Shameful Masculinity: What Afrikaner Men Share after Apartheid
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: The recent accusation of Minister Lulu Xingwana, during an interview that the Oscar Pistorius murder case could be traced back to how young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing they own a woman, is only the latest instance of how Afrikaner masculinity is problematized after apartheid. This paper explores how Afrikaner men re-imagine their cultural identities in South Africa after apartheid. Engaging the past and the present, media debates have become the primary site around which fraught masculine identities are being stitched together. Afrikaner public intellectuals, music artists, and writers played a prominent role in these debates. During apartheid, white Afrikaner masculinity was constructed within a frame of patriarchy, racism, and control. In the post-apartheid era, Afrikaner masculinity is no longer supported by the raw political and military power of Afrikaner Nationalism. Nevertheless, for all the popular talk of destabilized identities and masculine uncertainty, I argue that public debates around what it means to be Afrikaans men have remarkably similar patterns and my analysis shows strong consistencies among Afrikaner men in their performance of masculinity across the political spectrum and across generations. I draw the counters of a new hegemonic masculinity that I call a shamefull masculinity.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Jacob R. Boersema
Institution: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3166760364