Vulnerable Men: Gender and Sentiment at the Margins of Cape Town, South Africa

Kurzbeschreibung

The purpose of this dissertation is to show what makes young heterosexual men from different racialized and religious identity groups feel vulnerable after South Africa's transition to democracy. It is about emotional wounds and how these tie in with enactments of masculinity in the post-apartheid city. The empirical research is based on 16 months of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in three neighborhoods of Cape Town (2007-2010). There were four main findings. First, when research participants’ social worlds made them hurt and foreclosed belonging, they struggled to become invulnerable. They embraced a system of culturally standardized emotional attitudes of invulnerability that assumed different meanings depending on their family’s trajectory during the regime of apartheid (1948–1994). Second, male research participants felt blatantly vulnerable in the face of economic and social exclusion, even if they tried to suggest otherwise. This vulnerability was tied to the desire for attachment in relationships that found expression in another set of attitudes that valued mutuality in different ways depending on how they had grown up and where they lived in the present. Third, there was a tension between the value placed on men’s independence, on the one hand, and the emphasis on being affected in relationships, on the other. When the two clashed, the struggle for invulnerability commonly had the unintended outcome of creating more vulnerability in a vicious cycle of decline that often lead to substance misuse and interpersonal violence. Finally, dominant enactments of masculinity could temporarily break down and become subject to reconstruction when men embraced vulnerability. The researcher found this to be partly the case in Evangelical and Islamic ritual spaces, which allowed and sometimes forced men to be vulnerable in order to bond with fellow believers, religious authorities, and metaphysical powers.