Men in the Third World: Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity

This chapter examines men and masculinity in the postcolonial world, a world formerly controlled by European colonizers. It considers how men and masculinity have been analyzed using a number of different theories and literatures and suggests that the specific gender conditions of the postcolonial world require a flexible, yet syncretic, approach if their lives are to be understood and, more important, appreciated and improved. Our starting point is that the world still bears the mark of colonialism. The World Bank, for example, divides the world into two economic categories: “more developed regions”— Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—and “less developed regions”—the rest of the world. A further subcategory (a part of the less developed regions that includes the poorest countries of the world) is “Sub-Saharan Africa.” There is still good reason to talk about the dichotomy between the metropole and the periphery and about the developed and developing worlds. These concepts are crude, sometimes misleading, and often inaccurate. Yet they retain an undeniable truth. As a shorthand, for all its shortcomings, we shall in this chapter be using the term Third World to refer to the unand underdeveloped regions concentrated in South America, Africa, and parts of Asia, an area often termed “the South” to distinguish its state from the industrialized and wealthy “North.” The differences between the First and Third Worlds can be found in the statistics shown in Table 6.1. People in different parts of the world have hugely divergent experiences of life. We can make some generalizations that will underpin this study. Many babies never make it to their first birthdays, and those who achieve this live in poverty for much of their lives. Many will live in rural areas, with little access to the technology that people in the more developed world rely on. And the situation is getting worse: The share