ABSTRACT
In South Africa, popular media and academic readings alike have long portrayed young Black men as offenders, immoral, disconnected from the older generations and involved in violent crime, including gender based violence (Wood and Jewkes 2001; Sangar and Hadland 2008; Clowes et al. 2010; Lefko-Everett 2012; Ward et al. 2012a). News of the many brutal acts of violence continue to feed what Posel (2005) has termed the ‘scandal of manhood’, the problematising of (especially Black) men in post-apartheid South Africa. Much of the violence literature sees young men as subscribing to, or performing, a violent hegemonic masculinity that arises out of struggle and is aimed at dominating other, more vulnerable members of society: children, women, or other less powerful men (Morrell 1998). Such analyses seldom include the experiences of those young men who choose not to join the ranks of ‘troubled’ men around them, nor do they address the dilemmas and complexities faced by those who do at some point in time engage with violence. Drawing on a longitudinal, in-depth study, in this chapter we argue for the need to hear and understand ‘alternative masculinities’ in post-apartheid South Africa, and to bear in mind that even hyper-masculine, violent identities are fluid, and dependent on context. It is in that fluidity that (additional) opportunities for change may lie.
