By ALIRAZA JAVAID

On an unimaginable, uncertain and unpredictable night, I was alone after a night out, floating aimlessly when really I should be getting home, to sleep and to experience the dreaded hangover the next day: but no, something kept me lingering on after the night out fuelled with alcohol and excitement. I was drunk. There was just one thing on my mind and that was finding love; I was still embedded in naivety, even at the age of 20–21, which was how old I was when my selfish offender raped me. When I was lingering on while people on the night out had started to disperse into their own ways, getting taxis to go home alone or with strangers for casual sex, I was looking for something or should I say someone, someone with whom I had previous sex with. Him and I had sex twice before. I wanted to see him again for the third time, as I was thirsty for some more sex. I fancied him. I lusted over him. I wanted to fall in love with him, but he just wanted to penetrate me and then to leave me, like all men. I never gave up trying to fall head over heels for him, though, so I went to see him after the night out; it was not dark as such, the light started to shine. While I was intoxicated, I made my way to his flat. Eventually, he came downstairs to get me after he was sleeping.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 302p.

By Adam Baird, Matthew Louis Bishop & Dylan Kerrigan

The murder rate in Port of Spain, Trinidad, rose dramatically around the turn of the millennium, driven overwhelmingly by young men in gangs in the city’s poor neighborhoods. The literature frequently suggests a causal relationship between gang violence and rising transnational drug flows through Trinidad during this period. However, this is only part of a complex picture and misses the crucial mediating effect of evolving male identities in contexts of pronounced exclusion. Using original data, this article argues that historically marginalized “social terrains” are particularly vulnerable to violence epidemics when exposed to the influence of transnational drug and gun trafficking. When combined with easily available weapons, contextually constructed male hegemonic orders that resonate with the past act as catalysts for contemporary gang violence within those milieus. The study contributes a new empirical body of work on urban violence in Trinidad and the first masculinities-specific analysis of this phenomenon. We argue that contemporary gang culture is a historically rooted, contextually legitimated, male hegemonic street project in the urban margins of Port of Spain.

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2021.

By Adam Baird

Belize has one of the highest homicide rates in the world; however, the gangs at the heart of this violence have rarely been studied. Using a masculinities lens and original empirical data, this article explores how Blood and Crip “gang transnationalism” from the United States of America flourished in Belize City. Gang transnationalism is understood as a “transnational masculinity” that makes cultural connections between local settings of urban exclusion. On one hand, social terrains in Belize City generated masculine vulnerabilities to the foreign gang as an identity package with the power to reconfigure positions of subordination; on the other, the establishment of male gang practices with a distinct hegemonic shape, galvanized violence and a patriarchy of the streets in already marginalized communities. This article adds a new body of work on gangs in Belize, and gang transnationalism, whilst contributing to theoretical discussions around the global to local dynamics of hegemonic masculinities discussed by Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) and Messerschmidt (2018).

Men and Masculinities Volume 24, Issue 3. 1-21 , 2019