Masculinity as a ‘hard small cage’? Reflections from Chimamanda Adichie’s We should all be feminists

Abstract

With data from YouTube, this paper examines some masculinity issues raised by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TEDx talk ‘We should all be feminists’ and some selected interviews. She problematizes the masculine ideal of suppressing emotions and acting tough and uses them to gauge how masculinity can be described as a ‘cage’. To exemplify how this ‘cage’ might look like in reality, I draw on evidence from the literature on masculinity and men’s health as well as data from an unpublished document on discourses of fear and anxiety among male COVID-19 survivors in Ghana. Using the concept of hegemonic masculinity, I argue that the plethora of evidence in the literature suggest that (hegemonic) masculine norms indeed constrain men in ways that may have dire consequences, not only for their ego, but also for their health; hence, Chimamanda’s call to change the existing discourse is in order. Focusing on the ‘cage’ metaphor (including its qualifiers), however, I question Chimamanda’s description of masculinity since it suggests as though there is no room for contestation – something which weakens her own call for changing the narrative. The paper therefore proposes going beyond the kind of cage Chimamanda equates masculinity with, to make way for the needed interventions.