My objective is to counterbalance existing gender stereotypes affecting African men by describing how some Ghanaian boys and young men express various degrees of femininity in their private or public lives, and to demonstrate how this is, to some extent, accepted by their families and friends. It also challenges the perception of African men as aggressive, sex and power voracious and sexist a stereotype conveyed through local and interregional popular culture (see for example Hip Life music videos and the Nigerian film industry which reproduce, amplify and spread such gender stereotypes ).ĢIn this paper, I examine the narratives of 7 young Ghanaian men studying at UCC who believe they possess an array of “feminine” characteristics in terms of their interests, emotions and behaviors ranging from cross-dressing practices to cooking or being “sensitive”. That 50% of the male students present embodied (or were thought to embody at one point in their childhood) some aspects of femininity raises questions about the construction of sex and gender in Ghana. It turned out that he was not the only male university student who felt feminine and/or had been partially socialized as a girl: in this fgd of 16 ucc students (6 females and 10 males), they were 5 (although 2 came to discuss the issue privately with me after the fgd). He admitted having a passion for high heels based on the assertion that he was born with “feminine features” and more specifically, “feminine feet”. Nonetheless, during a mixed focus group discussion ( fgd 1) on cross-dressing among students of a gender studies’ class, Kwesi, a 21 year old, third year student from the University of Cape Coast ( ucc), comfortably started discussing his femininity. Kwesi could be any University student: fashionable but always “proper”, he attends church and has many friends on campus. This excerpt was not taken from the interview of a somewhat flamboyantly queer, deviant young man.
1My opening quotation reveals one way in which a boy embodies femininity as well as the internal and external tensions that may result from its expression, as the boy grows older.