Review
Robert Morrell (ed) (2001) Changing Men in
Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of
Natal Press, London and New York: Zed Books
IvorChipkin
Changing Men in Southern Africa is an important text for being the first
major work in South Africa dedicated to the study of masculinity. As such,
it is a theoretical challenge to the academy. In reviewing the book I want to
ask some questions about the theoretical pin that holds the book together:
the notion ofmasculinity itself. I do this not so much as a critique of the book,
or an attempt to dismiss the notion of masculinity, but in the spirit of the
theoretical challenge that it represents.
    In the 1990s a growing interest developed in the international literature
aboutwhether 'men are in crisis' andaboutthe 'New Man' -mother words,
men who favoured women's liberation, looked after the children, supported
women pursuing careers, were sensitive and introspective. Campaigns to
promote women's rights and gender equality were associated with the
organic rise of a 'new men's movement', which emerged from men coming
together to discuss the role of men in the exploitation of women. The earliest
public expression of this movement was the British publication, Achilles
Heel, founded in the 1970s. By the 1990s governments and the UN were
including issues of masculinity within the purview of their gender policies.
The question that was often posed was the following: if equality is to become
a reality there has to be a genuine desire for change on the part of men and
women. Hence the 'New Man' was one defined as 'wanting to change'. Once
'man' was posited as 'able to change', this implied, contrary to a version of
feminism that took men as given, that men were potentially allies in the
struggle for equality. Why? Precisely because being a man was not fixed to
any necessary 'identity'. It is precisely this diversity that the term masculinity
seeks to capture. Unfortunately, the focus onreducing inequalities between
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 men and women, Morrell suggests, has obscured the way masculinity is
 defined and practiced in Southern Africa since 1994. Hence the book.
     This shift to an interest in diversity, at first glance, seems to insinuate
 itself from the historical and social record. The view frommasculinity studies
 wants us to see men as constructed in the context of class, race and other
 factors, interpreted though the prism of age (8). Morrell contrasts, in this
 regard, the Talib(m)an with, say, a man that does not believe all women are
 nags, or belong in the kitchen or should be pretty but quiet. At stake are the
 different conditions under which these men have been made as 'men'.
 Masculinity wants men treated in a similar way, say, to how some feminists
 regard 'woman' -ahistorical and social production. Masculinity studies are
 a sort of disciplinary corrective, a will to even-handedness in the domain of
 gender studies.
     Let us note from the start that studies in masculinity are dogged by a
 theoretical challenge which did notnecessarily arise before. When 'men' are
 defined by virtue of their a priori relations to women (domination,
 exploitation), then the ontological status of 'man' is precisely these relations.
 Simply put, man was identical to these relations. Studies in masculinity,
 however, unsettle precisely this ontology. If masculinity is a historical and
 social construct, such that 'men' are diverse, what is the quality of identity
 (man-ness) that makes Taliban men, 'New Men' andgaymen, somehow, all
 men? Morrell himself does nothing more than note this difficulty. He
 observes that there are those for whom men are associated with a core set
 of transculturally similar/identical activities or traits (7). Others are satisfied
that the only commonality between men is their penis. This is no negligible
matter. At stake is the raison d'etre of the book itself, and moreover, the
conceptual integrity of the notion of masculinity. What do the men in
 Changing Men in Southern Africa have in common? Does the notion of
masculinity want to have its cake and eat it? Does it want both to reduce the
status of 'man' to a floating signifier (such that his meaning is purely and
simply contingent) and, at the same time, retain some sense of a universal
quality (penis, domination, exploitation)? Ifall that is common to men is their
penis and the penis is not constitutive of their identities as men (precisely
because they are produced elsewhere) then the penis is not a causal variable.
If, however, there is some hard kernel to being man that defies socio-cultural
construction, then masculinity says little about man (as a gender relation)
and much about other aspects of their identity. Why? Because in this case
the male gender relation would be these universal relations of man-ness.
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Either the notion of masculinity dissolves the category 'man' altogether, or
it contradicts itself.
    Does Gramsci's notion of hegemony help us out here? Does the notion
ofhegemony permit both the notion ofman as construct and simultaneously
the notion of man as universal? Firstly, let us note that the notion of man
(from the point of view of masculinity) is not homologous to the notion of
class. A class relation remains identical, irrespective of the culture in which
it is located. It is always a relation of exploitation (strictly defined). This is
not the case of 'man' in masculinity studies. What is important is that
Gramsci treated class (as an objective position) as a causal factor in the
production of ideology (class in its contingent state). It is precisely where,
on his own terms, he failed. Now a similar sort of move is closed to the study
of masculinity. Having equivocated on the ontology ofmen (what is the man-
ness of men), how do we know that hegemonic ideologies say anything
about men per se? How do these discourses of and about men relate to the
universal gender relation when we are unable to say what that might be?
What this means is that, for example, we are not in a position to understand
when or why rape is an expression of masculinity or of something else.
Jacklyn Cock's article in the book, in part, makes a similar argument. In
wanting to link violence and anxiety, she suggests that new social identities
involve uncoupling militarism from masculinity. Here the violence may be
predominantly carried out by men, but is not in and of itself 'masculine'.
    There are important clues to dealing with these theoretical dilemmas in
some of the chapters in the book. Shadowing many of the papers is
consternation about the high levels of violent crime in South Africa and
especially that ofrape. Several authors draw an explicit relationship between
such crime and 'culturallyprojectedidealsofmasculinity' (Xaba:107).Being
a ' comrade' in the 1980s was not simply a political vocation or calling but
intimately related to a libidinal economy of esteem, status and power. When
these same 'comrades', after having sacrificed 'education for liberation',
were unable to re-establish their places in the libidinal economy after 1994
 through formal, legal practices, many took to violent crime. Here crime and
rape are symptomatic of efforts to re-establish the libidinal economy of the
 1980's through other means. They are symptomatic in the same way that
 lifeguarding in Durban offers young African men of Thekwini access to the
libidinal economy (Crispin Hemson); as does stick-fighting amongst migrant
workers in KwaZulu (Benedict Carton). Such a perspective allows us to
 consider right-wing activism in South Africa as the other side of the coin of
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crime and rape. The loss of white privilege, suggests Sandra Swart, has seen
the Afrikaner lower middle class face economic competition from other
 ' ethnic' groups and classes. Job losses and economic precarity render white
Afrikaans men socially vulnerable; thatis, unable to reproduce theirpositions
of authority and wealth in Afrikaner society. As crime becomes another way
for former comrades to re-create the libidinal economy of the 1980s, right-
wing politics promises classes of Afrikaners a chance to reproduce the
symbolic and material capital they had during the apartheid period.
     What these essays gesture towards is treatment of the dilemma discussed
above. Masculinity in many of the essays in the collection tacitly posit a
relationship between: men, symbolic and material exchange (status, power,
money, goods) and expressions of man-ness. Here masculinity is not simply
a social and historical construct. If we borrow an unfashionable Marxist
expression we might say that what determines a relation of masculinity in the
last instance, is the universal phallic signifier. We might say, in other words,
that access to symbolic and material capital is attained for men as such
through the elaboration of masculinity. Here the phallus (the lack that is
desire) is not simply a biological element, incidental to masculinity, but the
very term that structures the relationship (man, capital, masculinity) in the
first place.
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