'Ukuba yindoda kwelixesha' ('To be a man in these times'): Fatherhood, marginality and forms of life among young men in Gugulethu, Cape Town
My thesis examines how young, marginalised men in Gugulethu, a poor township in Cape Town, formulate their conceptions of fatherhood and fathering, and understand their roles and involvement with their children. Far from being a simple biological function, the nature of fatherhood among these young men is shaped by social, economic, political and historical conditions and by the moral standards that surround their daily existence. The men who are the focus of this study were selected on the basis of findings from an earlier study of infants born to HIV+ women. That study demonstrated the erratic nature of fatherhood in the picture of infant life. I traced some of the fathers of those infants, and developed a snowball sample. The young men in this study live a life of social displacement and alienation. They do not have access to gainful employment; many have been imprisoned; all use drugs; few are in stable relationships; few have independent households despite having fathered children. I show in the thesis that while the relationships I describe are unique in many ways, core cultural tropes, such as the significance of children, the role of marriage, the social place of initiation, among others, play through them, albeit in ways that undermine their potential. Despite a rhetoric which exhorts men to 'be responsible', most of the challenges that confront young African men today can be traced to legacies of colonialism, urbanisation, and apartheid which destroyed clans and families' ability to retain both the specific practices and the meaning and function of traditional practices and the material means by which families could be maintained. I note in particular the absence of father figures in these young men's lives. These findings lead me to explore the role of men in attachment. While many men have been able to create positive self-identities and roles, those with whom I worked have struggled to attain socially sanctioned ideals of masculinity, work, parenting and partnering. They inhabit forms of masculinity that rest on danger, even as they desire social approval. Drawing from Raewyn Connell's idea of hegemonic masculinity, I show how these masculinities are not predetermined but constructed within a specific social and historical context.
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