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MEN in the THIRD WORLD Postcolonial Perspectives On 06-Kimmel.qxd 3/5/2004 5:21 PM Page 90 6 MEN IN THE THIRD WORLD Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity ROBERT MORRELL SANDRA SWART his chapter examines men and masculinity the developed and developing worlds. These in the postcolonial world, a world formerly concepts are crude, sometimes misleading, and T controlled by European colonizers. It often inaccurate. Yet they retain an undeniable considers how men and masculinity have been truth. As a shorthand, for all its shortcomings, analyzed using a number of different theories we shall in this chapter be using the term Third and literatures and suggests that the specific World to refer to the un- and underdeveloped gender conditions of the postcolonial world regions concentrated in South America, Africa, require a flexible, yet syncretic, approach if their and parts of Asia, an area often termed “the lives are to be understood and, more important, South” to distinguish its state from the industri- appreciated and improved. alized and wealthy “North.” Our starting point is that the world still The differences between the First and Third bears the mark of colonialism. The World Bank, Worlds can be found in the statistics shown in for example, divides the world into two eco- Table 6.1. nomic categories: “more developed regions”— People in different parts of the world have Europe, North America, Australia, New hugely divergent experiences of life. We can Zealand, and Japan—and “less developed make some generalizations that will underpin regions”—the rest of the world. A further sub- this study. Many babies never make it to their category (a part of the less developed regions first birthdays, and those who achieve this live in that includes the poorest countries of the world) poverty for much of their lives. Many will live in is “Sub-Saharan Africa.” There is still good rural areas, with little access to the technology reason to talk about the dichotomy between that people in the more developed world rely the metropole and the periphery and about on. And the situation is getting worse: The share Authors’ Note: We would like to thank Bob Connell and Jeff Hearn for their helpful comments on this draft. 90 06-Kimmel.qxd 3/5/2004 5:21 PM Page 91 Men in the Third World • 91 Table 6.1 Differences Between the First and Third Worlds Life Life Life Births per Deaths per Infant Expectancy Expectancy Expectancy Percentage 1000 of 1000 of Mortality at Birth at Birth at Birth of Urban Population Population Rate (Total) (Male) (Female) Population More 11 10 8 75 72 79 75 developed Less 25 8 61 64 63 66 40 developed Sub-Saharan 41 15 94 51 49 52 30 Africa SOURCE: Population Reference Bureau (2001a, p. 2). of the poorest 20% of the world’s population as we show in section 3 of this chapter, the in, the global economy in 1960 was 2.3%; in general approach has the potential both to focus 1997 it was down to 1.1% (Heward, 1999, p. 9). theoretical light on men in the periphery and to Beyond this generalization there are gender prompt new angles of research into masculinity differentiations, which this chapter will explore. that give greater weight to alternative paradigms The Third World is still portrayed in the (particularly, indigenous knowledge systems). mass media in ways that Edward Said (1978) explained in terms of the concept “orientalism.” The (mostly) black people of the Third World were “othered.” Despite the vigorous debates SOME HISTORICAL about such (mis)representation, the Third World AND THEORETICAL STARTING POINTS is nonetheless represented as a combination of emaciated children, crying women, and men Postcolonialism refers to the period after colo- engaged in war. These gendered portrayals both nialism. Although the impact of colonialism is reflect global disparities and gravely misre- contested, we take it to refer to a phase in world present them. In this chapter, we set out to see history beginning in the early 16th century that how these global inequalities can be understood eventually, by 1914, saw Europe hold sway over in gendered terms. Following the main thrust more than 85% of the rest of the globe. of critical men’s studies, we move beyond gen- Another meaning of colonialism refers to dered essentialisms to examine how different the political ideologies that legitimated the masculinities are constructed and how men are modern occupation and exploitation of already positioned and act in the world. It is important settled lands by external powers. For the indige- from the outset to note that there has been little nous populations, it meant the suppression of analysis of men and masculinity in the Third resistance, the imposition of alien laws, and World. Anthropologists have left a rich descrip- the parasitic consumption of natural resources, tion of the doings of men, although seldom have including human labor. these been put into a conscious gender frame, Colonialism was a highly gendered process. and rarely have these scholars incorporated the In the first instance, it was driven by gendered history of colonial and postcolonial society into metropolitan forces and reflected the gender their ethnographic accounts (Finnström, 1997). order of the metropole. The economies of Two works consciously working from a critical Europe from the 16th century onward were men’s studies perspective provide exceptions to geared toward the colonies. The men who this generalization in South Africa (Morrell, were engaged in conquest and those who were 2001) and South America (Gutmann, 2001). It is absorbed into industry producing and profiting surprising that the emergence of postcolonial from the subordination of large parts of the theory, with a strong element of feminism in it, world, working and ruling classes together, were has done little to rectify this omission, although, complicit in exploitative practices, the most 06-Kimmel.qxd 3/5/2004 5:21 PM Page 92 92 • GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PATTERNS brutal of which was the nearly three-century-long policing of the “dangerous classes”: the working trans-Atlantic slave trade. Europe’s Enlighten- class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays ment ambitions, fused with its colonial past, and lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd and so were based on the power and symbolic potency on. At the same time, the cult of domesticity was of the nation-state. Today the process of the not simply a trivial and fleeting irrelevance, belonging properly in the private, “natural” realm transnational economy spells the decline of of the family. Rather, I argue that the cult of nation-states as principals of economic and polit- domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension ical organization. The decline of the nation- of male as well as female identities—shifting and state and the end of colonialism also marks unstable as these were. (McLintock, 1995, p. 5) the concomitant historical crisis of the values it represented, chiefly masculine authority foun- In his chapter in this volume, Robert W. ded and embodied in the patriarchal family, Connell (see chapter 5) argues for the need to compulsory heterosexuality, and the exchange look beyond ethnography and local studies of women—all articulated in the crucible of to comprehend how globalization is shaping imperial masculinity. gender power in the 21st century. In thisn chap- As many have argued, from one of the first ter, we argue that a necessary complement to this Africanist historians, Basil Davidson (1961), in approach is the need to recognize what anthro- the 1950s and 1960s, to the historian of the pologists used to call “the Fourth World”— transatlantic diaspora and its cultural impact, a world that policies of modernization did not Paul Gilroy (1993), the slave trade changed the touch, where life continued much as it had meaning of “race” and produced an equation of always done except that the ecological con- black with inferiority. Much of the research on sequences of advanced industrialization were race (Hoch, 1979; Staples, 1982; Stecopoulos & experienced catastrophically in climate change Uebel, 1997) is still trying to make sense of the and attendant natural disasters. Added to this is way in which masculinities in the 20th century the need to examine contexts wherein develop- were shaped by the systematic elaboration of ment has failed and people no longer believe in racist discourses. A derivative of recent theoret- the promise of progress. In large parts of the ical advances has been to examine how the world, people today are poorer than they were experience of race in the colonies (Stoler, 1989) half a century ago. In most instances, the slide influenced class relations and identities in the into poverty has not been linear but has been metropole (Hall, 1992) and how metropolitan punctuated by moments of material improve- ideas travelled into the periphery (Johnson, ment. There are few places in the world which 2001). In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock still harbor the illusion that, in material terms at (1995) argues that to understand colonialism least, things will get better soon. Globalization and postcolonialism, one must first recognize has been described as another form of colo- that race, gender, and class are not “distinct nialism or imperialism. It has not “corrected” realms of experience, existing in splendid isola- the legacies of the uneven march of capitalism tion from each other”; rather, they come into or the differential impacts of imperialism existence in relation to each other, albeit in (Golding & Harris, 1997). Instead, globalization conflictual ways. Others have argued before her has fostered media and cultural imperialism. that the Victorians connected race, class, and Information technologies have disseminated gender in ways that promoted imperialism Hollywood images around the world, giving abroad and classism at home, but McClintock an illusion of a homogenous global culture.
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