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Events

Politicising Masculinities: Beyond the Personal

Andrea Cornwall, Tessa Lewin and Samia Rahim (BRAC) attended the Politicising Masculinities symposium in Dakar, Senegal from 15-18 October. This symposium was organised by IDS and co-hosted by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and the Alliance National Contre le Sida, ANCS.

See Tessa's Blog on the symposium as part of Open Democracy's coverage of '16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence at: Open Democracy 50:50 Initiative.

The symposium brought together activists, practitioners and academics to revisit theories of masculinity through the analysis of practices that are changing men’s gender identities and relations.

Symposium Rationale
Much of the most innovative work on men and masculinities has worked at the level of the personal - seeking to transform men’s sexual behaviour, violence against women and relations of fatherhood. The HIV epidemic has forced open space for greater acknowledgement of the fluidity and diversity of men’s sexual and social identities. But relatively little of the innovative thinking and practice that has taken place in relation to these issues has been carried into other areas of development work. Masculine privilege remains unproblematised in mainstream development, while within gender and development, the ‘men as problem, women as victim’ discourse continues to hold sway. Both rest on essentialisms that are rarely brought into question.

At the same time, work on men and masculinities in development has arguably failed to engage sufficiently with efforts to change the institutions that sustain inequitable gender and sex orders. It is time to move the debate beyond the personal to address questions of structure, power and politics.

This symposium hopes to generate new thinking, new alliances and new possibilities for informing and inspiring a greater engagement by men in the struggle for gender justice and broader social change.

Guiding Questions
Some of the questions that will be debated include:

what does it mean to target the heterogeneous category of ‘men’ as a constituency for gender change? In what ways can this constituency be programmatically and politically effective without reinforcing a binary understanding of gender?
what lessons can be drawn from advances and failures in work with men on HIV/AIDS, violence against women and broader issues of SRHR? What has changed - and how have these changes come about?
what kind of ‘gender myths’ about men are in circulation in these and other areas of development work and what shape do they take in practice? To what extent does work on and with men challenge, contest or affirm ideas and beliefs about men?
what are the political implications of current masculinities discourses, in different policy/programme areas and academic fields, including relationships between domestic and communal violence and armed conflict/civil war? How do they conceptualise gender and power - and how does this relate to understandings emerging from practice in different contexts?
what does it take to break away from binary concepts of gender and essentialist understandings of women and men without losing sight of structural inequities and inequalities? What implications does evidence from social science and natural science have for how we conceptualise gender differences and their representations, as well as for efforts to transform gender identities and relations?
where and how are connections being made between working on the personal dimensions of change and broader struggles for social and gender justice? How do these connections inform work with men around their accountability for gender privilege and their experience of other forms of oppression? What lessons emerge from this that can be used to build new alliances and mobilise men to address structural gender inequities?
what does all this mean in terms of the work that is needed to challenge ideologies, practices and institutions that maintain inequitable gender and sex orders?

See: Papers and Summary from the Symposium on Siyanda
See Also: Politicising Masculinities Workshop Report by Emily Esplen and Alan Greig

Marie Stopes International Global Conference on Abortion, London, 23-24 October 2007

http://www.mariestopes.org.uk/ww/press/press-ww-271106.htm

The Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC and the Realising Rights RPC teamed up to co-organise a panel on 'Experiences of Abortion Law Reform' at this event. Panel presenters were:

Sarah Onyango on behalf of Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance, Nairobi, Kenya
Gilberta Soares, Brazilian Campaign for Safe Abortion
Patience Aniteye (Ghana), LSHTM UK
Susannah Mayhew, LSHTM UK (Co-organiser)

With the chair as Hilary Standing (IDS and Realising Rights RPC).

Further details of panel (pdf file 23KB)

See openDemocracy Marie Stopes Global Safe Abortion Conference Blog and Cecilia Sardenberg's article for openDemocracy on The Right to Abortion: Briefing from Brazil.

See also RPC Feminisms and the Struggle for Reproductive Rights in Latin America project details

See also Realising Rights RPC website

The annual DSA conference was held at IDS from 18-20 September and Stephanie Barrientos (IDS) - a member of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC - chaired a panel on 'Gender, Work and Globalization' on 19 September.

See the conference homepage for more details.

Summary of Session:

Globalisation is leading to significant changes in the lives of women in paid work. It is opening up new opportunities for women to enter paid work, but much of that work is highly mobile, insecure and without adequate access to labour rights or protection. Women are becoming more integrated into an increasingly commercial and technical global economy, but face challenges in combining paid and unpaid activities or realising the benefits of greater economic activity. Accessing paid work is contributing to women’s changing socio-economic position and potential empowerment, but they also face difficulties in organising within the context of existing social structures and regulatory domains. This panel examines diverse examples of women’s integration into work in a global economy, and explores some of the complexities of enhancing women’s social and economic rights in a more liberalised global economic environment.

Panellists and Papers:

Nitya Rao UEA, School of Development Studies	Reconstructing Gender and Class: Globalisation and Women’s Work in Bangladesh
Kyoko Kusuabe, AIT Bangkok & Ruth Pearson, University of Leeds	Globalisation, Gender and Labour mobility: A Case Study of Burmese Women Workers in Thailand’s Border Factories
Kathrin Forstner, UEA, School of Development Studies	Craftswomen in a Globalised World: Joint Craft Production and Marketing in Southern Peru
Mariagrazia Leone, Dept of Sociology and Political Science, University of Calabria	Alternatives Coffee Production: Gender Empowerment in Peru
Meena Gopal, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University	Mutations in the Home Based Beedi Industry with New Economic Changes in India

International Association for Feminist Economics - 2009 Annual Conference, 26-28 June, Boston, Massachusetts, see http://www.iaffe.org/conferences/annual/index.php for more information

The Sexual Violence Research Initiative is holding its first conference, the SVRI Forum 2009 in Johannesburg, South Africa from 6-9 July 2009. For more information visit http://www.svriforum2009.svri.org

Gendering East/West, a conference to celebrate 25 years of Women's Studies at the University of York, UK, 8-9 July 2009. For more information see the website at www.york.ac.uk/inst/cws

Gender and Social Transformation: Global, Transnational and Local Realities and Perspectives, 17-19 July, 2009 in Beijing, China. If you are interested in this conference, submit your proposed paper abstract (250-500 words) by 15 February, 2009. Submit abstracts in English to Esther N. Chow (echow@american.edu) and in Chinese to Wu Jing (wujing@wsic.ac.cn). Notification of paper acceptance will be around mid-March, 2009

Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) - 2nd CSBR Sexuality Institute 2009 to be held in Beirut, Lebanon from 8-16 August 2009. Application deadline 10 May 2009. For more information contact Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR) – New Ways, Email: newways@wwhr.org