Jones, M., 2011. Masculinities in Motion: Mobility, The Township and the Spectacular. Faces of the City Series.

RSVP: Zakiyyah.ayob@wits.ac.za

The paper explores the rendering of township masculinity in two recent novels and its constitution through crime, money and heteronormative desire. It discusses the emphasis on spectacle, in novelistic form and content, through which the male is imagined. Both fictiond rely on a deployment of the spectacular, expressed through violence or excessive consumption, alongside a vernacular of nonchalance that contests conventional morality. As explored in the writing of theorists such as Foucault and Butler, what emerges is a sexed body produced discursively and performed through social practice. Following Butler, this is not to undervalue the materiality of the body or to dismiss the experiental authenticity of corporal suffering or joy, but rather to think through the body as a site of rich social meaning. Specifically, I focus on figurations of the masculine as mobile; the protagonists of these fictions move with ease across local and global landscapes through modes which are always vehicular. The project of my paper is ask why this is so. How do representations of vehicular mobility map the male body within and beyond the geography of the township and how do they speak to contesting notions of masculinity in contemporary urban South Africa?