Search

This paper argues that in many sociological theorizing on gender, work, and employment, relatively little is known about how men who engage in female dominated informal works make sense of their gendered identities. Drawing from qualitative research in a rapidly urbanizing Ghanaian city, we examine the meanings and implications of men's involvement in gender atypical informal works. An unpacking of the constructions of gendered identity reveals the situative strategies that men may deploy to maintain, embolden, and/or adjust their masculinities congruent with dominant cultural scripts. In the end, we argue that men who engage in traditionally feminine work are accused of failing to herald the mainstreaming of the fulfillment of hegemonic masculinity which is a necessary cultural milestone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, our aim is to foreground men's discourses on gender-based violence as linked to gendered hierarchies, power struggles, and social respectability in Ghana. Situated within decolonial feminist theories and drawing on interviews, we argue that men's interpretations of masculinity and the possibility of perpetrating violence against women is significantly mediated by such intersectional factors as sociocultural background, education, and broader societal normative requirements. The findings deepen the understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize men's talk of violence. The article discusses how these ambiguities and contradictions serve as important domains for engendering critical attitudes toward violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is growing debate among feminist scholars on how fathers often socialize their male children to aspire to embody specific values and behaviors, there is limited academic research on how fathers themselves construct and represent masculinity in Ghana. This article draws on data from six focus group discussions held with forty men to foreground men's negotiations, expressions, and representations of masculinity among the Dagaaba in northwestern Ghana. Our findings suggest that men in rural northwestern Ghana are likely to embody hybrid masculinities where traditionally hegemonic masculine ideals—such as men being seen as independent breadwinners—and contemporary gender-conscious norms—such as men as supportive partners—interact in complex ways. Yet the hybridization of masculinity both challenges and reinforces patriarchal gender arrangements in subtle ways. By maintaining a keen interest in their heteronormative breadwinning role as a model of masculinity, educated and gainfully employed men are critical of patriarchal norms that may be destructive to feminist discourses, yet their representations of masculinity indirectly embolden male hegemony in marriage relationships. Our findings further reveal considerable ambiguity in how men define themselves as supportive allies of feminist discourses by endorsing gender egalitarianism, yet none of them visibly challenges why women cannot also be breadwinners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this article is to contribute to a more critical, African-situated understanding of the complexities, emotional vulnerability, and multidimensional positionality that a male researcher is likely to face in conducting fieldwork in a native country. Drawing on my own experiences in conducting fieldwork in northwestern Ghana, the article demonstrates how a male researcher conducting interviews with his fellow countrymen could be constructed within hierarchies of masculinities; where he is simultaneously positioned as a powerless native subject and a powerful researcher. I problematise how my negotiation of fieldwork as a Ghanaian male researcher and my ideological baggage as a gender scholar could be read within the larger politics of gender and geography, as well as feminist intersectional theories. Drawing on these theories as useful analytical guides to foreground my fieldwork experiences and how I interpret my data, allow for critical understanding on the range of cultural norms, taboos, gendered subjectivities, and contested meanings which perpetuate multiple masculinities in fieldwork. My reflection from a postcolonial context contributes to growing global concerns to rethink and decolonise how we approach fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social discourses on gender and sexuality have become controversial in the African context, there is a tendency to overlook how the domestic space contrives and participates in such productions. This paper examines the domestic space to reveal the ways that it reproduces, sanctions, challenges, and disrupts discursive productions on sexuality. Drawing on interviews with selected urban Ghanaian families, the paper contributes to scholarship by arguing that the processuality of sexual scripts linked to moral scripts and cultural taboos produces complex tensions and ambivalences, with implications for cultural authenticity, power relations, fear-mongering, and social persecution. The analysis shows that sexuality, much like gender, is deeply discursive, processual, fluid, and shaped by culture and history, requiring scholars to engage in deep reflections on how discourses of sexuality inscribe themselves into the social and moral fabric to shape individual actions and behaviors. Taking evidence from urban Ghana, we argue that an important question remains eminent against the background of transformation for harnessing the potentials of the domestic space, which prescribes gender-specific behaviors and expectations between men and women across families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines contextually-grounded perspectives on the socio-political significance of marriage in contemporary Ghanaian society. Drawing on qualitative interviews among men and women in northwestern Ghana, this article argues that, beyond historicizing the institution of monogamous marriage, women's agency in desiring, and navigating marriages are performatively agentic and tied to attaining a myriad of socio-cultural, economic and political capital. Situated within the constrained articulations of participants, our findings alert us to complex negotiations and manoeuvres through which men and women aspire for specific forms of masculinities and femininities within the larger gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]