Migration trajectories in Southern Africa: The masculinity fix between Maputo and Johannesburg

Based on the premise that masculinity is constructed within geographically and historically located social spaces, this chapter draws on forty biographical interviews with Mozambican men carried out between 2005 to 2014. Focussing on the life stories of Mozambican men who migrated to South Africa from the 1960s onwards, the chapter seeks to contribute to expanding the theoretical and methodological conversations about the spatial dynamics of migrant masculinities. It explores the interconnectedness of masculinity, migration, colonialism, capitalism and socio-economic inequality in Southern Africa. The chapter borrows and expands David Harvey’s notion of spatial fix to highlight the spatial dimension of migrant masculinities and suggested that there is a particular spatial management of masculinities. While the masculinity-fix is produced by the racial and gendered dynamics of transnational capitalism, it also associates masculinity with geographically and historically situated spaces, where men engage with their trajectories and perform their subjectivities.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Gender in a box? The paradoxes of recognition beyond the gender binary

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Sexualized bodies: masculinity, power and identity in Mozambique

Drawing on ethnographic work carried out among Mozambican men living in Maputo (the capital of Mozambique), this paper intends to describe how subordinate men from a poor background are reconstructing their masculinity through the explicit sexualization of their self. It has been shown that among poor Mozambican men the lack of money or other material goods is compensated by complex practices and a variety of discourses on sex and sexuality. Sexuality, and its bodily enactment, is then used to reconstruct a powerful sense of manhood, which may take a variety of forms ranging from identification with the norm of the ‘good lover’ to more struggle-based discourses. All of these strategies imply an explicit investment in various forms of ‘bodily capital’, which may lead to the building up of a phallocentric masculinity, though women’s sexual agency is not ignored. In male discourse, a value is attributed to goods, whether material or symbolic, which function discursively according to an imagery of economic exchange as if the body were a commodity, a discursively constructed capital of manhood. Through a number of ethnographic examples, I will contend that we can consider masculinity as a complex structure of capitals that can be enacted in different spheres and with different meanings. As a result, different power hierarchies can be reconstructed and a degree of plurality may be incorporated into what we consider hegemonic masculinity. Sexuality and sex, while performed through a bodily hexis and discourses on power and control, are at the core of these processes and represent a vital constituent of the male self.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reassessing (de)standardization: Life course trajectories across three generations

A central problem of life course analysis concerns the changes brought about by the pluralization and differentiation of biographies in western societies. Lives would be increasingly dissimilar from each other and marked by a broader range of transitions and stages. Under the lens of life course theorization, the heterogenization of biographies is typically understood as destandardization. However, if the destandardization hypothesis gained momentum, there is still little information about its explanatory power outside the wealthiest centres of Europe and North America. Following recent trends in research, the article critically examines the applicability of the destandardization hypothesis to the Portuguese case. Through an analysis of the lives of three generations of Portuguese men and women, we reconstruct the life trajectories of each generation starting from the 1930s until the early 2000s. Through the reconstitution of both family and work trajectories, we see if there is a standard biography from which to derive subsequent patterns of heterogenization. From this perspective, we reassess the extent to which the destandardization model is suitable for explaining life course transformations in the Portuguese society.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Globalization and Identity: reassessing power, hybridism and plurality

Globalization has been a disputed concept among social theorists who diverge in defining the time-line, the contents or even the consequences of global processes, whether they refer to transnational capitalism, to liberal democracy, to cultural encounters, mass-media, fashion or the internet. Traditionally, globalization has been either viewed as the spread of western modernity, as an eroding force against the nation-state or, perhaps more importantly, as an uneven and contradictory system of fluxes between centre and periphery, which is often associated with the historicallybounded dichotomy between the west and the rest. Rather than a reified substance, contemporary globalization is broadly the heuristic device which connects the global and the local supporting the continued relations between old colonizers and postcolonized societies. From imperialist days to nowadays, globalization brings into play a history of violence and domination, but also of resistance, change and creativity, a history of civilizational encounters but also of inner transformation and permanent recreation of modernities. The purpose of this paper is to rethink the nature of the global context and its significance for local experiences of culture, power and identity, departing from the timeless structure/agency problem. I argue that the historical construction of the post-colonial society and of the individual self are not separate processes nor suffer differently the impact of local and global forces; on the contrary, they establish a relation of complicity marked by openness, indeterminacy and ambiguity. Hence, I discuss three main problems in order to establish the relation between globalization, agency and the constitution of modernities