Drawing on long-term fieldwork with two generations of Black migrant men, including former mineworkers and contemporary informal traders, across the Mozambique-South Africa corridor, this paper traces the interplay between racial capitalism and masculinity. Under the colonial-apartheid regime, coerced migration and compound labour shaped masculinities centred on endurance and breadwinning. In the neoliberal era, however, this drive for self-worth has been reframed as entrepreneurial risk, mobility and consumption. In both regimes, masculinity is not merely a by-product of labour; it is also used to reproduce accumulation under conditions of inequality. Coercion and endurance gave way to desires for autonomy and success, channelling men's aspirations into circuits of value extraction. Expanding upon Connell's notion of transnational elite business masculinity, this paper introduces the concept of subaltern business masculinities to understand entrepreneurial 'self-making' within the margins of capitalist economies. Inspired by Gramsci's interpretation of subaltern groups, this study highlights that subordination and exclusion are not opposite to hegemony, but rather the conditions for its reproduction. These masculinities are shaped by the tension between a desire for autonomy and conditions of structural precarity. Excluded from the privileges of hegemonic power, subaltern entrepreneurs embody Foucault's description of the neoliberal 'entrepreneur of the self'. Masculinity becomes an aspirational formation, with agency acting as a form of self-governance that simultaneously resists and perpetuates domination, thereby sustaining the racial capitalist order. Offering a Southern African perspective, this paper repositions masculinity as a formation of racial capitalist governance, contributing to broader debates on gender, race and postcolonial capitalism.

'Colonial Senses' explores how Portuguese late colonialism and its afterlives are experienced and resisted through the senses. Moving beyond a purely textual analysis, the Element examines the insurgent optics of Amílcar Cabral, the feminist haptics of Paulina Chiziane and the sonic politics of Black female activists in post-colonial Lisbon. The Element posits that Portuguese late colonialism's sensory regime prioritised proximity and aesthetic contact in order to mask violence and stifle dissent. Using social theory, literature and ethnography, we analyse a variety of visual, tactile and auditory registers. We offer a new hypothesis on the sensory architecture of empire: that the Portuguese colonial empire developed a distinctive multisensory regime structured around aestheticised contact, intimate violence and the suppression of autonomous sensory expression. Combining historical and sociological analysis, this Element demonstrates how sensory colonial legacies endure into the present and contributes to sensory and postcolonial studies.

Life course theory often views transitions as a linear progression of normative stages, but this perspective overlooks the fluidity and complexity of social change. In particular, transgender and gender non-conforming identities challenge the assumption that transition unfolds in discrete stages. Drawing on six exemplary cases in Portugal and the United Kingdom, this article highlights the temporal asynchrony, ambiguity and constantly evolving nature of gender transitions. Revisiting van Gennep’s notion of liminality, it shows how conventional life-course models fail to capture the recursive, context-dependent processes that often define trans experiences. Rather than viewing transition as a singular disruptive event that is resolved by conforming to a binary norm, we show that it is an open-ended space of negotiation in which identities are continually adapted to shifting socio-historical contexts. Empirical findings suggest that non-linearity is more common than traditional frameworks allow, revealing prolonged states of in-between, multiple trajectories of becoming and the persistent possibility of redefinition. We argue for expanding the analytical toolkit to include these uncharted dimensions of transition, thereby developing more inclusive and nuanced approaches to exploring diverse experiences at the margins of conventional life course theory. In doing so, this article opens up new ways of understanding how change itself can remain a persistent, liminal state.

In recent years the concern with gender diversity fuelled by the rapid expansion of transgender studies highlighted multiple possibilities for constructing gender through discursive enactments. As the self-declaration of gender identity gained legitimacy, personal narratives became increasingly relevant. Verbalizing gender identity is instrumental for extending the very notion of gender as belonging to the domain of individual subjectivity and amenable to as many names as people's non-transferable experiences allow. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in Portugal, the article examines the multiple terms used to self-describe and affirm gender identity over time. Reconstituted step-by-step through longitudinal lenses, each semantic journey illustrates how individuals appropriate different lexicons and self-describe at the intersection of multiple categories, resist biomedical codifications of gender transition and reinvent the terms of binary discursive regimes. Through their discursive practices, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in the Portuguese context challenge one-dimensional readings of gender identity. While combining narrative approaches with regimes of power, the paper mobilizes Foucault's notion of discursive formation and Bourdieu's concept of field. 'What's in a name' is more significant than Shakespeare ever imagined. The more the nexus-bodies-names-identities is disarticulated, the more individuals gain semiotic agency for self-describing their gender identities.

Confronted with the centrality of the body for trans-masculine individuals interviewed in the United Kingdom and Portugal, we explore how bodily-reflexive practices are central for doing masculinity. Following Connell's early insight that bodies needed to come back to the political and sociological agendas, we propose that bodily-reflexive practice is a concept suited to account for the production of trans-masculinities. Although multiple, the journeys of trans-masculine individuals demonstrate how bodily experiences shape and redefine masculinities in ways that illuminate the nexus between bodies, embodiments, and discursive enactments of masculinity. Rather than oppositions between bodily conformity to and transgression of the norms of hegemonic masculinity, often encountered in idealizations of the medicalized transsexual against the genderqueer rebel, lived bodily experiences shape masculinities beyond linear oppositions. Tensions between natural and technological, material and discursive, or feminine and masculine were keys for understanding trans-masculine narratives about the body, embodiment, and identity.

Resumo: As histórias de vida de pessoas trans-masculinas, embora diversificadas, demonstram que a construção da masculinidade não pode ser entendida fora dos efeitos materiais produzidos no e pelo corpo, dentro de uma ordem de género erigida sobre a masculinidade hegemónica. Confrontados com a centralidade dada ao corpo por indivíduos trans-masculinos em Portugal e no Reino Unido, exploramos as ligações entre masculinidade, incorporação e a materialidade corporal do género. Seguindo Raewyn Connell (1995, p. 56), quando afirma a inevitabilidade do corpo na construção da masculinidade, desenvolvemos duas linhas de argumentação. Primeiro, sugerimos que a reconfiguração das premissas conceptuais da masculinidade, como lugar, prática e efeito, é um passo fundamental para entender as possibilidades de se fazer masculinidade. Segundo, defendemos que a masculinidade é, sobretudo, um efeito de práticas corporais reflexivas.