4 - Men ‘Not Feeling Good’: The Dilemmas of Hyper-masculinity in the Era of HIV/AIDS

Summary

I have addressed the roles that concepts of non-human animals, children, women and, specifically, abused women, play in determining the actual living conditions of these subjects in terms of their relationships with their immediate families, their communities, the state, the public, and their negotiation of their own identities within these complex networks. Now I wish to turn to the question of male agency in the current post-apartheid era. If I had concluded with the last chapter, my project would risk implying that masculine agency in South Africa is not only essentially violent, but overwhelmingly powerful. In this chapter I would like to demonstrate that fear of the shame instantiated by entry into the domain of the speakable and the subject's simultaneous bearing witness to her desubjectification, constitute a crucial element in understanding men's specific, complex vulnerability within the post-apartheid landscape: this vulnerability can translate on the one hand into violence, but on the other into a positive resilience.

Men, open to alternative ways of thinking and being, do renegotiate relationships with the women and men in their lives to redistribute gendered power. As always, this re-imagining and enacting of private space cannot be viewed as a triumph over prevailing political, social and discursive practices. Just as the women of Soweto with whom I worked were able to form a private network of support that was limited in its scope; just as the final scene of So What's New?