Gendering roles, masculinities and spaces: negotiating transgression in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings

ABSTRACT

This article discusses perceptions of Shona dominant masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s and other writings. The texts analysed in this article are set in different socio-historical contexts – during the colonial and stretching to the contemporary times; in rural, urban and diaspora spaces. Collectively, the texts offer the reader textual spaces to trace the strategies used by heteropatriarchal dominant masculinities to maintain dominance within families. The article demonstrates that the selected texts call attention to how Shona women have always challenged patriarchal hegemony – subversion that has resulted in the formulation of social discourses, especially within men circles that some men are dominated by women (anotongwa nemukadzi). I read Mungoshi’s selected texts alongside Kabwato’s ‘The breadwinner’ and Sigauke’s ‘African wife’ to think through how discourses such as anotongwa nemukadzi, are persistently invoked in contexts where anti-patriarchal successes might have provoked significant shifts in gender roles. Such power-based masculinities, in the modern contexts, provoke dramas that play out when husbands lose the breadwinner status, that happens simultaneously with wives becoming sole breadwinners in their families. This article draws from Ratele’s thoughts on toxic masculinities, Adichie and Enloe’s feminist perspectives to show how gendering of roles ties seamlessly with gender stratification and inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwe
• Shona
• ‘real men’
• masculinities
• patriarchy

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Tendai Mangena

Tendai Mangena is an Associate Professor of African Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English and Media Studies at Great Zimbabwe University and a Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. From January to September 2020, she was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at University of California, Riverside. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in the Department of Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies at Bremen University in Germany from 2016-2018. Her research interests are in the areas of gender, politics, power, and justice in African literature and onomastics.