Global North theories of being “young” or a “man” do not translate neatly onto the everyday lives of young men in the Global South (Jeffrey and McDowell 2004). The specters of colonialism, postcolonialism, and global capitalist inequalities, as well as the various politics of race, caste, class, sexualities, religion, and local histories, powerfully shape both the countries of the Global South as well as youth masculinities therein (Nayak 2016; Philip 2022; Mani and Krishnamurthy 2021). In such a context, this special issue seeks to put forward an empirically grounded understanding of youth masculinities from perspectives emerging and grounded in the Global South. The specific challenges, opportunities, desires, and practices of young men from the Philippines, India, South Africa, and Senegal, as well as various other contexts covered in this special issue, reveal the broader global dynamics shaping youth lives today.
The decolonial turn within sociology has importantly shed light on the idea of a “connected sociology,” highlighting global interconnections and shared histories that produce both the “North” and the “South” in relational ways (Bhambra 2014). Similarly, youth scholars have also emphasized the need for thinking about a global and interconnected generation (Philipps 2018; Roberts 2014) that thinks of youth through a contemporary global lens rather than one that is regionally bounded. Building on this scholarship, in this special issue we place importance on regionally focused, globally oriented frameworks for thinking about youth masculinities. We emphasize empirical and connected research that meaningfully takes on board Global South perspectives on young men while thinking relationally and comparatively.
Prioritizing the experiences and perspectives of young men from the Global South is important both politically and intellectually for us as Guest Editors. As Connell (2014) has long argued, masculinities become a way of global and social organization rather than just identities that men embody. Hence, the experiences of young men in various Global South contexts sheds light on the various global and social arrangements and structures of oppression that shape their lives. These experiences also shed light on avenues of power, resistance, and agency in the lives of these young men within the Global South in the face of neocolonial and neoliberal expansion.
We received a diverse set of research articles that not only deal with different locations across the Global South but also provoke different questions of contexts, norms, and modes of embodiment. In order to recognize and provide ample space to the regions and contexts, we are arranging these articles in two consecutive issues. This issue consists of five research articles and a book review. The next issue consists of five research articles that discuss different sets of perspectives. These two issues jointly bring out the heterogeneity, complexities, and contradictions of the contemporary Global South, and in their dynamic conversations with one another, they suggest multiple ways of theorizing the youth masculinities from the Global South.
In this special issue, our authors reveal the complex ways in which young men and boys navigate and make sense of their everyday social contexts. From demonstrations of religious belonging to economically precarious contexts, these everyday realities of young men's lives in various parts of the Global South are taken seriously to produce both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Moving beyond colonial ideas of universal theory-making on “youth” or “men,” we heed Connell's (2014) provocation to think about “southern perspectives” rather than “theory” as a way of challenging some foundational “theories” around the ways youth masculinities have been conceptualized and researched. In so doing, the special issue privileges the empirical contexts of our authors to allow for specificities, connections, and imaginations to creatively work and provide us with a nuanced way of thinking about both interconnected as well as disconnected masculine cultures within a global framework.
Contributions in the Special Issue
Reva Yunus's essay, titled “Unpacking Agency and Coercion: Boys’ Views on Gender, Romance, and Violence in Central India,” discusses the social relations of urban working-class youth in Indore and their engagements with sites of religious nationalism. Yunus weaves the economic constraints of postcolonial India not only with the realities of work, but also as shaping aspects of leisure and romance. The article reaffirms the need to look at questions of leisure vis-a-vis access to public spaces to understand the category and aspirations of youth in a Global South context, which are deeply inflected with caste, gender, and class. Additionally, Yunus's work is important for reflecting on the methodology of feminist ethnography and also for discussing how access (or the lack thereof) vis-a-vis people and spaces shapes the experience of a woman in the field. This is an important question for anthropology and sociology that needs to be explored rigorously and ethically in further research.
In his article, “The Men and the Monks: Masculine Ideals in Northern Thailand,” Ben Theobald explains archetypes such as “monks” or “Nak leng” that shape these young masculinities vis-a-vis their different relations to ideas of work and violence. In addition to age, he discusses how notions of rest, labor, and style shape masculinities among novice monks. This work reaffirms the in-betweenness of lived experiences of masculinities in a Global South context that is assumed to be homogeneous and predictable. Creatively, the article discusses how activity or labor is central to the construction of Thai masculinities.
Continuing the discussion on work and responsibility, Emmanuel Mayeza and Mosia Seipati, in their article “Vulnerable and Resilient Masculinities among Schoolboys Heading Homes in South Africa,” look at how young boys’ and men's masculinities are shaped by economic constraints and in the absence of parental figures to run homes. The authors show us the extra roles these boys are forced to take up and their responses to these responsibilities. This research centers the community in building resilience and looks at these young men as active shapers of their aspirations. In this context, they reveal the need to think of youth masculinities not in binary terms as vulnerable or resilient, but to explore the interplay between these ideas.
Giving a perspective on the subjective experience of time, Genevieve Sekumbo's article, “Young Men's Livelihoods in ‘Waiting’: Navigating Youth Transitions amidst the Commodity Cycle of Natural Gas in Mtwara, Tanzania,” discusses the dynamic relationship of masculinities with the passage to adulthood, non-formal work, and relationships in the context of the “gas-rush” and its aftermath in the specific Global South context of Tanzania. The author explains how Boda drivers’ precarious yet immediate access to disposable income locates them within a unique (and often temporal) frame of respectability. Notable is how this new subjectivity is shaped within a notion of “waithood” that places these young men between childhoods and uncertain adulthoods.
Matt Maycock, Ojaswi Shah, and Julie Brethfeld explore the shifting masculinities in Nepal and their relationship with particular social and personal values. Additionally, they show us different modalities of caste-masculinities beyond an India-centered South Asian context, which is highly relevant in the malleable and resilient caste formations in the contemporary world.
Together, these articles propose to recognize and develop grounded perspectives to understand and shape youth masculinities from the Global South.
References
Bhambra, Gurminder. K. 2014. Connected Sociologies. London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Connell, Raewyn. 2014. “The Sociology of Gender in Southern Perspective.” Current Sociology 62 (4): 550–567.
Jeffrey, Craig., and Linda. McDowell. 2004. “Youth in a Comparative Perspective: Global Change, Local Lives.” Youth & Society 36 (2): 131–142.
Mani, Veena., and Mathangi Krishnamurthy. 2021. “Making a Locality: The Politics of Land and Football in North Kerala.” In Leisure, Racism, and National Populist Politics, ed. Ratna, Aarti, Erica Rand, Daniel Burdsey, Stanley Thangaraj 74–87. Oxford and New York. Routledge.
Nayak, Anoop. 2016. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Philip, Shannon. 2022. Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. New Delhi, Cambridge University Press.
Philipps, Joschka. 2018. “A Global Generation? Youth Studies in a Postcolonial World.” Societies 8 (1): 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8010014.
Roberts, Steven. 2014. Debating Modern Masculinities: Change, Continuity, Crisis? Basingstoke, UK, Springer.