Vehicle for Southern African Knowledge? Men and Masculinities and Research from South Africa

Men and Masculinities (M&M) has been a major vehicle for showcasing masculinity research in South(ern) Africa. It has published seventeen articles on South Africa in its twenty years of existence which is testament to the work of South African researchers and to the journal’s commitment to being a truly global journal. Some indication of this may be in having included Raewyn Connell’s piece on Masculinity in Global perspective in the very first issue (1998). I will say more shortly about Southern scholarship in a global context but for now I want to focus on the South African masculinity work.

South African gender research originated in the 1970s and early 1980s and grew in volume dramatically thereafter, particularly in the mid-1990s (Morrell and Clowes 2016).

Masculinity as a subfield was an important component in gender research and attracted considerable interest across a variety of disciplines, history, sociology, education, literature, and religious studies. This research is made visible by new technologies (including open access publishing), and this was obviously a factor in spreading the word about masculinities research both inside the country and beyond.

A question arises as to whether this growth of research work was simply derivative of Northern scholarship or reflected national conditions and imperatives. Exogenous or endogenous? These questions are currently being debated in the context of Raewyn Connell’s concept of Southern Theory (2007) and the Comaroff’s Theories from the South (2012). While this avenue of exploration now includes many tributaries, one element is the extent of Northern power or hegemony and the influence the North exerts over global scholarship. Connell’s Southern Theory alerts us to the existence but marginalization of Southern theory (and scholarship). The Comaroffs, by contrast, argue that the North is no longer so powerful in terms of knowledge-making, that it has lost its dynamism (even though its resources continue to ensure its visibility), and that historical momentum now lies with the South.

The role in knowledge production of journals like M&M which are based in the North and feature editors working in Northern institutions, comes under the spotlight in debates about Southern theory. Since by impact factor, the major journals are all located in the North, there is at least a case to be made that these journals operate as gatekeepers and provide privileged access to Northern scholars. This might be considered an uncharitable view, although there is no doubt that scholars in language milieux other than English and those with fewer resources and contacts who are located in the South are at a disadvantage (Beigel 2016; Carvalhao 2014; Connell et al. 2018). But things are rarely as simple as they seem, and it is clear that some journals have made particular efforts to promote Southern Scholarship (Epstein and Morrell 2012) and, in turn, journals have been established in the South to provide avenues for research publication (Moletsane, Reddy and Haysom 2015).

In this context, it is helpful to review M&M’s performance and the development of Masculinities work in Southern Africa. The very first issue of M&M contains the landmark piece by Raewyn Connell, “Masculinities and Globalization (1998).” She made the argument that masculinities needed to be considered in global context and no longer could be considered in isolation of the global forces that were reconfiguring economy, communication, and knowledge production. This marked an increasingly strong emphasis in her work on the geopolitics of knowledge and knowledge inequality which culminated in Southern Theory (2007). A central feature of her argument is the power of the global North and the marginalizing effect that this has on knowledge production in the periphery.

How does a knowledge subfield like masculinities develop in the South? I will use my own experience to offer a story of origin which will provide some evidence to reflect on the two questions that I’ve asked so far: How does a subfield come to exist in the South and is the work done a reflection of something new, of Southern Agency and autonomy, or derivative and better understood as a neocolonial outpost dancing to the tune of the North (with journals like M&M pursuing a project of global hegemony)?

In 1990, my interest in and knowledge of gender was limited. In the mid-1970s, I had my curiosity piqued by Jacklyn Cock, my feminist Sociology lecturer, at Rhodes University. This was in the heyday of apartheid, of racial segregation and political repression. Radical ideas were on the fringe, many texts were banned, and it was a criminal offense, for example, to be part of a Marxist reading group. Oppositional energy was focused on removing apartheid. But the student movement had a small feminist component, as did trade unions and even the African National Congress and there were small independent women’s movements. While these registered in my consciousness, I only gave passing interest and notional support. It was only in 1989 that I began to think more seriously about masculinity. A primary motivation was being told to teach feminism to fourth-year education students. I embarked on a crash course of reading (all the feminist standards) and found my lectures receiving an enthusiastic response from two thirds of the class, and an apathetic and even hostile response from the other third. Huh? My tub-thumping beratements about male oppression and female subordination went down pretty well among the females in the class (two thirds) and not well among the males who felt targeted and humiliated. This got me thinking and the following year, I began looking for feminist reading on men and masculinity.

It was my good fortune that the University of Natal’s library was quite well stocked and still had a book budget because I quickly came upon (and ordered) the work of Harry Brod, Raewyn Connell, Jeff Hearn, Michael Kaufman, Michael Kimmel, and Vic Seidler. At this time, there was no text that I could find on men and masculinity in Africa, in fact the concept of masculinity was the preserve of psychology although some anthropologists did valuable and perceptive work about the sexual division of labor and male rites of passage.

My newfound knowledge of masculinity led to much better lectures and a much better and more open discussion with students. It rapidly became clear that South Africa had a big problem with masculinity manifested most obviously in very high levels of recent political violence and directly attributable to apartheid. It slowly became apparent that the problem went much deeper as horrifying levels of rape and intimate partner violence were uncovered (Wood and Jewkes 1997; Jewkes and Abrahams 2002). The role of men in this violence was obvious, and it became similarly obvious that male behavior was central in the rapid transmission of HIV which led to South African becoming the global epicenter of AIDS (Campbell 1997).

The interest in gender and masculinity grew for a number of reasons. South Africa was transitioning from apartheid to postapartheid. This opened the intellectual space, new practices were encouraged, exiled scholars returned, the academic boycott lifted, research funds became more readily available, and a major traffic in ideas was the result. The second reason was that the country, particularly under president Nelson Mandela, carried the hopes of the world. Could something be made from horrible ingredients, a rainbow nation be born of awful parents? The third reason was that after the most superficial of appraisals, it was clear that levels of violence were very high, and that to understand these, it was necessary to undertake research on men.

The focus on masculinity steadily grew even though the concept had no presence at all at the first gender conference in Southern Africa held in Durban early in 1991. This was the Conference on Women and Gender in Southern Africa at which sixty-six papers were presented with nary a mention of masculinity and only one explicit mention of men (in a paper, “Women’s Power, Men’s Authority,” by Deborah Posel). In 2008, when Diederik F. Janssen compiled a bibliography of works on masculinity, the entry on Africa South of Sahara numbered 354. While some of the pieces were in French, most were in English. The selection criteria are not clear as there are some entries that refer to race and masculinity (and not to Africa at all), but there is good continental coverage. A disproportionate number (over half) relate to South Africa (181/354) and most of these are written by South Africans, whereas many of the other contributions are authored by American, British, or European scholars.

One of the first pieces was Cathy Campbell’s Learning to Kill (1992), which raised issues of violence and masculinity from a social psychology perspective. This influential and well-cited article did not connect to the literature that was now beginning to grow in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, instead it rooted itself in debates about political economy and society in Southern Africa.

In 1992, I had the great good fortune telephonically to meet Raewyn and Michael Kimmel. I was on my first-ever visit to the United States and with my brother’s help found their telephone contact details (this was in the era before e-mail and the web). Both were incredibly friendly, interested, and supportive. They suggested readings and emphasized the importance of conducting research in South Africa. Emboldened, I stepped into an unfolding global world of knowledge production. In 1997, I hosted a conference in Durban (Colloquium on Masculinities in Southern Africa). South Africa and its scholarship had been partly isolated from the global mainstream, and I saw this as an opportunity for integration and to invigorate local scholarship with new ideas and conversations. To this end, I invited the people who I knew or whose work I knew from Masculinities, Gender, and Southern African Studies. I was lucky to attract Raewyn Connell (who gave the keynote), Debbie Epstein, Marc Epprecht, Jeff Hearn, Michael Kimmel, Jorgen Lorentzen, Stefan Miescher, John Tosh, and a host of Southern Africanists including William Beinart, Keith Breckenridge, Cathy Burns, Ben Carton, Bill Freund, Jeff Guy, Jon Hyslop, Dunbar Moodie, and Luise White. Together with these scholars from the North, I invited everybody I could think of who had written on or vaguely about men and masculinities. It was an amazing moment of exchange and reflection and I was able to bring the richness of that gathering to a much wider audience with a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies (1998) and an edited book (2001).

The study of men and masculinities is now well-established in South Africa. Large numbers of postgraduate students choose to do research in this area and many local universities have staff who have expertise in this subfield. Initially confined to a few academics and universities, interest now spans the region. Has this growth been organic? For the most part I believe it has been. Local scholars, South Africans, have developed curricula and provided supervision to a next generation of scholars who are now publishing in the area. One model of growth in academic production is that scholars from the periphery undertake postgraduate work in the global North and then launch their careers on the basis of the skills and connections developed there. For most (but not all) South Africans, this is not the case. A local training capacity has been developed in situ, allowing for curricula and research agendas to reflect local concerns which in turn have influenced local research agenda. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that the scholars who are visibly working in this subfield are utilizing concepts developed in the North and their visibility testifies to having connections with a global (and Northern) research community. Collaborations tend to be from South to North rather than South–South, although there are research links with Brazil and Australia and, via activist networks, with India and further afield. I have argued elsewhere that the first generation of South African gender scholars blended anti-apartheid activism with their scholarship to make a distinctive impact that demonstrated research autonomy (Morrell 2016). I would make the same argument for masculinity scholars.

M&M has published seventeen pieces on South Africa, roughly one a year since its inception. Given the size of the country (60 million people and 23,274 academics/researchers; National Research Foundation 2014, 7) and the enormous global span of masculinities research, this might even be considered an uneven and overgenerous share of the journal’s attention and space.

The first M&M piece on South Africa was published in 2001 (Morrell 2001). It was published as part of a special issue on “Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities,” edited by Debbie Epstein who by this time was a collaborator in a British Council funded project on gender inequality, violence, and HIV in schools. I like to think that there was some scientific merit in my work, but it is obvious that the networks that I had built up over the previous decade helped me to publish the piece. I knew the literature and its leading authors, and I was now alert to which journals mattered. Two years later, Dean Peacock wrote a piece on gender activism (Peacock 2003). Dean was not working as an academic and had recently returned to South Africa after spending much of his life in the United States (including studying at Berkeley). He was making waves in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) gender world and became a major figure globally through his work with Sonke Gender Justice and MenEngage (with Gary Barker). His contribution is significant, therefore, because it shows how transatlantic networks are important (but possibly less hierarchical than is sometimes supposed) and how activism and research have blended in productive ways to orient South African masculinities research.

Russell Luyt’s (2005) piece represents a strong social psychology line in masculinity work. Trained at University of Cape Town, he took up an issue not many South African masculinity scholars have followed and applied South African data to a global measure (the norm inventory). This showed the increasing connectedness of South African with global gender scholarship and fuelled the growth of interest and productivity.

The next two M&M contributions both emanated from Rhodes University, a small, rather isolated, university in the Eastern Cape. Louise Vincent wrote a piece (2006) raising issues of race and power in South African higher education while her student, Irishman Daniel Conway (2008), took from his PhD research material on the End Conscription Campaign, an organization of young white men who had defied the state by refusing to serve in the military. In 2010 Kirsten Talbot and Mike Quayle, students of psychologist, Graham Lindegger, based in Pietermaritzburg at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, analyzed the role of women in constructions of hegemonic masculinity, drawing attention to how young women propped up notions of masculinity that perpetuated gendered divisions of labor and affect.

A special issue on Hegemonic Masculinities (2012) provided the opportunity for two more pieces. Converting work from a collaborative South Africa/Swedish project, I worked with Jeff Hearn (Linkoping University) to produce a comparative piece on hegemonic masculinity and its relevance in these two countries and then with Rachel Jewkes and Graham Lindegger (an epidemiologist and psychologist respectively) to write a piece on changes in hegemonic masculinity as a result of the ending of apartheid and the assumption to power of Jacob Zuma. The following year, Claire Laurier Decoteau, a visitor from the University of Illinois temporarily based at Wits University, produced a reflection on neoliberalism and masculinities in transitional South Africa, focusing on how the AIDS pandemic reflected and was impacted by these global and national forces. She argued that AIDS provided a forum where the state could satisfy the imperatives of nation-building while also addressing gross social inequalities.

The centrality of AIDS (as a gendered social reality) and gender inequality have been major drivers of masculinity research. The pieces by Shari Dworkin et al. (2013) and Erin Stern (2015) both deal directly with the intersection of HIV prevention initiatives and gender equality work. They assess the work being done in South Africa, often driven by NGOs dedicated converting giving government policy into gender reality in the context where such policy is progressive but the political will of government to gender equality questionable. The internationalization of the field is reflected in their North American origins and in the development of mixed research teams including local and foreign researchers. A related suite of articles (Shefer 2014; Ratele 2014; Barker and Peacock 2014) assess the impact of gender equality work, globally and nationally. As with the AIDS articles, these also demonstrate South Africa’s involvement and integration in global gender politics, featuring collaborations with foreign, often US-based, partners.

The final two pieces are from the discipline of psychology. Malose Langa (from Wits University) discusses the perceptions of young township boys, living in poverty, with the era of apartheid behind them but with an uncertain future ahead. But the argument is not just about South Africa. The article advocates an approach to masculinity research which is particularly relevant for community-based interventions and which links to global debates about the use of psychology in gender research. And the final piece comes from two researchers in Stellenbosch. Lesch and Kelapile (2016) pick up issues of masculinity and fatherhood, a well-developed field globally and in South Africa. Locating their study in very high rates of father absenteeism where many fathers are unemployed and unable to fulfill the provider role, they argue that narrow conceptions of fatherhood prevent unmarried fathers from being involved with their children. As with Langa, the authors locate their work within a particular disciplinary approach (phenomenology), directing attention to methodological issues as well as to the substantive issues surrounding fatherhood in South Africa.

A review of the contributions on South Africa published in M&M allows for a number of conclusions. Authors are drawn from all over South Africa, are male and female, and black and white. Many of the articles show the importance of global links via the composition of the authorial teams, research collaborations, and cosmopolitan experiences or global migrations. The articles show that particular conditions in South Africa are fertile for scholarship, and this assists researchers to make contributions to scholarship which have not only national value but which contribute to global debates. Contributions on South Africa and from South African scholars suggest not just a temporary spike of scholarly interest but rather the existence of a sustainable subfield which draws energy from activist work, from the dynamic state of gender politics, student interest, and from the academy.

Commenting on South African historical research, Jon Hyslop noted recently, “South African historians can look back over the last few decades, with a degree of modest satisfaction. A really substantial national historiography has been created” (Hyslop 2012, 317). I think much the same could be said of the country’s masculinity scholars. At the same time, he notes the obstacles that are placed in the way of current and future scholarship, the key ones being lack of state funding, the state of national research resources, and the global curse of converting academics into part-time administrators who only can use their “spare” time to engage in writing and research. He draws attention to a perennial and structural problem for countries located in the South—how does one make one’s work relevant to an audience beyond national or regional boundaries. “An increasingly globalised scholarship is posing new research questions. We need to continue to find new ways to engage with wider publics, especially in a time when the consciousness of the young is being shaped by new media, with its inbuilt ‘presentism’” (p. 318). Masculinities research actually benefits from some form of presentism as this is the terrain worked by activists, but the other challenges remain. Indications are, for the moment though, that South Africa’s researchers are contributing to a global scholarship and are not just walk-in visitors but part of the global research community. M&M contributed to this achievement.