Refashioning the local: Black masculinity, class and clothing

abstract

During September 2005, I conducted a visual ethnography with black male undergraduate students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa with a focus on masculinity and clothing as signifiers of identity. UWC is a historically disadvantaged institution and most of the participants were from low-income to lower-middle class homes. Despite their socioeconomic status the students sought to produce powerful self-images through expensive, designer clothing and seemed determined to display ‘unique style’. Their clothing, and the discourses they valued and perpetuated around clothing (such as masculine individualism) were derived from a model of masculinity found in the magazines they read. The upper-class masculinity in Gentleman's Quarterly provided an imaginary of masculinity which participants deployed to resignify their class aspirations. As apartheid conflated race and class, UWC students as emerging professionals whose upward mobility was refigured by post-apartheid possibilities, were transforming their masculinities to differentiate themselves from black lower-class masculinities. I will argue, that their recourse to Gentleman's Quarterly and the clothing expressing their new masculine ethos became vehicles to signal upward social mobility and so provided participants with a means to disarticulate apartheid's conflations of racialised class.1

Keywords:

• Black masculinity
• clothing
• individuality
• men's lifestyle magazines
• socioeconomic conditions

Notes

1. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Kopano Ratele for his helpful comments.

2. Most research on Africans and clothing tends to exoticise Africanness and reproduces difference through a relativist focus which ignores the impositions of white capitalist racism and its effects. Fashion is what the West does (see Allman, 2004). Sartorial elegance in a search for modernity is what Africans do who are amongst other things, dream-like (eg Gondola, 1999) or essentially collectivist (eg Friedman, 1994) in contradiction to Western moderns who are supposedly rational actors despite the research that shows the similarities (eg Kjeldegaard & Askegaard, 2006; Murray, 2002; Woodruffe-Burton, 1998; Thompson & Haytko, 1997. I have chosen to disregard Africanness due to its limitations as a category through which to consider the meanings around clothing. Most research on fashion in Africa assumes Westernisation as a desired end, a search for modernity or cosmopolitanism or emulation of a Western other (see Allman, 2004) even when they are addressing political economy (eg Friedman, 1994). This Focus will proceed with urban South Africans as contemporaneous, cosmopolitan, modern subjects who are part of a global economy of cultural flows which they take up and discard according to individual and local needs (Appadurai, 1996).

3. Drawn from the Black Consciousness Movement, Black is used strategically to collectively signify the racialised groups that were oppressed during apartheid. It is noted that though apartheid racial classifications are used, it should not indicate that I endorse these categories. However race still and most certainly at the time of the study, has socioeconomic and psychological consequences. Further, it is noted that strategic essentialist use of Black as a racial signifier intentionally collapses the difference of apartheid experiences and effects.

4. Participants negotiated their identities against racialised stereotypes that connoted low-class. Coloured participants for instance averred their refusal to be identified as gam. Gam as Adhikari (1992:95) informs us is “a pejorative label for the Coloured labouring poor” and indicates a “loud, uncouth working-class Coloured person” with a propensity for “criminality, gangsterism, drug and alcohol abuse, and vulgar behaviour” (Adhikari, 2006:482). These internalised racial stereotypes against which the participants re-imagined themselves were re-coded as class positions with gam being used to indicate an undesirable low-class position and identity. The use of class will thus be used with this renegotiation in mind and thus low-class and upper-class will be used as this more closely shows the distinctions in social identities that participants were making. This should not indicate that the author subscribes to these identifiers.

5. Pink (2005) discusses the complexity of the ethical issues when photographs or video footage of participants are used for research purposes. She states it is usually impossible to guarantee anonymity if one has received permission to take photographs of participants.

6. As participants were ensured confidentiality, pseudonyms have been used to protect their identities.

7. Habits of embodiment, that is the habitual ways in which we use our bodies and which Bourdieu (2006) called habitus are socio-cultural and therefore located in class.

8. YDE is now part of the Truworths chain-stores.