- Title
- Masculinity, respectability and divergence among migrant informal traders in Johannesburg
- Creator
- Igbanoi, Osikhena Leo
- Subject
- Immigrants, Masculinity, Interpersonal relations
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Doctoral (Thesis)
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/296712
- Identifier
- uj:32331
- Description
- Abstract: Although migrant masculinities exhibit diverse forms of solidarities in host countries, existing masculinity-migration studies have not duly accounted for how their exercise of agency associated with the construction of masculine respectability results in migrant-migrant contestations among them. This study fills in this gap by interrogating the masculine relationships among African men in Johannesburg. Employing qualitative in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, data was collected from 20 young, male migrants from four African countries - Ghana, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia – across 4 informal business sites in Johannesburg over a period of 6 months. This information was subsequently thematically analysed using Creswell’s (2009) six-step data analysis approach. Findings reveal that in their articulations of masculine respectability, the migrant men create and co-create each other in the social fields that they inhabit through gendered agency. Sometimes such enactments of masculinity are material they construct and reconstruct themselves materially, for instance, as providers and heads of households. At other times, the men turn to other social means to construct self-esteem, including employing past and present cultural and symbolic social resources like educational attainment, age, legal status in South Africa, etc. In the relational contexts that the bodies of the men interact, they mobilise individual and collective agencies to forge useful relationships and solidarities. Yet, these are mostly instrumental in nature thus tend to be frequently disrupted by individual and group senses of respectability that result in tensions among them. The manifest outcomes include verbal and physical contestations and co-constructions, which sometimes are also violent in nature. These, then, lead the men to make calculated decisions to engage minimally with each other while maintaining strategic solidarities. The thesis adds a significant voice to studies on migrant masculinities by interrogating the complex realities and relationships that migrant men are embedded in within host contexts. Ultimately, it presents a critical perspective of masculinitymigration literature that is largely fixated on xenophobia discourses, which tend to locate migrant men as victims during the migratory process., D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)
- Contributor
- Chagonda, Tapiwa, Prof., Dworzanowski-Venter, Bronwyn, Dr.
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Johannesburg
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