Introduction to Jeff Guy’s ‘An Accommodation of Patriarchs’

Abstract

In 1997 Jeff Guy presented ‘Accommodation of Patriarchs’ to the Colloquium on Masculinities in Southern Africa in Durban. This was an event that brought together gender and area scholars, researchers with an interest in masculinity and an interest in Southern Africa. The event was attended by leading figures working on gender and masculinity, Raewyn Connell, Jeff Hearn andMichael Kimmel. The keynote address by Connell featured as the lead article in the new journal, Men and Masculinities, that appeared the following year. The Colloquium attracted historians with established reputations including William Beinart, Dunbar Moodie, John Tosh and Luise White and of course, Guy himself. A primary goal of the Colloquium was to encourage the gendered analysis of men and masculinities in Southern African studies. Another goal was to alert an international audience to the richness of South African scholarship. The study of masculinity as a socially constructed, gendered phenomenon had been growing since the mid-1980s but Connell’s landmark 1995 volume, Masculinities marked a take-off. Creating a framework that identified multiple forms of masculinity – from hegemonic, to complicit, subordinate and protest – Connell’s theories offered an approach that went beyond simple, binaried approaches to questions of gender and patriarchy while politically adhering to broad feminist principles. Twenty-eight papers were presented plus a keynote by Connell and closing remarks by Jeff Hearn and Michael Kimmel. After the colloquium three edited volumes were produced: a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies, another of the Durban-based feminist journal, Agenda, in 1998, and an edited book. Most of the papers that were presented at the Colloquium were published in one of these three collections but Guy’s was not. He declined invitations to develop his paper. Now, 20 years after the event, his paper will finally, posthumously, be made widely available. This is not to say that it went unnoticed. Surprisingly for an unpublished conference