Paper short abstract:

Face to the strong changing pressure in local gender system, the young men of slums of Praia enact innovative masculine performances. This ethnography analyses how they perform gender in local relations, constituting what Connell defined "protest masculinities".

Paper long abstract:

Praia, capital city of Cape Verde, is actually a context of strong socio-economic and cultural changes. The transition to democracy and the backlashes of global economic crisis increased local wealth, but also social inequality and unemployment. Contemporary, strong cultural transformations of sex/gender system are happening thanks to government's commitment in the fight for gender equity and to innovations introduced by migrants. The economic change affects men's power, while innovative feminine gender performances hinder the fulfillment of local hegemonic masculinity that legitimate gender unequal power relations. Previous local model of hegemonic masculinity (that has different nuances according to social class and other factors) is becoming an unreachable ideal for Cape-Verdean men. Face to this situation, in popular suburbs young people organize themselves into two types of groups almost exclusively masculine: urban gangs and movements of social activists. These groups are very different each other, but they both represent alternative forums of self-affirmation in contrast with the experience of social marginalization. Qualitative data collected consider these groups as practice communities where young people of poor suburbs enact innovative masculine performances, discourses and bodily aesthetics inspired to hip-hop transnational culture or to Afrocentric issues. In this way, they do not produce innovation in gender power relations. On the contrary, they avoid cultural and economic obstacles and they get able to perform hegemonic masculinity in a new way. They claim the supremacy coming from gender belonging in response to a general context of marginalization, representing what Connell called "protest masculinities".