‘Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men’ : Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men Posted on 09/09/2018 (12/02/2021) by Siki kigongo PUBLICATIONS RESOURCES // PUBLICATIONS Journal Articles ‘Life is Not Designed to be Easy for Men’ : Masculinity and Poverty Among Urban Marginalized Kenyan Men Data, Measurement and Evaluation September 2018 Current analyses of poverty and economic marginality in relation to masculinity continue to ignore the direct perspectives of men whose lives form the crux of such investigations. I draw on interview and ethnographic data from two slums in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city to address poor men’s constructions and performance of manliness in relation to poverty. Men acknowledged economic adversity as both a major constraint to their masculinity and a significant dynamic in their own evolution and development into ‘proper’ men. In striving for locally valued masculine identities, particularly breadwinner hood, Nairobi’s poor men advanced new values, narratives and strategies that both projected them as socially respectable men and reconstituted their normatively ‘un-masculine’ actions as macho. Ironies suffuse masculinity in the slums of Nairobi, and are, in large part, driven by the critical and complex social dynamics and popular subjectivities, which poor men navigate while seeking to make valued masculinity both notionally and practically accessible for themselves. Download CONTRIBUTORS SIMILAR PUBLICATIONS Briefing Papers Utafiti Sera: policy knowledge community on social protection in Kenya Briefing Papers Urban health in Kenya. Key findings: The 2000 Nairobi cross-sectional slum survey* Journal Articles Understanding Inequities in Child Vaccination Rates among the Urban Poor: Evidence from Nairobi and Ouagadougou Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems* Journal Articles Understanding inequities in child vaccination rates among the urban poor: Evidence from Nairobi and Ouagadougou health and demographic surveillance systems* Briefing Papers The Nairobi Intergenerational Design Challenge Briefing Papers The Health Status of the Urban Poor in Kenya: Access to Basic Services Journal Articles The health and wellbeing of young people in sub-Saharan Africa: an under-researched area?* Briefing Papers Technical Brief In Their Hands Evaluation Project Journal Articles Subcellular dissemination of prothymosin alpha at normal physiology: immunohistochemical vis-a-vis western blotting perspective