Men feeling differently: masculinity, normativity, and the prevention of gendered violence
Creators: name: McCook, Sarah
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 440201
subject: Causes and prevention of crime
classificationCode: 440712
subject: Social policy

description: Efforts to engage men in the prevention of gendered violence are receiving increasing scholarly attention in Australia as elsewhere. There is an established body of research documenting the different ways in which masculinity, as a constitutive part of the patriarchal gender binary, is associated with men’s power and use of violence in different settings. There is also growing—though not universal—recognition that men must be actively involved as part of the solution for building non-violent, equitable futures. However, recent feminist critiques of both masculinity studies and the violence prevention literature have highlighted an over-emphasis on normative constructs, and inadequate attention to the normative processes and structural dynamics through which those constructs are reproduced (e.g., Beasley, 2020; Fletcher, 2014; Piedalue et al., 2020). In effect, our understandings of how men themselves might reflexively negotiate, resist, and rework normative masculinity are conceptually and empirically under-developed. These knowledge gaps have implications for how men are brought on board with the difficult work of gender transformative change.

In this thesis, I attend to these shared gaps in the prevention literature and critical studies of men and masculinity (CSMM) to critically examine and understand men’s experiences of the normative processes of masculinity. I present findings from two stages of qualitative research. The first involved key informant interviews with 16 prevention practitioners in Australia whose work centred on engaging men and boys. In the second, I conducted photovoice interviews with 33 men aged 25–39 that explored their experiences of masculinity, close relationships, and gendered social change. I further draw from key feminist and queer theoretical approaches to normativity centred on affect and relationality (e.g., Ahmed, 2006, 2014; Hemmings, 2012; Wetherell, 2012) to consider how we might move beyond masculinity as an object, and identify pathways towards openness, connection, and social justice. From this position, I argue that men’s reflections on feeling outside the norm illustrate the affective tensions of (dis)comfort that can arise in moments of shifting gender politics. Within these reflections, men’s relationships with friends, partners, family, colleagues, and unknown others regularly informed when and how masculinity became tangibly felt and known. In other words, connection underpins how men came to feel and know differently about gender, violence, and inequality. Importantly, there were complex patterns of privilege and power that shaped how these men navigated resistance and complicity in their endeavours to be ‘good men’ who take responsibility for equality. This point echoes the inherent tensions of engaging men as the dominant and powerful group in violence prevention and gender transformative change.

The challenges of bringing men on board with preventing gendered violence are now well documented (e.g., Burrell, 2018; Casey et al., 2018; Keddie, 2021). For practitioners working in this space, there is a need for ongoing, reflexive attention to how gendered power and normative processes might inadvertently reproduce patriarchy; prevention itself can be constrained by masculine privilege, heterosexism, cis- and heteronormativity. I therefore conclude this thesis by considering different directions for supporting men in resisting masculinity and moving beyond the gender binary. Here, I argue for decentring masculinity within prevention and working instead to generate open normativities (Shotwell, 2012), informed by an ethics of relationality, agency, and shared investments in non-gendered social life (Nicholas, 2014). Drawing on the existing strategies of practitioners in this study, I further outline an ethic of care for prevention work with men, which centres on transformative empathy, felt experience, and making connections with others. Taken together, these findings substantially develop our understandings of how we might better support men to actively resist and rework the normative processes of masculinity, and to collectively work towards non-violent futures.