'Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men': Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men

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Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men: Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men

Chimaraoke O. Izugbara

Published online: 20 February 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Current analyses of poverty and economic marginality in relation to masculinity continue to ignore the direct perspectives of men whose lives form the crux of such investigations. I draw on interview and ethnographic data from two slums in Nairobi, Kenyas capital city to address poor mens constructions and performance of manliness in relation to poverty. Men acknowledged economic adversity as both a major constraint to their masculinity and a signicant dynamic in their own evolution and development into proper men. In striving for locally-valued masculine identities, particularly breadwinnerhood, Nairobis poor men advanced new values, narratives and strategies that both projected them as socially-respectable men and reconstituted their normatively un-masculine actions as macho. Ironies suffuse masculinity in the slums of Nairobi, and are, in large part, driven by the critical and complex social dynamics and popular subjectivities, which poor men navigate while seeking to make valued masculinity both notionally and practically accessible for themselves.

Keywords Men Masculinity Poverty Kenya

C. O. Izugbara (&)

African Population and Health Research Center, Nairobi, Kenya e-mail: [email protected]

C. O. IzugbaraUniversity of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

C. O. IzugbaraUniversity of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

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122 Gend. Issues (2015) 32:121137

Introduction

Masculine identity has been recognized as a malleable characteristic that is constructed and reconstructed in social relationships and through ideology, control, performance, language and related aspects [3, 6, 811, 37]. Essentially, the production of masculinity involves an active process of negotiation with social situations and contexts and fashioning ways of existing in them. Messerschmidt [29] asserts that gendered responses are human reactions to unique social situations and contexts. Masculinity is, therefore, not the product, simply, of passive socialization, but of ongoing engagement with emergent social circumstances and reality. As critical aspects of social reality, livelihood conditions and economic circumstances are among the factors that circumscribe...