Masculinities and Urban Informality: Negotiating Everyday Masculinities in the Street Food Vending Economy

This chapter seeks to understand how young men who engage in a gender-marked occupation such as food vending may make sense of and negotiate their masculine identities and what possibilities such negotiations may offer for imagining alternative gendered subjectivities, especially in the informal sector. By approaching young men as being marginal within a system of hegemony, the analysis opens up dialogues between Northern and Southern scholarship on critical studies on men and masculinities and urban informality. Drawing on qualitative research in Ghana, we argue that to study African men, specifically black men who engage in a gender-atypical domain means making visible diverse configurations of masculinities. We conclude that studies on the masculinities of young men should be viewed as always undergoing changes and transformations in line with the neoliberal capitalist system and unequal global world.