Negotiating Respectable Masculinity

War and displacement often challenge gender and family relations. Loss of livelihoods and social positions may turn gender into a battlefield where appropriate behaviour, moral values, and social status are negotiated and struggled over. For Somali refugees, gender ideals and family life in Western welfare states are a much debated - and contested - issue. This is the topic of the article 'Negotiating Respectable Masculinity: Gender and Recognition in the Somali Diaspora' in the journal African Diaspora, written by Nauja Kleist, project senior researcher in the Migration Unit at DIIS.

Taking departure in fieldwork in Copenhagen, London and Somaliland, Kleist explores how the Somali civil war and the following displacements have caused multiple losses of social position and upheavals in gender relations. Although both men and women are subject to these changes, Somalis describe the situations of men as more difficult.

The article shows that men's difficulties are articulated as a transfer of male authority to the welfare state, reflecting female empowerment and male misrecognition. However, the focus on men’s loss can also be understood as processes of positioning and of re-instituting a 'traditional' gender baseline in which the positions of respectable versus failed masculinity are established.

Finally, the article argues that Somali men negotiate and enact respectable masculinity through associational and community involvement, creating alternative social spaces of recognition.