The Crisis of Liberation

Abstract

In postapartheid South Africa, a “crisis of masculinity” has become the most prominent explanation for high rates of violence against women and the gendered nature of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This article offers a critique of such an analysis, and suggests that the sexualization of politics in the postapartheid era allows both state actors and impoverished community members to manage and negotiate the paradoxes of postcolonialism. Combining a discourse analysis and ethnographic study, the article analyzes the various ways in which the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” are deployed (and resignified) in and through discursive struggles over masculinity and sexuality. Overall, the article argues that gender has become a primary terrain upon which colonial and postcolonial conflicts are played out. As such, rather than a “crisis of masculinity,” the sexualization of politics signifies and masks deep-seated concerns about the “success” of liberation.

Keywords

postcolonialism masculinity neoliberalism HIV/AIDS South Africa

Liberal versions of sexuality, which mark South Africa’s new democracy, have had a number of highly contradictory consequences for women and men, as old notions of masculinity and male privilege have been destabilized. The transition to democracy has precipitated a crisis of masculinity. Orthodox notions of masculinity are being challenged and new versions of masculinity are emerging in their place. Some men are seeking to be part of a new social order while others are defensively clinging to more familiar routines.

(Walker 2005, 225; my emphasis)

According to academic and popular analysis in South Africa, the dehumanization of African men under apartheid and the high rates of unemployment inaugurated by deindustrialization have triggered a “crisis of masculinity.” Because African men have been robbed of their identity as breadwinners, the argument goes, they resort to more violent or self-destructive means of expressing their masculinity. This theory is used to explain everything from high rates of violence against women, to stigmatizing behaviors and sexual promiscuity. The “crisis of masculinity” analysis is widespread, taking up significant space in popular newspapers, academic work, and discourses on gender promoted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements.

From 2002 through 2009, The Star newspaper, Johannesburg’s most popular daily, published on average fifteen articles a year deploying this “crisis of masculinity” argument. And the coverage is just as frequent in other news sources:

[T]he era of conflict from which we have just emerged so damaged South Africa’s psyche that we find it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong. So we have man-beasts roaming our streets and homes, raping and beating women at will. (Mail and Guardian 2002)

Men, especially black men, found themselves diminished by the system, which caused them to be called “boys” and to be unable to take up responsible positions, so the only place to be the “boss” was in the home. (Farber 2003)

While emancipated women have a choice and real men do not abuse, social observers note a relationship between the feminization of the workplace and threatened males. Has the problem of wife abuse increased with the emancipation of women? … Instead of focusing on the victim we now need to turn our gaze to the collective psyche of men. What makes them so vulnerable? … Are they overburdened by their need for possession and protection? Perhaps men are more in need of liberation than women. (Rajab 2009)

In the “crisis of masculinity” discourse, economic conditions are often used to explain high rates of violence against women and their greater vulnerability to HIV infection. Yet, when this thesis is espoused in public sphere debates and especially when possible policies are suggested, the focus is often shifted from economic reform to solutions aimed at “modernizing” gender norms. For example, the Men as Partners Program¹ has become a popular policy initiative in South Africa. Liz Walker, who conducted ethnographic work with men participating in programs of this type found that these men were not only being encouraged to embrace rights-based “liberal” definitions of gender, but through their adoption, came to view their previously held beliefs as “traditional” and therefore “wrong” (Walker 2005).

Similarly, some of the academic literature on postapartheid masculinity problematically upholds a kind of binaristic “clash of civilizations” thesis whereby “modern” and “traditional” gender orders are presumed to be mutually exclusive. For example, Leclerc-Madlala (2001) argues that while women in South Africa are more likely to celebrate changes in gender dynamics brought by the proliferation of “liberal” feminist ideology, men are more likely to pine for the strictness imposed by “tradition.” Sideris (2005) reports on a group of men who have embraced a human rights framework in order to reject the use of violence as a conflict resolution strategy in their own homes, thereby coming to define themselves as “different” from the rest of the men in their communities. These studies are laudable for the way in which they illustrate the multiplicity of masculinities at play in the postcolonial context, but they tend to homogenize and demonize “traditional” masculinity by situating it firmly within the African population and by characterizing it as violent and misogynistic. In addition, such an approach assumes a cultural teleology whereby liberal gender rights are not only heralded but presumed to be “winning” an anachronistic battle of civilizations.

This article offers a postcolonial critique of the academic analyses which insist South African men suffer from a “crisis of masculinity.” These approaches largely ignore the processes of hybridization which have occurred throughout the past 400+ years of South Africa’s colonial history, but they also ignore the complex ways in which “tradition” and “modernity” themselves are constantly being reinvented. The data presented here shows how the tropes of “traditionalism” and “modernity” are utilized as political weapons in contestations over hegemonic masculinity to manage anxieties associated with South Africa’s national identity and position in the world system.

Following South African scholars who have argued that the postapartheid era is marked by a certain “sexualisation of politics and politicisation of sexuality” (Robins 2008, 412; Posel 2005), this article combines a discourse analysis and ethnographic study to analyze how the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” get deployed (and resignified) in and through discursive struggles over masculinity and sexuality, in an attempt to negotiate certain postcolonial contradictions. Sexual politics becomes an arena through which state actors strive to salvage the image of South Africa as a postcolonial, postracist state, despite the exacerbation of racial, gendered, and economic inequalities. In poor communities, which are most often identified as locations that exhibit severe “crises of masculinity,” politics are sexualized in an effort to challenge economic and cultural marginalization. In the end, the article argues that rather than a “crisis of masculinity,” the sexualization of politics in the postapartheid era signals and masks a profound crisis of liberation.

The article begins with an analysis of the differential masculinities performed by South Africa’s two most recent Presidents: Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Their performances serve to rearticulate and redeploy the colonial tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism.” These idealized constructs were utilized by the apartheid state to implement and justify indirect rule (Mamdani 1996); however, they are often rearticulated in the postapartheid era, where they signal the postcolonial difficulty of defining a national imaginary in the face of both economic globalization and cultural imperialism. In the case of gender and sexuality, this emerges in the confrontation between “modern” rights-based gender norms on one hand, and so-called “traditional” African sexuality on the other. As such, gender becomes a primary terrain upon which colonial and postcolonial conflicts are played out.

Next, drawing on extensive ethnographic data, I illustrate the ways in which poor communities have responded to the destabilization of their gender orders. Some bemoan the loss of “traditional” gender values and others critique the uneven distribution of the benefits of “modernity.” Here, debates over “modernity” and “tradition” are deployed as a means of resolving fundamental contradictions wrought by shifts in cultural beliefs and practices, the political economy, and the politics of recognition.

In juxtaposing the textual and ethnographic data, I am able to explore the ways in which the discursive formation on masculinity operates at different scales—within public sphere discourses and within poor communities. As such, the relationship between different constructions of masculinity becomes apparent, as does the effort (at both scales) to manage cultural and economic conflicts about the postcolonial condition. These data make it clear that any analysis of gender must pay heed to the interlocking structural forces of the economy, the state, and culture, and the way in which they shift and change over time both generating shifts in and being transformed by practices of sexuality.

Crisis Tendencies

Connell (2005a, 84) argues that masculinity itself can never be “in crisis” because such a formulation assumes masculinity is a coherent construction rather than a “configuration of practice within a system of gender relations.” She argues that we can speak of crisis tendencies within a gender order that serve to disrupt, reconfigure, or reify hegemonic masculinity. But this formulation can only help explain disruptions to coherent gender orders and must be amended to account for the overwhelmingly destabilizing effects of colonial and neocolonial forces on gender systems in the global South (Silberschmidt 2005; Sideris 2005). In the postcolonial context, I argue, there are multiple (often competing or conflicting) gender orders at play, which operate within systems of extreme structural inequality. Postcolonial gender theory must be able to grasp the simultaneous processes of colonial coercion and its epistemic ruptures, as well as the processes of hybridization, subversion, and uncertainty that emerge out of the postcolonial condition. The fall of apartheid, the onslaught of AIDS, and the introduction of neoliberal economic reform (in its multiple modalities) have all had profound effects on the gender orders that operate in postapartheid South Africa.

Practically overnight, the African National Congress (ANC) was forced to transform from a militant revolutionary movement into a reputable governing body. In the 1990s, it faced a legacy of immense inequality, international pressure to abandon social democratic ideals in exchange for market competitiveness, and a disease that would become an epidemic of unparalleled proportions. This particular conjuncture of events served to both undermine and define the postapartheid state’s capacity and legitimacy on the global stage. Its postcolonial status, as well as its economic viability, was at stake.

Unemployment rose steadily in the first decade after apartheid and has plateaued at approximately 25 percent; however, it reaches 36 percent when discouraged work seekers are included (Statistics South Africa 2010). According to the United Nations, from 2000 to 2006, 26.2 percent of South Africa’s population lived on less than $1.25 per day and 42.9 percent lived on less than $2 per day (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] 2007). South Africa’s Gini coefficient has remained relatively unchanged since 1975 (Seekings and Nattrass 2006, 307), showing that the end of apartheid failed to significantly transform the racial or class makeup of South African society. In fact, many have argued that the entrenched inequalities of apartheid have only been exacerbated by the adoption of neoliberalism (Bond 2000; Marais 2001).

Democracy was also accompanied by a transformation in the relationship between the state and gender/sexuality. South Africa’s constitution, ratified in 1996, was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual preference ( BBC News 2005). On December 1, 2005, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and exactly one year later, they became legal ( BBC News 2005; Nullis 2006). In 1996, abortion was legalized through the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, and the 1998 Employment Equity Act provides federal legislation outlawing sexual harassment, which is quite ambitiously defined and severely punished. And yet, some have been critical of the ways in which gendered citizenship was “rendered in the grammar of liberal democracy” (Manicom 2005, 32) which left intact many structural gender inequalities (Hassim 2006). As I argue below, this focus on “rights” is often problematically positioned in opposition to gendered “traditions” (Hunter 2010).

Although the forced migration required to sustain the mining industry under apartheid disrupted the preapartheid institution of the family and the taboo on extramarital sexual relations,² marriage remained the primary means of expressing both respectable femininity and masculinity throughout the apartheid era (Hunter 2004, 2010). Ilobolo, the custom of the groom’s family providing cows (or the monetary equivalent) to the bride’s family—a stable accompaniment of marriage until the postapartheid period—has been undermined by the stagnation of the formal economy (Ibid). Deindustrialization has been accompanied by a precipitous drop in marriage rates. Only 30 percent of the African population is currently married (half the rate of marriage in the same population in the 1960s; Hunter 2011, 1114 and 1124).³ “Marriage today is, in many respects, a middle-class institution” (Hunter 2007, 695). And yet, sexuality is still linked to a material economy of gift exchange. Some have suggested that “transactional sex” has come to replace marriage in the postapartheid era (Hunter 2007).

Transactional sex is in no way related to the institution or profession of prostitution (Hunter 2002), nor is it necessarily related to concurrency—engagement in more than one sexual relationship at a time (Dunkle et al. 2004). However, with unemployment and poverty rates as high as they are, women do often engage in more than one “transactional” relationship at a time in order to survive and provide for their families. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that women are generally expected to raise any children that result from sexual relations. Because it is increasingly likely that at least one if not both sexual partners are in concurrent relationships, transactional sex is one of the primary mechanisms of HIV transmission (Morris and Kretzschmar 1997; Wojcicki and Malala 2001; Dunkle et al. 2004). In a demographic study on transactional sex in Soweto, the authors found that “transactional sex was associated with HIV seropositivity after controlling for lifetime number of male partners and length of time a woman had been sexually active”(Dunkle et al. 2004, 1581).

Shifts in the political economy and in state leadership as well as the onset of HIV/AIDS have destabilized South Africa’s already atomized gender orders, which are riddled with contradictions and conflicts. This article analyzes the ways in which state actors and people living in impoverished communities differentially deploy the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” in an effort to make sense of and navigate the shifting terrain of gender relations.

The Social Construction of Masculinity

Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, will be most remembered throughout the world for his “AIDS denialism.” Denialism was the label most commonly utilized to describe the belief held by the former president and key members of his Department of Health that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral treatment is toxic. In a macabre kind of irony, the denialism that stalled the rollout of antiretroviral medication and subsequently contributed to the loss of almost half a million lives (Chigwedere et al. 2008)—most of them within the African population—was inspired by a strong belief that the international AIDS response was inherently colonialist and racist. Mbeki denounced the explanation that HIV causes AIDS as a theory that was informed by racist assumptions about the voracity of Africans’ sexual appetites and that effectively blamed the high rates of HIV in South Africa on individual behavior (see also Mbali 2004; Fassin 2007).

History “ … created an image of our Continent as one that is naturally prone to an AIDS epidemic caused by rampant promiscuity and endemic amorality.” (Mbeki 2001, 7)

We [Africans] are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passion to reason. We must perforce adopt strange opinions … convinced that we are but natural-born promiscuous carriers of germs … They proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our devotion to the sin of lust. (Mbeki, from Forrest and Streek 2001)

Mbeki sought a structural explanation for Africa’s high prevalence rates: poverty. He also questioned the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the massive profits it stood to gain from the AIDS pandemic in Africa, should antiretrovirals be purchased to stem its tide.

Mbeki’s denialism should be understood in relation to his efforts to promote a new form of African modernity. He deployed the symbolism of the African Renaissance in his election campaign:

[O]ut of Africa reborn must come modern products of human economic activity, significant contributions to the world of knowledge, in the arts, science and technology, new images of an Africa of peace and prosperity. Thus shall we, together and at last, by bringing about the African Renaissance depart from a centuries-old past which sought to perpetuate the notion of an Africa condemned to remain a curiosity slowly grinding to a halt on the periphery of the world. (Mbeki 1998)

As Krista Johnson (2005, 311) points out, one of the motivations behind Mbeki’s AIDS politics was a fear that South Africa would become dependent on the Western world, both financially and epistemologically—instead, he endorsed “African solutions to Africa’s problems.”

Mbeki worked to promote South Africa as an economically viable leader on the African continent which included the wholesale neoliberalization of South Africa’s economy, but he constantly called into question Western imperialist projects and the unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization. Such a tricky political positioning required him to deploy the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” in sometimes contradictory ways—often leading to paradoxical resignifications of race, class, and gender.

Mbeki’s public image was of a Western-educated leader who embraced capitalist democracy and secular “modernity.” This side of Mbeki is revealed in his championing of “modern,” liberal, gender rights:

[T]he women of our country carry the burden of poverty and continue to be exposed to unacceptable violence and abuse. It will never be possible for us to claim that we are making significant progress to create a new South Africa if we do not make significant progress towards gender equality and the emancipation of women. (Mbeki 2002)

Mbeki supported a woman to succeed him and introduced quotas for women’s representation in political office and ANC structures.

Mbeki rejected the “crisis of masculinity” discourse as racist, especially when espoused by Western “experts.” In an ANC Today article, Mbeki (2004) challenged an “internationally recognized expert” on sexual violence who blamed “African traditions, indigenous religions and culture [for] prescrib[ing] and institutionalis[ing] rape.” Mbeki went on to expose this expert’s assumptions: “Given this view, which defines the African people as barbaric savages, it should come as no surprise that … ‘South Africa has the highest rates of rape in the world’ … because, after all, we are an African country, and therefore have the men conditioned by African culture, tradition and religion to commit rape.”

However, Mbeki also embraced certain indigenous “traditions” in his battle against the international biomedical industry and its supporters in South Africa. Mbeki believed that biomedical science was an imperialist paradigm that ignored the cultural and racial identity of Africans. “[T]he Western way of fighting AIDS will not transfer to Africa” (“Castro Hlongwane,” Anon 2002).⁴ Indigenous healing was therefore introduced into public sphere discourses on HIV/AIDS. Mbeki’s Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, often suggested that “traditional” health care was a viable alternative to antiretrovirals (Sunday Independent 2004). Because 80 percent of South Africans use some form of indigenous healing (Department of Health, South Africa 2003), the promotion of “traditional” healing over “Western” antiretrovirals allowed Mbeki to appeal to populist sentiment by deploying a language of cultural authenticity.

Mbeki’s denialism was an attempt to resolve the contradictory requirements of postapartheid nation building. It allowed him to challenge the global hegemony of biomedical science and avoid financing the public provision of antiretroviral medication, thereby successfully championing both economic liberalization and African nationalism. Mbeki avoided and even critiqued the discourses claiming Africans faced a “crisis of masculinity” because he believed such discourses reified racist assumptions of African promiscuity (Posel 2005). But he also refused to support the state provision of antiretrovirals and utilized the discourse of “traditionalism” in order to defy the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the broader Western biomedical establishment. In his efforts to challenge the inherent racism of dominant assumptions about African sexuality, he condemned a portion of his population to certain death.

But Mbeki’s acrobatic politic tactics—using the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” to champion neoliberalism, deny the usefulness of antiretrovirals, and convince the poor that he had their interests at heart—failed him in the end. He was ousted from national politics by his own former deputy president, Jacob Zuma. Zuma was deputy president until June 2005, when he was charged with corruption and asked to resign. In addition to corruption, Zuma was accused of raping an HIV-positive woman who was a longtime family friend. Zuma admitted that he had unprotected sex with the woman, but claimed it was consensual. His trial and acquittal of rape took place in May 2006. In December 2007, Zuma beat Mbeki in a race for the leadership of the ANC. In April 2009, he was acquitted of all corruption charges and won the national Presidency in a landslide victory.

During the rape trial, the sexual and personal history of the woman who accused Zuma of rape was used as evidence to delegitimize her charge. He claimed she led him on, and was engaging in sexually provocative behavior because she wore “revealing clothes.” In addition, though he was formerly chairperson of the South African National AIDS Council, Zuma invoked outrage by claiming that he reduced his chances of being infected with HIV because he took a shower after intercourse. Zuma claimed that “traditional” Zulu culture justified his behavior. “‘If she had said no, I would have stopped there and got up and left.’ But, he claimed: ‘I know as we grew up in the Zulu culture you don’t leave a woman in that situation, because if you do then she will even have you arrested and say that you are a rapist’” (Soros 2006).

The Zuma rape trial is the perfect example of the way in which the tropes of “traditionalism” and “modernity” are pitted against one another in public sphere debates about sexuality. Throughout the entire ordeal, images of “traditional” Zulu masculinity were contrasted with images of “women’s rights activists” protesting outside of the court house. Many of Zuma’s supporters, sporting “100% Zulu Boy” T-shirts, burned photographs of the rape accuser, singing “burn the bitch” (Vetten 2007, 439; Robins 2008, 418):

“A young man stood up, (and) … declared that Zuma was his leader and that from now on he would no longer be wearing a condom, to laughter and applause from many of the young men who filled the back benches and the upstairs gallery.” Zulu men who did speak out against the misogyny were portrayed as not being quite Zulu. (Terreblanche 2006)

Zuma was supported by African women as well as men (Hunter 2010, 2) and not simply within the Zulu population (Hunter 2011).

In their outrage, many women’s rights activists employed dehumanizing terminology to bemoan the way in which they felt “modern” rights were being reversed or undermined: “Zuma’s testimony revealed his Neanderthal attitudes to women and sexual violence” (Robinson, Tabane, Haffajee 2006; my emphasis). It is for this reason that Zuma’s performance of “traditionalism” irreparably linked, in the public’s imaginary, Zulu culture and misogynistic sexual behavior, leading many social commentators to interpret Zuma’s rise to power as simply a return to sexual conservatism (Robins 2008, 413).

And yet, Zuma’s performance of Zulu identity is highly contested. An editorial in the Sowetan newspaper lamented: “During his rape trial, ANC president Jacob Zuma … testified that according to the Zulu culture he is not allowed to leave a woman unattended if she is ready for sex. Why are we degrading and humiliating our cultural heritage to suit our own reckless lifestyles?” (Mmila 2009). In late 2008, Zuma confirmed publicly that he recently fathered a child out of wedlock. Though polygamy is a historic practice within Zulu culture (which Zuma engages in), extramarital sex is not—leading many to suggest that Zuma was (once again) dragging Zulu identity through the mud:

“This is my culture,” said Zuma tongue-in-cheek. But people should not use culture selectively, utilising only aspects of that culture or interpretations thereof which suit their personal situation. According to the traditions of the Zulus and African culture as a whole, premarital and extramarital sex are taboo. Even a man who chooses to be polygamous cannot have sex with the woman until they are married as per tradition. (Bofelo 2010; Written by a political commissar from KZN)

In our present day, it seems that those prejudiced against Africans need not even lift a finger to do their dirty job—Africans themselves appear to be doing it on their behalf … As someone who projects himself to the world as a custodian of African culture, Zuma should know … that Africans believe in children being born in marriage, to give them a sense of security and identity. (Sesanti 2010; Written by a professor from Stellenbosch University)

Steven Robins suggests that it was Zuma’s performance of “traditional” Zulu masculinity, juxtaposed and positioned in opposition to Mbeki’s “modernism” that won Zuma the Presidency (Robins 2008, 423). In other words, Zuma strategically deployed this “traditionalist” persona in order to position himself as everything that Mbeki was not. However, such an analysis assumes that Zuma’s performance of “traditionalism” is coherent and consistent. Rather, Zuma also manipulates the tropes of “modernity” and “traditionalism” to fit his political needs.

Within five months of becoming president, Zuma gave what has been heralded by AIDS activists and health professionals as a “landmark speech,” in which he “left no doubt about the decisive departure from the previous government’s stance of denialism and indifference” (The Lancet 2009). Later that same year, Zuma announced a massive expansion of both treatment and prevention efforts by vowing to cut new infections in half and scale up treatment to 80 percent of those who need it by 2011 (Sidibé 2009). But Zuma also uses “traditionalism” to call for a reconstitution of sexuality, thereby sanctioning certain cultural practices while simultaneously “modernizing” them. For example, Zuma approached the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, to discuss the policy of restoring the “tradition” of male circumcision among the Zulu people in an effort to curb HIV transmission (Dugger 2010). The practice had been outlawed by King Shaka in the nineteenth century because his warriors were spending too much time recovering from the surgery (Mazrui 1975, 74–75; BBC News 2009). Zuma is calling for the reinstallation of more “traditional” norms as part of the government’s effort to double the level of HIV testing, prevention, and treatment.

The struggle between Zuma and Mbeki for national leadership represents a struggle over hegemonic masculinity. For those in the modernist camp (who wish to champion constitutionally and rights-based gender norms), Zuma’s performance of Zulu masculinity is troubling and threatening—indicating a crisis in the “modern” gender order that has deep implications for liberalism and feminism. For others, Zuma signifies the resolution of a crisis of “traditional” masculinity that the public sphere discourses spotlight. In other words, many poor men and women who feel as though their “traditional” values have too long been attacked see in Zuma the reclamation of a lost identity. This, coupled with his impoverished, self-educated, guerrilla-warrior background, makes him the first public persona with whom the poor can actually identify in postapartheid South Africa. Whereas the public sphere discourses on the “crisis of masculinity” target the poor, African man, turning him into a fetish representing the moral depravity of the nation, the poor have made a fetish of Jacob Zuma—he embodies all that is right with “tradition,” whereas Mbeki embodies everything that is wrong with “modernity.” As one community activist explains it:

Mbeki’s ANC … represented the rich, you know. And then most of them, they wanted –they benefited from things like BEE [Black Economic Empowerment], but the rest of us … we didn’t. But Zuma’s vision is that everyone benefits from democracy … Zuma is not that much of an intellectual, who will sideline … poor people, you know, most of the poor people … who didn’t go to school and that. We … We identify with him … and I believe in him as a true leader of the poor people of our country. (Interview, Thulani Skhosana, June 18, 2009, Sol Plaatjie)

And yet, Zuma has a difficult task ahead of him. He rode to power on the promise of “service delivery” and gained much of his election support from not only the poor but the working class (through his strong ties with the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]). And yet, in early 2011, Zuma launched a New Growth Plan—which is meant to create five million jobs by 2020—but which has been heavily criticized by COSATU because it is simply reinstates, in a new guise, the neoliberal macroeconomic strategy put in place by Mbeki (Rossouw 2011). It remains to be seen whether or not Zuma’s rearticulation of the “tradition”/“modernity” tropes, through the sexualization of politics, will succeed in convincing the poor that their liberation is finally at hand.

It has not been my intention to reify the idealized constructs of “modernity” and “traditionalism,” but rather to show that while they are powerful ideological tools wielded in symbolic struggles for hegemony, they are replete with contradictions and inconsistencies. Mbeki and Zuma have recoded the colonial tropes of “traditionalism” and “modernity” to deal with the postcolonial dilemma of satisfying the demands of neoliberal capital while simultaneously convincing the masses that their liberation is imminent. Mbeki and Zuma perform this subtle political maneuver in different ways, but for both of them, the AIDS epidemic has been the primary political terrain upon which these battles are played out.

Masculinity at the Margins

Since 2004, I have been conducting ethnographic research⁵ in two informal settlements, or squatter camps, outside of Johannesburg: Lawley and Sol Plaatjie. Like most informal settlements in Johannesburg, both are geographically removed from job opportunities, not to mention schools, clinics, and other social support services. In June and July 2009, I conducted a community participatory research survey in both communities.⁶ According to the survey, 47.4 percent of residents in Sol Plaatjie live in a household that has a monthly income of R500 ($65) or less, and 70.2 percent live in a household that has a monthly income of R1,000 ($129) or less. In Lawley, 37.4 percent of those surveyed live on R500 or less, and 75 percent live on R1,250 ($156) or less per month. Given that the average family size is four to six people, an overwhelming majority of residents in both of these informal settlements live far below the international poverty line.

When I began working in these communities, both had informal housing (tin shacks), and neither had running water, electricity, or sanitation services. Sol Plaatjie has recently been upgraded, and now approximately 51.4 percent of the residents have formal housing. The only significant change in Lawley since I began research there is the provision of electricity and paved roads. With the upgrades came the privatization of social services. The residents of Sol Plaatjie now have water in their homes, but will soon have to pay 5–10 percent of their household income to access it, and residents of Lawley already pay approximately 15 percent of their household income on electricity.

In Lawley, the water source is a tank that the city fills twice a week. The water is often contaminated because the tanks are never cleaned, so residents are forced to purchase more electricity simply to make their water potable. In addition, the residents have outdoor toilets which are supposed to be emptied weekly, but residents told me that the sanitation truck often only comes once a month, and by that time the toilets are overflowing (Focus group discussion [FGD], March 7, 2009, Lawley).

People in informal settlements are painfully aware that the government has failed them. I asked one of the residents of Sol Plaatjie who had been evicted from Soweto (a formal township nearby) what he thought when he arrived in the truck that transplanted his family and all of their worldly possessions to this place they had never before seen. He replied, “Yeah, I saw that it’s like we were—I need an appropriate word—like, condemned” (Interview, Bongani Sibeko, June 28, 2009, Sol Plaatjie). Thulani Skhosana, my primary informant in Sol Plaatjie, refers to the settlement as “solitary confinement.” He once told me: “We are not good business according to the government. The poor in this new South Africa, they don’t have a space … Not giving HIV+ people health care is one strategy that the government uses to get rid of the poor” (Interview, June 5, 2009, Sol Plaatjie). Although there has been some renewed hope in the Zuma administration to manage the crisis of liberation felt so profoundly by the poor, this shaky optimism is nonetheless contingent on the ability of the state to redress structural inequality.

Desperation contributes to high rates of HIV infection. Again and again in interviews, when I asked people why community members do not use condoms or avoid multiple partners, despite the fact that they are well educated on HIV transmission and watch their community members die on a daily basis, the reply was:

Many people think that HIV might kill them in 10 years, but poverty or violence will kill them first, so why worry about it? (Field notes, December 19, 2005, Soweto)

People are dying all the time in my community, so many people just accept that as … you know, their future. So, they aren’t careful about HIV' cause they expect to die anyway. They don't care what kills them. (Interview, Thulani Skhosana, May 20, 2006, Sol Plaatjie)

People have reached a point where they aren’t afraid to die. (Female Interviewee, April 15, 2005, Soweto)

This is the context within which people are negotiating sexual relationships. Because sexuality is situated within an economy of exchange, in order to have sex, men must have purchasing power. But men who simply have sex with women, without being able to make their partners’ lives and the lives of their children secure, are not respectable (Hunter 2004). But neither are poor men who cannot afford to engage in sexual relationships:

When I … I lost my job, I had a lovely wife, you know. But since there was no income, she … she left. She took my two kids with her. And she went. I couldn’t afford to keep her because I didn’t have an income. For a while, she was working when I couldn’t find work. She used to bring in food, you know, but … it is not the custom. There is this mentality, the mentality that you have to pay in order to be a man. It is so fixed—that idea … People looked down on me in the community. They said, like “Wow, you’re useless,” and it was partially because I didn’t have a woman. If you’re a bachelor, you don’t have a dignity. (Interview, Thulani Skhosana, June 11, 2006, Sol Plaatjie)

Poor men’s masculinities are as precarious as their opportunities for work and pay (Silberschmidt 2005, 195)—the insecurity that plagues their lives has been embodied into their very senses of self. “Men who don’t work … can’t have a relationship. They laugh at you if you are unemployed. When you start working, even in a piece job, you start now wanting to enjoy yourself and you want women next to you. You start now spending your money on women, and that is how men contract the disease” (Male FGD participant, July 4, 2009, Sol Plaatjie).

It has been well documented that neoliberalism’s impact on women is ambiguous—contributing to a certain feminization of the labor market (though in largely low-paid, insecure forms of employment) but also to an erosion of the welfare state (see, e.g., Bakker 1994; Sassen 1998; Benería 2003; Barker and Feiner 2004). In South Africa, because of deindustrialization, the rise of the NGO sector and the fact that the minimal welfare still provided is often linked to child care, very poor women sometimes have more access to some money than very poor men. But women have also taken on more responsibilities. With a decline in marriage, high birth rates, and the fact that women take care of children from all sexual unions as well as the elderly and the sick, women carry a heavy burden, leading to a serious crisis in social reproduction (Fakier and Cock 2009; Hunter 2011). In many cases, women engage in transactional sex to resolve this crisis:

I can’t stand hunger as a woman. And there’s the kids here also. And there you are, the man, sitting there on the bed. You can’t go anywhere to look for anything to do so that you can come and feed us. I take it in my hands to do something in order for my kids especially to get something to eat. Yes. Then I go out. There’s working men outside I meet. (Interview, Nomachina Makalo, July 1, 2009, Lawley)

It’s poverty. Whilst we are hungry, we go out and phanda—to forage—to find anything you can to survive … Like, I meet a man and I propose to him, and we make love and he gives me money and there is unprotected sex. (Female FGD participant, July 4, 2009, Sol Plaatjie)

It is important to note that transactional relationships are usually enduring, they often involve cohabitation and the sharing of child-rearing responsibilities, and women exercise agency in choosing their partners (Hunter 2002). For many women, transactional sex actually allows for greater freedom than marriage. It allows a woman to choose her sexual partners, leave them when she wants, and perhaps most importantly, the money comes directly to her as opposed to her family (Ibid). Gender relations and sexual practices are transforming in poor communities throughout South Africa, in response to shifts in the terrains of culture and political economy. These changes in gender norms and sexual practices invoke a wide range of responses from community members.

When I first began conducting interviews focusing on gender practices and ideologies, I would ask people the following question: “In your opinion, is there a connection between gender oppression and HIV/AIDS?” When my interpreter would repeat the question, a long discussion would almost inevitably ensue. He would provide a lengthy explanation of what the question meant, the respondent would ask questions, and finally an answer would emerge. Almost every time, the answer would include the term “women’s rights,” which was likely to elicit both derision and anger from the informant (no matter their gender). I soon learned that my questions and the language I used was interpreted as “Western,” and why not, given the source?

I, on the other hand, would go home and wonder why both men and women in the communities in which I was working invoked such patriarchal notions of gender when their practices told a much more complicated story. Women who were outspoken leaders in their communities, who would “put men in their place” in public meetings, and who would insist on their autonomy and strength at every occasion would not bat an eye telling me that some women in their community are asking to be raped because of the way they dress, or would insist that women who “go out on their man” deserve to be beaten. Over the course of many years of involvement in these communities, I have become familiar with the complexity of gender relations and sexual practices at play.

The men and women I worked with felt very strongly that it was precisely the imposition of liberal definitions of gender (what they refer to as “women’s rights” or “50/50”) that was directly responsible for destabilizing gender norms in their community, leading to high rates of HIV infection:

If a woman says “no, this is my right,” this encourages the husband or boyfriend to go out and seek other avenues for receiving pleasure or sex. As a result, this causes the spread of disease … (Female Interviewee, October 26, 2005, Lawley)

Yes, men have lost their sense of manhood. Men are undermined now. Because of “women’s rights,” men is no longer the head of the family, and men can no longer do anything. (Female interviewee, October 26, 2005, Lawley)

I feel that women also abuse men—because of this thing of 50/50 and “women’s rights” … The women are losing sight of what their role is. Our president is giving more power to women, and this makes women disrespect men. The president should teach women about their rights and their responsibilities. (Female FGD participant, June 10, 2006, Sol Plaatjie)

Unlike Leclerc-Madlala (2001) and Kimmel (1987), both of whom suggest that women initiate change and men cling to “tradition,” I have found that both men and women express anger at the imposition of “women’s rights.” For poor men, this anger may come from not having ever secured an equal portion of the patriarchal dividend (Connell 2005b, 1809), and for women perhaps it comes from feelings of frustration with the crisis of social reproduction (Hunter 2011). What is clear is that many men and women feel that the imposition of “women’s rights” is meant to erase their sense of culture and identity. By defining progress and development as an abandonment of “traditionalism” in the move toward liberal or constitutional definitions of gender and sexuality, an unquestioned cultural imperialism is at work in the popular, media discourses on masculinity:

This thing of “rights” has changed our culture and our value systems, and how people should conduct themselves. The manner in which it happened—it just came and nullified who the men are. These things only promoted the rights of women … Culture is culture … Where you are from, you have your own culture, and we have our own culture. In fact, by assuming we will just adopt other peoples’ culture and nullify our own culture, this is a problem. This is where we are going to lose ourselves … Now, we are taking other peoples’ cultures more seriously than our own, and so we are going to lose our culture, and lose ourselves. (Interview, Pheello Limapo, November 9, 2005, Johannesburg)

I think that one of the problems is that we adopted too much of white peoples’ cultures and everything because we think that everything the white people are doing is right. We forgot what was originally ours. [CD]: During apartheid? No, this happened after. (Interview, Nelly Mbiletsa, July 1, 2009, Lawley)

Even if the judgment of “modern” rights is homogenizing and simplistic, the underlying critique of the operations of power is significant. “Tradition” is often invoked within these communities as a protest against a threat of cultural imperialism and erasure. But just as it does in public sphere discourses, “tradition” has a loose signification in township discourses. It is often used to resurrect an idealized (and impossible) past untainted by colonialism, but it is just as often used to critique contemporary economic and political realities. For many, the past signifies horrific racism, violence, and oppression, but also the glory of struggle and the hope for freedom—and many of my respondents were an integral part of that battle. And yet, the rewards of liberation were distributed unequally. As such, “tradition” is often summoned in an attempt to control the uncertainty that has accompanied millennial capitalism—an uncertainty that is felt most profoundly by the poor (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). In many ways, the condemnation of “women’s rights” is an expression of exasperation over the lack of delivery of human rights since the end of apartheid.

Yet, many women do welcome the promises of “women’s rights.” A woman in Lawley told me that she was forced to abandon her children in order to escape her husband who beat her so brutally that he almost killed her. The courts ruled in favor of her husband. “Now I need to know where those women’s rights exist because I have not seen them. And the government is not doing anything about it” (Interview, Nelly Mbiletsa, July 1, 2009, Lawley). She escaped her husband by moving to an informal settlement. And she is not the only woman for whom the informal settlement offered a release from oppressive family conditions:

I came here because I wanted to have my independence and a place of my own, where no one will give me problems … [where I can] exercise my independence. Where I come from, other people would want to make me miserable because they know my [HIV] status. This is the reason I wanted to have my own place. (Interview, Nomachina Makalo, July 1, 2009, Lawley)

The stories in this section illustrate the various ways people struggle to make sense of the radical disturbances in South Africa’s gender orders over a relatively short historical period. Some pine for an idealized and constructed sense of gender stability and others bemoan the uneven way in which the rewards of “modernity” have been distributed. Here, discourses on “rights” and “traditions” are used to express and resolve the gendered contradictions that have come to define Africans’ postapartheid experiences.

The Crisis of Liberation

Countering a “clash of civilizations” thesis that the postcolonial world is stuck in an anachronistic battle between “modern,” rights-based gender ideals and “traditionalist” cultures insistent on male authority, this article shows that the tropes of “traditionalism” and “modernity” are fluid and deployed toward divergent political ends. The state manipulates these tropes as a technology of governmentality, whereas they are deployed as tools of resistance in impoverished communities. Through both a discourse and an ethnographic analysis, I have argued that the sexualization of politics reveals a deep-rooted anxiety about the identity of the postapartheid nation and its relationship to Western culture and politics. This concerns key questions about race, class, and nationalism—illustrating the way in which analyses of gender must be situated in broader contexts exploring the contingent relationship between structural forces and inequalities. Crises of postcolonial identity are articulated in and through the reconfiguration of gendered meanings and relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Barbara Risman, Mark Hunter, Lorena Garcia, and Andy Clarno for their constructive criticism and feedback on earlier drafts of this article. The two reviewers for Men and Masculinities were tremendously helpful and supportive. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my research assistant in South Africa, Torong Ramela, and to Kelly Underman, who helped with archival details and transcriptions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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