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Paper short abstract:

Beyond colonial legacies through which street men are figured as embodying a dangerous and un(re)productive masculinity, how do young men talk about their lives as family men or lovers? How might exploring these narratives of vulnerability enable a more complex account of masculinity on the streets?

Paper long abstract:

With diminishing state welfare and rising unemployment in Nigeria, many young men increasingly turn the streets to seek alternative routes to financial security beyond the formal work economy. Literature on street life in many African contexts has shown how the street emerges as both a physical space of male sociality and labour and a figurative site for imagining new opportunities for hustling and belonging. Yet with a focus on practices of body building (Masquelier, 2019), bluff spending (Newell, 2013), gang territoriality and crime (Geenen, 2009; Iwilade, 2023), much of this literature has primarily accounted for the cultivation of hard masculinity on the streets where men get by through performances of toughness and crude force.

In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research in Lagos, I consider how street men narrate their more vulnerable experiences as lovers and family men and ask, how do these accounts complicate take-for-granted notions of street men as hard men? My approach in this paper will be part historical and part ethnographic. On the one hand, I am interested in the enduring legacies of the figuration of street men, since colonial times, as embodiments of a particular kind of dangerous and un(re)productive masculinity. On the other hand, I am interested in the ways these young men come to narrate scenes of vulnerability which are not immediately obvious in their public performances. I examine how these accounts of intimacy and family responsibility offer a space for young men to signal respectability under conditions of precarity on the streets.