Interrogating conceptions of manhood , sexuality and cultural identity

Inxeba revived debates on ulwaluko and its attendant social discourses in South Africa. Elided by these debates, which saw the film censored from public view by the Film and Publication Board of South Africa, were formulations of ‘Manhood’ which we maintain are rooted in culture, tradition and custom; formulations that frame homosexuality as abject in our context. Through delineating Manhood from manhood proper, we argue that Inxeba reveals the nexus between Manhood, policed sexualities and cultural identity. In detailing the status of manhood proper, we critically unpack masculinity and challenge the ‘factual’ position of Manhood. The problematics which arise out of Manhood are informed by a (mis) conceptualised notion of this identity as stable and unchanging, creating dichotomous bifurcations of what constitutes being a man; a framework that is depicted and contested by the narrative of the film. Using feminist theory to interrogate culture, custom and tradition and its imposed silences on feminised bodies in contemporary South Africa, we explore how Inxeba subverts and contests Manhood through a propositioning of manhood proper.


Introduction
We find ourselves, at the writing of this paper defined as a queer Black man and a Black woman respectively -definitions that are ascribed to us by social categories, and that necessitate a declaration of our intentions in the writing of this paper. We page 02 of 19 Number 32, 2018 ISSN 2617-3255 come to the writing of this paper spurred by the public debate that contests definitions of manhood -contestations that find their genesis in the screening of Inxeba in South African cinemas in 2018. Owing to these contestations, we conceptualise manhood 1 as a discursive tool -marred by power dynamics and challenged meanings -owing to our location, which situates us in the philosophical discipline along with public definitions that are constantly shifting in how the concept is understood and applied in public discourse. Our objective thus is to attempt an understanding of the moral panic that characterised the public debate that ensued from the screening of the film.
Ours is not to offer definitive prescriptions, as that would be a betrayal of our disciplinary allegiance; rather, we are concerned with deepening our and the reader's understanding of why Inxeba was seen through the lens of social, moral and cultural transgressions which resulted in the film being -briefly -banned from cinemas. This ban was characteristic of prescriptive positions which define the social, political and economic conditions of possibility that permit one mode of life, while denigrating another. The moral panic, which characterised the screening of the film, underscores how we define manhood proper and situates our use and analysis of homophobic discourse in South Africa. We define the concept as action-as-legislation, which transgresses existing social norms in order to constitute new possibilities of being (such as argued by Arendt, 1994). The denigration of one mode of life is further linked to the moral panic that characterised the screening of the film. In an attempt to uphold a factual, fixed conception of Manhood, culture, custom and tradition framed Inxeba and its attendant aesthetic as demeaning the custom of ulwaluko. In this narrative, the proponents of "culture" who wanted to silence, and even expunge, the film failed to realise how the concerted efforts at silencing the film were themselves a manifest expression of the erasures, modes of silencing and violences perpetuated against feminised bodies.
We suggest therefore, that from a philosophical interpretation of these conditions of possibility -what is required is an exercise into deepening understandings to subsequently expand interpretation. The denigration of a mode life defined as "other" is rooted in the South African context and, for the purposes of our analysis, in colonialism(s) that infantilise Black masculinities -a point which complicates unilateral readings of masculinity as violence, and to which we will return. Framing a discussion on masculinities from a philosophical predisposition foregrounds our aim of clarifying the status of manhood proper, 2 necessitating the question 'what is the [social] obligation of [men] if manhood is an essential element of being'? (Louw 2012:181). Louw's (2012) question catalyses the notion of action-as-legislation, elevating manhood proper to the position of a functionary of the social and its attendant obligations. These obligations signify an alignment of aesthetics with the ethical which denotes a relational life that is non-violent towards an/the Other (Cornell 1995:78). This clarification contributes to page 03 of 19 Number 32, 2018 ISSN 2617-3255 our understanding of the moral panic which characterised the screening of Inxeba in South African cinemas.
In proffering a suggestion on the status of manhood proper, we begin by positing a working definition of the ontic status, through revealing deceptive bifurcations which locate Manhood 3 outside of manhood proper. Manhood in South African, and more specifically in the Xhosa tradition, rests on specific reproductions of "culture" which perpetuate and maintain violent masculinities through ascribing to Manhood notions of virility and sexual prowess (Schneider, Cockroft & Hook 2008). Further ideological constructions of Manhood substantiate the deceptive distinction between nature and culture, with the former being the space of women and the latter reserved for men -as argued by Ortner (1972).
From a feminist perspective, we maintain that Manhood has been encountered and theorised as violent/ce in the South African context, necessitating a consideration of manhood proper which holds in tandem, and in check, identities premised on Manhood. In our discussion we complicate violent masculinities using Gqola (2009:71), where she notes that 'masculinities in the South African context are contested, contradictory and varied over time' -thus complicating a binary understanding of violent masculinities through revealing that manhood proper, whose constitutive element is inclusive of Manhood, was a rejection of the infantilisation of Blackness by colonial impositions such as apartheid. This rejection acted as a mode of ontological reclamation on the part of Blackness from a self-referential perspective. However, we argue that the act of reclaiming Black ontologies through heroism and bravado birthed violent masculinities.
In the first section, our concern is with violent masculinities in South Africa which are

Ulwaluko/circumcision, Manhood and manhood Proper
Manhood, in the Xhosa tradition, is framed as the process of transitioning from boyhood to manhood proper through isiko lokwaluka. This transition is seen to happen through an initiation custom that is understood as a continuous learning process. The specific event of isiko lokwaluka is the liminal stage of the process wherein one enters as a boy and loses this identity to gain manhood proper. We argue that there is a concerted effort on the part of those who wish to continue the tradition to preserve what is held to be an authentic 5 process of attaining the ontological status of manhood in the cultural milieu of Xhosa identity. In the process of attaining an authentic status of Manhood, cultural practices and tradition appeal to violences -such as the policed sexualities of feminised bodies, the exclusion of women in cultural practices -that create and recreate violent masculinities manifesting as Manhood. In its ideal structure, the custom of ulwaluko teaches young men the values of discipline and integrity, while inculcating a laudable moral position -which we understand here as manhood proper.
The perception by non-Xhosa speaking people has been that this practice is exclusively for men. The demarcation of this site of culture as a space for men alone is false; the discursive exclusion of women and gay men -who are, inherently, part of the process -reveals that the practice is not exclusively reserved for the cis-gendered, heteronormative male body. We wish to contest the claim that the process of Xhosa initiation is both ontologically and linguistically male. In its uses of masculinist language in the process of initiation, (mis)conceptions of the custom produce Manhood, which is then inculcated in initiands while bodies existing outside of these masculinist demarcations are disallowed from that cultural space. In this is found substantiation for the moral panic surrounding the screening of the film. Ulwaluko through social discourse is exclusively preserved for men, albeit on premises that are false and are aimed at sustaining identities that are fixed, unchanging and violent. Thus Manhood rests on specific reproductions of culture, which perpetuate and maintain violent masculinities through ascribing to it virility and sexual prowess (Schneider, Cockroft & Hook 2008), which can be detailed through reference to dialogue in the film that pivots around the prized social position that the circumcised penis holds in Xhosa cosmology. Such an analysis draws out the tensions between manhood proper and Manhood. A detailed consideration of manhood -through delimitations that showcase how Manhood is a constitutive part of manhood -shows an apparent tension between these two categories, or even how, in Moolman's (2013) suggestion, the male body oscillates between these two categories entabeni. 6 The status of manhood proper In articulating manhood proper, we are careful in being non-prescriptive. Rather, we follow a delimitation process through revealing apparent tensions between Manhood and manhood proper. We subsequently take a cue from Louw (2012:181), who writes Oldman: young men, you have crossed the first of many rivers of manhood. You must be patient and persevere, my sons. The deepest river is the one you cross when you leave this place. As men you should be proud. We are principally interested in the distinction that births a dichotomous tension between Manhood and manhood proper. The first -Manhood -describes the cultural ascriptions that define Manhood while in turn reproducing and maintaining violence against feminised bodies. A working definition of Manhood, which is adapted from social discourses that create bifurcations between the two categories, denotes an oppositional dichotomy to an alignment of aesthetics with the ethical. This oppositional inclination would see the violence meted out against feminised bodies continue unabated, for as stated above, the alignment of aesthetics with the ethical denotes a non-violent relationality between the self and the Other (as developed in Cornell, 1995).
Such alignment creates requisite social conditions that permit all modes of life to flourish, thus truly emulating manhood proper, which is action as legislation undergirded by the alignment of the ethical with the aesthetic -fashioning that which is just and that which is right. This conception of manhood is vividly conjured in the juxtapositioning of the two categories through Inxeba and the social, moral and ethical questions that it inspires. Fundamental to the social, moral and ethical questions raised by the film is Kwanda's question '[h]ow can love destroy a nation?'. Implicit here is the requisite demand that aesthetics be aligned with the ethical so as to inspire a just social obligation, which sees manhood existing coevally with feminised bodies.
[m]anhood proper can further be understood as that which defines the social in the normative sense: an ethically just ordering of society. In the knowledge that even this position can be viewed as problematic in its presuppositions about that which is ethically just, we leave the interpretations of an ethically just society open to our reader, as we are cognisant of the continuous social changes that define and re-define society.
Continuous changes are expressed in the shifting meanings placed on the social achievement of building a family, and the wholehearted embrace of the ways of the city, changes that are starkly expressed by the contradistinction between Kwanda and the Oldman. As indicated earlier, philosophical considerations are neither prescriptive nor definitive, as this approach would undermine the philosophical enterprise of understanding the social, political, economic conditions of possibility.
Socially contested meanings ascribed to the ethical particularly demonstrate the shifts and changes which come to define manhood proper as action as legislation; succinctly captured through Kwanda's final (dying) speech of what it means to be a man.
We are of the view that the words of the Oldman centre Manhood, along with the attendant imbrications of cultural identity and policed sexualities feeding on and into tradition and the attendant conceptions that accompany this static ideal of manhood.
Against this, manhood proper is neither fixed nor factual, but changing and constantly This undergirds social identity formation processes, which, as Robins (2008) Gqola's (2009) analysis of the Zuma rape trial, which highlights the links between Manhood, virility, heroism and cultural identity, and builds on earlier arguments (Gqola, 2007b) in which it is noted how colonialism and apartheid had interfered with the self-construction of Black masculinities. Using Suttner's (2004) work, Gqola (2007b:153) maintains the need to 'rethink whether participating in (reshaped) initiation rituals can carry varying meanings under conditions in which manhood is denied, as in the minoritisation of Adult African men as boys under apartheid'. In response, we maintain that reshaping tradition, custom and culture begins to respond to the intimation that manhood is indeed negotiated, changing and a social construct. It is only once we have acknowledged this reality that manhood proper can begin to attend to the realisation of an all-inclusive manhood.
However, we acknowledge that this confrontation with the reality of manhood -as a negotiated, changing and constructed identity -is not an easy one. The work of Salo (2007:160) explores the notion of being a man as opposed to being a "moffie" in the Cape Town township of Manenburg. Salo (2007:161) traces the socio-economic and historical legacies of the construction of masculinity and analyses the struggle that ensues as masculinity and femininity are negotiated through place and belonging in a space defined by gang violence, unemployment and the Group Areas Act of 1950.
In spaces defined by such historical reality, gender is still an identity constituted through stylised repetitive acts (Butler 1988:519). As Butler (1988:520)

argues in
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, our gendered selves become compelling illusions and objects of belief, subsequently rendering it difficult to question and challenge these constructions -as that would suggest questioning and challenging our very performed "essence". However, we maintain that in order to articulate manhood, we ought to confront these fixities and factualities for the purposes of understanding and refining the meanings attendant to the category.

A false tension: Manhood and manhood proper
Briefly referring to the characters of Vija, Xolani, the elders (amakhankatha) and Kwanda, the initiand (umkhwetha), also reveals apparent tensions between Manhood and manhood proper, interrogating the positionality of these characters in a space defined by culture, Manhood and policed sexualities. Invariably, ulwaluko is constructed through language as a cultural practice. The use of language in cultural practices and custom entangles these men in a patriarchal practise that is committed to the reproductions of Manhood. Furthermore, language and its uses entabeni frames this space as fundamentally masculine. On this, Gqola (2001b) writes about the masculine structure of language which explicates our position; the subject defined through and by masculinist language -the male cis-heterosexual -is constantly entangled in dominant heteronormative language constructions which determine one mode of life while denigrating the Other. Entabeni as a space can be seen to be defined by hypermasculinity, the language of the space and its attendant discourses which are patriarchal and masculinist, subsequently excluding queer and female bodies. Thus revealing the apparent tension between Manhood and manhood proper vis-à-vis the language entabeni.
South Africa, as a socio-political space of transition, provides the opportunity for the re-negotiation and contestation of social identities such as manhood proper (see Moolman 2013). Defining manhood proper as action as legislation reveals that this definition provides a lexicography that holds in tandem competing conceptions of manhood, in turn allowing manhood to fashion, refashion and renegotiate itself. This allows for irresolvable incongruences to be the genesis of the aesthetic being aligned with ethical. Moolman (2013), in her discussion on Rethinking Masculinities in Transition, advances this concept with the understanding that certain macro-social processes and social institutions affect(ed) and continue to influence our conceptual understanding of social identities such as race, class and sexuality. The Xhosa cultural practice of ulwaluko is not exempt from the macro and micro-socio-political institutions which affect change in cultural practices.
Ulwaluko has succumbed to change adhering to medical requirements, as discussed in Gqola (2007b); she discusses how the practice has been forced to adhere to [m]anhood proper allows for social subjectivities fraught with incongruences to be negotiated and refashioned. Renegotiation suggests that social identities are practiced and performed through broad social processes and solidified through and by social institutions, in this case the cultural practice of ulwaluko.
Such renegotiation is encapsulated in the character of Kwanda -revealing the dichotomy between tradition and the ways of the city, suggesting that social identities are performed through broad social processes. Kwanda is sent entabeni to become initiated into Manhood, an initiation which proves to be fatal as he does not return home post-initiation. We wish to stress a variance at this point, as his failure to return is not predicated on Gqola's (2007b) botched circumcisions, but rather on the narrative's need to keep Manhood as fixed, factual and unchanging. Traditional initiation is imposed on him, it is a prerequisite rite by virtue of his being born into Xhosa tradition.
We see from the sentiments his father expresses at the beginning of the film that this rite of passage acts as a catalyst to force him into Manhood, because he does not behave in a "manly" fashion. Thus, sending him to the mountain is aimed at "fixing him" -demonstrated in his fathers' words to Xolani: 'I want you to be firm with my son.
The boy's too soft. If you ask me, it's his mother who spoiled him' (Trengove 2017).
Kwanda is portrayed as an outsider to the traditional world and characterised by He is constantly repressing his feelings and negotiating his self-image, which signifies an element of the contestations and negotiations of manhood proper, allowing a brief purview that intimates towards the claim that Manhood and manhood proper do not exist in a binary.
The key questions that arise then are why does being a Man exclude being gay, queer or other more inclusive modes of gendered being? What do these exclusions reveal of gender conceptions and constructions amongst Blackness? Could this possibly be the reason why there was a homophobic reaction to the screening of the film?
Below we offer a possible, speculative, answer.
Before suggesting a speculative answer, however, we wish to highlight that the deceptive dichotomy that exists between Manhood and manhood proper snubs a genuine confrontation with homophobic discourses. This speculative project begins by tracing the reactions which express inter-cultural tensions to the movie being screened abroad. When the trailer was released on July 17, 2017 the controversy seemed to be about the exposition of the initiation rite of ulwaluko; an exposition which we contest in this paper as these objections to the film maintain Manhood through the discourse of culture, subsequently reinscribing homophobic discourses.
The criticism lay initially in the claim that the traditional practice, through the film, was being exported to the global north and the sentiment was that the cultural practices of "Xhosa people" were being lent to the white gaze. We understand the men who were objecting to the film being shown abroad to be referring to something akin to what Fanon highlights in Black Skin, White Masks ([1967] 2005. Fanon argues that the experience of Blackness as difference, as a phenomenological response to Merleau-Ponty's use of the corporeal schema, can only be understood through the proverbial eyes of whiteness i.e. the white imagination (Weate 1996). That is, Fanon was 'content to intellectualize these differences'; however, once he entered the white world and felt the weight of the 'white gaze', he experienced his otherness and became aware of pre-theoretical racial attitudes which, up to that point, had not existed for him (Weate 1996:134-151). These men were essentially arguing that the movie was being understood for the purposes of and via the white imagination. The second more salient move lay in negating the existence of homosexuality in a space defined through and by masculinist language that excludes feminised bodies. The phenomenon of masculinist language is associated with the deferential status of Manhood being oppositional to femininity; a deferential position which sustains homophobia and homophobic discourse.
A number of Xhosa men, who are seen as the custodians of culture, tradition and custom within the cosmological schema of Xhosa identity, seemed to initially feel that the film was not an accurate portrayal of ulwaluko. Misrepresentations here denote the association of a masculinist space with effeminate beings, who sully the deferential status of Manhood. As we suggest above, this deferential position maintains salient modes of homophobia and homophobic discourse. One of the premises of this line of thinking asserted that the film was simply a commercialised portrayal that packaged cultural practices for the global north -essentially lending Xhosa tradition to exoticism.
These responses mutually reinforced each other, the one speaking to the exoticisation and the exportation of custom and tradition to the "western" world and the other claiming misrepresentation through locating queerness in a space of culture and tradition; a space sullied by colonial imposition which "brought" queerness to Africa. 7 Many Xhosa men saw this as a form of cultural neo-imperialism. As Mqhayi (1914:v)  In conclusion: aligning aesthetics with the ethical Our attempt at detailing the concept of action as legislation, the definition which we gave to manhood in this analysis, has centred on highlighting the ostensible distinctions made between Manhood and manhood proper. We now wish to suggest a consideration of the aesthetic reception which characterised Inxeba as a site of contestation in society. Our discussion on the characteristically displeasing aesthetics of Inxeba is premised on an analysis that reveals a false distinction between Manhood and manhood proper. Further to this, we understand the displeasing aesthetics of Inxeba to be premised on the moral panic which ensued when the film was aired in South African cinemas. Our brief consideration of the aesthetics of Inxeba is concerned with highlighting how an alignment of the aesthetic with the ethical provides a social framework that does not uphold a fanaticism, for, as Louw (2012:191) suggests, 'ethics without aesthetics leads to fanaticism, legalism and moralism', going some way to elucidate the moral panic that characterised the screening of the film in and around South African cinemas, eventually leading to the film's temporary ban.
That which was ethically displeasing about the film was the location of femininity/ queerness/ feminised bodies in the space of culture, tradition and custom; in essence, the ethics of culture, custom and tradition were confronted by an aesthetics which has forever been relegated to the periphery. This relegation postulates that Manhood is factual and fixed, while in fact Manhood is a constitutive element of manhood proper -which itself is ever-changing, negotiated and reformulated. We would therefore suggest that further research look closely to the relationship between aligning aesthetics and the ethical as a mode of clarifying how culture, custom and tradition can begin working concurrently with manhood, so as to deliver on the promise suggested by Mamisa Chabula's note that 'a custom is supposed to heal' (cited by Gqola 2007b:158).
We have argued that manhood is denotative of action as legislation, subsequently accommodating the constitutive element which is Manhood. This clarification has allowed us to dissipate a deceptive distinction between Manhood and manhood proper which maintains systems of injustice and oppression through homophobic discourses healing]' (Gqola 2007b:158). We hope to initiate a conversation which allows Manhood the possibility of confronting itself without the fear of the incongruences of personal identities. It is only in confronting these incongruences that we can begin to address the complexities of identity that facilitate the creation of dichotomous bifurcations in social relations.

Notes
1. The concept of manhood has been debated and theorized in anthropology (Ortner 1972), and sociological theory and genders studies (see Jackson 2006).

2.
[m]anhood, as we use it in this paper, is in line with the Arendtian ([1954]/1994:441) suggestion which posits action as legislation. Action, in terms of manhood, denotes acting in such a way that the principles of an individuals' action could become the general law, and to be a man of goodwill represents a constant concern -not with obedience to the existing laws but with legislating through ones' actions.
3. In our argument, we highlight a false distinction between Manhood and manhood proper in order to showcase the lexicographical nature of the latter, while further troubling Manhood as maintained by appeals to culture, tradition and custom. We ought to make it clear that our discussion centers