Configuring traditional masculinities among young men in northwestern Ghana: Surveillance, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities

Most academic scholarships, particularly from the global North continue to theorize African men, especially poor black men as problematic, abusive, and violent. Such scholarship often fails to foreground how men’s gendered subjectivities are likely to be shaped by intersecting inequalities. The danger of such neglect is that African men continue to be pathologised as being unable to cope with western liberal conception of gender equality. Drawing on interviews with young men in northwestern Ghana, our findings highlight those young men may construct masculinities and femininities in ways that reproduce harmful gender norms, relations, and power inequalities. Despite the problematic constructions of gender, the narratives of participants appear to offer some potential in imagining alternative masculine discourses which reject and resist hegemonic masculine ideals. Based on this, we argue that a sincere appreciation of how young men may progress towards imagining progressive masculine subjectivities ought to develop clearer understandings of the ambiguities, ambivalences, and conflicting appeals of multiple voices of masculinities.