Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic and interview data from two slum communities in Nairobi, Kenya, I explore configurations of manliness in contexts of poverty. The paradoxical relationships between hegemonic and other masculinities assume interesting dynamics in poor urban spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Using ethnographic and interview data from two slum communities in Nairobi, Kenya, I explore configurations of manliness in contexts of poverty as well as men's responses to the threat of poverty to their masculine subjectivity. Proper manliness in the slums I studied was primarily constituted in terms of the tenacious pursuit of breadwinnerhood in the face of its unfeasibility. This construction, I argue, represents an adaptation to the challenges of material survival under situations of severe poverty. In their quest for breadwinnerhood, slum men marshaled a curious miscellany of both un-masculine and hyper-masculine practices. Paradoxically, they sometimes fulfilled an aspect of a masculine subjectivity through one utterly antagonistic to it. And at other times, they satisfied it through actions that disproportionately supported the same subjectivity. Newer ways of envisioning the relationships between hegemonic and other masculinities are urgently required.