‘Thanks to Corona virus’: trajectories of masculinities during the Ugandan lockdown

ABSTRACT

The restrictions to curb the Covid-19 pandemic have caused an escalation of gender-based violence all over the world, but they have also changed the trajectories of masculinities in nuanced and complex ways. In this article, I explore the experiences of Ugandan men who became unable to provide under the national lockdown, often finding themselves confined in their homes for the first time in their life. I discuss two dimensions of this experience. On the one hand, men had to painfully withdraw from circles of reciprocity, exemplified by the practice of ‘checking on’, too burdensome in a moment of economic insecurity. On the other hand, men’s ‘being there’, at home, progressively shifted from an unwanted obligation to a welcomed responsibility, embraced intentionally. Juggling between forced proximity and distance, men explored different ways of validating themselves in the crisis. They both reproduced pre-existing dynamics, grounded on the tension between provision and withdrawal, and experienced emergent forms of caring masculinities and fatherhood, performed through sharing and reciprocity.

KEYWORDS:

• Uganda
• Covid-19
• emergent fatherhood
• caring masculinity
• reciprocity
• breadwinner

Acknowledgements

I thank Prof. Lotte Meinert and the members of the IMAGENU project for their comments on an earlier version of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for carefully reading the manuscript and suggesting substantial improvements.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19.

2 Organised by the African Studies Bookstore (Kampala) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Uganda, 12 November 2020.

3 These observations resonate with Jesper Barnesen’s presentation ‘A family affair? Creating and maintaining transnational bonds through phatic kinship’ (Stockholm University, 19 October 2020). Bjarnesen, drawing on Malinowski’s concept of ‘phatic communion’ (Malinowski 1936), similarly reflects on the importance of maintaining online conversations going in order to validate a relationship.

4 I have regularly sent airtime money to my interlocutors in order not to impact on their telephone budget.

5 In his speech on 11 April 2020, retrievable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypFNMXaRCAs&ab_channel=BBSTEREFAYINA.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been carried out within the project IMAGENU (Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda), funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Danida Fellowship Centre in Denmark [grant number 17-07-AU].

Notes on contributors

Anna Baral

Anna Baral is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University in Växjö (Sweden). The article is based on her postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Anthropology of Århus University (Denmark) within the project IMAGENU (Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda). Her research interests include masculinity, morality, intimacy and their intersection with mobility and migration.