Theorizing black (African) transnational masculinities

Just as masculinity is crucial in the construction of nationhood, masculinity is also significant in the making and unmaking of transnational communities. This article focuses on how black African men negotiate and perform respectable masculinity in transnational settings such as the workplace, community and family. Moving away from conceptualizations of black transnational forms of masculinities as in perpetual crisis and drawing on qualitative data collected from members of the new African diaspora in London, the article explores the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being challenged, re-affirmed and reconfigured. The article argues that men experience a loss of status as breadwinners and a rupture of their sense of masculine identity in the reconstruction of life in the diaspora. Conditions in the hostland, in particular, women's breadwinner status and the changing gender relations, threaten men’s ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and consequently force men to negotiate respectable forms of masculinity

Final report / Skills Training of the Short Term Offender; Zimbabwe

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Masculinities and femininities in Zimbabwean autobiographies of political struggle: the case of Edgar Tekere and Fay Chung

Because masculinities and femininities are socially and culturally constructed, they often play significant roles in constructing identities and distinguishing one another. Femininities and masculinities therefore play a key role in nation-building and in the sustenance of national identities. In this article I explore, through the autobiographies of two luminaries of Zimbabwe’s liberation war, how individual politicians configure their own gender identities and consequently the masculine and feminine identities of others. I posit that the autobiographical mode allows for intimate gendering of the liberation discourse. I also argue that Tekere celebrates the heroic masculine self, preferring military femininities to domestic ones. He privileges his own masculinity while “feminising†Robert Mugabe. Chung debunks the perceived manliness of political struggle and its representations by hailing the participation of women in the struggle for liberation. Her narration of their femininity is in relation to the nation and is structured around the struggle for national liberation, female emancipation and nation-building. Typical of female life-writing, Chung exhibits a relational sense of identity in which the autonomous self is subordinate to or subsumed in the collective. Hers becomes a projection and celebration of heroic femininities. I conclude this article by asserting that masculine and feminine identities in Zimbabwe’s political discourse remain bound up with the historical processes of colonial and nationalist liberation struggles