Abstract:
The extant South African literature base on male homicide is relatively small and reveals a
paucity of qualitative studies. This study aimed to elicit discourses embedded within the
narratives of men involved in homicidal encounters, and to analyse them from a social
constructionist perspective. Semi-structured, individual interviews were conducted with 30
male prisoners who were convicted of murder. An analysis of narrative forms, followed by a
critical discourse analysis of the narrative contents, was conducted and aimed to assess the
social and ideological significance, functions and effects of these discourses. Participants'
talk included masculine performances that allowed for positive self-presentation and ways of
constructing meaning of their actions for themselves, the interviewer and an `invisible
audience'. Narrative forms of stability/continuity, decline, and transformation/growth that
relied on normalising, reifying, tipping point, propitiatory and rehabilitatory lexical registers
were deployed as a means to position participants as reasonable, normal, rehabilitated, and as
`successful' men. Within the narrative contents, participants constructed homicide through
exculpatory and justificatory discourses to rationalise and minimise their agency, and drew
on essentialist, moral and deterministic notions of male violence. Discourses of spectacular
and instrumental violence were also evident. References to male honour, status and power; a
defence against emasculation; the assertion of control over commodified female partners; the
maintenance of referent familist and ageist discourses; and the normalisation of male
violence as a utilitarian tool to access resources in unequal social contexts, underpinned these
discourses. The homicidal acts thus represented adapted performances of hegemonic
masculinity in a noxious context where this dominant form of masculinity is often
unattainable. While participants' talk reproduced hegemonic constructions of masculinity
within broader social contexts, it also contested hegemonic orders of moral discourses that
govern the legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence. The findings reveal how contexts of
discoursal production have a contradictory response to violence - denouncing it, but also
simultaneously acting as a pernicious incubatory environment for male homicide. It
concludes that the prevention of male homicide must involve the de-linking of masculinities
and violence at material, structural and institutional levels, but also within systems of
signification, if non-violent masculinities are to gain ascendancy.
