Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities
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Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848139817 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 590 KB |
About the Author
Andrea Cornwall is professor in anthropology and development at the University of Sussex, where she is an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and director of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme. Joining the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) as a fellow in 1998, she supported the emergence of work on sexuality and helped establish the Sexuality and Development Programme. She has published widely on gender and sexuality in development and is executive producer of Save us from Saviours, a short film on Indian sex workers’ challenge of the rescue industry.
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. She has worked on participation as a researcher and practitioner for many years, and is author of Beneficiary, Consumer, Citizen (2000) and Democratizing Engagement (Demos) and co-editor of Pathways to Participation (with Garett Pratt, 2003), Spaces for Change? (with Vera Schattan Coelho, 2006) and The Politics of Rights (with Maxine Molyneux, 2009). Jerker Edström is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, IDS, where his research interests focus on the men and masculinities in relation to structural dimensions of sex, gender and power in HIV epidemics, as well as on the politics of the global response. He has studied and worked in HIV, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Population, Gender and Poverty since the mid 1980s. His most recent post was at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, where amongst other things, like NGO support programme development he drove the promotion and development of 'Participatory Community Assessment' (PCA) methodologies in HIV with partners. Alan Greig has worked for over ten years as a consultant with community-based organizations and activist formations in sub-Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia and the USA on the links between personal and political violence. Much of this work has been concerned with issues of masculinity and male power, and how these shape the lives of people of all genders. Through strategic planning, curriculum development and programme evaluations, Alan has supported the design and strengthening of innovative gender work with men rooted in a commitment to gender justice as a central element of social justice.
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Men and Development
Politicizing Masculinities
By Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström, Alan Greig
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan GreigAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-981-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Politicizing Masculinities in Development
Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig
Men and masculinities have captured greater space in development's 'gender agenda' over the last decade. The growing visibility of gender violence and HIV has given rise to exciting gender work with men, addressing the impact of norms of masculinity on how they think and act as men. Yet there seems to have been relatively little transfer of energy or experience from initiatives focused on the more internal and interpersonal aspects of men's lives to efforts to address the unjust effects of men's privilege in the worlds of politics and the economy. Organizations working with men on gender issues are often surprisingly silent when it comes to gender injustice in the public sphere, from men's dominance of leadership positions to persistent gender pay gaps. Mobilizing to demand equal pay, equal rights and equal representation still seems to be as much 'women's work' as doing the housework.
At the same time, there is a widespread sense amongst feminist activists and researchers that the gender agenda has been depoliticized as it has been taken up by development agencies, stripped of the original concern with inequitable power relations and reduced to interventions that are palliative rather than genuinely transformative (Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead, 2007). A number of writers have observed the extent to which this embrace of 'gender' has been accompanied by a tendency to play down challenges to the status quo and play up the benefits of instrumentalizing women in the service – or broader project – of development (Batliwala and Dhanraj, 2004; Chakravarti, 2008; Wilson, 2008). Power has come to be represented as something that can be bestowed or acquired rather than a structural relation that is in itself gendered. And targeted 'investment' has come to displace any consideration of the broader social changes that need to take place if the persistent inequalities associated with gender difference are to be eradicated. In a recent and extremely worrying trend, this instrumentalist logic is being taken to its limit through an increasing focus on the adolescent female as the agent of economic recovery, if only she can be empowered sufficiently. From this deeply individualized perspective, the complex interactions between gender and other axes of inequality in the lives of both women and men are lost from view, and the policies and programmes of economic and political elites that shape such interactions rendered invisible. It is hardly surprising, then, that work on men and masculinities in development has seen the more radical edge of early interventions in this field blunted.
This book aims to contribute to shifting the gender agenda back to a concern with the fundamental structural inequities that continue to make our world unfair and unequal. Written and edited by practitioners and researchers engaged in work on men and masculinities in different institutional and geopolitical contexts, this volume is both self-reflection and self-critique. It builds on dialogues at a symposium in Dakar in 2007, Politicizing Masculities: Beyond the Personal, which brought together people from a diversity of engagements with men and masculinities. It examines key preoccupations, dilemmas and absences within the field and explores the challenge of engaging men in work that more explicitly addresses the structuring of gender orders and their concomitant inequalities and injustices. In this introduction, we first provide a brief sketch of the intellectual trajectories, advances and limitations which motivate the book. We then propose three dimensions of politicizing masculinities, around which the sections of the book take shape. Finally, we highlight emerging questions and challenges for future work on men, masculinities and the gender agenda in development.
Of masculinities and men
Debates on masculinity first began to capture the attention of social scientists in the 1980s. What came to be dubbed 'the new men's studies' (Brod, 1987) and the 'new sociology of masculinity' (Carrigan, Connell and Lee, 1985) focused on the cultural production of masculinities, alternative models of 'manhood' and questions of naturalized male power (Brittan, 1989; Kaufman, 1987; Kimmel, 1987; Kimmel and Messner, 1989). The emerging rubric of 'men and masculinities' proved remarkably fertile in generating new conversations and connections in relation to a diverse set of issues and social concerns (Hearn and Morgan, 1990; Brod and Kaufman, 1994; Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994; Connell, 1995). In reviewing the contours of this emergent field of enquiry and debate, Jeff Hearn noted in 1996, for example, 'the increasing interest in the links between masculinity and power, masculinity and violence, masculinity and crime, masculinity and child abuse and masculinity and the law' (1996: 206).
A strong thread in this literature from the beginning was a focus on male subjectivities, men's inner lives and the harms of masculinity, with contributions to the field by authors as diverse as Robert Bly (1992), Lynne Segal (1990) and Victor Seidler (1997). An interest in men's relationships to masculine representations brought into question the contingency of gendered identities and depictions of masculinity and power in culture and everyday life (Chapman and Rutherford, 1988; Silverman, 1992). Such contingency, in part, was the result of the queering of the gendered body in the work of Judith Butler (1999) and other queer theorists, whose inversion of the nature/culture model of the sex-gender system significantly troubled assumptions about the connections between masculine identifications, the maleness of bodies and 'man' as a social subject (Kosofsky-Sedgwick, 1995; Halberstam, 1998).
An interest in bodies and their practices led Connell, in her seminal Masculinities (1995) and subsequent writings, to conceive of masculinity in terms of 'body reflexive practices', culturally constituted and institutionally embedded, that performed and thus produced maleness, or what it means to be a man, within distinct but overlapping domains of power. In emphasizing the plurality and plasticity of such meanings, Connell challenged the dichotomous thinking of sex role theory, helping to lay the groundwork for much of the subsequent work with men on doing 'their' masculinity differently. The concept of 'hegemonic masculinity' has proved particularly useful in this regard (Carrigan, Connell and Lee, 1985; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). As well as drawing attention to the reality of hierarchies among men, it has highlighted the interests that men have in challenging such hierarchies because of the harm that hegemonic practices of masculinity do not only to women but also to men.
Less well understood, though perhaps more important, was the utility of the concept of hegemonic masculinity for exploring the workings of power, and the ways in which specific practices, representations and narratives of masculinity secured consent to patriarchal arrangements of power. This wove together another thread of the emergent rubric of 'men and masculinities', a thread that emerged from men's engagement with the women's movement in the 1980s and was concerned with men's experiences of and relationships to structural and institutional dimensions of power (Hearn and Morgan, 1990). Sociologists like Les Back (1994) and Paul Willis (1981) explored the lives of men and boys at the intersections of gender, class and race, and the complex interplay of privilege and oppression that shaped such lives.
Over the course of the last two decades, the literature on masculinity has expanded exponentially. Anthologies abound, as do websites populated with literally hundreds of volumes dedicated to the study of men and masculinity, and to activism engaging men. The burgeoning nature of the field owes partly to its theoretical eclecticism, drawing variously on social psychology, psychoanalysis, social constructionist gender theory, post-structuralism and queer theory. The radical political promise of the turn toward masculinities was born of this plurality. In moving beyond the static binaries of sex role theory, the emerging 'men and masculinities' field opened up a deeper exploration of the relationship between gender and power, drawing attention to the extent to which certain ways of being a man are culturally and socially privileged. By insistently focusing the gender gaze on men, and thus decentring the traditionally unmarked male, the field has helped disrupt patriarchal knowledge-power systems and made room for new questions to be asked of sexuality and intimacy, as well as violence and trauma, in men's lives.
As a result, there has been a remarkable growth in programming and policy debate on men and gender in international development. The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was the first forum where the international community challenged men to play their full part in the fight for gender equality. Within a year, the Platform for Action outlined at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing restated the principle of shared responsibility and argued that women's concerns could only be addressed in partnership with men. It called on men to support women by sharing childcare and household work equally, and for male responsibility in the prevention of HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI). Indeed, as the international response to the HIV epidemic gathered momentum, so too did gender work with men. In 2000–1, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) mounted a world campaign on the theme 'Men make a difference', emphasizing the positive role men can play in HIV/AIDS prevention and care (UNAIDS, 2000); and the Declaration of Commitment from the 26th special session of the General Assembly on HIV/AIDS the following year addressed men's roles and responsibilities related to reducing the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS, especially the need to engage men in challenging the gender inequalities driving the epidemic (UNGASS, 2001).
Increasing attention to the relationship between gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS has also helped expand violence prevention work with men and boys in many countries of the Global South, with a predominant focus on male violence in heterosexual relationships. This work has drawn on the longer traditions of men's anti-violence activism and batterers' treatment programming that emerged out of men's work within the women-led domestic violence and sexual assault movements in the Global North (Funk, 1993; Kaufman, 1987; Kivel, 1992; Stoltenberg, 1990). A groundswell of public concern and policy debate about men and care – especially as fathers – has grown in recent years, and has been the focus for imaginative programming around the world. Men's health has also emerged as a locus of attention and action for researchers and practitioners. For all the ambivalence about men in the Gender and Development field, there has been a number of initiatives and publications that have sought to highlight how development has been 'missing men', to make the argument that 'masculinities matter' (Cleaver, 2002), to explore what 'men-streaming' might mean (Chant and Gutmann, 2002) and to explore different dimensions of men's gendered experiences in development settings, from men and work (Jackson, 2001; Whitehead, 2000) to the politics of the personal (Cornwall and White, 2000).
Across this diverse set of interests and issues, some common themes can be discerned. A key premise of a wide range of programmes and campaigns is that men can change and are changing, and that as masculinity is socially constructed, it can be reconstructed. This builds on long-established feminist arguments about 'gender' as malleable and amenable to change (Oakley, 1972). Such programmes often focus on the plurality of masculinities in order to emphasize the possibility of men's resistance to hegemonic forms of masculinity. There is an emphasis, too, on motivating men to get involved in supporting gender equality through highlighting the costs of masculinity for men, as well as a desire to avoid 'turning men off' by appearing to blame them for the harms of patriarchy – an approach that has engaged quite some hostility from feminists who have seen it as soft-pedalling on questions of men's exercise of power (Win, 2010; Turquet, 2010).
Equally striking are some of the silences and absences in this work. For all the attention given to masculinities in work with men on HIV/AIDS, surprisingly little is said about men's plural sexualities. HIV work with men who have sex with men (MSM) has developed in parallel with, rather than as a part of, mainstream HIV prevention work with men. Much of the work that is done with men on the harms they suffer from norms of masculinity fails to locate these harms, and indeed the norms themselves, in the context of oppression, and many men's experience of class exploitation, racism and ethnic exclusion and/or homophobia. When it comes to gender-based violence, the focus on behaviour and norms has precluded much discussion of the institutionalized nature of this violence and the kinds of mobilization that will be required to address it. The typical focus on fatherhood has said rather less about other issues relating to men in the domestic arena, particularly in relation to equity in the division of domestic labour. More fundamentally, this emergent body of masculinities work with men has paid insufficient attention to the political and economic inequalities that constrain women's lives. This lack of attention includes both a neglect of the masculinities in the political domain that make it so difficult for women to gain and use their voice, as well as a failure to highlight men's lack of active involvement in advocating for gender justice in relation to issues like equal pay and representation of women in senior leadership positions.
Engaging men in the project of gender equality has come to be about addressing the need to transform masculinity by changing cultural or social norms that guide men's behaviour, rather than addressing the structural basis of gender inequalities. It is not surprising, then, that many feminists both recognize the need to engage with men and express concern over its potential implications, whether in terms of funding or control. Ensuring that this engagement gets to grips with gender and its structuring of inequalities is critical if the promise of masculinities work with men for greater gender justice is to be realized.
Politicizing masculinities
What, then, would it take to politicize the 'men and masculinities' field? Some would argue that the field is already politicized, arising as it has from a deeply political commitment to addressing men's abusive behaviour towards women, and rooted as it is in feminist and queer research from the 1980s that put the spotlight on patriarchal and hetero-normative power structures. The premise of this collection is that much has indeed been done, but also that much more needs to be done. A concern with men and masculinities has been taken up selectively by development agencies to pursue a very partial gender agenda. This has involved the avoidance of certain topics for fear of 'scaring off' the men, and a selective emphasis on certain issues and areas at the cost of addressing the structural inequities at the root of gender inequality. At the same time, the field itself has developed in a way that has retreated from a more critical analysis of men's attitudes and behaviours, neither politicizing the personal nor exploring the interpersonal dynamics of power and privilege within broader struggles for gender justice (McMahon, 1993).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Men and Development by Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström, Alan Greig. Copyright © 2011 Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: Politicizing Masculinity - Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström & Alan Greig
- Part I - Embodiments and Transgressions
- 2. Performing Heterosexuality: Male Youth, Vulnerability and HIV in Malawi - Chimaraoke Izugbara and Jerry Okal
- 3. Is s/he More of a Man? Constructing Masculinity as a Female to Male Transsexual in India - Cath Sluggett
- 4. Meyeli Chhele Becomes MSM: Transformation of Idioms of Sexualness Into Epidemiological Forms in India - akshay khanna
- 5. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Constructions of Masculinity and Contemporary Understandings of Sex Work - Cheryl Overs
- 6. Beyond 'Vulnerability': Men, Power and HIV - Jerker Edström
- Part II: Structures: Inequities, Violence, Power
- 7. Organized Powers: Masculinities, Managers and Violence - Raewyn Connell
- 8. What Would Make Men Interested in Gender Equality? Reflections from East Africa - Margrethe Silberschmidt
- 9. Men in/and Gender Equality: A Conversation from South Africa - Robert Morrell and Penny Morrell
- 10. Militarized, Religious and Neo-colonial: The Triple-bind Confronting Men in Contemporary Uganda - Chris Dolan
- 11. Local Lives, Global Dialogues: Shifting Discourses of Masculinity in India - Radhika Chopra
- Part III: Engagements: Changing Masculinities
- 12. Gender Regimes Changing Men or Men Changing Gender Regimes? Challenges for National and Trans-national Social Policy, Gender Equality and Organizing with Men - Jeff Hearn
- 13. Masculinities, Social Exclusion and Prospects for Change: Reflections from Promundo's Work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Gary Barker, Marcos Nascimento, Christine Ricardo, Marianna Olinger and Marcio Segundo
- 14. Masculinities and Men's Groups in China: A Conversation Between Activists - Fang Gang, He Xiaopei and Susan Jolly
- 15. Women's Empowerment: What do Men Have to Do with It? - Andrea Cornwall, Henry Armas and Mbuyiselo Botha
- 16. 'Swimming Against the Tide is Easier as a Shoal' Changing Masculinities in Nicaragua: a Community-based Approach - Patrick Welsh
- 17. Anxious States and Directions for Masculinities Work with Men - Alan Greig