Hybrid symposium

Over the past decades, critical studies of men and masculinities globally have continued to, whether consciously or not, frame Black masculinities as the “antithesis of white masculinities”. The study of Black men’s masculinities within this subfield has not only been juxtaposed with that of white men, but it has also solidified the immovable demise of pathology as innate to the existence and performances of Black masculinities. As a pathway to present counter-narratives to the hegemonic damage-centred paradigm, Black researchers in Africa have called for the decolonisation of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities in Africa.

Embedded within this decolonial call, the symposium will seek to tether on the historical consciousness that Black masculine subjectivities are contingent on the colonial imposition and mechanisation of discursive power that distorted and fundamentally re-made colonised men’s selfhoods, through the violent inscriptions of a new ontology of gender, that unmade racialised men and masculinities into the “lost, dying/ dead and always in-crisis manhood“. Here, however, we, through this symposium, seek not simply to write, read and engage these men and masculinities as though “victims” of history.

Therefore, to “rupture”, we evoke Miller’s (2018) conceptualisation to understand that post-colonial expressions, constructions, embodiments, practices and performances of Black men and masculinities present material and ideological conditions of change, yet structural conditions persist. In this symposium premise, it is essential to unpack how subjectivities constructed over time and space facilitate the emergence of new imaginations, practices and understandings of the Black men and masculinities world (and world-making).

Therefore, as we intend in this symposium, an engagement with these ruptures does not guarantee a replacement but rather offers a perspective into centring the conditions of possibility whereby Black men and masculinities in Africa explore new social relations and ideas with self, other men, women, children, and structures.

Thematic interests/ focuses of the symposium:

• Beyond pathology: Black men and masculinities in Africa
• Continued reproductions of hegemonies of masculinities, cultural practices, embodiments and ruptures
• Geographies of existence: spatialities and digitalised geographies of black masculinities Black masculinities and Ecologies: Masculinities and entanglements/relationships with land, water, and the more-than-human life/entities
• Black masculine transgressions through the embodiment of sexualities (economies of ‘pressures and pleasures’)
• Black masculinities, within the nexus of relationality with femininities, violence, victimisation, trauma, and vulnerabilities
• Radical imaginations and the ‘alternative’ of black masculine existences: Black masculinities’ indulgence within affective economies towards tenderness, care, and the reparative
• And on other “Questions of the black boy child”

We welcome presentations in a wide range of formats, including papers, panels, poster presentations, workshops, and arts-based research submissions like performances, demonstrations, short film screenings, etc.

The due date for submission will be 30 May 2026.

To make submissions, please click on the link: Submission form (Gform)

Please read through the guidelines carefully. Abstracts that do not adhere to these guidelines will not be considered. No late submissions will be considered.

For further information, please contact:
Fidel Parks on fidel.parks@uct.ac.za

Kind regards,
The Rupturing of Black Masculinities Symposium Organising Team