Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Connell's (1995) concept of hegemonic masculinities has been invaluable for prevention efforts that seek to promote a shift in hegemonic male norms that drive the HIV epidemic. However, most work on masculinities is non-narrative and positivist, which fails to appreciate how individual men both conform to and resist hegemonic norms in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. This limits our comprehension of how to promote the transformation of men's identities, which is necessary for effective and sustainable HIV prevention efforts. A narrative approach, for privileging the diversity in men's lived experiences, could address such concerns. 50 sexual history interviews with men and 25 interviews with women were conducted with participants purposively sampled from a wide range of cultural and racial backgrounds, age categories, and in urban and rural sites across five provinces in South Africa. The data was analyzed using a narrative approach, which pays attention to both content and process including how men perform to constructions of masculinity in sometimes unconscious ways. The narratives reveal the fluid and divergent nature of male sexuality, and provide a platform for understanding under what conditions men resist gender norms that can be damaging to their sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Such nuanced and contextualized understandings of men's SRH are critical for gender transformative HIV prevention efforts and point to the value of a narrative approach in more deeply understanding male sexual risk and agency and the meanings and experiences that underlie it.