Young men, poverty and aspirational masculinities in contemporary Nairobi, Kenya

As originally published in Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Dec. 17, 2019 (Taylor & Francis)

In this paper, the authors, Izugbaraa and Egesab, explore the masculinity aspirations of poor male youth in Nairobi and the role of memory and lived experiences in driving norms and imaginations of masculinity among them. The focus is on the question of whether, how, and why young men and boys are imagining and forging masculinities differently from their fathers and the men around them. Specifically, we probe, amongst poor urban Kenyan male youth, some of the ‘affective and imaginative spaces of opened aspiration’ that Appadurai (2003, 2004) writes of and the social actions that can potentially follow in the process from ‘aspirations for change to articulation of voice and social action’.