Abstract
The focus of this ethnographic research, which took place in London in 2019, was on a small number of Black, Asian and minority ethnic young men and their relationships with their mothers. Data came from informal conversations and recorded interviews, capturing the perspectives of the young men, mothers and youth workers. We draw on the concept of philogynous masculinities—defined as the fondness, love and adoration of women—a neglected research area. While practicing a distinctive and often violent cultural form of street masculinity, our objective is to show that these young men can, and often do, display a caring, loving, respectful and highly protective side in their attitudes, practices and relationships with their mothers. This recognition starkly contrasts the co-existence of the highly misogynistic way they generally treat other young women whose bodies are objectified and sexualized.
Introduction
This article focuses on young black men’s relationships with women, particularly their mothers. It aims to show that young men with lives of violence can, and often do, display caring, respectful and highly protective attitudes and practices towards their mothers. Further, they recognize and appreciate their mother’s role in their upbringing in place of often absentee fathers. This reverence—or ‘philogyny’—contrasts with their highly misogynistic treatment of other young women, which is an inherent contradiction in their identities. This article uses an empirical setting to advance theorizations of philogynous masculinities, which, we argue, are underused in research and are seldom applied to working-class young black men. Much of the data comes from interviews with mothers and their views on their mothering role and relationships with their sons. The study also gives a greater voice and agency to the young men, which we wish to highlight, and provides different perspectives from three mothers and two youth workers who worked closely with the families.
The young men in this study love their mothers; they are 18–22 years old, black and working class 1 and live on a London housing estate, which we call Maxwell, 2 amid socioeconomic and cultural disadvantage. The estate is rife with crime and gangs; the estate’s young men are thus at risk of criminal exploitation, antisocial behaviour and victimization. As Roberts and Elliott (2020) state, society often views these marginalized groups as deficient, unchanging and pathological. Dominant academic and media narratives also demonize these young men as ‘hypermasculine perpetrators of violence’ (Harris, 2020, p. 2), conveyors of ‘bad’ masculinity (Roberts & Elliott, 2020) or ‘toxic’ (Harrington, 2020).
As well as being a material place in a specific location, like Maxwell, the street is a metaphor for where particular cultural practices occur, and has its own hierarchies, rules and codes. The street frequently inducts young men into a local, and often destructive and violent, culture of street masculinity, which celebrates and validates fatalistic versions of masculinities while derogating other ways of being a man. Subsequently, young men lack alternative models to harmful masculinities. On Maxwell, many carry knives for ‘protection’ and to remain loyal to the specific street code (Anderson, 2000; King, 2022). Others grew up without fathers and experience poor schooling, violence and trauma alongside pervasive institutional racism, which creates a potent underlying sense of futility. Many feel a vulnerability and persistent anticipation of danger (King & Swain, 2022). Nonetheless, they also possess and display positive emotions, including love, reverence, protection and caring—which are not always visible in public spaces and remain underexplored in research.
Research shows that masculinities can contain more caring and egalitarian elements (Elliott, 2016; Messerschmidt, 2018). Males enact different versions of masculinity at other times and in different spaces or even within the same area at different times (King, 2022; King & Swain, 2022). Although there is literature about mothers’ positive effects on Black men’s resistance to societal prejudice (e.g., Das et al., 2022; Pimentel et al., 2023), there is scant literature about young men’s feelings and emotions towards them. We ask why mothers are revered and how they engender such emotions, juxtaposing these behaviours with those directed to other females on Maxwell. We support young men’s and their mothers’ agency to share their stories alongside a third perspective (giving a more profound understanding) from two youth workers on Maxwell. Our findings have implications for policies promoting mothers as role models and advocates for positive change via their powerful influence on young black men.
Following the introduction, we review studies on philogynist masculinities, the literature on the role and influence of mothers on black boys and young men’s attitudes, behaviours and cultural influences (e.g., rap/hip hop) and their role in their upbringing. We discuss masculinity theories, detail our methodology and present data on young men’s attitudes, relationships and practices towards and with their mothers, the multiple roles mothers play and the diametrically opposite way young women are treated. We end with a discussion and short conclusion.
Literature and Theories of Masculinity
Literature
The term ‘philogyny’ rarely appears in masculinity literature. We appropriate Tyree and Jones’s (2015, p. 57) definition: ‘the fondness, love, and adoration of women’. Due to the paucity of philogyny research, much of the literature below is on mothering (a particular set of caring practices and relationships mothers have and carry out with their child) rather than philogyny per se. One exception is the presence of philogyny in rap music, which, according to Tyree and Jones (2015), is inextricably linked with black culture. For some time, the music industry has monopolized rap music with misogyny and misogynistic symbolism (de Boise, 2020; Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009), with critics deriding the entire genre as unfavourable.
Although hip hop/rap (and its subgenres such as grime or drill in the UK) often stereotype black women in overly sexualized or derogatory terms (Perry, 2004) or as ‘gold-diggers’ looking to exploit men (Castelin & White, 2022), some females, particularly black women, are frequently imbued with attributes such as strength, independence and fortitude (Gartner, 2021). Outside of music, and as part of an exploration of more gender equitable tendencies among young men in secondary schools, Groes-Green (2012, p. 2) ‘tentatively introduces the concept philogynous masculinities as an alternative to existing conceptualisations of forms of manhood that challenge male domination over women’. His findings include 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique, involving over 100 school students aged 17–26.
Barker (2000) and Gartner (2021) have also studied philogyny and masculinity. Barker’s (2000) work with 25 disadvantaged young men, aged 15–21, in Brazilian shanty towns, show how gender-equitable forms of masculinity co-exist alongside hegemonic features, including male brutality, selfishness or being ‘the breadwinner’. Gartner’s (2021) ethnographic work in Ghana examined male musicians aged 20–32 called ‘shabomen’. Gartner (2021, p. 820) found that shabomen support girls to overthrow gendered conventions in work division—often against opposition—via performances of romantic and emotional masculinity, which Gartner understood as a form of ‘philogynous masculinity’.
Scholars acknowledge that being a man has different constructions and meanings in different social contexts. According to Ratele (2008), these inconsistencies avoid treating men as a homogenous group with a masculinity that is negative and inflexible. However, as Groes-Green (2012, pp. 3–4) warns, men continue to subordinate women in socioeconomic, ideological and physical ways. For Groes-Green (2012) and Barker (2000), alternative (including philogynous) masculinities can exist alongside persistent patriarchal gender structures; thus, such performances do not always challenge the dominant or hegemonic masculinity or attempt to reconfigure the gender order. Readers should note the stark difference between our study and, for example, the work of Groes-Green and Barker. These researchers examine young men’s relations with young women—where sexuality is important. In biological relationships, sexuality is not pertinent; thus, our work and findings differ notably.
While trying to avoid reductionist depictions of ethnicities, one should consider how black male stereotypes influence research on black fathers. The experiences of black families, predominantly in US research, reflect the different roles and presentations of black fatherhood. However, as McAdoo (2002) acknowledges, research often lacks a balanced view of black fatherhood. For example, much research focuses on biological fathers and, more pointedly, absent biological fathers, rendering non-biological fathers and paternalistic figures invisible (Moore, 2013).
Maxwell houses a significant black African diaspora, with many families arriving in the 1980s and 1990s following various conflicts on the continent. Moore (2013) suggests that African families tend to be larger than European households (which sometimes can be associated with larger families elevating parents’ social status), which casts African mothers’ identities during their mothering practices as the predominant carers. Moore (2013) notes that ‘motherwork’, shaped by Africa’s political context, emphasizes homemaking alongside a struggle for survival. Often, mothers took sole caring responsibilities when separated from their fathers, including preparing their children for societal racism (Pimentel et al., 2023).
Across the socioeconomic strata, descriptions of black femininity often involve images of maternal strength, invulnerability and protection of others. Such images echo the traditions built during slavery and the need to counteract men’s economic and psychological difficulties emerging from structural conditions with roots in societal racism (Haskins & Shawhill, 2007). Moreover, high pregnancy rates among young black girls in socioeconomically deprived areas (Tolman, 2006) may provide cultural models depicting motherhood as the primary identity and goal for sexual attractiveness (Laney et al., 2015).
Black mothers’ concerns for their sons seemingly relate to personal and female relatives’ and friends’ negative experiences with men. In Collins’s (2015) research, black mothers felt let down by their children’s biological fathers—partly due to their unexpected absence during pregnancy. Thus, black mothers seemingly prepared young daughters to be self-sufficient as they may become involved with unstable men. Critical race feminist scholars posit that, due to internalized oppression, black mothers resigned themselves to negative images of black masculinity (Ispa & Halgunseth, 2006), which resulted in them protecting their daughters from unrealistic ideas about men. In Sharp and Ispa’s (2009) work, this plan rested on black mothers’ assumption that their sons’ generation would become the men from their generation. This impression creates a predicament for mothers rearing sons, resulting in many ‘over-nurturing’ to supplant potential troublemaking with affection, which may foster their sons’ reciprocal warmth.
In Sharp and Ispa’s (2009) research, mothers of black sons ranked education highly in their childrearing goals. Simultaneously, mothers expressed apprehension that, during adolescence, ‘delinquent’ schoolmates would derail their sons—pressures which also appear in the stories of Maxwell’s young men presented below. Reflecting on these issues in Sharp and Ispa’s (2009) study, mothers of black boys told these researchers that they wanted their sons to bypass illegal activities and ‘be his own person’ (including having the determination to stay away from negative peers). Mothers’ strategies to instil aversion to undesirable and pressurizing peers included firm discipline and association with religious organizations (Elliott, 2016).
Theories of Masculinity
Dominant masculinities are the most fêted and influential version of manhood shown in a setting (locally, regionally or globally). A significant conceptual development in Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) has been the move to understand and delineate dominant and hegemonic masculinities (e.g., Beasley, 2008; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2018; Schippers, 2007). While dominant and hegemonic masculinities involve individual practices and are part of larger systems of gender relations, hegemonic masculinity denotes relationships that ‘legitimate an unequal relationship between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and among masculinities’ (Messerschmidt, 2018, p. 75). Sometimes, the hegemonic form is the most dominant. Both masculinity formations possess nuance and fluidity, and, in Maxwell, they oscillated across times and places from hegemonic (when observed legitimizing unequal gender relations) to dominant (when they were not sanctioning inequalities).
Maxwell’s Street Masculinity
Maxwell’s dominant and hegemonic masculinities overlap into a distinctive localized street masculinity (Ilan, 2015; King, 2022; King & Swain, 2022). Driven by a craving for belonging, peer status and respect, the street masculinity included features of the dominant masculinity (e.g., hedonism, exemplifying ‘swagger’ and ‘coolness’, parading material possessions, displaying success, showing loyalty and protection to peers, independence, proving oneself, providing for one’s family, taking drugs, showing aversion to state authorities, using violence and knife-carrying, using social media and possessing local knowledge) (Gunter, 2008). However, many of these features became hegemonic when legitimating gender inequality.
Caring and Philogynous Masculinities
Much appears in CSMM about caring masculinities, which Elliott (2016) defines as a softer, more inclusive form refuting patriarchal domination and promoting more feminine qualities of interdependence, tolerance, care and positive emotion. The subjects of much empirical research about caring masculinities are white, middle-class, heterosexual men (e.g., fathers). To date, researchers have rarely applied it to black, working-class men.
We argue that philogynous masculinities are one aspect of caring masculinities that include affective feminine qualities but with a particular focus on positive emotions towards women, such as respect and adoration in private and public spaces. In contemporary social science literature, philogynous masculinities do not necessarily characterize specific men or social segments. For Groes-Green (2012), they open a theoretical landscape and show that such masculinities may exemplify diverse male identities that potentially confront prevalent gender hierarchies. However, we argue that young men’s practices on Maxwell are an accepted feature of the dominant or hegemonic masculinity forms and do not challenge them. For Groes-Green (2012), the variability and ambiguity of philogynous masculinities throughout contexts requires research, like this study, in local settings across time and space.
Methodology
Maxwell is among the bottom 20% of England’s most deprived neighbourhoods (IMD, 2019). Even with pockets of regeneration, the estate remains derelict. From a social perspective, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora persist en masse, joined more recently by, for instance, white Eastern European migrants. This influx has not diluted Maxwell’s social fabric but instead added greater cultural diversity.
Fieldwork occurred over nine months in 2019 and involved the first author’s personal and ‘long-term’ engagement with Maxwell’s community. The second author, a white full-time academic, did not participate in fieldwork but supported data interpretation and co-authored this article. The fieldwork followed an urban ethnographic methodology to explore Maxwell’s culture during a period of intense commitment. Walking site visits to Maxwell occurred at least three times per week, usually from 18:00 hours for approximately four hours. 3 On weekends, fieldwork was often during the middle of the day to catch social gatherings at Maxwell’s community centre. The main aims of the research sought to uncover how Maxwell’s culture functioned, exploring why some young men carried knives, how the street codes that underscored its culture moulded young men’s practices, their identifications with masculinity and their relationships.
The first author (and researcher) is a white male who grew up on Maxwell during the 1980s and 1990s. After leaving the neighbourhood in the early 2000s, he returned in 2017. His interest in masculinities grew when working with street-based youth workers to curb knife crime. These youth workers considered Maxwell unsafe for outsiders; therefore, his primary participant recruitment strategy came from those workers who operated on Maxwell. Youth workers escorted him to participants’ congregational spaces and homes, areas often off-limits to outsiders and researchers. The author’s experience of Maxwell also assuaged any participant misgivings and helped foster reciprocity during fieldwork interactions. Nonetheless, his positionality as a ‘white guy’, with its attendant privileges in a predominantly black space, required fieldwork amendments and careful navigation of questions or issues pertaining to race. He often wrote fieldnotes out of sight to avoid raising suspicions of any collusion with restorative justice agencies. The researcher primarily used participant observations (passive and participatory) and formal interviews for data generation. Due to the incumbent risks, the researcher could not speak formally with the upper echelons of Maxwell’s criminal hierarchy (e.g., gang leaders). The participant sample thus comprised 48 participants, most of whom were 19–20 years old.
The young men were reluctant to be formally interviewed or recorded because they were wary of being seen conspiring with an authority figure. There were also trust issues with authoritative figures, so the researcher only managed three recorded formal interviews with young men. Street observations also often included multiple informal conversations—often the most practical data generation method (Swain & King, 2022)—with approximately 40 with young men, 14 with youth workers (four recorded), 4 seven with young men’s mothers in their homes and five with social workers and teachers. When these approaches addressed the research questions, the researcher recorded them in his field diary as soon as possible. As most of the data came from impromptu informal conversations around Maxwell, selecting young men on their family set-up was impossible; nonetheless, youth workers estimated that around 70% of Maxwell’s young men lacked fathers (King, 2022).
Analysis
Data analyses followed a thematic analysis called a hybrid approach (Swain, 2018), combining deductive and inductive approaches. This involved constructing a priori (or pre-empirical) codes from the research aims, observational themes, interview questions and a posteriori (post-empirical) codes generated from the data. While a priori codes included masculinities, identities, relationships and mothers, the surfacing a posteriori codes included respect, protection and caring.
Ethics
The study followed the BERA (2018) 5 guidelines and passed a detailed risk assessment by the university’s ethics committee. The fieldwork ethical issues were complex, particularly when using informal conversations (Swain & Spire, 2020), and, as most of the conversations were opportunistic (meetings were not usually preplanned, and the researcher often encountered young men by chance), it was not possible for potential participants to sign consent forms. However, the researcher met participants alongside youth workers, and although young men’s research understanding was necessarily partial, they had at least some awareness of what the study was about, that any involvement was voluntary and that their personal information would be pseudonymized. Trust developed gradually, and most were happy to have the chance to express their views.
Findings
We organize our findings around (a) young men’s appreciation and respect for their mothers, (b) mothers’ multiple roles and (c) the sexualization of young women.
Appreciation and Respect for Mothers
As one youth worker, Darius, said: ‘the majority of young men love their mothers deeply’, 6 and as they enacted philogynous masculinities, their philogynous beliefs included a lifelong commitment and passionate dedication. The young men confirmed mothers’ centrality in their lives, as these extracts from informal conversations show. They respected and appreciated their mother’s sense of invulnerability, maternal strength and protection (Haskins & Shawhill, 2007), for managing the household and looking after the home (Pimentel et al., 2023), their effort and tenacity, knowledge and wisdom, and always being there for them, even when they transgressed. They prized their mother’s loyalty and their ability to work multiple jobs while remaining present to provide food and care.
I’m close to my mum as she’s the one who puts food on the table, pays the bills and keeps everything on point—she’s the one who runs the house. [Tyrell]
My mum’s a soldier: she wakes up before sunrise, preps us breakfast and leaves before we’re up. She works two or three jobs and always makes it back before dinner time so she can have the family meal together. [Jack]
My mum’s always gonna be there, no matter how hard I fuck it up! [Daniel]
She (the young man’s mother) is the one who stuck around when things got tough … She didn’t breeze (leave) when shit got real. [Ryan]
The young men were highly protective of their mothers, who were ‘off limits’ to any criticism, even when proffered in a light-hearted way.
[Responding to a friend’s jibe] What the fuck, fam. I know you aint talking shit about my mums. Anyone else, I don’t give a fuck, but that’s my heart, cuz. [Mohamed]
Young men extended protectiveness to sisters, as the below extract from one informal conversation with Tyrell shows:
They [sisters] are livin’ the struggle too. They aint gonna get wetted [stabbed] or whatever on-road, but they feelin’ [the struggle] like we do so we gotta remain tight [close and protective].
Since sisters were closer in age, and many were street-oriented or ‘street savvy’, the impression was that they did not need shielding. Often, sisters intermittently occupied the same spaces as Maxwell’s young men, many were raised to be self-sufficient (Collins, 2015) and carried a street presence and self-representation.
Although we argue that more caring performances of masculinity occurred in private spaces like the home, sometimes philogynous masculinities were also enacted in the street’s public arenas. The extract below, from the researcher’s notes, shows the fluency and contextuality of masculinity as well as that philogynous performances exist alongside, rather than challenge or contest, the dominant or hegemonic masculinity of the street’s particular gender order (Barker, 2000; Groes-Green, 2012).
Here, one young man, Azeez, exuded the misogynistic features of hegemonic masculinity before switching to a philogynous form within seconds to protect his mother, Amina, from knowing with whom he was associating. This is something Azeez referenced in multiple private conversations with the researcher and observable in the researcher’s fieldnotes.
I spent lots of time with Azeez and his friends today. Lots of talk about football, stuff online and girls they were trying to chat up. Lots of profanity and misogynistic terms for the girls. The phone rang, and when he saw mum’s number, he begged his friends to be quiet, so his mum wouldn’t know who he was with. With his mum, his voice changed completely—the pitch went up, and all the bass disappeared. He began to sound more like the teenager he is!
It is striking how Azeez’s young peers were complicit in this silent respect for his mother, with no one betraying his whereabouts. When mothers exited group situations, young men reverted to their brash, dominant and often hegemonic, street masculinity performances.
Azeez was typical of his peers on Maxwell in that he wanted to show his mother appreciation; he did not reveal that the gifts came from illegal gains. Whether this dishonesty was disrespectful is discussed later.
I wanted … I needed the money. I wanted to get stuff, sell it, and buy myself and my mum things. I saw this Louis Vuitton scarf for her birthday. Treat her nice, you know. I needed to make money! Where else was I gonna get it? Mans don’t have that kinda paper just lying around.
Azeez’s reverence for Amina (coupled with his contempt for his father) created a dutiful need to reward her in highly symbolic ways and speak about her with admiration. He enjoyed the aspirational mantle of ‘protector’ and ‘provider’ (supplanting or inverting his mother’s role) and became excitable describing what he ‘bought’ her. Providing for one’s family was a feature of the dominant form of street masculinity. However, this data also shows the emotions of caring and love as exemplars of caring and philogynous masculinity, which also possess more feminine values and traits.
Mothers’ Multiple Roles
One prominent reason for mothers to engender their child’s love in performances of philogynous masculinities was being there and creating a home for them (Pimentel et al., 2023). As another youth worker, Jaden, said: ‘Mum’s are always there, keeping things ticking over’. Darius thought their status resulted from a presence that accompanied their wisdom:
I think it’s because the mums are present in these young men’s lives that they receive all the love. Lots of these kids here have absent fathers; older brothers are like the dads around here, uncles too. Mums take on the responsibility to be everything … lots of the cultures and communities around here value status and wisdom—that kinda ‘respect your elders’ thing, you know? Well, the mums have that status and respect from most people because they are the wise ones, dishing out life lessons for a lot of these kids.
Later, he repeated:
For a lot of these young men, mothers are everything … It’s no wonder they hold such a special place in their [young men’s] lives.
Darius’s mention of mothers as ‘everything’ suggests that they fulfil many familial roles, including, in fathers’ absence, breadwinner, cleaner, cook, primary influencer, carer, teacher/guide and disciplinarian. We focus on the last four most significant and prominent roles, although we recognize their overlapping.
The Primary Influencer
Many black mothers felt let down by their children’s biological fathers (Collins, 2015), and in the absence of a father figure, Darius spoke about the mothers’ dual role and responsibility in forging their sons’ values and identities and keep away from the powerful and often negative peer influence (see Sharp & Ispa, 2009).
They [mothers] play a huge role in the lives of Maxwell’s young men. There’s an absence of strong male role models around here—most of the young men see the gang bangers and drug dealers and kinda look up to them as paternal figures. Mothers then have a bit of a thankless task of playing mother and father at the same time. They [mothers] take on huge responsibilities in teaching the young men how to be men, all while swimming upstream and fighting the influence of gangs and all that nonsense.
Both youth workers spoke about the mothers’ pivotal importance for their sons. In many ways, mothers practiced a form of dominant femininity, the most common, widespread and prized motherhood form on Maxwell. Although we lack room to develop this concept, this form may resemble ‘matriarchal’ femininity, especially when it replaced the patriarchal power of absentee fathers.
One of the mother’s essential duties was a public demonstration that, however little money she had, she could be the sole provider, show pride and raise presentable children. As Darius said:
It’s a big thing, you know, being seen to look after your kids even if you don’t have the money. Make sure they’re clean and have clean clothes out in public; if there’s a different story at home, then so be it, but out in public, where everyone can see, there’s a kinda public impression, you know. You want your kids to look OK.
Carer
Mothers also felt responsible for their child’s safety. Darius spoke about the impossibility of mothers monitoring their sons 24/7:
Do they [mothers] know everything that these [their sons] are up to? Of course, no. But they’re spinning so many plates … juggling so many things that that’s almost impossible to expect. They can’t be everywhere, have eyes everywhere.
Jaden, however, felt that many mothers were more aware:
They [mothers] keep their ears to the ground most times like they have street intel or something. It might be their girls [daughters] who tell them that so-and-so is up to no good. Then word gets around, and the mums tell each other what’s going on. It’s like they have their own network or something. Most of them are clued up, like, about what’s going on.
Azeez confessed that, although he revered his mother, and could ‘talk to my mother about most things’, he did not always communicate the extent of his street life—perhaps to protect her. However, his secrecy was arguably disrespectful:
Things on-road, I guess. It’s not that I’m lying or whatever, she [mother] would get upset if she knew what mans is doing on road. I wanna protect her, you know? It would break her heart if she knew I was hustling or whatever … she’d get mad. I’m only doing it kinda to, you know, help out around the house. If I’m hustling, it kinda helps her out, maybe she don’t have to work as hard, work as long … maybe I can buy her nice things she deserves.
It was interesting to note Amina’s knowledge of Azeez’s activities. However, one can speculate how she might dread a call from the police whenever Azeez was ‘on-road’ and embedded in Maxwell’s street culture. For example, she may have suspected her expensive gifts came from ill-gotten means but did not want to risk her relationship with Azeez by probing. She conceivably knew she could not be an ever-present guardian and arrived at a pragmatic accommodation to protect her emotional well-being by prioritizing Azeez’s safety. Her limited aims included, wherever possible, keeping Azeez out of significant harm, as the extract below shows:
He might not think I know what he gets up to, but a mother knows. When he doesn’t pick up my calls or doesn’t return my messages, I know why. When he tells me that he’s at a friend’s house, I know he’s probably out on the street. I can’t watch over him 24 hours a day, so I’m happy to just see that he’s healthy and safe. It might not sound much, but that’s all a mother can ask for around here.
Teacher/Guide
Mothers also knew their responsibilities as teachers and/or guides (Sharp & Ispa, 2009). When school did not teach her son about black history, one mother, Angela, told the researcher that she assumed this role herself.
We [mothers] are everything to these children. When I spoke to my son’s school about what they were teaching him about Black culture or history, they basically said nothing. I decided to teach him myself—it’s important he understands more about who he is, what it means to be a young Black man. I gave him stuff to read, nothing major, but stuff he wouldn’t get at school.
For Sharp and Ispa (2009), mothers valued education highly for their Black sons to escape the detrimental local culture that promoted negativity towards authority, including teachers, and a lack of aspiration. The above excerpt shows the lengths that some mothers went to for their son’s holistic education, including what it meant to be a black male. This dedication appears in the comments of one local schoolteacher, who told the researcher that mothers constituted approximately 90% of attendees at parents’ evenings and events.
Another mother, Laurette, was conscious of the institutional racism among state-run agencies, something present in interviews with mothers of black sons by Harris and Amutah-Onukagha (2019) and Das et al. (2022); she saw it as her job to raise her son’s awareness of what ‘being Black’ meant and preparing him for the racism in society he would experience (Pimentel et al., 2023):
I try my best to help my boy out in the big wide world. Being Black around here, in this community, means one thing, but being Black out there, outside this estate, means something else. My boy knows now [because of me] that the world can be cruel because of the color of his skin … that the police, teachers, other people might treat him different because he and his sisters are Black.
Disciplinarian
These excerpts show mothers’ exalted position for their sons. In many ways, the matriarchal and even heroic status, respect and control they displayed at home echoed features of the street masculinity. This mirroring included (sometimes gratuitous) violence at home to instil discipline: young men described mothers grabbing spoons, belts and shoes to reprimand them. Simultaneously, many of Maxwell’s young men resorted to violence (albeit comparatively more severe) to gain or assert their status and power on the street. When disciplining to their children, mothers knew they had to be strong as well as caring (Elliott, 2016) and, once again, be mother and father. As Laurette continued:
There’s a lot of nonsense around here. Lots of these young men are running around pretending they [are] grown men and hurting each other. Lots of them don’t have strong parents in their lives, so we, especially us mothers, need to be strong for them, give them discipline and keep them out of trouble as much as we can. There aren’t many people helping us, so most of us have to do this alone, without fathers—the boy’s dads—around to help us. Lots of us [mums] are both mum and dad to these young men … which is a lot to handle.
This dual role was a difficult balance. Still, Amina said she realized she should not overly derogate Azeez’s absent father. For Amina, telling her son about his father’s misbehaviour, violence and poor paternal influence risked tainting the image of being a black man from Maxwell. Further, if her son thought that all black men from Maxwell were ‘no good’, he had nothing to live up to and everything to ‘live down to’; Amina knew of the plethora of negative male role models and undesirable versions of masculinity (Ispa & Halgunseth, 2006) around the estate; she was worried about their influence and effect, and wanted her son exposed to as many positive black masculine identities as possible.
The Distrust and Sexualization of Young Women
Trust was one key ingredient of young men’s street culture (Hanlon, 2012), but it was granted only for mothers, close family and select friends. One young man, Damion, confided that many people in his life had let him down and that he did not have any close or ‘true’ friends. His mother and sister were the only people on whom he could rely. Trust was in short supply and needed earning through actions and words. Young men, in general, did not have confidence in the estate’s females, often considering them disposable and objectifying them to diminish their status. Subsequently, many treated young women with suspicion, which drove their barbed comments towards them as the exchange below shows.
Damion: I’m grown [up] enough to know that people leave: friends, my father, girls. There ain’t many people who stick around, you know?
Researcher: Who has stuck around, stuck by you no matter what?
Damion: Just my family. My mum, my sister. Sometimes they’re the only people I can trust.
Researcher: What about friends?
Damion: Nah … you know, life on-road. Man’s only be looking after themselves. Lots of snakes, you know what I mean? People be sneaking behind peoples’ backs, up to all kind of fuckery, innit.
In contrast to how young men viewed and treated their mothers, sisters and other close family female members, they regarded other young women as being of a dubious and inferior nature, or as sexualized objects. This is just one example of hegemonic masculinity where unequal gender relations were legitimated. In contrast, young men did not sexualize their mothers’ bodies and steadfastly opposed any sexualization of them. Indeed, a common confrontational phrase was ‘suck your mum/mother’, an overt and aggressive sexualization of the object of young men’s philogyny.
Many were unconvinced of forming close relationships with girls. Some young women were suspected ‘gold-diggers’ looking to exploit men (Castelin & White, 2022; Hobson & Barlow, 2008), like portrayals in popular rap music. Young men on the fringes of gangs were mindful that honey trapping was rife. Here, young men arranging to meet girls on the promise of sexual relations were sometimes ambushed by rivals, as shown in the excerpt from an informal conversation with Jaden:
There’s a feeling that some girls and their affections are not genuine. There are many instances of girls sent to [Maxwell] from rival estates. They come to attract young men who are making a name for themselves, asking them [young men] to drive them places, but it’s all a set up. Sometimes rivals will be lying in wait.
This trend, perhaps with an apocryphal quality, fed young men’s suspicion of young women:
These other women (girlfriends, girls from the estate) ain’t shit—what’s the phrase, ‘ten a penny’, innit?’ They come and they go—they all just passing through. [Donny]
Amongst the many displays of hegemonic masculinity, Maxwell’s young women were often subject to young men’s misogynistic taunts. The influence of rap was significant; here, artists often sexualized and derogated women (Perry, 2004). Due to the prevalence of social media, there was also abundant material for young men to comment on, usually offensively. For example, in other enactments of hegemonic masculinity, Azeez and his friends often shared screenshots of young women on their phones, some of whom they would claim to have had sex with. If the young women were unattractive according to friends, they became ‘bruk’ or a ‘ho’—a disparaging name for a promiscuous female. The most frequently used term for a non-familial woman was ‘bitch’. In his hegemonic practice, one of the leading young men, Bankz, often referred to his ‘bitch’ (girlfriend) or ‘she’s just some bitch [girl] I know, no wifey [long-term girlfriend] ting’. Indeed, many young women became known as that ‘chick’ or ‘bitch’ from Maxwell or beyond. Thus, they lacked the status of even possessing a name.
Discussion and Conclusion
This article aims to add to the literature on philogynous masculinities by exploring young black men’s relationships with their mothers and other women in a disadvantaged housing estate in London. This masculinity form is rarely utilized with young, working-class or black men. The study also highlights contradictions in the men’s treatment of, and attitude to, women of different ages and relationships. It shows mothers’ powerful influence in young black men’s lives and how they produce philogynous emotions, resulting in the performance of caring and philogynous forms of masculinity. The study focuses on a group of marginalized young men drawn into violence who practice versions of a specific, dominant and often hegemonic street masculinity situated and contingent on a localized disadvantaged area. Other patterns of masculinity were feminized and regarded as weak, especially when performed in public (King, 2022). These masculinity formations also included relationships with young women where misogyny and objective sexualization of bodies were the norms. Still, our research shows that these young men can also practice philogynous masculinity forms in their relationships with their mothers and, to a lesser extent, their sisters (the research did not explore their relationships with other women who are close family members). It also shows the fluidity, nuance and time-context-dependent practices of masculinity.
Without father figures, mothers become reified; they are a pivotal and indispensable influence in forming the young man’s masculine identities, including more caring and egalitarian traits. The mothers practice a form of matriarchal femininity and exercise power and authority, particularly in the home’s private setting. Although the public space of the street is where the closed cultural circle of the peer group becomes the critical influence in masculinity making (Connell, 2000), where adolescents and young men learn how they are supposed to be and act, this research shows that the mothers’ influence retains a prevalence in this domain.
We believe that many mothers on Maxwell should appear as ‘heroic’ mothers, as their dedication towards their children and unwavering support often meant that they went ‘beyond the call of duty’. Mothers’ exalted status in young men’s eyes means that they can be potential powerful sponsors for positive change and a prime focus for engagement with outside policy interventions or services seeking to work with young black men. Motherly status may offer a route for policymakers to engage mothers of those young men most at risk of violence or knife-carrying. If mothers buy into an intervention, their sons may likely follow due to their admiration for mothers’ choices, values and practices, and show them that there are other models of masculinity and that being a black man is not only about family but can also be about showing respect and love to the many rather than the few. However, we recognize that, in some ways, this is also expecting more from those who already do the most.
Promoting philogynous masculinities may also help soften outsider perceptions of young black men, many of whom appear through a lens of ‘gangersterization’ in mainstream media (King, 2022). This study shows that, although these young men are often violent, they have emotions such as love, respect and reverence for their mothers. They are also highly appreciative and protective—a fundamental tenet of Maxwell’s dominant street masculinity. We argue that this form of philogynous masculinity is a subset of caring masculinity and needs greater recognition in CSMM literature. However, like Groes-Green (2012), we do not think this form subverts dominant or hegemonic forms of masculinity or challenges the gender order. Moreover, despite their philogyny, some young men were mindful of disclosing information that would ‘hurt’ their mothers. Thus, they simultaneously cared for but regularly deceived their mothers, citing reasons like ‘what she does not know cannot hurt her’, and the fear of involving mothers in the retributive practices of rivals.
Much of the previous research using philogynous masculinities concentrates on young men’s sexual relations with young women; this study then is one of the only studies focusing on their emotions towards their biological mothers. It also makes a methodological contribution, with much of the data generated through informal conversations, engaging and unlocking the agency of those on the margins who are often unheard. The researcher’s familiarity with Maxwell’s idiosyncrasies, and his closeness with youth workers, gave him privileged access to private spaces, which is often missing in other studies.
There are, however, limitations to our study. For example, the research focus was limited and could not explore and comment on the conditions in which philogyny and (in contrast) misogyny occurs. We believe these questions are essential and hope they undergo future investigation.
We acknowledge that this study explores a specific version of philogyny: young men’s relations and emotions towards biological mothers. There is no room to remark on their sisters or other close female family members, including aunties or grandmothers. While conversations and observations with the researcher intimated that young men cherish these females, it would still be illuminating to undertake more research.
While we include several voices from Maxwell, we concede that, in places, there is an overreliance on one participant, Azeez, who was one of the very few willing to take part in a lengthy, more formal, recorded interview. Azeez’s data is thus richer and more extensive. However, Azeez represents a microcosm of these young men the researcher observed and spoke to, and he typifies the fluidity of masculinity across specific times and spaces. Future research may draw on larger samples of young men in different settings, perhaps with different ethnicities, to show the extent of generalizability. We are also aware that the study focuses on one-parent families. How things would differ in a two-parent nuclear family is unclear. However, much depends on mothers’ involvement in young men’s upbringing, but would they be equally revered when fathers are present?
Finally, the term ‘philogynous’ is difficult to define in gender studies exploring complex human relations. The Tyree and Jones (2015) definition we appropriate remains limited because they talk about the representation of women (in rap) and do not engage or analyse everyday lived relationships, which future work should focus on. We do not deny the power of these concepts but rather remain conscious of their limitations and call for further research in the CSMM field.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.