On Becoming and Being a ‘Living Testimony of Change’: Masculinity, Gender Activism, and Pentecostalism in South Africa

Abstract

Building on ethnographic research, this article explores the significance of narrative accounts, namely testimonies and confessions, in the social project of creating reformed men in urban and peri-urban settings of present-day South Africa. By drawing attention to certain ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1953) between Pentecostalism and gender activism, it analyses how gender activists use testimonies of personal transformation to influence other men to change their self-understanding as men, their attitudes, and patterns of behaviour. Throughout the article I elaborate on the socially integrative and disintegrative effects of this endeavour as well as on the difference between such testimonial accounts and confessions. By exploring the distinction between these two forms of speaking out, the article illustrates what it means to be a gender activist in this context, and what ideas about personhood are deployed in gender activism.