Court Archives and the Making of Masculinity: Embodied Proof and Legitimacy in Yorubaland, 1905–40

In early twentieth-century Yoruba courts, men were required to account for their sexual capacity and reproductive competence before judges, litigants, and community witnesses. Masculinity was not presumed; it was examined and measured. Court proceedings transformed intimate bodily uncertainty into public evidence, placing the male reproductive body under sustained juridical scrutiny. Rather than treating colonial court records simply as sources about domestic conflict, this paper approaches them as procedural sites in which masculinity was made legible through evidentiary practice, because the archives shifted the question from whether men possessed authority to how authority was publicly substantiated. These records offer a perspective that complicates prevailing frameworks in masculinity and health scholarship. While theories of hegemonic masculinity have emphasized structural dominance, and recent works on men’s reproductive health have shown how modern biomedicine rendered men reproductively marginal, the Yoruba case reveals a different configuration; men’s reproductive bodies were neither automatically authoritative nor institutionally invisible; they were procedurally produced. Legal institutions transformed reproductive competence into a criterion of recognizable manhood. By foregrounding court archives as technologies of verification, this paper argues that masculinity operated as a contingent status grounded in bodily credibility. Masculine authority could be affirmed, contested, or diminished through adjudicative procedure. In doing so, the paper invites scholars to reconsider how legal institutions not only regulate masculinity but also generate it through regimes of examination, documentation, and proof.