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‘Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men’: Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men

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Abstract

Current analyses of poverty and economic marginality in relation to masculinity continue to ignore the direct perspectives of men whose lives form the crux of such investigations. I draw on interview and ethnographic data from two slums in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city to address poor men’s constructions and performance of manliness in relation to poverty. Men acknowledged economic adversity as both a major constraint to their masculinity and a significant dynamic in their own evolution and development into ‘proper’ men. In striving for locally-valued masculine identities, particularly breadwinnerhood, Nairobi’s poor men advanced new values, narratives and strategies that both projected them as socially-respectable men and reconstituted their normatively ‘un-masculine’ actions as macho. Ironies suffuse masculinity in the slums of Nairobi, and are, in large part, driven by the critical and complex social dynamics and popular subjectivities, which poor men navigate while seeking to make valued masculinity both notionally and practically accessible for themselves.

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Notes

  1. A popular wealthy neighborhood in Nairobi.

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Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to the people of Koch and Viwa for providing the data used in this paper and to my fieldworkers who supported data collection activities. This study uses data from the Slum Masculinities Project which was funded by the Ford Foundation (Grant No. 1105-0320). Analysis and writing time was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Grant No. 2006-8376), Rockefeller Foundation (Grant No. 2008 AR 001) and Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida, Grant No. 54100029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. African Population and Health Research Center, Nairobi, Kenya

    Chimaraoke O. Izugbara

  2. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Chimaraoke O. Izugbara

  3. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Chimaraoke O. Izugbara

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  1. Chimaraoke O. Izugbara
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Correspondence to Chimaraoke O. Izugbara.

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Izugbara, C.O. ‘Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men’: Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men. Gend. Issues 32, 121–137 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-015-9135-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-015-9135-4

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