Men's constructions of masculinity and male sexuality through talk of buying sex.

Commercial sex is an everyday occurrence across a range of contexts in South Africa. In this paper we turn our attention to the often-marginalised role of the buyers of sex by drawing on narrative interviews with male clients of female sex workers recruited through online advertisements in order to explore the ways in which heterosexual men construct, negotiate and perform their masculinity and sexuality through talking about their experiences of paying for sex. We highlight parallels between men's narratives of paying for sex and dominant discourses of gender and heterosexuality. We show how men draw on heteronormative sexual scripts in constructing and making sense of paid sexual encounters and how men are simultaneously able to construct and enact a particular idealised version of masculinity and male sexuality through their talk on paying for sex. Finally, we discuss how online resources could be used more extensively in future research with the male clients of sex workers.

"The Only Solution There Is To Fight": Discourses of Masculinity Among South African Domestically Violent Men.

This qualitative study investigates the discourses that men used when talking about their experiences of attending a Duluth-cognitive-behavioral-therapy (CBT) domestic violence program in Cape Town, South Africa. Data were collected from 12 men who were recruited from three programs. A discourse analysis of interviews revealed that men drew upon various dominant discourses of masculinity that may reinforce the subordination of, control over, and violence against women. Our findings from this study contribute to the debate surrounding the Duluth model's effectiveness in South Africa by questioning its successes in transforming violent masculinity.

Violence, violence prevention, and safety: a research agenda for South Africa.

Violence is a serious problem in South Africa with many effects on health services; it presents complex research problems and requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Two key meta-questions emerge: (i) violence must be understood better to develop effective interventions; and (ii) intervention research (evaluating interventions, assessing efficacy and effectiveness, how best to scale up interventions in resource-poor settings) is necessary. A research agenda to address violence is proposed.

Narrative possibilities: poor women of color and the complexities of intimate partner violence.

This article shows how a narrative methodological approach is particularly suited to examining the dynamics of intimate partner violence, especially among poor women of color in South Africa. We show how a narrative approach allowed women to represent their experiences of violence according to their own frames of meaning, examining the complexities of abuse as it is informed by sociocultural factors of gender, poverty, and deprivation. In particular, we show how a narrative approach departs from other qualitative work by enabling women to construct particular forms of identity, thereby giving them agency in authoring their own stories of violence.