The topography of masculine normativities in South Africa

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine representations of masculinity in the English-language South African print media. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to interrogate a large corpus (18 million words) of English-language newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, we investigate the ways in which different South African masculine types are positioned with respect to one another in the media and examine how these positionings draw on broader tropes of gender, race and social class that circulate in South African society. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a more nuanced picture of gender/sexual hegemony in South Africa that goes beyond a simple opposition between dominant versus subordinate forms of masculinity to explore the range of competing normativities in the region. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to debates about the role of norms and normativities in the theorizing of masculinity more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• South Africa
• print media
• hegemony
• normativities
• corpus-assisted discourse studies

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Paul Baker, Sally Hunt, Christopher Stroud and Jane Sunderland for discussions of this project, and to audience members at IGALA 8 at City University of Hong Kong for comments on an earlier version. We alone are responsible for any remaining errors or shortcomings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Erez Levon is Reader in Sociolinguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. His work uses quantitative, qualitative and experimental methods to examine patterns of socially meaningful variation in language. He primarily focuses on the relationship between language, gender and sexuality, and particularly how they intersect with other categories of lived experience, including race, nation and social class. Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. Email: [email protected].

Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His most recent work deals with issues of language, gender and sexuality in South Africa. Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

E. Dimitris Kitis is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Linguistics/School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research focus is on subcultures and their discourses, protest, conflict, urban space, political discourse, new communication technologies and the mass media. He has a PhD in sociolinguistics from the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication at King’s College London. Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

ORCID

Erez Levon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1060-7060

Tommaso M. Milani http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7237-5501

Notes

1. The 20 publications are: Business Day, Cape Argus (and Cape Argus Weekend), Cape Times, Daily Dispatch, Daily News, Mail & Guardian, Post, Pretoria News (and Pretoria News Weekend), Sowetan, Sunday Times, Sunday Tribune, Sunday World, The Herald, The Independent on Saturday, The Mercury, The New Age, The Star, The Sunday Independent, The Times and The Weekender. For the The New Age, data are available from 2011 to 2014; for Mail & Guardian, data are available from 2010 to 2014; for The Weekender, data are available from 2008 to 2009. For all other publications, data are available throughout the study period (2008–2014).

2. It is important to note that our analysis of different ‘types’ of South African men that follows is necessarily restricted by the fact that we consider only the English-language print media. We are currently conducting similar research on representations of masculinity in both the Afrikaans and isiZulu press. For the moment, however, our results are confined to the Anglophone print media in South Africa.

3. Only the top 75 keywords are chosen in an effort to restrict our analysis to those terms that occur with at least a minimum amount of frequency in the corpus, and thus enhance the representativeness of our interpretations.

4. Keyword analyses of the terms bloke and guy further understood the racial connotations of both words. In both cases, bloke and guy appear overwhelmingly in the context of articles about rugby and cricket, with top keywords including TEST, CRICKET, GAME, BOKS, BLACKS, BALL, PROTEAS, etc.

5. A reviewer notes that in comparing our results to those found in Europe, we may inadvertently perpetuate a view of Northern understanding of masculinity as normative. We take the point. Nevertheless, we think such a comparison is important given the predominance of Northern perspectives in masculinities research, and the assumption that these perspectives are in a certain sense universal. We hope that highlighting differences that exist in our data serves as a useful corrective to this universalizing tendency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under Grant SCHQ02.