Providing Women, Kept Men: Doing Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic and interview based fieldwork to explore accounts of intimate relationships between widowed women and poor young men that emerged in the wake of economic crisis and a devastating HIV epidemic among the Luo ethnic group in Western Kenya. I show how the cooptation of widow inheritance practices in the wake of an overwhelming number of widows as well as economic crisis resulted in widows becoming providing women and poor young men becoming kept men. I illustrate how widows in this setting, by performing a set of practices central to what it meant to be a man in this society - pursuing and providing for their partners - were effectively doing masculinity. I will also show how young men, rather than being feminized by being kept, deployed other sets of practices to prove their masculinity and live in a manner congruent with cultural ideals. I argue that ultimately, women's practice of masculinity in large part seemed to serve patriarchal ends. It not only facilitated the fulfillment of patriarchal expectations of femininity - to being inherited - but also served, in the end, to provide a material base for young men's deployment of legitimizing and culturally valued sets of masculine practice.

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