by their athleticism, I encourage them, but also impress on them the need for control and restraint. After about 20 minutes I suggest we have a break and send them out of the training room, following them down the stairs to catch up with my teaching colleague. When I return, I am surprised to find Liam and Aiden on the floor of the training room, Aiden with Liam in a painful and dangerouslooking headlock and Liam, red-faced, shouting obscenities. I tell them to stop fighting and to separate, a command they ignore. My teaching partner has followed me in, and together we do separate the boys, telling them to calm down; my colleague taking Liam outside to cool down. After ten minutes or so, Liam returns and the boys shake hands, telling us they were just practising MMA holds. We tell them to stick to less contact-based combat in the future, a message they seem, at least on the surface, to accept. Boxing, MMA and weightlifting form a cornerstone of student development on the Sports Leaders course, allowing me and other tutors to spend time away from the classroom, bonding with the students. At the YMCA, this process serves a dual purpose: allowing

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students to cultivate relationships away from unmanageable friendship and family networks; and providing an alternative space away from toxic relationships with school and work. Sport plays a vital role in this process, creating the grounds for the ritualization of intersubjectivity, using combinations of performance, discipline, enjoyment and achievement to deepen and strengthen the connection between individual transformation and collective unity (Jennings et al. 2010: 553; see also Wacquant 2004: 235; Kohn 2007). However, incidents like the one described forced me to reflect on whether I was modelling or undermining the notions of masculinity that circulate in this setting, and are embedded in the ethos of the programme. In breaking up the fight I was attempting to promote a caring Whole Man masculinity, but through my promotion of physical competition, I was also paradoxically attempting to use the very system of embodied power we were trying to displace, potentially feeding into alternative systems of masculinity based on violence and physical dominance. In her detailed ethnography of a London council estate, Gillian Evans (2011) has identified how ‘Big Man systems’ on the street translate into school spaces as a ‘pecking order of disruption’, a ‘frenetic . . . learned disposition’ that militates against the expectations of teachers and parents which required pupils to be ‘good boys’ at school (2011: 296). As with the YMCA, boys were required to learn a different form of ‘self-value’, creating ambiguity and confusion as they moved from one system of masculine power to another (2011: 317). The YMCA operates as a transformative interface between the two systems of male prestige, school and the street, hoovering up young men multiply rejected, failed by mainstream education and parents, but also left intimidated and confused by the often unmanageable demands of the street. Though it has the power to recalibrate the set of values through which young men interpret male prestige and masculine behaviour, this process is rarely complete, part of a continued and contingent negotiation. This uncertainty and ambiguity was reflected in my discussions and relationships with young people on the course. For example, Liam’s sometimes fractious relationship with Aiden reflected a significant transformation from his initial appearance on the course, when he had been withdrawn,

188 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism sullen and seemingly angry. Unlike other students, who were often overtly aggressive, his complex emotional state manifested as a simple withdrawal from activities, as well as keeping his distance from other students. Liam came to the course with something of a reputation for violence, both in and out of school. Down one side of his face was a six-inch scar, giving him the impression of hardness, a physical marker of manly experience. From this physical reference point, both staff and students treated Liam with deference, reflecting an awareness of the Big Man system from which he had emerged. It was only when we moved to boxing and kickboxing that he began gradually to integrate into the group. Liam started sharing cigarette breaks with some of the other students, where their bond deepened under the guidance of an experienced kickboxing instructor who would occasionally join us. Through these tiny increments, his enjoyment of the course seemed to change. Though he was never the most enthusiastic member of the group, his patience with written work did improve, as did his attention span in group discussion. And he did start listening to his YMCA tutors, including me. This gradually growing bond of trust surfaced during my interviews with him where he frankly discussed his history of violence. Echoing Evans’s model of the tensions between the street and school, he told me of how ‘the idiots’ in his peer group had caused him to stay away from school. When he did go he would get into fights or cause trouble in an attempt to stay at the top of the pecking order. As he states here, although the course has had an impact his past actions haunt his present daily life: ‘I changed it around a bit now but I’ve still got like a bit of a reputation. The police always want to seem to stop and search me and they are a bit annoying to me like that.’ His relationship with the local police reflects his antagonistic relationship with most of those around him, including his family, social workers and his school, resulting in both his expulsion and a stressful period of homelessness, living on the streets. Liam’s time on the streets had also reinforced his sense that street-based values steeped in machismo and violence should take precedence in the way he lived his life, a view that slowly began changing while he attended the YMCA course, as he depicts here:

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Well I was getting arrested nearly every other day – just getting in fights near enough every day. Nicking cars – I was like nicking cars – one or two a day. I was going out first thing in the morning – nick a car drive around in it for the day and then set light to it. Then I’d go out about 10.30/11 at night and nick another one and drive that around for the night. It was either cars or motorbikes; anything with an engine. That was at a bad point, I didn’t really care – [I was] on the road to self-destruct. I didn’t care about myself or no-one. For Liam, struggling to find a new identity outside of stealing and brawling, the damage to his face was his nadir. But it was also a point of epiphany: he entirely dropped out of school and began a slow process of change, culminating with his appearance on our course. In Liam’s story, the breakdown in his relationships had been the cause of his criminality, the territorial allegiance Evans identifies as a factor in Big Man systems leading him into violence, but also creating the grounds for his redemption. Removed both from his geographical and filial interconnections, he had begun to rebuild his life with a new set of values, forever reminded of his violent past. It was in his body that his transformation began to take hold. He talked of the Sports Leaders course as ‘using my energy up’, whereas before ‘usually I would get into trouble – go out and have a fight or try nicking stuff, but when I get home from this I just want to relax and sit down and not do anything’. On the streets he had eventually had one fight too many, getting badly injured and scarred. In his account, the pain of the wound had been nothing. What scared him was having to endure an injection for the pain. The hardship endured and pain received were Liam’s badges of masculine toughness, at odds with his fear in the face of a simple injection. Liam’s violent encounter was both part of a performance of toughness, but also a way of performing and narrating his current transformation into another way of being, one that offered him a different masculinity. As I tried to learn about Liam’s story, I was also implicated in this process, offering respect to his physically dangerous past, but also new ways of showing manliness and being a ‘good man’. For Liam, the opportunity to tell his story was also an opportunity to

190 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism display a masculinity that carefully balanced his histories of violence and vulnerability, creating a provisional or working masculine identity in the present. Yet it was also an opportunity for me to open up a new way of being for Liam, offering succour to the marks of manhood, whilst questioning their validity and worth, pointing the way towards new ways of being vulnerable but also exciting, new ways of being manly.

The shifting sands of manhood: sport and situational masculinities in the Gambia It’s 1 p.m. and I’m in a dusty Gambian village. In front of me is a group of expectant young faces, listening intently to what I am saying. They are a local youth football team, and I am giving a half-time pep talk at the request of my YMCA student, Siaca. Next to the pitch, some felled logs are providing the supporters with somewhere to sit and I am encouraged to sit down next to a group of about ten young men. Some of them ask me questions, and chat to me about English football. After a pretty uneventful goalless first half, people flood across the pitch, including several washerwomen, baskets on heads, hurrying on with their daily chores. After my speech, the players walk back to the field and, as they do, the older men from the log bark agitated instructions at them in various languages. The players stop and listen. One man in particular has taken the lead and the players bow their heads as he berates them. Siaca remains passive and silent next to the older men, eventually thanking them and walking his players back to the pitch. I ask one of the young men near me what the older man had been saying. ‘Oh, he just said play better; he used to be a player.’ Whoever’s speech was more successful, the team do play better, but so do their opponents and the game finishes one goal apiece. Most people seem happy with the result, except the angry man on the sidelines, who, even as the other supporters drift off, follows Siaca to give him some advice – but it’s difficult to tell, from where I’m sat, whether Siaca is listening or not. Siaca’s battle for authority on the football field, and his exploitation of his relationship with me, can be seen in the broader schematic of

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African youth stuck in between youthhood and adulthood (Jeffrey 2010; Masquelier 2013). Whilst he is also part of a ‘sandwich generation’, caught between intractable elders and discouraged youth, he bridges other divides between economic muscle and community power, working horizontally whilst restricted vertically. I met Siaca early in my fieldwork. A couple of young security guards working at the YMCA had mentioned his name in conversation and encouraged me to enrol him on the Sports Leaders course. Eventually, I gave him a call and met him face to face, but it wasn’t until a few months later that I managed to get him onto one of the courses. By the time I visited his village to watch the football match and subsequently to interview him, he had also become a security guard at the YMCA, looking after the underpopulated hostel building. What initially struck me about Siaca was the way his entrepreneurial spirit was woven into his civicmindedness, his everyday grafting for his family naturally extending into care for his community. Living in a compound with 13 mouths to feed and only two workers, as he tells me, ‘The living condition is also very difficult here, it’s all about, what we say, manage it from hand to mouth, just push it . . . it’s a big load onto us.’ Yet, whilst ‘doing business’, as he puts it, and working as a security guard, he was also involved in sports coaching, youth work and arts programmes – as well as finding time to produce two reggae singles. As an older youth, Siaca saw it as his responsibility to help those ‘coming up’ behind him. The experience of the Sports Leaders course means, in his words, ‘This is the knowledge I have from the coaching, so this is what I have to translate here.’ At least part of this translation is giving younger youth better chances than are available to his generation: ‘We work with the young ones, at any ages, because we try to render services for the community that will help create opportunities, and foster relationships among the youths in the community here.’ Siaca claims that he’s inspired by the Gambian President and is trying to achieve development at home. His attendance on the Sports Leaders course is part of a wider strategy rooted in tying his individual aspirations to both his community and his nation: ‘I’m trying to improve the living condition of the society. There are lots of changes [I want to make], financial changes, education changes, that’s what I work on.’

192 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism In Masquelier’s (2010) study of young Ivorian Muslims, she usefully identifies a form of ‘situational ethics’ defined as specific modes of tactical behaviour tailored in response to a range of pressing economic, social and cultural contexts (2010: 252; see also Jeffrey 2010; Leblanc 2000). Siaca’s different ways of asserting authority and community endeavour seemed to reflect a situational or tactical masculinity, that altered specifically from context to context and allowed him to accrue masculine prestige in a variety of domains. This allowed Siaca cumulatively to create a reputation and profile in the community, whilst also attempting to avoid disrupting the Big Man system of masculinity. This became clearer when I went to Siaca’s compound to interview him and meet some of his family members before the football match. As we entered we were greeted by his stern-faced grandmother, pounding maize in a large pestle and mortar. As Siaca explained my presence, she nodded and smiled, directing a question at Siaca. Siaca explained she didn’t speak English, but that I was welcome. His grandmother ushered me in before slowly returning to her work. Inside, the house was cool and dark, with the lights turned off. It was bigger than many Gambian houses, and the tiled floors gave instant relief from the heat outside, but as we sat in a large reception area the house seemed empty. Abruptly, it sprang into life as the family was alerted to my presence: mother and daughters emerged from the kitchen, wiping their hands; small children of both sexes emerged from bedrooms; young men and women, friends of Siaca and the family, appeared at the doorway, framed by the light as they crammed inside. I was asked to sit on a chair in the middle of the room, as all the friends and family gathered round keeping a respectful distance, one young boy clinging to his sister’s leg. After introductions and pleasantries, I asked if I could interview a couple of family members and a friend. First came his mother, who, in broken English, told me what a ‘good boy’ Siaca was. Second came a male friend, who told me how much Siaca did for his family and the community, also telling me Siaca was a ‘good boy’, meaning he was a good friend and a decent person. Last came his sister. I was surprised to learn that she was also a football coach and player, encouraged greatly by her brother’s example and his ongoing encouragement. He is a ‘good brother’, she told me.

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The story of Siaca’s sister reflects a deeper, negotiated reality for young men in the Gambian context, struggling with intergenerational change and mutating gendered hierarchies. Prior to the football match, Siaca and I had passed a group of young women in headscarves and full football kits on their way to the field. They were members of the team his sister coached. She told me that many of the girls change after they have left their houses so as not to aggravate their family members, who see this type of dress as un-Islamic. By encouraging his sister, Siaca was promoting the young women’s own gendered negotiation of femininity, as they sought to situate themselves in between sport, Islam, and the family. These manoeuvres were also implicated in the complex intergenerational tensions encapsulated on the football field. Whilst young men were encouraged to take charge, the room given for their voices to emerge is occupied by the community elders. As Utas (2012) has noted, young men in particular coordinate their ‘Bigmanity’ in relation to a fixed, charismatic centre, striving towards an ideal masculine type through activities that amass standing within that system. Siaca’s leadership qualities were simultaneously accruing prestige within his community while also disrupting the Big Man constellation, destabilizing the primacy of eldership and establishing a new primacy based on civic-mindedness, knowledge and merit, in which Siaca was the central authority. His support of the girls’ football team fits into this schematic. By encouraging his sister and her team, he was supporting them as individuals outside of the established gender norms and age-specific hierarchies. In doing so, he was also reaffirming a new pattern for gendered relationships based on equality, merit and community, which aligned both with the objectives of the YMCA and his emergent masculine power.

Conclusions: making men ‘whole’ As I have shown, in the cross-cultural context, comparative projects can show how geographies of exclusion and inequality are being remapped from global to local coordinates and being enforced and articulated through specifically gendered discourses of masculinized self-development. In the Global North, leadership is seen as a way

194 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism of revitalizing a politically disengaged generation through civic participation and entrepreneurial dynamism (Flanagan 2008). However, this discourse of discipline inevitably targets specific classes and ethnicities (Evans 2006). As my discussion with Liam showed, taken out of its performative zone, his masculinity became more pliable, open to manipulation and modification through the relationships and values instilled on the YMCA course, where aggression needed to be controlled, productive and instrumental. Consequently, students on the Sports Leaders course are seen as transitioning from moments of failure to moments of success, a narrative conversion of moral value played out in terms of new masculine behaviours. In the Global South, understanding the gendering of leadership becomes more urgent in the context of harsh economic conditions, fracturing male role models and a universalizing concept of Western agency that contradicts autochthonous notions of manhood (Durham 2008: 171). However, unlike many youth movements in Africa, particularly religious groups, that have created intergenerational friction (see for example Janson 2008; Leblanc 2000) the YMCA might be seen to reinforce overarching societal norms connected to traditional modes of leadership that include gerontocratic hierarchies and Big Man masculine dominance (Lindsay and Miescher 2003: 3 cited in Barker and Ricardo 2005: 11). YMCA courses intervene in an ‘elastic’ (Flanagan 2008: 136) period of youth, where failure is built into stories of success and experimentation (Jeffrey 2010). In this context, the YMCA may be contributing to hollow aspirations rather than clear pathways out of poverty (Durham 2004). Nonetheless, youth are rarely simply passive recipients of gender coordinates, articulating their own complex versions of agency, masculinity and aspiration (Durham 2004). Through his discreet and thoughtful work, Siaca was challenging many entrenched Gambian gender norms across multiple domains. Through the Sports Leaders course, I was able to help him maximize the cultural capital he had already accrued, lending him greater authority to wield in the many arenas of negotiation that he dealt with on a daily basis, creating new forms of leadership, masculinity and subjectivity through which to exercise his agency. In Liam’s case this sense of agency was more clearly governed by the physical elements of the Sports Leaders

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course, showing the way success is built from the body up. Whether Liam will be a good leader or not is much harder to tell, but he was learning to trust us and the YMCA, and in doing so progressively breaking away from various problematic domains of his everyday life. Understanding this procedure also means understanding that my own masculine subjectivity was integral to this mechanism of masculine reconfiguration at work at the YMCA, incrementally making Whole Men, even as they were being silently, and sometimes painfully, unmade. Only through further studies of this type can a deeper understanding of the neoliberalization of everyday life through development be understood as a problematic, and sometimes paradoxical, process of masculinization and the reproduction of both economic and gender inequalities.

Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks go to the staff and students of the YMCA, whose generousity made this research so rewarding, and to the ESRC whose funding made the research possible. I am also indebted to Jon Mitchell, James Fairhead and Katie McQuaid who read early drafts. I reserve special thanks for Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne and Frank Karioris for organizing a great conference. Their thoughtful suggestions have helped me significantly refashion the text.

References Barker, G. (2005) Dying to be Men: Youth, Masculinities and Social Exclusion, Routledge, London. Barker, G., and Ricardo, C. (2005). Young Men and the Construction of Masculinity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for HIV/AIDS, Conflict, and Violence, World Bank, Washington DC. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Oxford University Press, New York NY. Chant, S. (2008) ‘The “Feminisation of Poverty” and the “Feminisation” of Anti-Poverty Programmes: Room for Revision?’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 165–97. Chant, S. and M. C. Gutmann (2002) ‘“Men-streaming” Gender? Questions for Gender and Development Policy in the Twenty-First Century’, Progress in Development Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 269–82. Connell, R. (2012) ‘Masculinity Research and Global Change’, Masculinities & Social Change, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 4–18.

196 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Cornwall, A. (2000) ‘Missing Men? Reflections on Men, Masculinities and Gender in GAD’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 18–27. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (1994) Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Cornwall, A., J. Edström and A. Greig (eds) (2011) Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities, Zed Books, London. Durham, D. (2004). Disappearing Youth: Youth as a Social Shifter in Botswana. American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 589–605. Durham, D. (2008) ‘Apathy and Agency: The Romance of Agency and Youth in Botswana’, in J. Cole and D. L. Durham (eds), Figuring the Future: Globalization and the Temporalities of Children and Youth, School for Advanced Research (SAR), Santa Fe. Edström, J. (2007). ‘Rethinking “Vulnerability” and Social Protection for Children Affected by AIDS’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 101–5. Edström, J., A. Das and C. Dolan (2014) ‘Introduction: Undressing Patriarchy and Masculinities to Repoliticise Gender’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 1–10. Evans, G. (2006) Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Evans, G. (2011) ‘Big Man System, Short Life Culture’, in V. Amit and N. Dyck (eds), Young Men in Uncertain Times, Berghahn, New York NY. Flanagan, C. A. (2008). ‘Private Anxieties and Public Hopes: The Perils and Promise of Youth in the Context of Globalization’. In J. Cole and D. L. Durham (eds), Figuring the Future: Globalization and the Temporalities of Children and Youth, SAR, Santa Fe, pp. 125–50. Janson, M. (2008). ‘Renegotiating Gender: Changing Moral Practice in the Tablighi Jama’at in The Gambia’, Journal for Islamic Studies: Reconfiguring Gender Relations in Muslim Africa, Vol. 28, pp. 9–36. Jeffrey, C. (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting, Stanford University Press and Cambridge University Press, Stanford CA. Jennings, G., D. Brown and A. C. Sparkes (2010) ‘“It Can Be a Religion If You Want”: Wing Chun Kung Fu as a Secular Religion’, Ethnography, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 533–57. Kohn, T. (2007) ‘Bowing onto the Mat: Discourses of Change through Martial Arts Practice’, in S. Coleman and T. Kohn (eds), The Discipline of Leisure: Embodying Cultures of ‘Recreation’, Berghahn, New York NY. Leblanc, M. (2000) ‘The Production of Islamic Identities through Knowledge Claims in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire’, African Affairs, Vol. 98, No. 393, pp. 485–508. Lindsay, L. and S. Miescher (eds) (2003) Men and Masculinities in Modern African History, Heinemann, Westport CT. Masquelier, A. (2010). ‘Securing Futures: Youth, Generation, and Muslim Identities in Niger’, in L. Herrera and A. Bayat (eds), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North, Oxford University Press, New York NY. Masquelier, A. (2013) ‘Teatime: Boredom and the Temporalities of Young Men in Niger’, Africa, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 226–39. Pype, K. (2007) ‘Fighting Boys, Strong Men and Gorillas: Notes on the Imagination of Masculinities in Kinshasa’, Africa, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 250–71.

The YMCA | 197 Utas, M. (2012) ‘Introduction: Bigmanity and Network Governance in African conflicts’, in M. Utas (ed.), African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, Zed Books, London. Wacquant, L. (2004) Body & Soul, Oxford University Press, New York NY. Warren, S. (2003) ‘Is That an Action Man in There? Masculinity as an Imaginative Act of Self-Creation’, Discourse, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 3–18. Wright, D. (2004) The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia, Sharpe, New York NY.

CHAPTER 13 (Dis)locating masculinities: ethnographic reflections of British Muslim young men Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood

Introduction During the 1990s we carried out a series of ethnographies that explored the ways in which young men were making their identities in UK schools (Mac an Ghaill 1994; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 1996). Many of these studies specifically focused on South Asian young men, particularly in the northern part of England. Whilst researching in these schools we were struck by how Asian young men were often seen as overly feminine by other white and black young men and women. Such ascriptions were further exacerbated when the young Asian men held hands, when they welcomed their peers by kissing cheeks, and when they talked about the closeness in their communities and how they would go to and share prayers together. Asian boys often became easy targets for white and black young men to assert their masculinities against, and we witnessed many episodes of white and black young men bullying their South Asian peers. A projected crisis of masculinity at that cultural moment was associated with criminal black men, boys without fathers, and the threat of the radical ‘homosexualizing’ political Left. Asian boys posed little threat at that time, whether within the classroom, within the playground or across broader society. It appeared to us that the aesthetics of South Asian cultural codes were often conflated with designations of a lack of masculinity that in turn became a sign of femininity and/or homosexuality. One example of this was that the term ‘Paki’ was not only an ethnically

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charged racist category, but also operated as a form of homophobia (Mac an Ghaill 1994). Riedel (2009) has suggested homophobic abuse can often operate as a form of objectifying those who are seen as ‘non-indigenous’, and similarly it was clear to see that rivalries within schools were not simply about demonstrating an authentic masculinity, but also about showing a masculinity that was visibly heterosexual. Teachers in these schools often talked about Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men via the idiom of their overbearing Asian father who kept their sons on a ‘tight rein’ (and their daughters even more so). In our ethnographies, we found that teachers often rebuked South Asian families for being a little too controlling, but also admired them for the respect that they seemed to instil in their children. At the time, we heard many teachers wishing that more (white) children could be ‘like the Asian kids’. A decade later, after spending the day shadowing a group of 11–12 year olds, one of us boarded the local bus to go home after school. It was full of the usual bustle and noise. To the left sat a young Sikh boy. One of the older boys from a different school was pushed over by his friends, hitting some of the younger children as he fell. As he stood up, appearing to be embarrassed, he turned towards the Sikh boy and shouted, ‘What the fuck are you looking at you fucking Osama lover?’ His friends laughed as this time he deliberately dived on the floor, spreading his arms and legs shouting ‘suicide bomber, suicide bomber, incoming’. Followed by the whole group of older children, he got up and ran upstairs laughing. It was the early 2000s. As ethnographers, we were recognizing that masculinity was beginning to be played out differently (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2005). We were becoming increasingly aware how ethnic difference was not simply being framed through a sexual difference, but also through notions of religion: more specifically, a growing threat/danger of religious extremism. At the time, and in the subsequent years, we continued to return to the concept of (dis)located masculinities to help us think through how masculine subjectivities are being configured. The concept of (dis)location and its ability to capture the simultaneous articulations of power is highlighted by Edwards and Usher, who suggest that (dis)location is

200 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism where the bracket signifies that the location and dislocation are simultaneously moments always found together, a positioning simultaneously with one and many positions. (1997: 255) Holding on to multiple discourses of masculinity, sexuality, religion and ethnicity that both coalesce and contradict at the same time is difficult. In many ways it has been ethnography that has enabled us to engage with this difficulty by providing the space to explore the (dis)location of masculinity, as it is lived out and experienced by Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men. This chapter is part of a process of working through our current ethnographic research that is examining how Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men are experiencing multiple forms of (dis)locations, by exploring our participants’ experiences of representation, self-reflexivity and the nature of their lived-out realities.

Ethnographic representational space, generational censorship, and collective self-reflexivity Ethnography has provided us with the opportunity for ‘a consideration of the synchronic, simultaneous, changing contexts in which conflicting (often incompatible) discourses often operate’ (Foxhall 1994: 134). Throughout the research project, questions of contested understandings, interpretations and meanings have been central, operating within specific power/knowledge configurations. In their post-critical research approach, Noblit et al. (2004: 3) have suggested that ethnographers should not have to ‘choose between critical theory and interpretive ethnography’. In this research project we held onto the tension between a philosophical and critical hermeneutics (Haverkamp and Young 2007). By recognizing that ethnographic accounts are mutually constructed, it is possible to identify narratives that serve to unsettle current hegemonic research intelligibility. In so doing, a collective reflexivity and an accompanying conceptual reconfiguration of dominant epistemologies is accomplished. This reconfiguration facilitates a challenging of how state, media and academic discourses produce ways of knowing Muslim young men. One example of this is education policies that are framing the significance of Muslim men’s identities.

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Social geographers have highlighted the significance of time, space and place in identity formation (Massey 2005). Across Europe there have been a number of declarations that talk about the ‘death’ or ‘failure’ of multiculturalism. The implication is that ethnic/religious difference is creating spaces of cultural separation as minority ethnic groups do not integrate into Britain (Ragazzi 2015). In response, there is an emerging tension between the cultivation of the neoliberal subject and the identification of religious identities. McGhee argues that In national level debates . . . Britain has entered an authoritarian and ‘anti-multiculturalism’ period in which multiple identities, loyalties and allegiances are both problematized and are deployed in order to facilitate ‘our’ primary identifications as British citizens who must accept British values above all else. (2008: 145) The cultivation of primary identifications of Britishness is resonating with young Muslim men, who are increasingly subject to a state-led project of normalizing their masculinity. Institutional policies that are informed by issues of national security and vulnerability are drawing upon neoliberal ideologies of responsibilization to reduce the risk of Muslim radicalization (Miller 2006). Being the ‘right kind of man’ in the UK is more and more infused with values of individualization, economic entrepreneurialism and rational self-reflexivity (Phoenix 2004). The explicitness and the pervasiveness with which the government, media and state institutions project prescriptive images of the ‘good Muslim’ mean that young Muslim men must negotiate their masculinity within a context of current state discourses that project an imagined version of Islamic tradition and Muslim culture. The latter is assumed to be practised within specific spaces – the mosque, the madrasas, ethno-religious neighbourhood enclaves, and the home – which are projected as repositories of a regressive (extreme) Islamist religiosity. More specifically, within a context of securitization, the Muslim family is positioned as the central repository of the radicalization of young men as sons. An example of this emerges in the following group interview.

202 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Sajid: The normal way the government sees it is you have a little family, then the kids leave and go on their own. You see it around here where little old (white) ladies live really lonely lives, then they die and some son or daughter comes. Amazing! For us, it’s like the opposite, if you’re a son, you’ll look after all the family. That’s what it means to be a son or a father, you have lots of responsibilities. Me and my brothers even look after our neighbour (older white woman). Wasim: Same at school, where they talk about getting on, achieving, being a winner, and all that stuff. To get on is to get out, to leave your family and what they see as a bad area. But most of us want to stay and have a successful job. Yusuf: So, the government, schools push all this individual success stuff and I think they are suspicious of us for wanting to stick with our families and look after them. Majed: Yeah, somehow in their heads they mix up, well especially when they think of young Muslims (men) our way of life and start talking about the family and especially the community as a place for encouraging young people to become terrorists. How is this possible? Abdul: Because they know nothing about us. They just read each other’s reports. Majed’s account highlights how the spectre of the Muslim has become embedded within government policy. Lewis and Craig perceive the shift in government policy away from diversity and equality to a language of community cohesion, where The promotion of social integration and de-emphasizing of respect for diversity in favour of public adherence to British shared values, resulted in a drift away from, rather than an abandonment of, multiculturalism. (McGhee 2008, cited in Lewis and Craig 2014: 23) This ‘post-multiculturalism’ moment in UK national and local politics involved community groups being directed to remove ethnic/‘racial’ titles from the name of support organizations. According to Lewis and

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Craig, this was in order to meet government funding requirements. At the same time, the funding for Prevent, a government scheme set up to tackle religious extremism, directly targets Muslim communities. This in turn has led to feelings of isolation in such communities (Lewis and Craig 2014). It is these feelings of isolation and of being ‘othered’ by white authority figures that is explored in the following sections of this chapter.

(Dis)locating masculinities: the spectre of the young Muslim man We situate the specificity of our research participants’ experience of (dis)location within a broader epistemological frame – one in which we understand the cultural representation of British Muslim young men as an effect of a specific historical legacy of a British ethnoracial regime’s technology of looking (Hickman 2005; Said 1978). In Bhabha’s work on colonial discourse, he argues that colonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible: hence, in order to conceive of the colonial subject as an effect of power that is productive – disciplinary and ‘pleasurable’ – one has to see the surveillance of colonial power as functioning in relation to the regime of the scopic drive. (1994: 76) Crucially, we see the institutional context as central to the process of (dis)location, in terms of the response to young British Muslim men’s positioning. Ethnography enables an alternative representational space for this third generation of young Muslim men as post-colonial subjects to provide self-authorized narratives about the complexity of securing (dis)located masculine subjectivities across public and private spaces. It is within this representational space that the young men talk about their experiences in the neoliberal era of increasing socioeconomic inequalities (in housing, schooling, work and health), pervasive negative visibility across the media, and intensified forms of global, national and local monitoring and surveillance. In the public domain, they are subjct to a state-led project of normalizing their

204 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism masculinity with political and media discourses ascribing to them a highly contradictory masculine identity, in which they are represented as both potential jihadists and highly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment (Said 1993; Shain 2011; Dodd 2014). In the UK, Bangladeshi and Pakistani young men’s masculinities have become a significant media spectacle. Reports of extremism, radicalization and Jihadi recruitment operate to heighten levels of risk and vulnerability of young boys, whilst at the same time highlighting the risk of dangerous and harmful Muslim masculinities. Central to the power of these media reports is the ambiguity that surrounds vulnerability and danger, in that any Muslim at any time could be revealed as vulnerable/dangerous. The sensationalism of the media reports resonates with a cultural imaginary that highlights a group of young men who do not respect borders, positions, rules and subsequently ‘disturb identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). As Butler suggests, Identities operate . . . through the discursive construction of a constitutive outside . . . of abjected and marginalized subjects . . . which return to trouble and unsettle the foreclosures which we prematurely call identities. (1993: 22) At the same time, the young men in this study are subjectively negotiating the discursive construction of Muslim identities. They are experiencing such changes in terms of dynamic dissonances that are (re)constituting their remembering of the past, the living and doing of the present and their imagined futures. This process is illustrated through the negotiation of the meanings attached to being Muslim. With young men’s ambivalence towards generationally specific ways of being Muslim men, based upon culturally infused religious identities and their rejection of masculinities underpinned by violence, identifications have involved reconfiguring the meaning of Muslim. In discussion with the young men, they explain that the increasing mobilization of the term Muslim as a collective self-referent – seen in the research literature as highly significant in terms of their changing self-definition – does not mean that a young generation of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are becoming more religious.

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Farhad: Obviously most people don’t think about it. They’d call themselves Muslim ’cos that’s just what they are. A lot of them are religious, if they call themselves Muslim. Imran: Yes and no. If you call yourself Muslim, it is a religious thing and it’s not. Different people have different meanings, like younger and older people. Depends on lots of things, where you are, who you’re with, why you’re calling yourself that (Muslim). Tamim: Our grandparents and uncles were new to this country, so they probably kept their heads down. But for us, we’re born here. We’re British and Muslim and we’ll show that. We have no choice, that’s who we are. Naqeeb: Yes, there’s all the differences between different Muslim people around the world but there is also a togetherness, we see it as a strength. But the authorities see it as a threat, a threat to them, don’t know why. (Group interview) In seeking to expand the concept of Muslim, the young men provide a more nuanced picture, pointing to its instability, its contextually specific meaning. Importantly, they make a distinction between their own self-definition as Muslims, embedded within a generationally specific cultural politics, and the state’s racialized use of the term that is deployed in framing their community (Said 1993). They experience the former as opening up the creative potential for self-authorization, self-expression and agency, while the latter serves to contain them, as part of wider state and institutional regulatory and disciplining practices. They are aware, as a third generation of Muslims, of shifting dominant public narratives about their lives: from an ascribed image as law-abiding citizens (their grandfathers and fathers) to the current image of dangerous brown men (as sons) (Bhattacharrya 2008), who carry an anti-British ethnicity (Shain 2011). In short, they inhabit public personae that officially are perceived as constituting the most visible high-risk component of a suspect community. Imran: It’s like when gay people come out. They’re not saying, we want to have sex with a man. It’s not about sex. They’re

206 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism saying, you try and define us but we’re defining ourselves. We’re proud to be different. It’s about not hiding away but getting respect for yourself, for your community. For me personally it’s the same with calling myself Muslim. But it’s my definition, nothing to do with how others like politicians tell us who we are. (Life history interview) In reading these narratives, it is important to note the global Muslim diaspora is nationally and ethnically a highly diverse population. For example, within a North American context the Muslim is popularly represented as Arab; within a British context the popular representation is often as South Asian (Pakistani and Bangladeshi). In earlier work we have found that ethnography has the capacity to enable an alternative representational space for research participants (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003). Like Munt we have sought to analyse the context of the Muslim young men’s securing of intricate subjectivities and identities ‘as they have formed historically within composite cultural narratives lodged in representation’ (2008: 15).

Living different (social and spatial) realities A key theme to emerge from the research was that the young men felt that minority ethnic communities and white authority figures experienced different realities. They identified a number of issues that discursively served to position their generation as the city’s major ‘racial other’, exemplified, for example, in the claim that Muslims are the least likely of any ethnic minority community in the city to integrate. For the young men, the city of Birmingham has become increasingly racially segregated over the last decade, and apart from their white friends with whom they have grown up in local neighbourhoods, their main contact with white adults was their interaction with teachers There was a constant official inverting of social reality as they experienced it, in which Muslims were represented as being against multiculturalism by forming parallel communities and self-segregation (Kundnani 2009). This is

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part of a wider public narrative about young Muslim men, who are projected as figures of anti-modernity, who have broken the British multicultural consensus forged in the 1970s. Tahir: My parents say that the schools around here have got more and more segregated over the last twenty years and government and media say this is evidence of Muslims not wanting to integrate. It’s amazing. It’s them (white people) who won’t live here. Raqib: We discussed this at school. Like our teachers, the white teachers, some of them are really good, don’t get me wrong. But we asked them, how come you won’t live round here? How come you won’t send your kids here? And they earn their living here. Mairtin: What do they say? Raqib: What can they say? We’re not living with you lot! But in the past teachers did send their kids to local schools. Now they have all this language, like ‘school run’. Iftikhar: Yeah, running away from the ethnics. Ali: Of course, they think we don’t know. They’ve got their own way of speaking to each other, like a secret code about us. (Group interview) Ethnographic research enabled nuanced and complex narratives to emerge beyond any single analytical research lens. For example, the research focus on Muslim young men’s lives often began by eliciting a discussion structured in terms that emphasized a (gendered) ethno-religious category and an accompanying oppositional logic – a Muslim–white dualism. However, as the research progressed a multi-dimensional aspect developed, particularly with reference to the concepts of generation, class, nation and region. Qureshi (2001) found that a group of young Pakistani men in her research made their masculinities through the ‘othering’ of young white men. One of the characteristics of the young men in our research was that the process of ‘othering’ of whiteness was seen as a characteristic of an older form of Muslim identity; an identification to which these

208 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism young men held a growing ambivalence. In the following extract the young men’s narratives highlight the intensified class division across Britain and make links with a long history of the demonization of the working class and working-class youth through which the middle class have established their identities (Lawler 2005). As Reay argues, with the current restructuring of schooling, the ‘very old class processes of exclusivity and exclusion are played out in the educational context of markets and choice’ (2004: 1006). The young men are witnessing how the inner-city working-class schools are the definitive ideological ‘no-go areas’ for the middle classes in the local material and symbolic production of their identities and that of their children. They provided a range of insights into the dis-identification of (white) teachers with white working-class students.

Abdul: They say we don’t integrate but like if you really look at it, Muslims want to live in this area. They call it a poor area but there are people who’re rich here. Like we think of this place as our home, we make it our home. But white people, especially posh whites, they don’t think about making this area their home or their family really belonging here. You talk to the teachers. They’re not born here (in Birmingham) an’ they and their kids will move just to get a better job, bigger house or better school to send their kids to, to get away from the ethnics, really. Azam: To be fair, it’s not really whites but the posh ones. Like our (white) mates round here live like us. When people look at this area, they see all the Muslims, as though they’ve cut off from white people. But if you live here you know it’s really about white posh people not wanting to live with us or the white people round here. Shoaib: It’s really, it often looks like teachers and police dislike, or don’t understand white kids more than us. I think they don’t like poor people. They don’t like people who are supposed to be like them but aren’t like them. Parvez: For the teachers, we’re seen as having too much culture that they feel they can’t be part of and the white kids are seen

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as having no culture, so the teachers don’t want to be around them. They’re afraid of us and hate them. Shoaib: I think our (white) mates are right, teachers look down on them more even than us. Parvez: Well, in a bad way, differently. (Group interview) Adapting Buckley’s (1997) analysis of young Irish women in Britain, any theoretical framework that seeks to locate young Muslim men in British society will be a complex one. This is because Muslim communities stand at the intersection of many powerful political forces that contrast with each other across the staging of their bodies, their labour and their sense of self. Nevertheless, as Buckley continues, we cannot reach them through many of the theoretical discourses traditionally used to discuss identities of difference in Britain. This difference, as we have seen, is a highly politicized process. As Tolson (2014: 285) suggests, ‘this neoliberal regime of truth does not recognize social so much as moral categories of persons and it constructs interpersonal problems as gendered moral/individual deficiencies to be both displayed and shamed’. A genealogical approach makes it clear that such traditional discourses not only regulate our understandings, but also institute the impossibility of rethinking the cultural dynamics of this group of young men’s way of looking at and being in the social world.

Conclusion In revisiting Cornwall and Lindisfarne’s (1994) Dislocating Masculinity, it may now be difficult not to imagine masculinity as a major analytical and political concept in making sense of gender relations. Dislocating Masculinity is one of the key texts that have helped to establish masculinity within a research context, and remains a central cultural resource for future work on ethnography, gender and masculinity (see Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2012). An emphasis in our research has been to challenge an understanding of masculinity read through fixed singular categories. In this chapter we have highlighted the contextual specificities of

210 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men’s lives, as they try to negotiate the post-multicultural moment of social cohesiveness, whilst at the same time recognizing that social and cultural differences are ascribed. The implication is that the dynamics through which masculinities are made may use a different and more complex set of values, as suggested by Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) in an earlier period, in their discussion of masculinities and the ‘macho man’. Currently, it could be argued that with the emergence of self-reflexive subjects in globally inflected conditions of late modernity, British masculinities are characterized by feelings of fragmentation, ambivalence and anxiety. Within this context, we have found it productive to think through the securing of masculine subjectivities as (dis)located across traditional ethnic/‘racial’ and more contemporary religious identity formations.

References Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, Routledge, Abingdon. Bhattacharrya, G. (2008) Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror, Zed Books, London. Buckley, M. (1997) ‘Sitting on your Politics: The Irish among the British and the Women among the Irish’, in J. MacLaughlin (ed.), Dislocation in Contemporary Society: Emigration and Irish Identities, Cork University Press, Cork. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Routledge, New York NY. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (1994) ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Dodd, V. (2014) ‘Threat of Extremist Attack in UK is Escalating, say Police’, The Guardian, 17 October, pp. 1–2. Edwards, R. and R. Usher (1997) ‘Final Frontiers? Globalization, Pedagogy and (Dis)location’, Curriculum Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 253–67. Foxhall, L. (1994) ‘Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Haverkamp, B. E. and R. A. Young (2007) ‘Paradigms, Purpose and the Role of Literature: Formulating a Rationale for Qualitative Investigations’, The Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 265–94. Haywood, C. and M. Mac an Ghaill (1996) ‘Schooling Masculinities’, in M. Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas, Open University Press, Buckingham. Haywood, C. and M. Mac an Ghaill (2003) Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research and Social Practice, Open University Press, Buckingham.

British Muslim young men | 211 Haywood, C. and M. Mac an Ghaill (2005) Young Bangladeshi People’s Experience of Transition to Adulthood, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York. Haywood, C. and M. Mac an Ghaill (2012) ‘What’s Next for Masculinity? Reflexive Directions for Theory and Research on Masculinity and Education’, Gender and Education, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 577–92. Hickman, M. J. (2005) ‘Ruling an Empire, Governing a Multinational State: The Impact of Britain’s Historical Legacy on the Ethno-racial Regime’, in G. C. Loury, T. Modood and S. M. Teles (eds), Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (trans. Leon S. Roudiez), Columbia University Press, New York NY. Kundnani, A. (2009) Spooked! How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism, Institute of Race Relations, London. Lawler, S. (2005) ‘Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-class Identities’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 429–46. Lewis, H. and G. Craig (2014) ‘Multiculturalism Is Never Talked about’: Community Cohesion and Local Policy Contradictions in England’, Policy & Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 21–38. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994) The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling, Open University Press, Buckingham. Massey, D. (2005) For Space, Sage, London. McGhee, D. (2008) The End of Multiculturalism: Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights, Open University Press, Buckingham. Miller, B. (2006) ‘The Globalization of Fear’, in D. Conway and N. Heynen (eds), Globalization’s Dimensions: Forces of Discipline, Destruction and Resistance, Routledge, New York NY. Munt, S. (2008) Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, Ashgate, Aldershot. Noblit, G. W., S. Flores and E. G. Murillo (2004) ‘Postcritical Ethnography: An Introduction’, in G. W. Noblit, S. Y. Flores and E. G. Murillo (eds), Postcritical Ethnography: Reinscribing Critique, Hampton, Cresskill NJ. Phoenix, A. (2004) ‘Neoliberalism and Masculinity: Racialization and the Contradictions of Schooling for 11–14 Year Olds’, Youth and Society, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 227–46. Qureshi, K. (2001) ‘Respected and Respectable: The Centrality of “Performance” and “Audiences” in the (Re)production and Potential Revision of Gendered Ethnicities’, Particip@tions, Vol. 1, No. 2. Ragazzi, F. (2015) ‘Policed Multiculturalism? The Impact of Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Radicalization and the “End” of Multiculturalism’, in C. BakerBeal, C. Heath-Kelly and L. Jarvis (eds), Counter-Radicalization: Critical Perspectives, Routledge, Abingdon. Reay, D. (2004) ‘“Mostly Roughs and Toughs”: Social Class, Race and Representation in Inner City Schooling’, Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 1005–23. Riedel, B. (2009) ‘Stolen Kisses: Homophobia as “Racism” in Contemporary Urban Greece’, in D. Murray (ed.), Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space, Duke University Press, Durham NC.

212 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Said, E. W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London. Shain, F. (2011) The New Folk Devils: Muslim Boys and Education in England, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent. Tolson, A. (2014) ‘Moments of Truth: Telling It Like It Is on the Jeremy Kyle Show’, in N. Lorenzo-Dus and P. C. G. Blitvich (eds), Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

CHAPTER 14 Football field, bar, and street corner: sports, space, and masculinities in rural Jamaica William Tantam

Introduction Monday to Friday Mr Bloom would return home from his accountancy firm as close to 5 p.m. as possible. Opening the ‘burglar bars’ protecting his house from would-be burglars, he would call out ‘You ready William?’ before going into his room to change into his football gear. A few minutes later Mr Bloom would emerge in tatty football shirt, shorts, and socks, his shin pads and football boots in his hands. We would get into his pickup truck, locking the burglar bars behind us. Starting up the occasionally stubborn Chevrolet pickup, he would reverse out of the garden before putting the truck into drive and accelerating forwards, sending the stray dogs guarding the neighbour’s house skittering in different directions. We’d bounce along the dirt road that ran between Black River and New Town, a community with less affluence, typified by half-finished houses and corrugated iron shops selling cigarettes, crisps, and cold drinks. As we approached the turning, Mr Bloom would slow down, eyes peeled for football shirts, ‘A Rasta dat?’ he would ask, wondering whether a man with dreadlocks by the side of the road was Rasta, one of the football players. ‘Maybe we should carry on!’ he would joke, before pulling off the road to allow Rasta to jump in the back. Others would arrive over the course of the next hour. Play would commence after the ‘bus’ – an estate car carrying 5–7 players from New Town – arrived. This chapter is about football, masculinities, and class in Black River, Jamaica. Inspired by Wacquant’s study of boxers in Body

214 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism and Soul (2004), I went to Black River in order to study the impact of football on understandings of masculinities in a town whose major industries had suffered significant decline. I was interested in exploring how, through the learning of football, class hierarchies became embodied and enacted. C. L. R. James’s seminal Beyond a Boundary (2005) showed how sport and colonial politics were intimately intertwined in the experiences of both Caribbean peoples and Caribbean migrants. As Kanitkar argued in Dislocating Masculinity, within certain colonial contexts ‘class and race values [became] institutionalized on and through the sports field’ (1994: 188). Indeed, in the literature on football, Archetti (1999) on Argentina and Leite Lopes on Brazil (1997) have both highlighted the intersections of colonialism and the colonial legacy, sport, and the construction of images of the normatively imagined citizen’s body. Sports became manifestations of the idealized body, and the sports field an arena in which such idealizations might be reimagined, challenged, and overturned. While such analyses of the relationship between sports and the normatively envisaged male body are important, I wanted to look at everyday football. In Jamaica, as it turns 5 p.m., empty patches of ground throughout the island suddenly undergo a metamorphosis into football fields. Each field carries its own webs of relationships and layers of meaning. I wanted to take one of these fields and analyse its importance for those who play, in the manner of Kerrigan’s (2012) study of a Trinidadian ‘small-goal’ football field. The football field in Black River is one of the few spaces in which young, precariously employed men interact with older, well-employed men, and therefore offers an opportunity for understanding processes involving the embodiment of different ways of being a man. In what follows, I give an ethnographic account of amateur Jamaican football, focusing on how what it means to be a man in this context intersects with ideas of age, wealth, and class. I concentrate on the social construction of the space of the football field in terms of age and class hierarchies, exploring socio-spatial divides – including the exclusion of women from these spaces – by following players between the football field and the bar/street corner.

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On the field The matches mainly comprised 8 to 14 players, fluctuating depending on the weather and other factors. To the left of the playing area there was a steep bank, and to the right an open field spreading for a couple of kilometres. During play, it was understood that players wouldn’t run with the ball too far away from the centre of the playing area, although theoretically they were free to do so, and normally one of the players vying for the ball would break off his attack and return to the main area of the field. Each of the goal ends were understood to be in line with the small, thigh-high cast-iron goals, and it was the goalkeeper’s job to call out ‘It gone!’ if the ball crossed this imaginary line. On many occasions, the goalkeeper would disagree with players on his own team over whether the ball had ‘gone’ or not, and would most commonly say that it had not gone over the line, when his teammates had said it had. There was no referee, so it was up to the players to be honest about whether they had committed a foul, or for the other players to administer the rules of the game. There were rarely fights. Arguments would normally end with one of the older players giving his opinion on the matter, and play would resume. The winning team would gain ‘bragging rights’ over the losing team and, often, would avail themselves of the opportunity after the match to goad and tease the players from the other team. Women rarely came to the field. Some women stayed sitting in the car by the side of the field on two occasions, and only once did a couple of younger women stand by the side of the field (to take photos for a university project). Although there are increasing numbers of women playing football in Jamaica, encouraged in part by state and NGO sponsorship of sports as part of social development programmes, football remains largely a sport for men to play and consume. Although many women go to watch the schoolboy football matches, Jamaica’s most popular domestic league, this support does not extend to their playing football in their free time, or following other football leagues. The teams themselves remained fairly constant evening to evening. One team was comprised of older men, and the other was a younger or ‘rebel’ side. The older men were wealthy members of the community

216 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism who had, for the most part, received higher education (mostly up to university level) in Jamaica and/or abroad. They included a doctor, an accountant, a high school teacher and several local businessmen. Most had attended a prestigious boarding school near Black River that boasts government ministers, international authors, and a Prime Minister of Jamaica as alumni. Austin (1983) suggests that class in Jamaica is legitimated through preferential access to education by wealthier families. On the Black River football field, this was to a large extent dictated by whether the player had gone to Black River High School, or to the prominent private boarding school a little way outside of town that was reputed to have produced more Rhodes scholars than any other secondaryeducation establishment in the Caribbean. Ideas of education were often invoked when understanding the different playing styles (and the success rates) of the older and younger teams on the field. The older team had an informally agreed style of football which valued passing over doing tricks and the efficiency of the team over the skilfulness of the individual. Distinctions of class on the football field overlapped with age distinctions, as the higher-class players were older, while the younger ones were lower-class. The older men had much more disposable income than many in the area, and were understood to be better off than the majority. Their children, in some cases of similar age to the ‘rebel’ side, were for the most part in the US working or studying at prominent universities, or, if younger, were attending one of the prestigious boarding schools near to the town.

Sensible football: the older players Mr Wilson was one of the regular older players. Although he was slightly atypical in that he hadn’t attended a prestigious school, he was a respected secondary school teacher in the community. He was also one of the senior members of the high-brow Anglican Church. He had played football throughout his life, on university teams, work teams, and then the more informal games that I took part in. He termed the older team’s style of play ‘sensible football’ and said:

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I think basically the ball does more of the work. That is . . . almost a physical necessity, aahm, so we will pass a lot. The other thing is that we try to keep things as simple as possible, and stay out of trouble as much as we can. Aahm. For me, and I assume for the other people, I think we also try to use our brains to play the football more than the younger men appear to do. Although not one of the fastest nor the most skilful, Mr Wilson worked hard to maintain the structure of the older side, and would vociferously chastise or praise pieces of play depending on whether they conformed to his idea of sensible football or not. He also loudly remonstrated with any player who tried to continue to play after there had been a foul, picking the ball up if he could and marching it back to the spot where the offence had taken place. If the older team won a free kick, he would frequently step up to take it himself, and drill it extremely hard towards the opposition’s goal. Whenever I played on the younger side, I would quietly try to stand anywhere else than between the free kick and the goal; the power of Mr Wilson’s shots was certainly no joke! One point that emerged repeatedly in talking to players from both the older and the younger team was the distinction between the ‘intelligent’ football played by the older team and the individuality (some of the players called it ‘selfishness’) of the younger team. Hidden behind the discussion of football was an implicit justification of the older men’s wealth and status in the community in terms of intelligence. However, to see the football field only in terms of the justification of privilege would entirely miss the different approaches to the field by the two groups. The younger players would not necessarily want to win the football match if that meant compromising their individual enjoyment of the game. Conversely, the older players would not enjoy the games if they were simply a series of demonstrations of skill. The younger players made this explicit when talking with me, one telling me that he came out to play ‘my ball’ and not to have to listen to other people telling him what to do. Another described it saying: Out a Ashton i really sound like, a fat man deh, ‘im bad, all mi play for a salad.1 Salad a di big ting now, see it’s a real fun we

218 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism do dis fuh now. Yuh see we na really a do dis fi, like, like it’s a match ting. You no wan lose same way, don’t get me wrong, but yu no we a have fun.2 The teams, therefore, were not only comprised of younger and older, precariously employed and stably employed, and poor and wealthy men, but also involved a difference in understandings of how to enjoy and play football on this rural field. Many of these differences would also emerge as I socialized with the players away from the action.

‘Bragging rights’: the ‘rebel’ side The rebel side were younger men, most of whom had left education after high school (18 years old). Many were precariously employed as handymen or in cash-in-hand jobs. Moreover, many had only been able to stay at high school from 16 to 18 on the basis of their football ability, which gave them a scholarship to play for the schoolboy football team. In some schools, this scholarship meant that you got all of your food paid for, as well as somewhere to stay during the football season. Unofficially, many of the schoolboy football players were allowed to skip a significant number of their school classes, and many left high school with poor educational attainment. Currently this system is undergoing significant change, as increasingly schools are insisting on minimal educational attainments for playing in the school team, which must be maintained throughout the season. In contrast to the older team’s style of play, the rebel side did not have a coherent style. In many cases, the team played as a squad of virtuosos, which meant that the older team won many more matches than they lost. Some refused to play on the older team, even when numbers dictated that some needed to cross, and would say that they came to play ‘[their] ball’ rather than to be told which passes to play or where to run. Frankie was one of the keenest players on the younger side. He had attended the local high school, and had played in all of his school teams from primary school up until the schoolboy under-18 league. He had also represented the parish (similar to the English county) at various levels, and played in the league just below the Jamaican Premier League. Although he admitted to running a little more slowly

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compared to his schooldays, he was still one of the best ball controllers on the field, and had an impressive sense of the game around him. He was a midfielder in the classic mould, receiving the ball, looking up, giving a neat pass or a quick piece of skill, moving up the field, then running back to defend against the older team’s next attack. In contrast to Mr Wilson, he thought of football in a very different way. As well as understanding the need to work for the good of the team, Frankie also emphasized the personal enjoyment to be taken from the game, saying: Mi seh no. Dat a sometimes a even, even when yuh play ball sometimes an yuh see mi a dribble i ball. A because a dat yuh no, cos mi a seh yo, why a mi haffi work fi ball an just carry fi yu an all yuh a go do a go kick cross an so, an dem stand up back. . . . So, mi nuh see sense. Mi seh no suh! But sometimes yuh no, a man in a position weh yu haffi give him di ball because he inna di right place, but sometimes mi seh no suh. Mi just tek it and dribble it, an if yuh lose it sometime, a so i go. Mi just seh why, why, why yuh haffi do all a di work, a just carry i come gi yu. . . . No man, y’have tek it an do y’own ting, have some fun fi yourself man.3 Frankie’s reflection is important as it suggests that the younger team knows how to play ‘intelligent’ football, but chooses to play differently. While Mr Wilson took enjoyment from winning matches through a structured, utilitarian approach to football, by contrast Frankie took pleasure and ‘fun’ by sometimes acting individually. Evidently, there is some slip between what is good for the individual and what is good for the team, as frequently the two overlap. However, what I argue is that the two teams approach football in different ways, and these different approaches reflect broader differences in the two groups’ understandings of being a man and homosociality.

Socializing and sociality off the pitch When the matches ended, the players ambled off the field. Almost all of the older men would leave within a few minutes after a cursory

220 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism ‘Gentlemen, tomorrow!’ If Mr Bloom had given me a lift to the match, I would leave with him and we would drive back to a bar in town, where some of the older players would reassemble. If there weren’t enough ‘drives’ for the younger players, Mr Bloom might also drop some off on the way into Black River. The bar was attached to the most popular hotel in the town, and was part of a decaying Georgian building. Although there were no restrictions on who could go into it, among people in the town it was generally understood to be a bar for ‘society people’, and was slightly more expensive than other bars. Indeed, at the very popular New Year’s party at the bar, many would refuse to go inside to buy drinks and would instead resolutely stand outside. The men bought drinks in rounds, and we would all take it in turns to buy our round, although this was made explicit only very rarely. Nobody ever questioned or challenged a man for what he asked for during a round, and even when I ordered expensive rum the man whose round it was would always encourage me to drink more of it. Conversations revolved around domestic and international politics, local and national business, and the goings-on in town. We might also discuss the Premier League and, less frequently, the amateur matches we played. Mr Bloom’s wife ran the bar, and her mother owned the hotel. The bar staff were all young women in their late teens and early twenties, while all of the kitchen staff were young men of similar ages. On starting work at the bar, the women would be taught to say ‘Good night’ (a form of greeting rather than farewell in the Caribbean) to the customer, and had to remain vigilant for the moment when men, nearing the end of their drinks, would ask, ‘You want another round?’ Although women were allowed to come to the bar, they did so only rarely. Occasionally Mrs Bloom would have an evening with her friends at the bar, when they would play cards and joke together, or one of the men would bring his wife. More frequently, however, a man would bring his girlfriend (as opposed to his wife) to the bar. On occasions when Mr Bloom did not give me a lift to the game, I would stay at the field after the match was finished to chat with the younger players. They might stay at the field for upwards of an hour, chatting about the Premier League and other sports like basketball.

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They also chatted a lot about what had happened during the evening’s match, with players vying to give their version of a trick they had done, or a particular skill they had used to beat an opponent. Often half-joking, light-hearted arguments would erupt over who was the better player, and who could ‘kill off’4 the other one. The men would also talk about girls, and trade pictures and stories of their different sexual experiences. Many of the men had fathered children, and spoke of the difficulties of juggling ‘baby mothers’ (the mothers of their children) and ‘wives’ (long-term girlfriends). None of the younger men were married. One of the older players decided that he no longer wanted to socialize so much with the other older players, and began to stay at the field to chat with the younger guys. He characterized the difference between the conversations at the bar and those among the younger guys like this: Y’know, and it would be all the intelligent guys together and all the educated guys together [the older players], y’know they would be talking, nobody wanted to talk real crap, it just more about, I, as the end of the football, at the end of football I don’t want to be sitting down and talking about politics . . . I want to be talking about rubbish, y’undestand? After a while, the men would drive back to New Town, and resume the same conversations while sitting on a brick wall outside one of the players’ houses. Bottles of beer might appear and be passed around, and talk of the evening’s match would resume. The team that had won the match could ‘brag’ over the other team for that evening. Occasionally a woman would walk past the group, and, if they knew her, the men would greet her. Other times, a man’s baby mother would call him up or stop by in a car to talk to him for a few minutes. After these conversations had ended, the men would talk about the demands of having children and meeting the demands of their baby mother. Also, men would intermittently be called inside to help with their children, before returning outside again to chat. No women would come to stand and chat. Children were not allowed to stand outside with the men, and would be chastised and told to return into the house if they came out.

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Inscribing difference From the drive to the football field, through the football game itself, and the socializing at the bar, the field, and the street corner, the differences between those men who were wealthy and educated and those who were not were continually reinscribed. Although the football field might appear to some as a space for egalitarian competition, and a space for the improvement of employment opportunities for those seeking work, instead it is constructed in such a way as to replicate the structural inequalities experienced away from it. Moreover, the style of play that typified each team in many ways was informed by, and, in terms of what was ‘learnt’ on the field, in turn informed socializing away from the field. The older team’s more egalitarian, intelligent football was transplanted into the space of the bar where they talked of politics and held ‘intelligent’ conversations while buying drinks in rounds – further establishing them as a group with shared modes of communication and enjoyment. By contrast, the younger team’s more virtuosic, individual style of football, when transplanted to the side of the football field and the street corner, re-emerged as a competition over bragging rights, tales of carnal conquests, and conversations consisting of ‘rubbish’. However, these conversations were anything but about rubbish, as they continually revolved around competition between the individuals. Through a shared acceptance of the role of competition in the establishment of an understanding of what it meant to be a young man in this context, competition actually emerged as something that connected, rather than broke apart, the group. Moreover, for the older team buying in rounds became a source of conflict when men felt that they were being missed out of rounds. The relative absence of women in the three spaces – the football field, the bar, and the street corner – made it clear that these were spaces for men. On the football field, women were implicitly (if not explicitly) proscribed from entering the field. It was a space for men to express themselves and compete over what it meant to be a successful man. In the bar, women appeared as quiet girlfriends and obsequious bar staff, while away from the bar the men’s wives cooked dinner for them at home. On the street corner, women entered in the guise of

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fleeting conversations, disembodied calls from behind the front door or through the mobile phone – but, once again, were proscribed from entering the men’s space. One man, speaking of his wife, said: She just nuh understand. And she upset, nuff times she get upset. But she must understand . . . yeah, like, like sum’n did wrong wi dat. Because, alright she seh she want mi to spend time with her at home, so mi a seh, ‘Wi nuh spend time after football, wha yu mean?’5 These spaces were thus constructed through the multivalent associations of what it meant to be a young/old, wealthy/less-wealthy, and well-employed/precariously employed man – and through the exclusion of women outside of their roles as girlfriends, mothers, and wives.

Conclusion I am frequently asked, and find myself asking, ‘Why do the older, wealthier men play these football games?’ Part of the reason was for the exercise. Another part of the reason was habit. Yet, I think that there was something more going on at the football field. Two facets in particular stand out. First, in their interviews, many of the older players talked of having an interest in helping the younger men to succeed away from the football field. From my ethnography, I have concluded that there was an apprenticeship happening on the football field in which the older players were transmitting knowledge to the younger players, albeit in an informal, often unvocalized manner. Second, Mr Bloom talked of how important it was for the wealthy in the town to make sure that they were not seen as ‘separating themselves’ from those who were not so fortunate, and thus also to try to avoid incidents of violent crime aimed at people perceived to be wealthy as happened elsewhere in Jamaica. The older players therefore played football against the younger players in an attempt informally to transmit lessons in successful social mobility, through embodied metaphors offered on the football field. This worked to create relationships across economic

224 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism hierarchies that had the potential to avoid economic conflict. By contrast, the younger players talked of playing football in order to escape the boredom of feeling trapped in a town unable to give them the opportunities they felt were open to other young people elsewhere. Lacking the necessary economic means for migration, and the qualifications for careers that they felt would be fulfilling, many frequently talked of how boring they found their lives in Black River – a boredom no doubt similar to that experienced by young men elsewhere (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Mains 2007; Masquelier 2005). Watching and playing football offered opportunities to escape this boredom and was, therefore, an expression of the young men’s inability to experience social mobility, in contrast to the older players’ reading of the game. For the younger men, football offered a response to wider socioeconomic marginalization as they were caught in precarious employment situations attenuated by the global financial crash in 2008. Due to poor educational attainment caused, in part, by their focus on schoolboy football to the detriment of their studies, by the increasing restrictions placed upon the migration of ‘unskilled’ Jamaican workers by the US, and by the shrinking of domestic employment opportunities, many of the younger men faced uncertain futures. It was also unclear how they could improve their socioeconomic positions. Both the competition of the football field and the bragging rights after match wins, however, offered them means for ‘social navigation’ (Vigh 2009: 97) through which they could improve their positions within their peer group hierarchy. The older men saw the football field as a means towards maintaining their health and strength. The sport offered a way to remain physically active and competitive with younger opponents. Playing was related to maintaining a strong back, which indicated both bodily strength and sexual functionality. The matches were one response to the processes of ageing and a symbolic way to preserve their hierarchical position over the younger men. Playing football was therefore a response to challenges posed by ageing and expectation. Lacking opportunities, the younger players were unable to realize their ambitions and could not attain the economic independence that was expected of successful men. By

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contrast, the older players had attained economic independence but had begun to feel the loss of bodily strength brought on by ageing. The football field emerged as a space for the men to improve their position within hierarchies of masculinities, and the possibilities offered by such a space contrasted with the increasing social and economic limitations felt in Jamaican communities in the aftermath of the financial crash.

Notes 1 A ‘salad’ is a trick a player uses to get past an opponent. Frequently, it is accomplished by pushing the ball through the opponent’s legs, and then running round them. 2 ‘Out at Ashton it really sounds like the fat man there, he’s bad, all he plays for is a salad. Salad is the big thing now, see it’s really fun we play for now. You see we don’t really do this for like a match thing. You don’t want to lose, all the same, but you know we have fun.’ 3 ‘I say no. That’s sometimes even, even when you play ball sometimes and you see me dribble the ball. It’s because of that you know, because I say yo, why do I have to work for the ball and just carry it for you and you just go and kick a cross or whatever, and they just stand up [without running back to help]. So, I don’t see any sense. I say no sir! But sometimes you know, a man’s in a position where you have to give him the ball because he’s in the right place, but sometimes I say no sir. I just take it and dribble it, and if you lose it sometimes, that’s how it goes. I just say why, hey, why you have to do all of the work, and just carry it and give it to you. . . . No man, you have to take it and do your own thing, have some fun for yourself man.’ 4 To ‘kill’ in this context meant to ‘beat’, ‘get past’, or, in the particular context of football, to ‘nutmeg’ (i.e. to push the ball through the opponent’s legs and run past them). 5 ‘She just doesn’t understand. And she’s upset, lots of times she gets upset. But she must understand . . . yeah, like, like something’s wrong with that. Because, alright, she says she wans me to spend time with her at home, so I say, “We don’t spend time after football, what do you mean?”’

References Archetti, E. P. (1999) Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina, Berg, Oxford. Austin, D. J. (1983) ‘Culture and Ideology in the English Speaking Caribbean: A View from Jamaica’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 223–40. Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff (2000) ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 291–343. James, C. L. R. (2005) Beyond a Boundary (originally published 1963), Yellow Jersey, London.

226 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Kanitkar, H. (1994) ‘“Real True Boys”: Moulding the Cadets of Imperialism’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Kerrigan, D. (2012) ‘White Supremacy versus Gangsterism on the Small-Goal Football Field’, Anthropology Now, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 7–14. Leite Lopes, J. S. (1997) ‘Successes and Contradictions in “Multiracial” Brazilian Football’, in R. Giulianotti and G. Armstrong (eds), Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football, Berg, Oxford. Mains, D. (2007) ‘Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 659–73. Masquelier, A. (2005) ‘The Scorpion’s Sting: Youth Marriage and the Struggle for Social Maturity in Niger’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 59–83. Vigh, H. (2009) ‘Wayward Migration: On Imagined Futures and Technological Voids’, Ethnos, Vol. 74, No. 1, pp. 91–109. Wacquant, L. (2004) Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Oxford University Press, New York NY.

CHAPTER 15 Ducks, dogs, and men: ‘natural’ masculinities in New Zealand duck hunting Carmen McLeod

Introduction Understandings of gender are inextricably linked with ideas of nature. In New Zealand ‘the rural’ and ‘the masculine’ are strongly interrelated. Even though the majority of people in New Zealand live urban lifestyles, the stereotype of the ‘Kiwi’ male as pioneering, self-sufficient and strongly tied to the land is still a potent motif found in advertising and popular culture. These ideas are also bound up with constructions of nationalism and rural discourse aligning duck hunting with the traditional New Zealand male (Matahaere-Atariki 1999; Phillips 1996; Connell 2005). Unlike hunting practices in the UK and other parts of the world, social class does not play a major role in structuring contemporary duck shooting practices in New Zealand. Indeed, duck hunting in New Zealand is still imbued with ‘a deep-rooted egalitarian ethos’ (Stewart 2013) associated with the goals of the nineteenthcentury British settler society to establish a non-elitist hunting system (McLeod 2004). In the contemporary context, this construction of a ‘natural’, traditional masculine, and egalitarian New Zealand duckhunting experience is enacted against a political landscape strongly shaped by the implementation of a neoliberal agenda. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter explores the relationships between duck hunters, ducks, and dogs, examining their dynamics and contradictions as they come to encapsulate a complex mix of pragmatic exploitation and emotional attachment. Following Cornwall and Lindisfarne’s (1994: 4) urging to ‘describe

228 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism the multiplicity of competing masculine identities in any given setting’, this chapter acknowledges a range of (often competing) masculinities that are part of framing duck hunting as a traditionally ‘macho’ activity. It focuses on three kinds of duck hunting: the dedicated duck hunters who shoot all season, often alone or with a couple of companions and without alcohol; the blokes-only duck hunters who go hunting on the opening weekend as a group, involving drinking and male sociability; and the community duck hunters who hunt with extended family members, and come together for meals involving spouses and children. Attitudes towards duck hunting and constructions of masculinities and femininities often vary depending on whether a person is involved in dedicated, blokes-only, or community duck hunting. These attitudes incorporate different emphases that are placed on relationships with men (and women), animals, and nature. These relationships also reflect the pleasures that duck hunters find in the hunting experience, and the ways that discourses around the idea of a natural masculinity are legitimized (Franklin 1998). Along with repetitive (unconscious) acts that create an overall gendered personhood out of a ‘non-gendered’ body (Butler 1994), sometimes duck hunters also participate in very masculine performances that are only acceptable within a very specific time and space, and in many cases, exclusively involved male bodies (Brickell 2003).

Performing masculinities in rural spaces Jo Little (2006) argues that gender theory has tended to emphasize sexuality and gender identity in relation to the ‘urban body’, while the ‘rural body’ has been overlooked.1 In an earlier article, Little (2003) is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between expressions of sexual identity within rural spaces and the dominant assumptions of heterosexuality that pervade Western societies. She contrasts the idea of ‘scary’, ‘heterosexualized’ urban spaces (drawing on Hubbard’s (2000) research on prostitution) with rural spaces, which are often coded as very ‘unscary’ places as they constitute dominant gender relations where conventional forms of moral heterosexuality are normalized and reinforced as benign.

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Bell also posits pervasive cultural constructions linking together ‘rurality, masculinity and heterosexuality’ (2000: 559, emphasis in the original). These assumptions about rural heterosexuality are relevant when deconstructing duck-hunting practices. In keeping with Little’s (2006) ideas, I found that the community duck hunters (and to a large degree the dedicated duck hunters too) articulated confidence in fairly traditional ideas about family and gender roles, particularly constructing the importance of men providing for their families through hunting. This was further strengthened by their observation of the natural spaces where they were carrying out their duck-hunting activities. Through observing the cycles of (male/female) mating and reproduction amongst different bird species, nature itself seemed to echo this unscary, rural, heterosexuality. For example, some duck hunters highlighted the family orientation of waterfowl, such as the protective behaviour of mother ducks, as well as stressing that species such as swans and paradise ducks mate for life. Yet while some duck hunters appeared to fit the notion of a traditional and conventional, unscary rural masculinity, I also found instances where gender performance connected hunting, heterosexuality, and misogyny, particularly amongst blokes-only hunters. During my fieldwork, I was shown a locally produced cartoon which depicted a naked man and woman in a maimai.2 The woman was bent over with a man positioned behind her suggesting he was having sexual intercourse with her. Sitting on the woman’s back was a glass of beer, and the man was also using her body to aim his shotgun while shooting at a duck. The cartoon is captioned: ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’ The misogynistic elements of the picture (which treat the woman as a passive sexual vessel – literally a table that the hunter can have sex with) are also intertwined with an ironic play on the idea of masculine Kiwi ingenuity. The duck hunters who showed me the cartoon admired how the male in the cartoon resolves the problem of doing three things that he really enjoys at the same time. This form of masculinity identity in the duck-hunting experience evokes the idea of sexual performance and control over women as a sign of masculine power, rejecting restraining femininities and endorsing liberating, ‘natural’ masculinities. Intriguingly, just as in the case of the more benign and conventional reproduction of rural masculinities

230 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism outlined above, some of the blokes-only hunters also referred to the behaviour of ducks and wildfowl to suggest a biological essentialism to these behaviours. In this case, however, in order to demonstrate the place of male dominance within nature, reference was made to the aggressive mating behaviour often seen with Mallard ducks.3 The duck-hunting events, therefore, provided a highly delineated time and space where some men felt they could behave badly – or ‘naturally’, as was the interpretation presented by several of the blokes-only duck hunters. There was some internal policing of this behaviour, possibly due to my presence in the group, and older duck hunters were more likely to move the conversation away from explicitly sexual or derogatory comments about women. I also observed some tension when blokes-only duck hunting came into contact with community practices. In the latter case, children and women partners sometimes visit the maimai, even if they are not actively joining in the duck-shooting activities. A young woman4 mentioned that her father was not happy with the pornographic material that decorated the maimai of a blokes-only duck hunter: My uncle’s maimai is quite male-orientated. Like Dad would never have those kind of pictures in the maimai on our pond, but my uncle has some quite dirty pictures on the walls and some, you know, dirty books and stuff. I guess it’s sort of male-orientated as such. I don’t think Dad likes me and my brother seeing that stuff but it’s not his maimai. (Mary)5 Another key masculine performance associated with New Zealand duck hunting is hard drinking, which links to research exploring alcohol consumption in rural places (see, for example, Honeyfield 1997; Campbell 2000). The enthusiastic consumption of alcohol is most obvious during the opening weekend of the season, and is most often allied with blokes-only duck hunting. Several men commented that drinking large amounts of alcohol (and the laddish behaviour that accompanied it) only occurred once a year and was not something they did in their normal lives:

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I really enjoy the night before opening day – we get together, drink a lot of piss, and have a lot of laughs. We probably overdo it a bit but it’s important to let off a bit of steam you know, and we only do it once a year. (James) Before we got this pond I got invited to quite a few different ponds and yeah, I have seen it all. I have seen all sorts of carrying on and no females and it is a great atmosphere, like it is a good weekend and the guys really do get on. You’ll have a few beers and maybe a few arguments . . . but it’s a great atmosphere and a lot of men like having a weekend off from the wife’s nagging. (Terry) In sharp contrast to the scarier, rural heterosexualized spaces highlighted above, and the endorsement by some men of macho performances, I also encountered behaviours that were childlike and ingenuous, particularly when duck hunters spoke of their enthusiasm in the lead-up to the opening weekend of duck shooting. John, a normally reserved Southland farmer, ruefully described how excited and impatient he is the night before the season begins: I find duck shooting’s more – well, not more exciting than Christmas – but it’s like being a kid waiting to be able to get up and open the presents. . . . Sometimes you can’t sleep the night before and you’re all keen. Like this year I woke up – I think it must have been about one or so – and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So at two o’clock I got up and cleaned my gun [laughs]. Other duck hunters also spoke of this boyish excitement, although always in a slightly embarrassed tone. Many also mentioned they would ‘count sleeps’ until the duck shooting season opened. Paul’s description is characteristic example: For most guys, you know, it is a massive pump up to go out there . . . you are so excited. [And then] the duck season rolls around and ‘D’ day comes – Duck day comes – and everyone is so fired up. And guys are counting down the sleeps as soon as the New Year comes in.

232 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism The expressions of boyish and childlike enthusiasm leading up to opening weekend appear in some ways contrary to the image of duck hunting as a macho activity. This desire for a return to boyish innocence does, however, fit with an understanding of duck hunting as a construction of a natural pastime where the restrictions and pressures of a civilized adulthood are lessened – at least temporarily. Although the nature/culture binary originally associated men with culture (and the civilized), and women with the ‘other’ nature (uncivilized and wild) (see, for example, Ortner 1974), these duck hunters connect nature with the notion of a natural masculinity and cast women as the civilizing and feminizing constraints on those masculine ideals. Another binary that can be found in the duck-hunting experience relates to wider political-economic drivers. New Zealand was one of the first countries to experiment fully with neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s (Kelsey 1995), resulting in a shift from a highly regulated welfare state to a market-led economy based on competition (Boston et al. 1991; Conway 2002). These radical reforms had an enormous impact on New Zealand society, particularly in rural communities. For example, neoliberal policies challenged the traditional construction of farmers as ‘stewards of the land’, in favour of more intensive, productivist, and business-orientated practices (Hunt et al. 2013). Some of the tensions that arise from traditional stewardship versus the competitive, profit-orientated approach are reflected in duck-hunting masculinities. In the following section these and other complexities are explored through New Zealand duck hunters’ relationships with ducks.

Of ducks and men The attitudes of duck hunters towards ducks are both fascinating and contrary. Paul, a participant in this research, has a deep affection for waterfowl, made obvious by the enormous variety of objects filling his house that celebrate ducks. In speaking to Paul, he clearly experiences a tension between understanding ducks both as populations that he can harvest, and as individual creatures, which he admires and enjoys aesthetically. Paul’s comments illustrate the paradox of feeling

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admiration and affection for ducks, and yet also taking pleasure in killing them: Waterfowl are beautiful creatures . . . I mean, I like waterfowl and you can see that around me here I have a little bit of waterfowl orientation [spreads his arms to indicate the paintings and ornaments of different waterfowl that fill the living room we are sitting in] and it is me, and I love them, but I don’t mind killing them. I mean, I shoot them because they are a harvestable resource, so I know that I am not endangering them. One aspect of duck hunting that is enjoyed by many duck hunters, including Paul, is duck calling. The chief goal of duck calling is to produce realistic sounds that lure ducks into coming into land near a hunter’s position, thus allowing a close-range shot. There is something rather comical about adult males making quacking sounds, but successfully fooling ducks into believing they are being hailed by their own species requires a great deal of skill and practice. An early fieldwork experience highlights how duck calling contrasts with the more macho paraphernalia and behaviours found in duck-hunting practices: When we entered the maimai I went and sat on a low bench positioned against the back wall. John and Bill, talking in whispers, began digging around in bags and getting themselves organized. Through the camouflage net at the front of the maimai I could see blues and pinks blossoming across the morning sky as the sun began to rise. I began to relax in this contemplative setting, but was quickly reminded that meditating on the rising sun was not the reason we were there. With practised familiarity the men were loading their shotguns. My stomach clenched and I felt really frightened. I told myself to stop being so ridiculous but seeing the guns in the men’s hands seemed to conjure up every violent film I had ever seen. Then John pulled a balaclava over his head, Frank smeared camouflage paint on his face, and the atmosphere in the maimai became even more oppressive and threatening. John smiled at me through his balaclava, consolidating all my fears

234 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism that he had turned into an unhinged psychopath with murderous intent. The menacing atmosphere suddenly dissipated, however, as John began making loud quacking noises with his duck caller. I suppressed my desire to laugh hysterically – quacking like a duck is a serious matter in the maimai on opening morning. (Author fieldnotes, May 1999) Observing duck hunters who are skilled at calling leaves a vivid impression. The movement of ducks in the sky alters immediately in response to their calls. Many duck hunters describe duck calling as a fun activity, and for others it is a chance to compete with fellow duck hunters. John’s description: Trying to call them in, you know, they’re miles away and you get on the quacker and [laughs] then when they don’t come around, then you give them a real squawk. But yeah, it’s just the fun of being out there and trying to get them to come . . . and not this last year, but the year before, one of my nephews and I were having a competition to see who could call in the most. For some duck hunters, the enjoyment of duck calling even supersedes the shooting component. Andy, for instance, is happy to call in the ducks and let his father do the shooting: Probably the most enjoyable thing for me now, is calling the ducks – that’s a big thing for me. Like it doesn’t really worry me if Dad shoots them, or whatever, you know. I’d rather call the ducks around and see their response of actually decoying them. Ron also describes the exhilaration of calling a large number of ducks onto a pond, and then explains that the group of hunters he was with were so excited that no ducks were successfully shot: We were sort of in a gully with a wee bit of a pondy bit in the river and we actually called those ducks right down on to that water until they landed and there would have been I think about

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25 or 26 ducks. . . . So we fired our shots and nothing falls out of the sky, so we fell over ourselves laughing and blaming everybody else for firing too soon. But that’s one of the better mornings that we have had, even though we saw nothing else for the rest of it. One key area where a discourse often associated with femininity has become part of duck hunting relates to caring for and tending duck populations and their habitat. Many duck hunters now explicitly position duck-hunting practices within an environmental discourse associated with wetland development and protection. Some individuals put significant time, money, and physical effort into developing wetland habitats on their own land – as can be seen in the large number of farm ponds that have been constructed in southern New Zealand over the past few decades. Other duck hunters may not put any direct effort into wetland development but stress that, through their game bird licence, they are contributing to it. Importantly, many duck hunters explain their efforts in regard to wetlands as protecting and caring for ducks.6 [Duck] hunters provide the habitat and create the environment for birds to live or protect the birds. If it wasn’t for hunters the birds probably wouldn’t be there. (Tylor) It is clear that, within the duck-hunting experience, the relationship between duck hunters and ducks is complex. Although hunters are often connected with the brutality of killing animals, other softer and less violent relationships are important. These relationships include communicating with ducks through duck calling, protecting ducks through habitat protection and development, and even collecting ornaments and paintings of ducks – all of which present gender performances outside a stereotypical macho hunting persona. Like the relationship between duck hunters and ducks, the relationship between duck hunters and dogs reveals further complexities in relation to constructions of gender, where emotional attachment vies with utilitarian constructs. The following section will explore this aspect of New Zealand duck-hunting practices.

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Of dogs and men The relationship between duck hunters and their dogs could be framed in purely pragmatic terms, emphasizing the utility of gundogs as a piece of kit for successful hunting. Dogs are trained to recover dead and wounded ducks and without them a duck hunter is often at a disadvantage. But in the field I noticed that the dogs were also treated as mates – they hang around in the maimai with the hunters, eating food and being spoken to (and sworn at) in a very similar manner to the way duck hunters relate to each other. The notion of dogs as ‘mates’ – a term traditionally used in New Zealand to denote a particularly masculine kind of friendship – connects to the iconic writing of Barry Crump.7 In his books, Crump describes his relationships with dogs as some of the most important in his life, sometimes even admitting he prefers his canine mates to human ones. In 2001, a New Zealand fishing and hunting magazine published a photographic essay dedicated to gundogs. Commenting on his relationship with his dog, the author describes how it ‘plays with the kids, sneaks to the lounge hearth for comfort and warmth, yet works his tail off after waterfowl and upland game in the harshest autumn conditions. Many of us hold our dogs to heart as best mates’ (Millichamp 2001: 35). This idea of the dog as a mate was echoed by Paul, who implies that his dog is the ideal companion because they share the same interest in hunting: Because I am single I have got no ties. I am answerable to my dog and he always wants to go hunting – so we get on great. The dogs involved in duck shooting appear to provide an important link between the duck hunters and nature, as the dogs’ natural hunting instincts are also understood to reflect the ‘natural’ hunting behaviours of the hunters themselves. Larry explained that the bond between duck hunter and dog is an ‘extension of human senses’; the dog becomes a kind of ‘essential bridge’ between the hunter and ducks: Well it [a dog] is an essential tool, I mean in the sense they have got a nose that we haven’t got and the ability to get wet in cold

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weather, which is something we are not quite able to do – so they are an extension of our senses, which we haven’t got. . . . I think a lot of people work their dog and hunting with the dog and the whole process is three-way: the man, the dog, and the duck, they are all intertwined as one unit, not just man and duck; it is the dog that is almost the essential bridge between the two. (Larry, emphasis added) In describing their relationship with their dog, many participants presented conflicting ideas. Several duck hunters emphasized that the dog was a tool and therefore had value in a purely utilitarian way. It was also clear that many participants had a deep sentimental attachment to their dog – one which some individuals tended to downplay, perhaps because sentimental regard for animals has feminine associations. He is essential; he is a tool. I mean he is my buddy. I lost a dog, it drowned duck hunting. . . . I burst into tears, I tell you, I was ugly! (Paul) Roger Sutton (2002), a well-known duck hunter and wetland conservationist from the Southland region, describes the difference in life span between humans and dogs as one of ‘nature’s great anomalies’ as he recalls the last time he went out into the field with his dog, Meg: On the walk back to the vehicle old Meg had always trotted in front. On this last occasion I noticed that she was following behind by 20 yards or so. When I stopped and looked back she would stop and sit down. I could see she was exhausted in a way not previously experienced and it was obvious that I had to do something about it. . . . We both lay down in the fern for a long rest during which I fed Meg with what remained of our lunch. . . .The rest of the walk back to the vehicle was very long, very slow and very sad. I would not have been the first to lament the fact that man lives seven times longer than dogs. (Sutton 2002: 163)

238 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Sutton’s (2002) account of the death of his dog is a moving one, and illustrates the emotional investment that some duck hunters have in their gundog, often appearing to express a sentimentality that is not obvious in their other relationships. This was echoed by a participant who described how her usually stern father was very attached to his gundog and was far more affectionate with her than he was with the working dogs on the farm (or even his family): My father had this dog – he absolutely loved this dog. A black Labrador . . . oh he loved that dog and she was the top dog, I mean there were the farm dogs and they were just working dogs but she was the pampered pet. She used to sit beside him in the truck . . . she was a great retriever. . . . He just thought she was wonderful; it was a very satisfying relationship for him. (Therese) Although many duck hunters expressed a great deal of pride and pleasure in their dogs’ accomplishments, a few offered a rather humorous contrast. Two participants described their dogs as being essentially useless at assisting in duck hunting, and yet still included them in these activities. Because these dogs are treated as one of the family, they do not have to fulfil any kind of utilitarian purpose in regard to duck hunting and are included for purely sentimental reasons: [Do you have a dog?] Yip, she’s useless though [laughs] . . . she likes to tag along to the maimai and watch the proceedings – she won’t go near a duck, though. (Gary)

[Do you have dogs?] We had a couple of dogs… one was really old and basically it had arthritis and it snored – it was a bastard of a dog. You would head off in the morning and it wouldn’t get up, just sit down there by the fire and say: ‘No bugger off, it’s too cold or too wet.’ . . . And then when the guns start going it would eventually trot down to see what was happening. . . . It might venture into the water, but that was highly unlikely, and then he would go back again and have another sleep. (Tony)

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Relationships between duck hunters and dogs appear to both reinforce and contest dominant constructions of a rural New Zealand masculinity. Duck hunters construct dogs as a ‘good mate’ who appears to ‘enjoy’ their involvement in duck-hunting activities. This enjoyment was interpreted through their behaviours (wagging their tails, jumping around and licking people, and leaping into the water without hesitation to retrieve a duck). This mirroring of enjoyment seems to be an important component of the relationship between duck hunters and dogs, and is indicative of the way in which these dogs are constructed as supporting and approving of these activities. However, whilst the masculine framing of mateship is clearly an important aspect of the duck hunter and dog relationships, there were also occasions that involved expressing ‘softer’, feminine attachment. That is, through interactions with these dogs, some duck hunters were able to express overt affection, in contrast to the traditional New Zealand norm of ‘emotionally disengaged’ manhood (Cox 2014: 230).

Conclusion New Zealand male duck hunters reproduce gender performances based on real (and ‘natural’) rural experiences that are also shaped by nostalgic (and social) constructions of New Zealand manhood (Campbell and Bell 2000) – all of which are influenced by the broader political economic landscape. Griffin (2005) argues that neoliberalism is both ‘gendered’ and ‘embodied’, and it would be fruitful for future research to explore in more depth how this manifests within the New Zealand duck-hunting context. This chapter has illustrated that the gendered performances that are perpetuated through duck-hunting practices cannot be explained by any kind of biological essentialism; rather, a sense of embodied appropriateness (or non-appropriateness) in the landscape is reproduced by men (and women) over time. For many men, practising duck hunting represents an opportunity to retreat from the restrictions of their civilised and to a certain degree, ‘feminized’, everyday life into a ‘natural’, masculine, place and space. Both the physical place and cultural space are predominantly masculinized by the men’s performances, which are constantly

240 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism monitored by the group to ensure conformity with hegemonic ideas about being a man in the New Zealand countryside. However, whilst traditional, heteronormative, and hyper-masculine performances – that prioritize toughness, lack of emotion, and antifeminine behaviour – are still clearly a dominant feature of duck hunting in southern New Zealand, ‘additional masculinities’ (Bull 2009) can also be identified. These are apparent in the childlike ritual of counting the sleeps to the start of the duck-hunting season, and in masculinities which emphasize social relations with family and friends, and which reject misogynistic approaches to women. For some duck hunters, their shooting activities are associated with a more traditional, stewarding relationship with nature, which could be seen as rejecting neoliberal ideals which prioritize competition and market benefits. These alternative and sometimes contradictory masculinities are particularly evident in the relationships that duck hunters have with ducks and dogs. Ducks and other wildfowl may be used as a biological referent to emphasize ‘natural’ masculine behaviours, sometimes emphasizing birds that are family-oriented, and at other times highlighting the aggressive mating tactics of some duck species. For some men, communicating with ducks via a duck caller has superseded their desire to shoot ducks, thus embracing a masculinity based on a particular skill that involves realistic quacking noises. For others, alongside their more macho duck shooting persona, they also enjoy collecting duckthemed ornaments, which might normally be considered a ‘feminine’ activity. Duck hunters’ relationships with dogs are often perceived as a natural reflection of mateship, but also reveal a wider range of emotional responses than would usually fit with the dominant construction of a typical undemonstrative, rural New Zealand man. This chapter has explored how duck-hunting practices contribute to the positioning of power between dominant forms of rural gendered identity and more ‘subordinated’ masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). However, as the traditionally acceptable pastime of shooting ducks comes under escalating scrutiny and criticism from wider (urbanized) New Zealand society (see McLeod 2007), it is likely that some of the traditionally acceptable hegemonic (and hyper-masculine) gender performances will become increasingly

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censured. This chapter has also shown how ideas of nature and the natural are fluid, and may be reconfigured to reinforce or undermine understandings of masculinities and femininities within New Zealand duck-hunting practices.

Notes 1 Although, more recently, the complexity of rural sexualities has received more scholarly attention. See for example Keller and Bell 2014; Bryant and Pini 2011. 2 ‘Maimai’ is the popular New Zealand term for a duck-shooting hide or blind. 3 Male mallards (individually and sometimes in small groups) will hold down a female to force copulation, sometimes resulting in injury or even death (Furtman 2001; Gu 2010). 4 Very few women participate in the shooting aspects of duck hunting, and those that do are most likely to have been introduced to it during their childhood and through the encouragement of their father. Although male duck hunters that I spoke to all generally said they would not exclude their daughters from duck-shooting activities, the majority with children still mainly only had sons shooting with them. 5 All participants’ names in this chapter are pseudonyms. 6 For an analysis of the ethical and environmental discourses mobilized by duck hunters in relation to killing ducks, see McLeod (2007). 7 Barry Crump’s first book, A Good Keen Man, was published in 1960. His semiautobiographical books encapsulate the stereotype of the New Zealand man as a self-sufficient, roving male with excellent hunting and bush skills, and an essential ‘natural’ goodness.

References Bell, D. (2000) ‘Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality, Masculinity, and Homosexuality’, Rural Sociology, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 547–56. Boston, J., J. Martin, J. Pallot, and P. Walsh (1991) Reshaping the State: New Zealand’s Bureaucratic Revolution, Oxford University Press, Auckland. Brickell, C. (2003) ‘Performativity or Performance? Clarifications in the Sociology of Gender’, New Zealand Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 158–78. Bryant, L., and B. Pini (2011) Gender and Rurality, Routledge, New York, NY. Bull, J. (2009) ‘Watery Masculinities: Fly-fishing and the Angling Male in the South West of England’, Gender, Place & Culture, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 445–65. Butler, J. (1994) ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy, No. 67 (summer), pp. 32–9. Campbell, H. (2000) ‘The Glass Phallus: Pub(lic) Masculinity and Drinking in Rural New Zealand’, Rural Sociology, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 562–81. Campbell, H. and M. Bell (2000) ‘The Question of Rural Masculinities’, Rural Sociology, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 532–46.

242 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Connell, R. W. (2005) Masculinities (2nd edition), Polity Press, Cambridge. Connell, R. and J. W. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp. 829–59. Conway, P. (2002) ‘The New Zealand Experiment 1984–1999’, paper presented at GPN Asia/Pacific Regional Meeting, 2–4 September, Bangkok, http://www. rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/wemgehoertdiewelt/nze.pdf (accessed 12 July 2015). Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (1994) ‘Introduction’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. Cox, R. (2014) ‘Working on Masculinity at Home’, in A. Gorman-Murray and P. Hopkins (eds), Masculinities and Place, Ashgate, Farnham. Crump, B. (1960) A Good Keen Man, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Wellington. Franklin, A. S. (1998) ‘Naturalizing Sports: Hunting and Angling in Modern Environments’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 355–66. Furtman, M. (2001) Duck Country: A Celebration of America’s Favourite Waterfowl, Ducks Unlimited, Inc., Memphis TN. Griffin, P. (2005) ‘Neoliberal Economic Discourses and Hegemonic Masculinity(ies): Masculine Hegemony (Dis)Embodied?’ IPEG Papers in Global Political Economy, International Political Economy Group, Leeds. Gu, A. (2010) ‘Sexual Conflict and Forced Copulations Lead to the Co-evolution of Sexual Organs in Anas platyrhynchos’, Rice University, file:///C:/Users/ svzcmm1/Downloads/sexual-conflict-and-forced-copulations-lead-to-the-coevolution-of-sexual-organs-in-anas-platyrhynchos-3.pdf (accessed 28 January 2015). Honeyfield, J. E. (1997) Red-blooded Blood Brothers: Representations of Place and Hard Man Masculinity in Television Advertising for Beer, University of Waikato, Hamilton. Hubbard, P. (2000) ‘Desire/Disgust: Mapping the Moral Contours of Heterosexuality’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 191–217. Hunt, L., C. Rosin, H. Campbell, and J. Fairweather (2013) ‘The Impact of Neoliberalism on New Zealand Farmers: Changing What It Means to Be a “Good Farmer”’, Extension Farming Systems Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 34–42. Keller, J. C. and M. M. Bell (2014) ‘“Rolling in the Hay”: The Rural as Sexual Space’, in E. Ransom, C. Bailey, and L. Jensen (eds), Rural America in a Globalizing World: Problems and Prospects for the 2010s, West Virginia University Press, Morgantown VA. Kelsey, J. (1995) The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment?, Auckland University Press and Bridget Williams Books, Auckland. Little, J. (2003) ‘“Riding the Rural Love Train”: Heterosexuality and the Rural Community’, Sociologia Ruralis, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 401–17. Little, J. (2006) ‘Embodiment and Rural Masculinity’, in M. Bell and H. Campbell (eds), Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA.

New Zealand duck hunting | 243 Matahaere-Atariki, D. (1999) ‘A Context for Writing Masculinities’, in R. Law, H. Campbell, and J. Dolan (eds), Masculinities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, The Dunmore Press, Palmerston North. McLeod, C. (2004) Pondering Nature: An Ethnography of Duck Hunting in Southern New Zealand. Ph.D thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand. McLeod, C. (2007) ‘Dreadful/Delightful Killing: The Contested Nature of Duck Hunting’, Society & Animals, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 151–67. Millichamp, R. (2001) ‘Gundogs’, Fish and Game New Zealand Magazine, Issue 12. Ortner, S. (1974) ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in M. Zimbalist Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Phillips, J. (1996) A Man’s Country: The Image of the Pakeha Male – A History, Penguin Books, Auckland. Stewart, R. (2013) ‘Right Racket over Duck Hunting’, Manawatu Standard, http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/opinion/riding-shotgun/8669867/ Right-racket-over-duckshooting (accessed 12 July 2015). Sutton, R. (2002) Keeping Faith with Fin and Feather: People and Imperatives in Wildlife Management, Roger Sutton, Invercargill.

CHAPTER 16 (Dis)locations of homosociality: men in an all-male university residence hall Frank G. Karioris

Introduction The first time I met the guys, they were gathered together on the front steps of the residence hall smoking a cigarette, or so I assumed. It was still warm enough in October that they didn’t yet need coats, even at 11 p.m. As I walked by, they squished over on the steps to allow me to pass by them down to the street. I stopped and said hello to Ed, whom I had met once or twice before.1 The group was tolerating my presence, but there was a tension. Sensing this, I started to head down the remaining few steps to the street when one of them dropped what he was holding. As it hit the ground it made a hollow metallic sound, bouncing off the pavement. It was not a cigarette but a metal ‘one-hitter’, used to smoke marijuana, painted to look exactly like a cigarette. At the clink, clink, clink of the metal on the pavement the group grew silent. Walking down the steps, I said, ‘Be careful, you dropped your metal cigarette.’ The group erupted in laughter. As I walked away a few of the guys made quick little jokes about my response. The noise of the one-hitter hitting the ground marked the beginning of my relationship with the group, and the gaining of a spot on the outskirts of their milieu. While it was not the first time I had interacted with them, it was the first time that I had come to them – in the literal sense of coming into their world. This chapter is about these men. They are all first-year students (roughly 18 years old) who attend the University of St Jerome (USJ), a mid-sized private Catholic university in the Midwestern United States,

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and are primarily from white, solidly middle-class families. In calling themselves ‘the Step Kids’, they unconsciously play on the motif of orphans, abandoned by the university. While marginal within it, they have created a web of strong friendships. Within the campus they work from a subordinate position, challenging a dominant version of masculinity, and acting as a collective resistance to defend their space. In this way, this chapter is about space, marginality and friendship between men, and the dislocations of marginal homosociality. While the term ‘homosociality’ is relatively new, it has been the focus of a large amount of theorizing and writing. The term gets one of its initial definitions from Jean Lipman-Blumen, who defined it as ‘the seeking, enjoyment, and/or preference for the company of the same sex’ (Lipman-Blumen 1984: 16). In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men, she discusses the concept of homosociality in relation to the power dynamics in erotic triangles of two men and one woman found throughout British literature, linking homosocial relations with a heterosexuality which used women as tools for relations between men (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1985). Sharon Bird says that male homosociality reinforces three key meanings: emotional detachment, competitiveness and the sexual objectification of women (Bird 1996: 122). These meanings provide much of the basis for current writing on homosociality that both draws on these authors as well as providing a varied picture of homosocial relations. Homosociality is crucial for understanding masculinity and the ways in which it is constructed. For the focus of this chapter, it bears particular resonance as homosocial relations are given primacy during the early university years. My aim in this chapter is to understand the overlay and overlapping waves of homosociality, space and place, and the ways that this group came into fruition through these spatial arrangements. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes: ‘There is nothing, in history or in society, which does not have to be achieved and produced. . . . Thus production in the broad sense of the term embraces a multiplicity of works and a great diversity of forms, even forms that do not bear the stamp of the producer or of the production process’ (1991: 68). My aim is to shed light on the ways the production of space produces social relations grounded in specific gendered contexts that are also

246 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism age-specific. These are inextricably linked to specific forms of class relations through a connection with the productive and reproductive elements of education, and the relationship of education and the market and its mechanisms for adjudicating lives, loves, and licence for what are acceptable means of connection. In looking at these issues, I seek to open up discussion of the ways that masculinities and male homosocial relations are working through, beyond, with, and around educational institutions and the economic, business models of relationality that are being put in place by universities and the broader neoliberal apparatus. In focusing on homosociality I seek to showcase the ways that the guys are finding strong ties outside of economic bonds and building outward from spatialized place making; while finding themselves part of a broader campus environment which brings them into struggles over power and the definition of places and masculinity.

Regan Hall, the university, and the step Regan Hall sits on the west side of the USJ campus. It is one of the older residence halls, and holds just over 300 students, almost all in their first year. Far from the heart of campus and the academic sites, and away from the union and other residence halls, the 1950s building is in very rough shape and has not been updated for decades. The rooms are almost exclusively double-occupancy, with just a few singles on each floor. Each floor has two sets of common bathrooms, each shared by two wings, and a common shower room on each side. There are roughly 60 residents per bathroom and shower. This style of building and room is the traditional residence hall model, which is going out of fashion as new halls are built on more suite-style setups, giving students more privacy and individual space. The residents often talk about the dismal conditions of their building, and say it is one reason why few actively choose to live here. The campus forms a bubble that insulates the students from the city, with University Public Safety Officers patrolling not just the campus, but more importantly the borders. Beyond the borders of campus is the ‘danger’ of the city. The students are largely from surrounding states, with roughly 84 per cent from the Midwest. The

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student body is primarily white, 22 per cent of first-year students are denoted as ‘ethnic minority’ and it has slightly fewer than 20 per cent first-generation students. The university is the place where many upper-middle-class parents from the area send their kids, as well as where middle-class and lower-middle-class students seek to find career prospects. The US university in the twenty-first century thus disrupts a sense of ‘locale’, as most students come from beyond the area. While the majority are local in the sense that they are broadly American, the campus should be seen as highly attuned to regional dynamics rather than primarily local. This allows for both students and university to further create their own sense of the local(e), conceived as part of a process of place making (Gupta and Ferguson 2001: 6). While a large number of students come from outside the local, this does not mean that there is not a regional locus of students who attend, and who are able to better understand the institutional mechanisms of the university and gain advantage within the specific field of a particular university (this is especially true of children of alumni). In channeling toward each educational institution the students richest in the dispositions that the institution is supposed to inculcate, a high proportion of whom have been brought up in families located in the very region of the field of power fed by the institutions . . . perpetuate the differences constitutive of social space and . . . the differences according to the structure of inherited capital between students who are themselves originally from the different regions of social space and the field of power. (Bourdieu 1998: 139–40) What is missing from this, though, is the sense of individuals. So while it is true that institutions are continued and constituted by actors knowingly acting in accordance with institutional regimes of power, the situation is complicated by the adaptable and contestable social space. Bourdieu’s analysis does not encompass extensive discussion of the impact of residences on university life, or the circulation and formulation of capital(s) and networks (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu 1998).

248 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism While the traditional rooms of Regan Hall are not the most appealing, what most often puts people off is that they are all-male. Once incoming students have accepted their offer to attend USJ, they are asked for their residence hall preference. Most incoming students select either Herald Hall or Celery Hall as their top choices. Only a small number of those who end up in Regan listed it as one of their choices. So almost all the Regan residents feel unhappy about their room situation before they even arrive on campus. The steps where I met the guys sit at the end of the grey concrete pathway from the front entrance of the building down to the sidewalk. There are four short steps, each one with cracks from the footfalls of thousands of students throughout the years. They sit as the connecting element between the building and the street, the university and the city, the known and unknown. The steps form a platform up into the university’s jurisdiction, and down to a world seemingly waiting to be made. The front steps to Regan act as a mediating force for this group of guys. During orientation week they all ended up on the steps, whether smoking cigarettes or discussing the location of parties around campus (a particular challenge to find, having been on campus less than a day). The steps act as both a starting-off spot, as well as a regrouping location at the end of the night. The steps are a place to escape to from their rooms or the library with their incumbent homework demands; as well as a place to meet before going to buy alcohol. For some, the steps are the locus of their lives on campus. Further it is important to remember, as Doreen Massey says, that space is a ‘product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ (2008: 9). It is in this way that these guys are self-constituting not only their group in relation to the physical steps, but also creating the steps through the interrelation with the group itself. Involved in this is the sense that the steps are mobile rather than fixed (Massey 1994: 2), in the same way that the social relations that make up the ‘Step Kids’ themselves as a group are fluid and in a process of constant ebb, flow, and rupture. Put another way, ‘social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others’ (Lefebvre 1991: 73).

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The Step Kids The Step Kids are a large group comprised of various smaller cliques or groupings. The first member of the Step Kids that I met was Ed. He is usually just called ‘Chicago’, in homage to his roots, his accent and his deep commitment to the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Ed is a lanky guy, with his hair trimmed short and a sharp smile always on his face. There is a certain strut to his walk – and to his personality. After his strut, the second thing you notice is his Chicago accent, tinted with a strong hint of Irish brogue. All four of his grandparents moved in their late teens to the US from Ireland. Two of them live with Ed and his parents now. Ed grew up with a large group of kids in a little neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago. ‘There is always neighbourhood loyalty,’ he says of his relationship with the other guys he grew up with. There are ethnic connotations to the loyalty too, as all of his friends and neighbours are pretty typical ‘middleclass, Irish, Catholics’. ‘I miss those guys a ton living out here. The hardest part about coming to school here is leaving your friends.’ This is the feeling for friendship and groups that Ed brings to his relationships in college and in Regan. For him, his friends are a large part of what it means to be in college. ‘I hang with the crew, that’s what we do.’ At the same time, though, he sees this as a period for new experiences. I always thought of college as you go and do something on your own, something you’ve never done before, something completely different. You put yourself out where it is just you and you just got to do your own thing, you got to make it work. Like a challenge kind of. . . . People often think I’m running away from something, but it’s the exact opposite . . . I just thought of college as like you’re on your own, if I was like 30 minutes from home I’m not going to consider that on my own. For Ed friendship and college go hand in hand. Each necessitates the other. The relationships he has with his friends and his opinion about what college is about is demonstrative not just of a clear vision of these objects themselves, but also of the connection between them

250 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism – with one being necessitated and synonymous with the other. Ed was not looking forward to Regan. ‘I didn’t ask to be put in Regan. I wanted to be in Herald. Regan wasn’t even on my list [of preferences], and then I got put here.’ This is a common story amongst most of the guys of Regan. In trying to describe why he didn’t want to live in Regan, he says Obviously, being a freshman you don’t want an all-male dorm, you know what I mean? You don’t want to be like three floors of all guys. I wanted to be co-ed like Herald, it’s supposedly the fun dorm for freshmen, so I was so angry. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it’d be. . . . I met a lot of cool guys here. I actually think I would prefer it now. Other than the fact that my two best buddies live over there [Herald] I think I would rather be here because it’s at least somewhat quiet and not crazy all the time. If I got work to do I can get it done here and concentrate here. Like the other Regan residents, Ed finds a way to justify living with all men. They are able collectively to counter the imposed stigma of the building by connecting with each other and the building in a more positive fashion. So while almost all of the residents come into the building saying they don’t want to be there – and many actively try to transfer – most of them eventually leave feeling a strong connection to the building, their friends, and the types of relationships that they created while living there. Ed’s experience is shared by many of the other Step Kids, as well as other residents of the building more broadly. There is a widespread feeling of missing what they no longer have, in particular the close contact with their friends from high school. I ran into Aaron, another one of the Step Kids, one night after he had been drinking. It was near Christmas break and he began talking about what he was planning on doing back home, and how much he missed his high school friends. ‘I miss my boys at home. And I’m going to see them soon over Christmas break. Then I’m going to miss my boys here though.’ In his intoxicated state he continued, ‘I am [going to miss them]. I have such good boys. They’re so awesome. I’m

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going to miss my boys here when I go home over break.’ There is a sense of in-betweenness here. He misses his friends at home, but fears missing his friends here at university. The feeling of closeness with one’s friends was paramount for all of the guys in the group, with each of them expressing the importance of their relations to their lives. Most of the guys spend little time in class and they often have no other major time commitments. So they spend significant amounts of time with their friends. This means that the majority of their time is devoted to socializing and studying (which can also be done while simultaneously socializing). When I asked them to guess how much time they spend with their friends, some said 60 to 80 hours a week. This time commitment to friendship is specific to this period of their lives, as once they move out of college many of them will get full-time jobs and have other obligations. There is thus an intensity to this period and these friendships that is all but unobtainable at other points in their lives.

The group’s formation Before the first week of school there is Orientation Week, which is meant to get all of the first-year students acclimatized to the university. One student, Tim, told me: ‘I loved my first week here. Because we didn’t have a lot of academic responsibilities and I just met a lot of new people. I was able to be really social. I started the inner workings of the friendships I still have now.’ Talking with Ed about his Orientation Week, one gets the distinct impression that many of the organized events went unattended. The flipside to the university’s sponsored events are the various parties that occur just ‘off campus’ – a term which indicates not so much geographic distance as it does a sense of not being owned or controlled by the university. So while the university organizes large social events to keep students on campus – and therefore not drinking – many smaller-scale parties are thrown by students living partially beyond the reaches of the university. Many students come to university with a very distinct image of college life in their head, and that often begins and ends with alcohol. While not all of the Step Kids are big drinkers, many of them drink fairly often. Drink is one of the things that brought them together.

252 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism The steps themselves are just outside of the hall proper, and therefore outside of the physical reaches of the residence staff. Yet they are still within the boundaries of the broader campus, with the attendant Public Safety presence. During Orientation Week, after the first party night, Ed met Felix and Aaron. They all had congregated on the steps, some to smoke, some to share stories. Over the next few days, they all met up on the steps before heading out for the night. They discussed where the parties were, which parties were the best, and who was going where. This type of activity continued throughout the semester and the year. Tim describes it: ‘First semester when it was nice out, we would be there like all day, every day. Any given time between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. on a Thursday through Saturday you could find at least five guys out there chilling.’ This activity formed out of the initial interactions that took place on the concrete steps at the beginning of the year. When I asked Tim about his friends he told me, ‘We were just talking about this the other night. Everyone that I hang out with, or at least all my really close friends, kind of all fall under this umbrella. We like to call ourselves “the Step Kids”. That’s just kind of our name because . . . right outside of Regan, you know that step, with the four little steps? Right next to the tree?’ They are aware that the place structures their relationships. Tim finishes by locating the steps for me with geographic markers, even though it is something we have talked about before. For him, and the rest of the guys, the steps are a place that are almost their own territory beyond the building and the building community. There is a sense of, to use Marilyn Strathern’s term, ‘replication’, as the collective group shapes and alters each other’s behaviours and visions of self, invoking a sense of other (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994: 43). In each other they find pieces of themselves, creating a group as part of this process. One of the difficulties, though, is that this group is impossibly tentative, and while unifying in some ways is also fragmentary. Tim tells me not just about the larger grouping of the Step Kids, but also about the fluid and mercurial partitions amongst the group. ‘We would always hang out there and call ourselves the Step Kids, and the way we think about it is there are kind of three individual

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colonies, but they all interact with each other. That makes up our friend group.’ So while there are three smaller groups, the groups all interact and form a broader friendship group. The group he associates with most is primarily located on his own floor of the residence. The other two groups, with some exceptions, share a similar pattern. Felix describes the groups in the same way: ‘Close group’, ‘3 South’, and ‘2nd Floor’. But these geographic groups are exceptionally supple in the way that they can include and exclude people at different points. Ed sums it up, We were all just Step Kids before, like, you’ve heard the Step Kids shit. Like we’d all meet up at the Step and smoke some cigs and pack lips when we were coming back from parties late at night. And they were always Step Kids, but second semester we just starting hanging all the time now. Like we’re hanging out on a day-to-day basis. . . . We’re like one huge group now, not two separate groups. He is talking about the way that not just their activities, but also the specific spatial arrangements of the steps brought them together. This geography is distinct from the vision of the building created by the university staff. In her book, My Freshman Year, Rebekah Nathan describes the ‘fifty-seven different formal bulletin board displays in my residence hall’, using this to describe the mentality of community that was being imposed on the hall by the staff; she also looked at the messages on the student’s white boards on their doors (2006: 22–3). Moffatt (1991), in very anthropological fashion, showcased maps not only of the campus but also of the floor that he was studying. Most recently, Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) talked about the ‘party pathways’ that existed on the campus they studied, and the way that the university not only accepted these but also furthered them.

Conflict with Herald Hall The Step Kids are just one group amongst many, both within the building and on campus more generally. Part of the mentality of

254 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism residents in Regan is that they are at a huge social disadvantage because of where they live. Al thought that disadvantage went as far as social exclusion: he didn’t feel he was able to interact with women because they immediately thought less of him for living in Regan. This sentiment could lead to extraordinary forms of camaraderie, but at the same time often resulted in conflicts. Herald Hall sits next to the main part of campus, right near the bright green space of the quad and union. It is the second-tallest building on campus at twelve stories, holding just over 700 first-year students. The building has been the ‘party dorm’ on campus for years, with some people coming to USJ just for Herald Hall. The university’s residence life web page says, ‘If you are a first-year student looking to be amid the action, Herald is it.’ This mentality is taken up by students each year, creating not just a specific type of community in the building itself, but fostering inter-hall conflict. Throughout the school year there had been a couple of interactions between members of the Step Kids and a group of guys from Herald Hall. At a party earlier in the year, one guy from Herald apparently sucker punched Paulson, causing the groups to go outside. It seemed that the Herald guy thought that Paulson was hitting on a girl that he was interested in. Once the two groups were outside a number of them started throwing punches and scuffling. Ed said: ‘It wasn’t a crazy fight, it was just kind of wrestling in the snow. A couple of sucker punches.’ After this short scuffle, they all dispersed. ‘We were all hamming drunk. The kids who had the fight, we all went back and kind of passed out. Woke up the next morning and were like “Jesus Christ, why was he in your face?”. . . Couldn’t tell you what the kids looked like . . . probably a good thing.’ The way that Ed begins this story is by saying that, ‘Someone hits your friend, and you hit the guy who hit your friend. Then, that’s your boy. You want to know that your boys have your back like that. . . . I know those guys feel the same way too.’ It is this mentality of solidarity that can further these conflicts, though the catalyst for the fights is far more often drinking and bravado than camaraderie. Their use of the phrase ‘sucker punch’ connotes so much. It suggests not that punching is wrong, but the way you punch. It is a way of dividing appropriate conduct and appropriate violence, and creating a moral

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tapestry of the actions. A sucker punch indicates hitting someone without warning. Ed though also uses it more broadly in talking about the actions of both the Herald guys and the Step Kids, to mean a more general punch. In this way he makes a claim that the situation should have been handled differently, and that if they had wanted to have a physical confrontation they should have said so first. This conflict escalated near the end of the school year into a larger incident between many of the Step Kids and the Herald Hall group. On the Saturday night two weeks before finals, many of the guys had decided to go out. Ricky Harwell, a Step Kid, ended up sitting in the lobby of Herald Hall drunk and out of it. One of the Herald guys came up to him and, according to Felix, sucker punched him in the face as he was just sitting there sluggishly in the lobby. Nothing happened at this point, as Ricky just shrugged it off and continued with his night. Ed, who had gotten very intoxicated at another party, met up with the guys later that night at a different party. When Felix and Aaron told him what had happened, Ed became irate and upset and wanted to get even. He wanted to figure out who the guys were that had done this, and where they might be found. Walking around the main food street on campus at 1.30 a.m., Ed and the guys ended up spotting one of the suspects sitting in NYC Pizza Co., one of the main latenight hang outs. The pizza place was full of people eating after a long night of drinking. Ed immediately got up in the guy’s face, demanding to know why he hit Ricky and what was wrong with him. Heated words were exchanged. The confrontation grew louder and louder, with the crowd gathering around them. Ed decked the guy in the face, swinging wildly and striking poorly. As soon as Ed had thrown the first punch the guy’s friends jumped in and started pummelling Ed. In amongst the crowd, Ed was taking punches from six guys at once, in his drunken state trying to keep himself on his feet and his hands in the air. The fight didn’t last but a minute or two, as Public Safety showed up to the scene. Public Safety is the university’s de facto police force, though their powers are not exactly those of the actual police. Rather than get out of their cars to figure out what was happening, the officers stayed where they were, shining a bright light onto the group and using

256 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism loudspeakers to demand everyone to disperse. The crowd quickly fled into the night, fearing to be associated with the event. Ed and the Herald guys ran too. Ryan, another Step Kid, helped Ed get back to Regan Hall and started cleaning up his wounds, while Felix and Aaron went looking around the area for the guys that had ‘started the fight’. With the night near its natural end anyways, everyone quickly made their way back to Regan. The next morning, with everyone recovering from their hangovers and Ed still reeling from his wounds, they found themselves barraged on Twitter. The Herald guys had taken to the twittersphere and were calling Ed a ‘bitch’ and saying that he was ‘in trouble’. When I talked to Felix a few days later he told me that he was concerned about what might happen and if there was going to be further trouble. He told me that the way he saw this was that it was really a conflict between the two buildings, Regan and Herald. For him, the Herald guys were making fun of them for living in Regan, and that that was grounds enough for mocking. When I finally saw Ed a couple days after the fight he told me ‘You should have seen me right after the fight. I couldn’t open my eye.’ The left side of his face was bruised, and his eye was solidly black and blue. He was lucky not to have any broken teeth, though it looked like he was close to breaking his eye socket. None of the other guys sustained any injuries. Ed took this violence in his stride, and hid it away from family members. Not only this, but he went to the doctor to get his face checked out and told them that he had fallen. The unwritten code is that one does not talk about these events, nor does one report them to the university. If they are dealt with at all, they are treated as something to be taken care of by retribution rather than through the university system of legislation and punishment. Part of this conflict is a negotiation of the meaning and understanding of both Regan as a symbolic place, but also of residents of Regan’s place within a campus geography that works through figurative and existent realms of capital and power. Inscribed in this friction is also intragroup tactics of seeking to create a ‘proper’. Michel de Certeau talks about ‘tactics’ as ‘a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization). . . . It has at its disposal no

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base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances’ (de Certeau 1988: xix). For Certeau, this calculus ‘is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”’ (1988: xix). The conflict with Herald is an altercation between two elements seeking to move outside of the institutional framework of the university. While they are both shirking the university’s boundaries, it is not a contest between two equally externalized visions of college life. Herald Hall dominates both the university campus and the institutional motifs of the meaning of life at college. Ed and the Step Kids, by attaching themselves to the steps, work to form a ‘proper’ – a spatial localization – from which to find and situate themselves amongst the broader spectrum. Felix said that he didn’t think that there would be any problems the following weekend, as it was the last one before finals and no one was planning to go out (or go out ‘too heavy’, at least). The problem, he said, would be next year. There might not be any more run-ins this year, but the ‘beef’ was certainly not settled. He was specifically concerned about what would happen next year when most of the Step Kids would be living in Stone Hall with most of the Herald Hall residents. Stone Hall is the second-year equivalent of Herald, where the partying continues. The USJ website says that it is ‘one of the most popular choices for returning students’. Ed said, ‘We’re going to live together next year, we’re all in the same building. So we’re going to see these kids a lot. . . . I don’t think anything will happen [during the rest of] this year.’ With many of them living in the same building next year, Felix knows that there will be problems. The way he puts it is simple, ‘This isn’t over.’ He doesn’t say it by way of threat, but as a statement of fact.

Conclusion The Step Kids represent one small group amongst the guys in Regan and the broader campus. Yet they demonstrate the malleable nature of the relations that are produced, encouraged (and discouraged),

258 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism allowed, and created by a specific university residence system. These men’s stories showcase a sense of friendship beyond the way the media often talks about men’s relationships, as well as beyond the very narrow confines of what is often talked about as occurring on campus. These guys have tried to create their own world, their own space. Situating themselves, and being placed by others, in a position of marginality on campus, these men struggle to find a place for themselves, and through this struggle form deep bonds with their friends. Near the end of the year Ed told me that, ‘It’s going to be weird not seeing these guys every single day. . . . Since August we’ve seen each other every single day.’ They had built a life around and upon one another, setting their relationships in relation to the steps. They were all heading home for the summer, before returning next year as second-year students. They had all worked diligently so that next year their living arrangements were such that the group maintained itself, with most of the group living in Stone Hall, the second-year equivalent of Herald. In Dislocating Masculinity, Chenjerai Shire builds a discussion about masculinity around masculine spaces in Zimbabwe, specifically the dare, which was the ‘traditional meeting place of men’ (1994: 147). In a similar way, Regan, as an all-male residence hall, and the steps in front of it, act as meeting places for men and spaces for the display, consolidation, and formation of their masculinities. Unlike in the dare, the authority of elders (in this case in the form of Resident Assistants (RAs) and the Hall Director (HD)) is secondary to the intergenerational relations that are prioritized by these guys. These men’s relation to their residence hall and the spatial geography that forms it is not a simple one, but one fraught with contest, conflict, and reconfiguration. The clean narrative of the university and its place in these men’s lives does little justice to both the creative methods these men use in refashioning their world and laying meaning onto the already meaningful. Nor does the university’s discourse recognize its own role in setting up a system which reinforces and perpetuates a hierarchical system that puts students into conflict with each other, building micro-nations rather than a broader campus community.

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Through a study of these men’s interactions and relationships, not just with their friends but also with their place in the geography of the campus, a clearer picture forms of the way that residential programmes play a strong role in shaping lifelong friendships that are premised upon contacts made in an unequal grouping of connections. While the friendships of that first year may last many of them for life, the masculine camaraderie they constructed will always be vulnerable to the weight of dominant masculinity. From this, it is possible to see the ways in which their masculinity confirms a wider structure of inequality between men and women. But their masculinity, as they lived it, was also a lived affirmation of equality.

Note 1 All names are pseudonyms, including that of the hall and the university.

References Armstrong, E. A. and L. T. Hamilton (2013) Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London. Bird, S. R. (1996) ‘Welcome to the Men’s Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity’, Gender & Society, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 120–32. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Bourdieu, P. (1990) ‘Un Signe Des Tempes’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, Nos 81/82, March, pp. 2–5. Bourdieu, P. (1998) The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity Press, Cambridge. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (1994) ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London. de Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley CA and London. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (2001) ‘Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Duke University Press, Durham NC. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, New York NY. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. Lipman-Blumen, J. (1984) Gender Roles and Power, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs NJ. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN. Massey, D. (2008) For Space, Sage Publications, London.

260 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Moffatt, M. (1991) Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ and London. Nathan, R. (2006) My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, Penguin Books, London. Shire, C. (1994) ‘Men Don’t Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, Routledge, London.

CHAPTER 17 Homosociality and heterosex: patterns of intimacy and relationality among men in the London ‘seduction community’ Rachel O’Neill

Introduction In this chapter I explore the relational dynamics and affective textures of homosociality within the London ‘seduction community’. Through involvement with this community – more properly regarded as a community-industry, on account of its substantial commercial interests – heterosexual men seek to attain greater choice and control in their relationships with women by undertaking various forms of skills training and personal development. A cultural import from the United States, the seduction community has had a presence in London for the last ten years, with one of the first UK-based seduction training companies established in 2007. Commercial training services currently available include oneto-one coaching, weekend courses and live-in residential programmes, while free and ostensibly non-commercial events regularly take place in the city. While spatially and temporally discontinuous, the activities of the seduction community in London are concentrated in the West End, most notably Oxford Street, Covent Garden, Soho and Leicester Square. Those recognized as experts within this community-industry detail their seduction methods in books, blogs, and vlogs; instructional videos posted to sites such as YouTube are especially popular, routinely garnering tens and hundreds of thousands of views. Recognizing the seduction community as a site of ‘mediated intimacy’ (Gill 2009), my research within this setting has led me to consider how intimate gender relations are being reshaped by neoliberal

262 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism rationalities, as masculine sexual subjectivities in this context are reordered by themes of management and entrepreneurialism. While men’s participation in this setting is expressly directed towards reshaping their relationships with women, in this short piece I consider how men’s homosocial relations animate their involvement with the London seduction community. In doing so, I hope to explore the question of what makes participation in this community-industry compelling to those who engage its teachings and practices. The chapter is formed of two sections. In the first section, I look at how men’s relationships with men outside the seduction community motivate them to pursue engagement with this community-industry by examining how ‘pickup’ or ‘game’ – as a set of knowledge-practices for the governance of intimate gender relations – promises to reconfigure hierarchies of masculinity. In the second section I examine dynamics of homosociality within the London seduction community, focusing in particular on those that pertain between men in the context of the commercial training events. In doing so I draw on fieldwork undertaken in London from 2012–13. Ultimately, I argue that the forms of relationality that emerge among men in this setting must be situated alongside broader reconfigurations of social and intimate life taking place within late capitalism.

Homosociality and heterosex In discussions about how and why they became involved in the London seduction community, most of the men I interviewed framed this in terms of a desire for greater choice and control in their relationships with women. However, while women stood at the centre of these narratives – often as objects of attainment – men crowded the peripheries. It soon became clear that men’s relationships with other men – that is, their homosocial relations – had, in various ways, motivated them to seek out and pursue engagement with this community-industry. A number of men described being ridiculed by other men for a supposed lack of heterosexual experience. Emmanuel, a recent graduate who had been involved with the London seduction community for a few years, spoke about being bullied by his college peers after revealing at age 17 that he was a virgin:

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They had their stories about girls and then like . . . with me it was just like . . . they really, really, like – they just really brought my self-esteem really down. And every single day when I used to come into college I would always get it, people like that just bullying me. . . . I just wish I didn’t even open up to them. Because it was just like . . . they were just tormenting me a lot at the time. For Emmanuel, the ridicule he faced from his peers at college had a profound effect on his sense of masculine subjectivity, and these experiences were central to his motivations for becoming involved in the seduction community. Indeed, Emmanuel described these events – which had taken place some years ago – at the very beginning of our interview, in response to a question about why he had first sought out pickup materials. To this extent, his experience affirmed that ‘ridicule from one’s peers serves as an instrument of control to ensure that the ideal of male heterosexuality is pursued’ (Holland et al. 2004: 161). Emmanuel was by no means the only participant whose reasons for becoming involved in the seduction community were directly informed by experiences of bullying and harassment, as a number of other participants described similar instances with male friends, peers, and family members. Such narratives give some sense of the compelling character of heterosexuality for men, where demonstrations of heterosexuality and heterosexual experience are both normatively required and a key source of masculine power and status (Richardson 2010). In his reference to the boys who bullied him as those who ‘had their stories about girls’, Emmanuel further highlights the relationship between heterosexual experience and masculine hierarchy. This is in keeping with research into youth sexual cultures, which documents the ways in which sexual stories – as well as other forms of proof of sexual experience, such as sexual images – serve as a form of currency and value among young men (Pascoe 2007; Ringrose et al. 2013). Research with men involved in the London seduction community suggests that similar dynamics may inflect men’s homosocial relations far beyond adolescence. Anwar, an entrepreneur in his late thirties, described being marginalized within his friendship group because he was unable to participate in rituals of sexual storytelling:

264 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism They’re all these amazing guys and they’ve all got lots of stories. And when we get together I’m normally the one that can’t say anything because I’ve only slept with six women, you know. And I don’t say anything, I just laugh and joke and try and, you know, try and join in, but I can’t because… I have never been that guy. And they won’t acknowledge it, and they just don’t . . . they don’t then ask me to give any stories. Because they kind of know in their heart of hearts I’ve never done it. Anwar’s reference to his friends as ‘amazing guys’ with ‘lots of stories’, as well as his invocation of an abstract masculine ideal (‘that guy’), underscores the way in which masculine sexual subjectivity is negotiated in relation to and through comparison with other men. Though his friends did not ridicule him for his supposed lack of sexual experience, Anwar nevertheless felt that his inability to contribute to rituals of sexual storytelling relegated him to the margins of his peer group. Importantly however, it was not that Anwar lacked sexual stories entirely – as he said, he has slept with a number of women and in our interview he discussed many of these relationships – but rather that he was unable to relate the kind of sexual stories that carry value in homosocial contexts. As C. J. Pascoe contends, rituals of sexual storytelling among men are not so much about communicating desire for women as demonstrating an ability to exercise mastery and dominance over women’s bodies, both literally and figuratively. Through recounting sexual stories of this kind, men affirm more than masculinity, ‘they affirm subjecthood and personhood through sexualized interactions in which they indicate to themselves and others that they have the ability to work their will upon the world around them’ (Pascoe 2007: 86). Because Anwar was unable to relate sexual stories that foregrounded masculine power and agency, he forfeited masculine status. From these narratives it seems evident that, for many men, the desire to reconfigure their relationships with women is at least in part motivated by the desire to reconfigure their relationships with other men. Indeed, implicit in the teachings and practices of the London seduction community is the promise that this form of skills training and self-development enables men to contravene conventional masculine hierarchies. Mark, a trainer in his thirties, explained:

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There’s also this concept that some guys are really good with women, and some guys are not, and that’s something you can’t change. Which isn’t true, you know. Some guys, some guys naturally get a lot of women, the majority of the others don’t. That’s something that you can’t change – it’s in their genes, it’s in their looks, or whatever. But that is a limiting belief.1 As a set of knowledge practices for the governance of intimate gender relations, pickup is regarded as having the potential to reorder men’s sexual access to women and, in so doing, reconfigure existing power relations among men. Adam, a trainer who has been working in the industry for a number of years, developed this theme further: ‘I think what game does, it kind of gives power back to those who are not the biggest, strongest, most athletic. It’s a set of skills that can actually be learnt, by different people. Which kind of makes it quite accessible to all.’ Through the language of meritocracy – the contention that these skills are accessible to all – pickup or game promises to empower men. There is, however, a kind of compulsion attendant on this promise. In reimagining the pursuit of sexual access to women’s bodies along entrepreneurial and meritocratic lines, pickup taps into the neoliberal fantasy that ‘anything can be achieved if the correct disposition has been adopted’ (Gilroy 2013: 26). Such meritocratic discourses both exploit and obscure complex racial dynamics. For South Asian men, who are overrepresented within the London seduction community,2 pickup can represent a means to renegotiate their marginalized or subordinate position within conventional hierarchies of masculinity in the UK context. Anwar, for example, already quoted above, spoke dejectedly about the fact that while his friends – all of whom were white – regularly set each other up with women, they had never done so for him. Expressing his hurt and disappointment about this, he said: ‘I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing, because I’m Asian, because I’m this person and they see me as being of less value.’ Later in our interview, Anwar detailed less equivocal experiences of racism, at one point recalling a university lecturer telling him: ‘You’re never going to amount to much, go and become a cab driver, go and work in a corner shop – because you’re never going to amount to anything, you’re nothing.’

266 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Having spoken at length about race, religion and cultural difference – indeed, this was the predominant focus of our interview – I was somewhat taken aback by Anwar’s response when I commented that racism is pervasive in the UK. Indeed, he categorically refused such a reading – while at the same time inadvertently affirming the existence of endemic racism by invoking the threat of the ‘black mugger’ to defend social practices of racial stereotyping. While denying racism on a structural level, elsewhere in our interview Anwar seemed to acknowledge, if only tacitly, the existence of racialized hierarchies of masculinity. Discussing his experiences undertaking a commercial training course in pickup, Anwar described how important it had been for him to work with an Asian trainer. As he explained, this trainer was the ‘closest representation’ of himself on account of their shared ethnicity and similar height, and therefore the person he could learn most from. In this way, Anwar betrayed an implicit recognition of the operation of racialized hierarchies of masculinity, as well as a desire to contravene or confound such hierarchies. While many of those involved in the London seduction community regard pickup as a means to reorder masculine hierarchies, this is not, in the final analysis, about collectively rejecting or contesting systems of racism and entrenched inequality. Instead, it is about learning to work within the parameters of these systems in order to improve one’s own position and gain a limited set of privileges. In the London seduction community as in neoliberal culture more broadly, individual self-work is proffered as the solution to structural inequality and discrimination (Gilroy 2013). This ‘privatization of resistance’ (Gilroy 2013: 29) is aided and abetted by the logic of meritocracy, which marketizes the idea of equality while at the same time encouraging competitive self-interest and ultimately re-securing a commitment to hierarchy and inequality (Littler 2013).

Remediating masculinity through homosociality Having considered some of the ways in which men’s homosocial relations outside the London seduction community motivate their engagement with this community-industry, I now want to examine the particular forms of relationality that obtain between men in this

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setting. In doing so, I focus particularly on the spaces of commercial training events and, most especially, the popular format of weekend bootcamps. Regularly taking place in venues across central London, these two-day events are sites of dense and complicated affective relations, animated by shifting dynamics of hope, envy and frustration, overlaid by an aegis of camaraderie. For many men, the act of signing up to these events is in itself an admission to a kind of gendered failure, something they would be loath to admit to their friends. David, a consultant in his thirties who has been involved in the industry for a number of years, related: I can’t even tell my male friends anything about the pickup industry, it would be just be weird if I told them. . . . It would just be weird, like to admit that I need to go to a pickup artist or something and . . . it just should be natural, it’s just what men should do, right? It’s just what men are programmed to do. Where men may be ridiculed for such admissions in their friendship groups, their commercially mediated relationship with trainers ensures, at least in theory, that they will be met with empathy and understanding. Introducing himself and other members of the team at the outset of a weekend training event I attended in 2012, a trainer in his late twenties named Aaron explained to the assembled students: ‘We’ve been where you are now. We’ve sat where you’re sitting. We’ve looked up with our notepad and pens, wondering, “Are we going to get good at this? Are we going to get results?” So we know what it’s like.’ For men who pay to attend commercial training events in London – which typically cost several hundreds of pounds – trainers embody the possibility of realizing greater choice and control in their relationships with women. Through the production of ‘intimate publics’ (Tyler and Gill 2013), these men document their own personal transformation, gesturing to a past in which they were lonely and unpopular, while showcasing a present in which they enjoy near constant access to beautiful women, as well as financial independence, world travel and a generally enviable lifestyle. In this way, pickup trainers become exemplars of a masculine ideal predicated on the ability ‘to make

268 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism things happen’ (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009: 280). Explaining his reasons for taking the bootcamp course, an ex-soldier in his late twenties named James told me: ‘You see the guys that are good at it, like the finished products, and you want to be that.’ With an emphasis on experiential learning, most training formats currently available within the London seduction industry encompass some kind of in-field coaching. During these sessions, students approach and interact with women on the streets, in shops and cafés, as well as in bars and clubs, while being observed by trainers who choreograph their interactions and offer feedback on their performance. In many cases, students are fitted with discreet microphones so that trainers can not only watch but also listen to their interactions with women. After the interaction ends, students rejoin trainers to receive their evaluation. Typically, this will encompass comments about their approach and the manner in which they delivered their ‘opener’; their body language, facial expressions and voice tonality; the conversational patterns they employed; as well as the effectiveness of their ‘closing’ strategy. Some trainers covertly film students’ interactions with women during in-field sessions; later, these videos are watched collectively, giving students the opportunity to review their performance and become spectators to themselves. Through these techniques of surveillance, evaluation, and feedback, students are taught the proper ways to enact a masculine self. For many students, the presence of other men facilitates this learning process. As James explained: Like I said, it’s that kick up your arse that you need. Ahm . . . before the bootcamp obviously the thought of approaching somebody that you’ve never met, especially if she’s hot, it’s quite daunting. But they give you that sort of goal, and before you know it you’re walking over to her, you know. And even just having them there, with other males – like I was talking to you before about – it’s like you’ve got the confidence then. You feed off each other’s confidence, in a way. For James, it is the performance imperative created by the presence of other men that provides the necessary ‘kick up the arse’ for him

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to pursue interactions with women. As a homosocial collective, men ‘feed off each other’s confidence’. While similar dynamics have been documented in other homosocial settings (Flood 2008), within the London seduction community the practice of voyeuristically participating in other men’s sexual interactions with women is normalized and made acceptable – even necessary – through the language of skills acquisition and self-development. In their bid to remake the gendered and sexual subjectivities of their students, trainers routinely engage themselves in regimes of monitoring and surveillance, most notably through the production of in-field footage: audio and audio-visual recordings of themselves approaching and interacting with women. These recordings are made using covert devices, generally operated by trainers themselves or, less often, by hired cameramen. In-field footage routinely spans trainers’ initial encounters with women on the street, as well as their dates with women in cafes and bars. Some trainers additionally record themselves having sex with women in order to teach men how to negotiate SDLs (‘same day lays’) and overcome LMR (‘last minute resistance’, that is, women’s resistance to sex). In almost all cases, the women involved are unaware that they are being filmed or that this footage will be shared with other men or used for commercial purposes. With in-field videos becoming increasingly tied to the status trainers achieve within the industry, many now incorporate this footage into their training regimes and promotional events. At one such event I attended, held on a weekday evening in a seminar room on a University of London campus, a trainer named Charlie stood at the front of the room while videos of himself played via the overhead projector. Standing to one side of the screen, Charlie narrated each interaction, drawing attention to various aspects of his body language, conversational repertoire, and general interactional style, thereby elucidating for his audience the dispositions of body and mind he himself had mastered. Occasionally, he paused the video to explain specific concepts and theories, referring back to notes he had prepared on each topic. As he lined up one video, Charlie promised his audience that the woman was ‘super high quality’. Instead of beginning the video from the initial approach, as he had done with the other videos,

270 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Charlie fast-forwarded to the end of the interaction, explaining as he did so that he had been ‘escalating on her for an hour’. Finding the point in the video he was looking for, he said: ‘This was the second approach of the day, I was like “I want to get more out of this”, like “wrap it up”.’ Pressing play, Charlie appeared on screen standing face to face with a woman outside a London Underground station. As he leaned in and kissed her on screen, standing in the seminar room he raised his arms emphatically and told his audience: ‘Just push it super hard, get the make out and walk away – always leave her wanting more.’ Unknowingly filmed by men who work as trainers in the industry and who use these videos to teach other men how to direct and control their heterosexual interactions, the women in these videos are not only objectified but become object lessons. This, it seems fair to say, is a distinctly new kind of ‘traffic in women’ (Rubin 1975; Sedgwick 1985). Within the context of the London seduction community, the competitive dynamic that frequently characterizes homosocial relations among men is, again, at least in theory, temporarily suspended. Speaking about his relationships with other men involved in the industry, a trainer named Mark claimed, There’s pretty much no rivalry between us. Like, there is no envy or rivalry . . . I mean, it’s like, what happens if a group of men, regular men, are interacting with a group of girls? They end up fighting over the most beautiful one, each one trying to out alpha the others, to get the girl. That is destructive. If I meet a girl and one of my friends wants her really bad – well, unless I want her really bad, as well, and then we can talk about it [laughs] – but he can have her. . . . He can have her, you know? What does it matter? Demarcating himself and his friends from ‘regular men’, Mark contends that conventional forms of homosociality are detrimental to achieving sexual access to women’s bodies, a claim made by many of the men I interviewed. Rather than competing with one another, Mark and his friends work together and cooperate in order to accomplish what is cast as a shared or collective goal. This however is not to say

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that competition and hierarchy are not sustained through less direct means, as Mark implicitly positions himself as capable of ‘gifting’ women to other men, nonchalantly proffering: ‘He can have her.’ While competition has repeatedly been identified as a central characteristic of men’s homosocial relations (Bird 1996), recent research by sociologist Steven Arxer suggests that men may adopt other strategies in order to sustain gendered power relations. Drawing on situated examples from his fieldwork, Arxer observes that ‘cooperation was a strategic platform used by men to increase their status over women and other men’ (Arxer 2011: 413). This same pattern of relationality is evident in the London seduction community, where men support rather than directly compete with one another in pursuing sexual access to women’s bodies; as one trainer I interviewed blithely remarked: ‘It’s like team sports.’ For men who pay to attend these events, commercial training provides access to trainers such as Mark, men who have established themselves as having realized a high level of heterosexual competence and who are capable of enabling other men to do the same. At commercial events they have the opportunity to engage with these men directly, rather than through the mediated spaces of online blogs and videos. What is more, trainers will work with and for their students to ensure that they get ‘results’. Indeed, for many trainers it is a matter of professional pride that their students have ‘success’. Danny, a trainer, explained in my interview with him: Danny: And generally I do not charge people if I don’t get them results. Rachel: What do you . . . how do you work that system or negotiate that with them? Danny: Ahm, so . . . so I’d literally like give them the money back if I haven’t given them the results. Or I’ll just say, ‘You know what, the session will be free. Pay me if . . . if you get success.’ Rachel: So what kind of – what would be success, for different students? Danny: Oh, so like – usually . . . for some it’s getting dates, some getting a girlfriend, some getting laid.

272 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Notably, Danny sees himself as responsible for his students’ results, not only in that he feels students should not pay for his services unless they have success, but that whatever success they do or do not achieve is in fact attributable to him: he doesn’t charge students if he doesn’t get them results, not if they don’t get results. Within the pickup industry there is a definite if generally unarticulated commercial imperative for trainers to ensure their students ‘get results’, thereby providing material for the all-important student testimonies displayed prominently on trainers’ websites. In addition to this, student success serves to demonstrate trainers’ supreme abilities as seducers, as they prove themselves capable of exerting mastery over women through other men.

Neoliberal intimacies Men who become involved in the London seduction community and who pay to attend commercial training courses do so towards a particular end: they want to exercise greater choice and control in their relationships with women, whatever this might mean for them personally. Through participation at commercial events, they also gain access to a particular form of homosociality which, for many men, is very appealing. This was clearly evidenced during my research by the sheer number of men I encountered during fieldwork who seemed to simply hang out at commercial events. These men included trainers who had formerly worked for the company but who had since left to pursue alternative careers, men who had completed training courses and were participating at events as unpaid interns or trainers-intraining, as well as past students who dropped by with or without invitation to catch up with trainers and meet new students. It was not uncommon for me to meet students who were taking courses for a second time during my research, and in interviews many men who had taken training courses described staying in contact with the other students they had met at these events. Discussing these dynamics with a woman who works in the industry, she nodded with recognition and said: ‘I always say they’re in it for the social life.’ While this form of sociality is enabled by a commercial relation – as Danny stated simply, ‘I don’t do this for charity’ – the

The London ‘seduction community’ | 273

financial exchange that is at the basis of these relationships is, for the most part, obscured or hidden from view. Indeed, an important aspect of the work trainers do is to contrive a sense of sociality and inclusion which masks this commercial relation. Jack, a trainer who has been involved in the industry for a number of years, explained: ‘We try to bring them up as much as possible, make them feel included in the group – as if they were coming on a night out with us and we’d instruct them along the way.’ In contracting commercial training services, students are promised access not only to a set of skills that will enable them to exercise greater choice and control in their relationships with women, but access to the sexual lifestyle that trainers enjoy as a homosocial collective. This was perhaps most clearly exemplified at a weekend training event I attended in 2012 when, towards the end of the second day of the programme, a trainer named Aaron took to the top of the room to tell students about the week-long residential programme the company offers. Wary that this may be seen as an attempt to upsell a more expensive programme to men who have already paid for a weekend course, Aaron prefaced his pitch by promising not to take up too much of students’ training time before beginning: What is the residential? It’s seven days living with us. You live with us in central London. We were in the flat last night and there was about ten girls there – that’s just your average night in the residential apartment. . . . What does the course involve? It is a lot of fun, you do get a lot of results, but it is a lot of work as well. If you’re not willing to work, you shouldn’t apply, because it’s a 24/7 programme. For seven days you’re going to be fully immersed in the world of pickup. Your results will rocket – not from day five, from day one. From day one you’ll be working hard, and getting results from day one. Watching this episode at the time and later reflecting on this through my field notes, I was struck not only by the easy blending of work and play – as in the contention that the residential programme is both ‘hard work’ and ‘a lot of fun’ – but by the sense that what was being sold here was not simply a skill set, but also a form of

274 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism homosociality centred on sexual access to women’s bodies. At the residential apartment, women (or ‘girls’) are readily available and freely accessible. Thus by entering into commercially mediated intimate relationships with other men – in this case, paying to live among trainers in their home for a week – students are afforded temporary access to a form of homosociality centred on sexual access to women’s bodies. Rather than concluding that the London seduction community has simply commodified a particular form of sociality among men, I want to suggest instead that the variegated forms of relationality that emerge in this setting must be situated alongside broader reconfigurations of intimacy and relationality taking place within late capitalist societies. As Elizabeth Bernstein has argued in her work on commercial sex, ‘the spheres of public and private, intimacy and commerce, have interpenetrated one another and thereby been mutually transformed, making the post-industrial consumer marketplace a prime arena for securing varieties of interpersonal connection that circumvent this duality’ (Bernstein 2001: 398). Understood in these terms, patterns of sociality within the London seduction community appear not so much as a deviation or departure from current social conventions, but can instead be seen as an extension and acceleration of existing cultural norms. That is to say, the commercially interested forms of relationality elaborated among men in this setting are consonant with the wider reorganization of social and cultural life being effected by neoliberal rationalities, wherein market logics are disseminated within previously non-economic domains (Brown 2005). Thus, the affective patterns and textures of men’s homosocial relations in the London seduction community must be understood as located and particular manifestations of a much broader reordering of sociality and intimacy by neoliberal capitalism.

Notes 1 The term ‘limiting belief’ is community lexicon for any mindset or belief system that will keep a man from achieving ‘success with women’. 2 In terms of race and ethnicity, the London seduction community may be said to broadly reflect the general population of London. It is predominantly

The London ‘seduction community’ | 275 white, and at any given community event white men usually account for between half and three-quarters of attendees. British Asian and South Asian men are somewhat overrepresented within the London pickup scene, a trend that is often commented on and discussed by community members. Despite this overrepresentation, it is notable that the best-known and commercially successful trainers within the London seduction industry are white, with only a small number of British Asian men achieving greater status as trainers or event organizers. Set against the general population of London, relatively few black men participate in the London scene, an absence that leads some community members to conclude that black men are ‘naturally good with women’. Reflecting the general demographics of the London seduction community, in this study just over half of interview participants (18) identified as white British or white European, 8 described themselves as South Asian, British Asian or British Indian, 3 as East Asian, 2 as black and 1 as Middle Eastern.

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276 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex’, in R. R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, New York NY. Schrock, D. and M. Schwalbe (2009) ‘Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 35, pp. 277–95. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia University Press, New York NY. Tyler, I. and R. Gill (2013) ‘Postcolonial Girl: Mediated Intimacy and Migrant Audibility’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 78–94.

INDEX

Note: n following a page number denotes a footnote with the relevant number. Abu Dhabi: abjected masculinity, 117–18; bachelor panic, 113, 120; demasculinized migrant workers, 112–13; Emirati men perceived as dependent and impulsive, 119–20, 122; family laws, 112–13; gender segregation, 111–12; Indian response to charges of effeminacy, 117–20; marriage considerations, 112–13; masculinity of Emirati men, 114–16; masculinity of Pathans, 113, 117, 118, 120; multi-ethnicity, 111; tribal knowledge, 115 age: acceptance of manual work, 13–14, 58–9, 60, 62–3; and football in Jamaica, 22, 215–25; labour market discrimination in India, 85–6, 89, 91, 96n7; see also older men Allison, Anne, 12–13 Angel, Brit-Zim Uebert, 171–2, 177–8 Angola: Christianity, 154, 155, 161; civil war, 163n2; delinquency, 156–8; social change, 151–3, 154–5, 161, 162–3; Umbundu

traditions, 155, 158; see also war veterans anthropology, 6–7 Asian men: abjected masculinity perception, 117–18; ‘effeminate’ colonial racial stereotyping, 17, 80, 121; as fathers, 199; in seduction community, 265–6, 274n2; see also Muslim young men Austin, D.J., 216 bachelor panic, 113, 120 Batliwala, Srilatha, 10 beards, and masculinity, 114 behaviour: and masculinity, 114–16; seduction coaching, 268–70 Bhabha, H.K., 203 Big Man masculinity, 187, 188, 193, 194 black men, 18, 125–8, 128, 274n2 bodily capital: Russian working class, 60; and tourism, 17, 18, 103–5 Brazil: capoeira fighter virility, 18, 126, 130; carnival, 128; emigrants’ mixed masculinities,

278 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Brazil (cont.): 18, 127, 131–2; exotic image of men, 18, 125–33, 126, 127–32; gender and regional inequalities, 128–9, 133; sex tourism, 18, 125–7, 129–31, 133 Bristol-Rhys, Jane, 17, 111–23 Buckley, M., 209 Butler, J., 204 capitalism, 30, 33 capoeira fighters, 18, 126, 130 Carrigan, Tim, 4–5 Certeau, Michel de, 256–7 Chernova, Zh., 53 child abuse, 179 children: and parental authority, 84; see also father-son relationships Chile, Pinochet coup, 35 China: admiration for wealthy men, 11, 46; Chinese sonpreference culture, 75–6; filial responsibilities, 15, 69–77; neoliberalism, 34, 67; rural-urban migration, 66, 77n1; Tiananmen Square protests, 35 Christianity: in Angola, 154, 155, 161; biblical support for polygyny, 174; evangelist preachers, 171–80; prosperity churches, 168–70; servant vs warrior leadership, 167, 171, 177–8; see also YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) cities, 47, 91 class: and education, 207, 208–9, 216; elites, 31–2, 38; Jamaican footballers, 22, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223–5; and racial segregation, 207, 208–9; and social mobility, 223–4; tourism industry, 100, 107; see also working-class men

clothing, 114–16, 123n2, 151 Coles, T., 51 colonialism: and racial stereotypes, 17, 80, 120, 121–2; and sport, 214; and tourism development, 100; and violence, 139 commodity logic, 41–2 Connell, R.W., 4–5, 9, 51, 83–4, 143, 183 consumer society: and gender differences, 44; intensified demands on male as provider role, 19, 61, 85, 143–4; social value of money, 144 Cornwall, A., 1–25; Dislocating Masculinity, 2–3, 5, 6–7, 21, 22, 30, 36, 209–210, 214, 258 Craig, G., 202–3 cultural skills, and masculinity, 116 Dardot, P., 7, 8, 9, 15 debt, 33 Deng Xiao Ping, 35 Dhanraj, Deepa, 10 Dislocating Masculinity (Cornwall and Lindisfarne), 2–3, 5, 6–7, 21, 22, 30, 36, 209–210, 214, 258 dogs, duck hunters’ mates, 236–9 domestic violence see sexual violence duck hunting: and alcohol, 230–31; blokes-only, 228, 229–32; boyish enthusiasm, 231–2; community duck hunters and family, 228, 229, 230; competing masculinities, 22, 228, 235, 239–41; dogs as mates, 236–9, 240; egalitarianism, 227; enjoyment of duck calling, 233–5, 240; and habitat conservation, 235; misogyny, 229–30; natural pastime, 232; ornament collecting, 232–3; softer masculinity, 231–3, 235, 239, 240

Index | 279 education: and class, 216; see also schools Edwards, R., 199–200 elites, 31–2, 38, 40–41 Enloe, C., 139 Enria, Luisa, 18–19, 136–48 entrepreneurial masculinity, 9–11 eroticism, 18 essentialism, 36–7 ethnography, 21, 24–5, 200 European Union, Growing Together video, 130 Evans, Gillian, 187 exoticism, 18, 126, 127–32 family: Chinese filial responsibilities, 15, 69–77; Chinese son-preference culture, 75–6; and community duck hunters, 228, 229, 230; monogamy and middle-class respectability, 168–70; and Muslim culture, 201–2; young men’s supporting role, 192–3; see also provider identity father-son relationships: anxiety for future generations, 151–2; challenges to masculinity in India, 87–90, 95; models of masculinity, 158–62; war veterans, 19, 152–6 femininity, 81, 90, 92, 95–6 feminism, 3 fitness, 41 football: class/age distinctions in Jamaica, 22, 215–25; coaching and leadership in The Gambia, 190–95; and women, 192–3, 215 Foxhall, Lin, 21 The Gambia, YMCA programmes, 185, 190–95 gay marriage, 44 gender: Abu Dhabi segregation, 111–12; and conflicts, 136–7; and

new standards of masculinity, 128–9, 133; NGOs and faithbased organizations, 184; and race, 121–2; and warfare, 137, 139–40 gender inequality, 11–12, 30–32, 40–42, 128–9, 133 gender marking, 37, 44–7 generations: Chinese filial responsibilities, 15, 69–77; football playing in Jamaica, 215–25; knowledge acquisition, 154; mismatch between, 19; social relations between, 22; tactical masculinity in the Gambia, 190–93; tension between patriarchal control and married sons, 87–90, 95; see also fatherson relationships Gifford, Paul, 168 Greig, Alan, 9 Gumbura, Robert, 174–7 Hall, Stuart, 165 hard masculinities, of Pentecostalism, 170–80 Hayns, Joe, 16–17, 99–108 Haywood, Chris, 21, 198–210 hegemonic masculinity, 5, 5–6, 37–8, 143 Hibbins, R., 70 Hindu nationalism, 80 historiography, 2–7 homeboy cosmopolitanism, 145 homosocial relations: college friendships, 22–3, 249–51; concept, 245; conflicts and solidarity, 253–7; ‘dividual’ people, 39–40; duck hunting, 22, 228, 230–32; football players, 22, 219–25; and impingement, 39; and place, 244, 245–6, 248, 251–3; seduction community,

280 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism homosocial relations (cont.): 23–4, 262–74; street culture, 145–7; women’s exclusion, 215, 220, 222–3; working-class men, 59–60 housing provision, 60–61, 62 Hwang, K.K., 74 identity: Chinese cultural distinctiveness, 70–71; essentialism, 36–7; partibility, 38–40; see also class; provider identity impingement, 39 India: adult masculinity and provider identity, 81–2, 83–6, 88–94; age-segregated labour market, 85–6, 89, 96n7; Babri Masjid mosque destruction, 35; female providers and male dependants, 90–94; intensified demands since economic liberalization, 85; marriage and transition from boy (payan) to houseman (veettukarar), 81–2, 86–7, 94–5; progressive feminization of older men, 82–3, 88–9, 95; provider rights and responsibilities, 83–4; tension between patriarchal control and married sons, 87–90, 95 Indian emigrants, abjected masculinity perception, 112–13, 117–20 inequality: Brazil, 128–9, 133; gender inequality, 11–12, 30–32, 40–42, 128–9, 133; and neoliberalism, 11–12, 30–32, 42–4; racialized tourism inequality, 16–17, 100; and suffering, 43; and university residence, 246–8, 254, 258–9 Iran, women’s position, 46–7

Jamaica: class/age distinctions of football players, 215–25; education and class, 216; everyday football, 213–14, 215; football scholarships, 218 Jamieson, L., 74 Java, Passion, 171–2 Jeater, Diana, 19–20, 165–80 Kanitkar, Helen, 22, 214 Karioris, Frank, 22–3, 244–59 Kideckel, D., 53 Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 35 Laval, C., 7, 8, 9, 15 leadership, sport and the community, 185–7, 190–91, 193–5 Lee, John, 4–5 Lefebvre, H., 245 leisure activities: fishing trips, 59–60; and masculinity, 116; su¯q workers, 102; working-class men, 59–60; see also duck hunting; football; sport Lewis, H., 202–3 Lin, Xiaodong, 14–15, 66–77 Lindisfarne, Nancy, 11–12, 29–49, 209–210; Dislocating Masculinity, 2–3, 5, 6–7, 21, 22, 30, 36, 209–210, 214, 258 Little, Jo, 228–9 Mac an Ghaill, Mairtin, 21, 75–6, 198–210 Macdonald, A., 139 McGhee, D., 201 McLeod, Carmen, 22, 227–41 Mahdavi, P., 45, 46–7 Makandiwa, Emmanuel, 171–3, 177–8

Index | 281 malandro, 128 managerial positions, 13–14, 56, 57–8 manual work: ambivalence of young men, 13–14, 55–6, 62; differing age attitudes, 13–14, 58–9, 62–3; lacking in social respect, 57; masculinity of Pathan labourers, 113, 117, 118, 120; subordinate masculinity, 41; valorized over mental labour, 51; value and moral worth for older men, 58–9, 62–3; vs managerial/office work, 13–14, 56, 57–8 Marrakech su¯q workers: emasculation in transactional sex with foreign tourists, 103–5; embodiment of European fantasies, 104; emotional hurt, 104, 107; and European paedophiles, 105; ‘foot dragging’ and stealing, 101–2; fugiding, 102; inability to provide, 105–6, 107; leisure time, 102; poverty, 101, 102–3; and shame, 102, 105–7, 108; and tourism, 100 marriage: Abu Dhabi considerations, 112–13; asymmetric intergenerational patterns, 153; Chinese obligation, 69, 73, 74; gay marriage, 44; migrant worker difficulties, 69; polygyny, 166, 167–8, 173–7; transition from boy (payan) to houseman (veettukarar)in India, 81–2, 86–7, 94–5; wedding rituals, 45–6; and Zimbabwe missionaries, 166–8 masculinity: behaviour and dress, 114–16, 123n2; biological markers, 81; and cultural skills, 116; dissociation from biology over life course, 81,

90, 92, 95–6; divergent and multiple, 185; reconfiguration under neoliberalism, 12–15; and social status, 81; see also hard masculinities; hegemonic masculinity; soft masculinities; subordinate masculinities Maxwell, David, 169–70 Mbembe, A., 144 migrant workers: Chinese ruralurban migration, 66, 77n1; demasculinized in Emirati society, 112–13; dignity and self-respect, 48; dislocated masculinities, 68; exclusion, 67–8; filial responsibilities, 15, 69–77; as high-prestige rural returnee, 70; Indian response to charges of effeminacy, 117–20; masculinity of manual labourers, 113; masculinity of Pathans, 113, 117, 118, 120; mixed masculinities of Brazilian middle-class, 18, 127, 131–2; outsourcing, 48; quality (suzhi) of life, 14–15, 68; and racism, 48; remittances home, 69, 72, 73–5, 102 military service, and adult male status, 153 miracles, 172–3 misogyny, 229–30 missionaries, 166–8 Mugabe, Robert, 173–4 mulata, 128 multiculturalism, 201, 202–3, 206–7 Muslim, diverse popular image, 206 Muslim young men: danger of religious extremism, 199, 203–4; feminine traits, 198; multiple dislocations of masculinity, 21, 199–206; Muslim culture and family, 201–2; self-definition as Muslims, 204–6; state’s racialized

282 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism Muslim young men (cont.): perception, 205–6; views on racial segregation, 206–9 nature, habitat conservation, 235 Neale, Jonathan, 11–12, 29–49 neoliberalism: changing concepts of masculinity, 13–15; concept, 7–8; and contemporary capitalism, 9; as free market, 34; geographical variations, 34, 35; hazards, 24; and inequality, 11–12, 30–32, 42–4; need for individual selfwork, 265, 266; policies, 29; radical effects, 11, 32; regime, 32–6; resistance, 34, 35–6; and social and cultural life, 274; structural adjustment programmes, 33, 169; see also consumer society New Zealand: neoliberalism, 232, 239; see also duck hunting Nonini, D.M., 68 older men: dependency and progressive feminization in India, 82–3, 88–9, 90–92, 93–4, 95; football playing in Jamaica, 215–18; homosociality after football, 219–20, 223–5; reasons for football playing, 22, 223–5; respect, 155; see also father-son relationships; war veterans O’Neill, Rachel, 23–4, 261–75 Ortner, Sherry, 24 Osella, Caroline, 17, 111–23 paedophiles, 105 partibility, 38–40 Pascoe, C.J., 264 Pathans, 113, 117, 118, 120 Peck, Jamie, 8 Pentecostalism: changing forms,

19–20; and hard masculinity, 170–80; and soft masculinity, 168–70 Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, 43 pickup industry see seduction community Piot, Charles, 12–13 Piscitelli, Adriana, 17–18, 125–34 place see space polygyny, 166, 167–8, 173–7 pride, 117, 271–2 prosperity churches, Zimbabwe, 168–70 provider identity: challenges, 16–17; failure of Emirati men, 119; female providers and male dependants, 90–94; housing in Russia, 60–61, 62; and Indian masculinity, 81–2, 83–6, 88–94; intensified demands from women in consumer society, 19, 61, 85, 143–4; male role, 10, 16–17, 19, 40, 60–61; Marrakech su¯q worker failure, 16–17, 105–6, 107; rights and responsibilities, 83–4; women as masculinist breadwinners, 10, 40, 82–3, 91–3 quality (suzhi) of life, 14–15, 68 Qureshi, K., 207 race: and gender, 121–2; inequality, 16–17, 100; sexualization, 125–33 racial segregation, and class, 207, 208–9 racial stereotypes: abjected masculinity of Indian migrant workers, 117–18; Asians as effeminate, 17, 80, 121; colonial, 17, 80, 120, 121–2; European

Index | 283 fantasies, 104, 107–8; Indian response to charges of effeminacy, 117–20 racism: masculine hierarchies, 265–6; and migration, 48 Reay, D., 208 religion: missionaries, 166–8; Pentecostalist preachers, 171–80; prosperity churches, 168–70; and social progress, 154, 155; see also Christianity remittances home, migrant workers, 69, 72, 73–5, 102 Romania, status of industrial workers, 53 Round, J., 54 ruling class see elites rural areas: heterosexuality, 228–9; labour market age discrimination, 91; see also duck hunting rural-urban migration, China, 66, 77n1 Russia: class transformations, 52–3; housing pressures, 60–61, 62; industrial sector collapse, 52; neoliberalism, 34; secondary jobs, 59, 61; vocational training, 54–6; working-class leisure activities, 59–60; working-class subordination, 52–4; workplace attachment, 58–9; see also working-class men schools: and class identity, 207, 208–9, 216; football scholarships, 218 seduction community: commercial training services, 261–2; heterosexual competence of trainers, 267–8, 269, 271–2; homosocial relations, 23–4, 266– 74; in-field coaching, 268–70; mutual support, 267, 268–9,

270–72; reasons for involvement, 262–6 sex role theory, 83–4 sex tourism: Brazil, 18, 125–7, 129–31, 133; Moroccon su¯q workers, 16–17, 103–5 sexting, 45 sexual experiences: Jamaican young men, 221; storytelling, 262–4 sexual violence, 179; Brazilian emigrants, 131–2; constant feature, 31; Zimbabwe, 20, 171, 178–9 shame: Moroccon s, 16–17, 102, 105–7, 108; young men in Sierra Leone, 144, 146–7 Shire, Chenjerai, 258 shoes, and masculinity, 114 Sierra Leone: civil war, 136–7, 138–40; economic marginality of young men, 141–4; street culture, 145–7; unemployment, 138–9, 140, 148; violence, 146–7; women excluded from demobilization process, 139–40 Simien Mountains, 5 social mobility, and class, 223–4 social relations see homosocial relations soft masculinities, 168–70, 231–3, 235, 239, 240 space: creation of a ‘proper’, 256–7; and social relations, 244, 245–6, 248, 251–3, 257–9; Zimbabwe dare, 258 Spall, John, 19, 151–63 sport: and colonialism, 214; elite hobby, 41; Islamic identity and, 192–3; and leadership, 185–7, 190–91, 193–5; see also football stag parties, 45 stereotypes see racial stereotypes Strathern, Marilyn, 39

284 | Masculinities under Neoliberalism street culture, 19, 145–7, 187–9 subordinate masculinities, 37, 40, 41, 48 survival struggles, 12–13 Sutton, Roger, 237–8 Syria, wedding rituals, 46 Tantam, William, 22, 213–25 Thatcher, Margaret, 35 tourism: and bodily capital, 17, 18, 103–5; and class differences, 107; neo-colonial institution, 100; racialized inequality, 16–17, 100; su¯q worker poverty, 101; Zimbabwe’s evangelist preachers, 171; see also Marrakech su¯q workers; sex tourism Trigell, Jonathan, 45 unemployment, Sierra Leone, 138–40, 148 United Nations, peacebuilding, 137–8 United States: miners’ strike, 35; neoliberalism, 35; war on drugs, 35 university students: conflicts and solidarity, 253–7; inequalities, 22–3, 246–8, 254, 258–9; place and social relations, 244, 245–6, 248, 251–3; Step Kids marginal status, 245 urban areas, 47, 91 Usher, R., 199–200 Vera-Sanso, Penny, 16, 80–97 violence: and colonialism, 139; gendered and sexualized, 31; and physical dominance, 186–90; and street culture, 19, 146–7, 188–9; structural basis, 11; to gain democratic inclusion, 147; to gain respect, 146–7;

and unemployment, 138–40; university solidarity, 253–7; see also sexual violence Wacquant, Loïc, 8, 15 Walker, Charlie, 13–14, 51–63 war veterans: economic marginality, 153; effects of military service on fatherhood, 162; as fathers, 154–62; lack of prospects, 155–6; and models of masculinity, 158–62; and social change, 151–3, 154–5, 161, 162–3 wealth: and masculinity, 46, 89–90; multiple wives and children as visible source, 175–7; prosperity churches, 168–70 Whole Man masculinity, 20–21, 183–5 Wignall, Ross, 20–21, 183–95 Wilkinson, Richard, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, 43 Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, 51 women: bar workers, 220; cash transfer schemes, 10; claiming masculinity, 80; empowerment, 10–11; and football, 192–3, 215; Islam and sport, 192–3; as masculinist household providers, 10, 40, 82–3, 91–3; object lessons in men’s seduction training, 269–72; power relations between two-sister households, 92; stress of provider role, 93; undercapitalized work, 93–4; as victims in conflict, 137; and warfare, 139–40 work: feminization of men doing women’s work, 89; health and safety, 47; and hegemonic

Index | 285 masculinity, 143; men’s need for prestige element, 93–4; see also manual work working-class men: attachment to workplace, 58–9; Brazilian masculinity, 129; Eastern European subordination, 53–4; lack of agency in material terms, 60–61, 62, 63; leisure activities, 59–60; marginalization, 51–2, 63; pragmatic acceptance of conditions, 54, 59, 60; secondary employment, 59, 61; subordinate masculinity, 38–9; and women, 40

Jamaica, 215–16, 218–19; football as response to socioeconomic marginalization, 224–5; homosociality after football, 220–25; role models beyond the family, 158–9, 160; security risk in post-war states, 136–40; sexual experience discussions, 221, 262–4; street culture, 19, 145–7, 188–9; unemployment and alienation, 138–9, 140, 148; violence and physical dominance, 186–90; see also Muslim young men

Yan, H., 68 YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association): sport and leadership, 185–7, 190–91, 193–5; Sussex Central, 185–90; The Gambia, 190–93; Whole Man masculinity, 20–21, 183–5 young men: ambivalence towards manual work, 13–14, 55–6, 62; commission chasing not proper work, 141–4; delinquency, 156–8, 161–2; economic insecurity in Sierra Leone, 18–19, 138–9, 140–44; football playing in

Zimbabwe: changing masculinities, 20, 180; dare meeting place, 258; domestic violence, 178–9; economic crises, 165, 170; evangelist preachers, 171–80; missionaries, 166–8; monogamy and middle-class respectability, 168–70; Pentecostalism and hard masculinities, 170–80; Pentecostalism and soft masculinities, 168–70; polygyny, 166, 167–8, 173–7; prosperity churches, 168–70; traditional religion, 169–70