On men's gender and kinship roles in poor, predominantly Afro-Brazilian families in the city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil, anthropologist Klaas Woortmann observed what he called a “subjective marginality.

” This perceived sense of being peripheral to their families and wider society, together with concrete poverty, “strongly inhibits men from fulfilling roles of masculinity as defined in the dominant culture,” Woort- mann argued.

My study, also based in Salvador, concerned masculinity and domestic violence. Such masculinities, somehow seen as “falling short” of normative expectations, have implications for the practice of domestic male violence against women. Are men who are unable, or disinclined, to fulfill the role of primary breadwinner and authori­tative head of household as prescribed in the dominant culture more likely to resort to violence as a compensating “resource” for power and control?

In broaching the connections between economic hardship, poverty, and violence, I do not wish to suggest that the insecurities and instabilities generated are exclusive to the poor. A ubiquitous insecurity exists for Brazilians of all classes and ethnic backgrounds, deriving directly from Brazil's ongoing economic crisis. Many if not most Brazilians feel that their worlds are perpetually spinning out of control. In some sense, the situation of the Brazilian middle class could be understood as even more unstable, or subject to dramatic and unforeseeable change, than that of the Brazilian poor, because the middle class has more to lose. Nonetheless, the crisis of the poor is certainly more existential, immediate, and desperate.

Without negating the usefulness of Woortmann's “rooster” metaphor, my re­search suggests an alternative reading: that precisely when the “rooster” feels his masculine identity threatened or called into question, does he begin to “crow,” strut and puff, and that part of this display may involve physical aggression against a fe­male partner.

Within Brazil, the Northeastern macho is particularly renowned. As a result, it is often assumed that the Northeastern woman must in turn be singularly submissive. Instead, and in keeping with a contradictory aspect of Salvador's image, my research portrays indomitable women whose mettle matches that of the most consummate macho. These contrasting images of men and women suggest that Salvador's singu­larly high (registered) indices of domestic violence may have as much to do with confrontation and contestation of male authority within conjugal relationships as with simple male dominance.

This research was inspired by my learning that Brazil, in response to pressure from its feminists, had created the world's first all-female police stations. The spe­cialized stations are staffed by policewomen and respond exclusively to women with complaints about aggression by men. After a year of fieldwork in Salvador's women's police station and elsewhere, I moved into a favela, or slum, with interest in gaining a more intimate perspective on men's subjective experience of conjugal discord, and to understand when and how violence was seen as a tolerable, inevita­ble, appropriate, or reprehensible result. The final phase of fieldwork, in which focus groups were convened with community men and women who had participated in ear­lier phases of the research, zeroed in on the question of how institutional criminaliza­tion and delegitimation of male violence are affecting the cultural tolerance for such aggression on the ground, with particular attention to male peer groups.

My intention in engaging men in conversations about male violence came as an effort to redress the striking absence of subjective male voices in the discourse on domestic violence, in Brazil and elsewhere. When a study includes a section on men and masculinity, it is inevitably informed by women's voices, and rarely moves be­yond a reductive “profile” of the typified, authoritarian, and macho “batterer” on the one hand, complemented by a beleaguered, esteem-drained female “victim” on the other.

The case of Brazil—a country historically infamous for social codes virtually mandating men to “wash their honor with blood” (by killing wife, her partner, or both) when subject to female adultery—calls into question treatments of violence that assume it to be somehow opposed or destructive to cultural meanings. However reprehensible, if in Brazil violence is something that can wash honor, then it is con­stitutive of meaning and value. Even as the so-called “legitimate defense of honor”—and yes, it is always male honor—is becoming a less and less viable tactic for absolving wife-murdering Brazilian men, and even as male impunity is slowly diminished through increasing criminalization, it is undeniable that male violence still holds positive connotations and values in the popular culture. Not only can a man use violence to “prove” that he is, in fact, a man, or to preserve his masculinity; he is often required to call upon violence, particularly when his other options are few for succeeding in the high-maintenance, labor-intensive work of continuing to “be a man.”