Imagining Masculinities Through an Exilic Consciousness

Abstract

A description of masculinities through the experience of fatherhood is presented as psychic exile in light of Edward Said’s notion of exilic consciousness. This is an attempt to write the exilic, understood by Said as that which stands as both located and displaced, familiar and estranged, and simultaneously within and without. This elaboration on masculinities is presented in a polyphonic psychoanalytic voice utilizing the concepts of exile, mimicry, mourning, nostalgia, and the contrapuntal to expand on the ambiguities of the necessarily discontinuous and precarious nature of male gender development. The notion of abjection is incorporated to give salience to the perverse dimensions of an exilic position. Associations to, and evocations from, case material and personal reflections are offered to give voice to a situated South African narrative, sensitive to the transience of that lived experience.

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