The emergence and sustenance of informal communities of care amongst migrant men in urban South Africa

Abstract

The chapter draws together these two interlinked formations of masculine communities of care amongst migrants in Cape Town and Durban. The everyday care practices and internal solidarities amongst men are entangled in non-kin-focused networks of care and the obligation to support families and friends back home. We organise the sections around three often interlinked elements of caring masculinity as articulated by our interlocutors: to build solidarity networks, to maintain dignity as financial providers, and as a form of obligation and sacrifice for family. These emerge out of, or are rearticulated due to, various experiences of precarity and are therefore challenging to enact in informal and precarious migrant contexts; however, the communities of care help them to reassemble and redefine their representation of masculinities.