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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the lives of a small group of friends of young Afrikaner boys at a high school in Cape Town, whose school experience has become a contradictory site around which their fraught white masculine identities are stitched together.

Paper long abstract:

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the lives of a small group of friends of young Afrikaner boys at a desegregated and recently re-segregated high school in Cape Town. I analyze how they—as the last white Afrikaner students at the school—imagine their ethnic identities and whiteness in South Africa after apartheid. Contrasting their narratives with those of the girls, I analyze how masculinity, whiteness and class intersect in specific ways for this young generation of Afrikaners. During apartheid, white Afrikaner masculinity was constructed within a frame of patriarchy, militarism, and racism. In the post-apartheid era, Afrikaner masculinity is no longer supported by the raw political and military power of Afrikaner Nationalism, and the neoliberal landscape has increased division of class. Engaging the past and the present, I show how the boys juxtapose national media debates onto their personal circumstances to make sense of their tragic circumstances, and to navigate their uncertain place in the world. I highlight how stigma and shame play a prominent role in their masculine performances. As their school experience has become a contradictory site around which their fraught masculine identities are stitched together, their story provides an interesting vantage point to rethink the trajectory of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa.