Forgotten Boys, Idle Men: Using Gender to Talk about Poverty in Kenya

• In Event: 4242 - Gender and the Crises of Global Capitalism

Abstract

Global shifts are complicating the gendered balance of economic power. A decline of jobs in arenas such as industry and mining, frequently worked by men, has been accompanied by a rise in service-sector jobs, often taken up by women. As working class men’s economic situations have grown more precarious in recent decades, attention to gender inequality has risen with provisions around women’s rights integrated into legislation and narrowing gender gaps in education in much of the world. Drawing on 160 semi-structured interviews with men and women in rural and urban Kenya, this paper explores how low-income men and women use gendered language to talk about the economic struggles of poor men. By focusing on the pervasive and controversial narrative in Kenya that “the boy child has been neglected,” I argue that familiarity with debates around gender inequality have become pervasive enough that many respondents are able to adapt the language of women’s rights to call attention to the needs of poor men. Because respondents have witnessed significant changes in the gender order while their economic surroundings, in contrast, have remained relentlessly harsh, it is understood that the government and international organizations care more about gender than they do about poverty. These simultaneous perceptions of gender progress and persistent economic hardship have transformed a simple phrase about young boys into a symbol of the complexities around introducing a language of gender equality into a context of extreme economic disparity.

Author

• Isabel Pike, University of Wisconsin-Madison