by
Alan Greig (with Aazam Otero, Gaurav Jashnani and RJ Maccani)
 |
| Alan Greig |
It
was partly out of a desire to confront our own gender practices, and the ways
in which these challenge or bolster the legitimacy of patriarchy, that a small
group of us came together in 2008 to form the Challenging Male Supremacy Project
(CMS). As an all-volunteer collective in New York City, we have since created
spaces and developed tools for working with men and masculine-identified people
to challenge male supremacist practices as part of a broader movement for
collective liberation.
The
push to create CMS came from a range of people and experiences. All of us have,
at different times, been called upon by women, whether in our intimate
relationships or political communities, to do more not only to change our own
sexist attitudes and behaviours but also to work more actively to support
liberatory practices and spaces within our communities, in part by holding
other men accountable for their oppressive behaviour. Simply by growing up as
men in societies such as the USA and UK, we have lived with the privileges of
being male-identified and participated in the harm and injustice produced by
systemic male supremacy.
We
have also experienced, in different ways, the violence of men, whether at home,
at school or in the street. When we
first met together to discuss forming CMS, one of us had begun to speak
publicly about his own experiences of being sexually abused when he was a boy.
Some of us were getting involved in processes to hold accountable men in our
activist communities who had used violence against women. We saw the damage being done to women and
gender non-conforming people by the sexual violence being used against them by
men within social justice movements, and what this violence was doing to weaken
movements’ struggles for greater justice in the world. We recognized that left
unaddressed, male violence within our communities reinforces the status quo of
existing oppressive systems and undermines the belief that a better world is
within our collective grasp.
It
became increasingly clear as we met that our everyday practices of male
privilege are the hardest to acknowledge, let alone address, because they are
so thoroughly normalized. And because too often we have operated within a
good/bad binary, in which “we”, the radical activists, saw ourselves as
different from “them”, the sexists and patriarchs. The words of US anti-racist
organizer Chris Crass resonated with us, in his
account of being called upon to change by an
intimate partner:
"What do you
mean I'm sexist?" I was shocked. I wasn't a jock, I didn’t hate women, I
wasn't an evil person. "But how can I be a sexist, I'm an anarchist?"
I was anxious, nervous, and my defenses were up. I believed in liberation, for
fighting against capitalism and the state. There were those who defended and
benefited from injustice and then there’s us, right?”
Our
initial conversations focused on how to name and frame our work. Some of us
were inspired by the work of the Challenging White
Supremacy (CWS) Workshops, founded by Sharon Martinas and Mickey Ellinger
in 1993. The CWS emphasis on consciousness-raising and skills-building toward
transformative organizing, and on mobilizing the people most privileged by a
system of oppression to challenge that oppression in solidarity with those targeted
by it, resonated strongly with us.
Taking
steps to challenge male supremacy
We
devoted much of our energy in the first three years to developing a
nine-session Study-into-Action
process, which focused on consciousness-raising and skills-building. Between
2009 and 2011, we ran two Study-into-Action processes for a total of 25 men,
chosen through our personal networks on the basis of their social justice
activism.
In
designing the Study-into-Action process, we drew on the teachings of Somatics,
an integrative approach to healing and transformation that understands and
treats human beings as a complex of mind, body, and spirit. Challenging male
supremacy requires fundamental transformations in the ways we act, individually
and collectively, and the Somatics exercises proved to be powerful ways of
getting in touch with not just the conceptual idea but also the felt experience
of transformation.
Incorporating
partners’ suggestions, we fashioned a process in which we explored issues
ranging from our own experiences of masculinity to manifestations of male
violence in our communities; practical actions we could take to change harmful
behaviours; and what practices of accountability outside the criminal penal
system could look like. In our final session, we evaluated the process and
discussed commitments to challenging male supremacy in our intimate
relationships and political work.
Accountability,
as a practice and a process that can truly generate transformation in harmful
behaviours and oppressive systems, was a key theme throughout
Study-into-Action. Given the violence perpetrated by the police, by courts and
prisons against communities of colour and low income communities in the US, it
is clear that we need to find other ways to respond to male violence, without
relying on state coercion and punitive sanctions. The question we still face is
how to respond to the harms of male violence in ways that build solidarity and
create community, whilst supporting reparation and healing for those who have
been harmed and demanding accountability from perpetrators.
Since
the end of the Study-into-Action process, CMS members have remained active in
co-facilitating or supporting accountability processes for men who have used
violence within our social justice networks. In common with other activist
groups, we still struggle with the challenge of sustaining our work. Questions
about where best to focus our energies persist. We like many others face the
similarly urgent tasks of creating more liberatory practices and spaces within
our own communities and holding the state to account for its policy failures
and abuses of power. We know that we can only do this collectively, and CMS is
committed to continue working on challenging male supremacy as our contribution
to broader struggles for collective liberation.
