Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)
Reid and Walker (2005) suggest that black South African men are ‘behaving
differently’. Added to this Budlender (2008) has found that South African men are
more likely to engage in unpaid community care work than conventional wisdom
suggests. Part of this community work involves black men acting as AIDS
caregivers. It is imperative to gain knowledge about masculine caregivers as the
informal health care sector bears the brunt of the HIV pandemic. The fragmented
and over-burdened public health system simply cannot absorb the 15-20% of HIV
infected South Africans. Coovadia et.al. (2009) point to a lacuna in the
scholarship regarding community health workers (CHW) in South Africa.
My study of black masculine caregivers, located in the world of informal AIDS
care, hopes to fill this gap. Yet, I do something more for I tackle the conventional
wisdom that suggests South African men are different and exceptional if they
conduct feminised care work. The emotions involved in care processes are the
basis upon which society may feminise care work. My argument is also premised
upon forging links between the past and the present. As such, I focus upon
determining the extent to which emotional labour that may be exhibited by
historical and contemporary black men. I make use of W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1903)
notion of double-consciousness to show how the normalising society,
surrounding masculine care, impacts this category of black men. In so doing, I
not only forge links between past and present by means of doubleconsciousness,
but I perform an intersectional analysis of emotional labour, and
the context, in which it occurs. In so doing, I show how double-consciousness is
an intersectionally-forged mechanism for Foucault’s (1978) biopower, and one
that has become reinvented in present day South Africa. In this way I augment
the works of Du Bois (1903) and Foucault (1978) for both did not give primacy to
gender as a construct. It is essentially this view of black men, involved in AIDS
care that contributes to the originality of this work.
This historical-sociological investigation relied upon the linking of cases. I
conducted historical research upon two cases: ‘houseboys’ in colonial Natal
(1850 – 1928) and mine hospital ‘ward boys’ (1931 – 1959). Contemporary cases
were constructed to reflect the world of AIDS and cancer care. The 13 original
cases were compressed into seven case categories and based on triangulated
survey and interview data (29 AIDS and 18 cancer caregivers were interviewed;
while 195 community workers involved in AIDS care were surveyed in 2005/6;
follow-up interviews were conducted with 11 caregivers across all case
categories in 2010).