By Dr. Gabrielle Hosein
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| Gabrielle Hosein |
Last Thursday, students in my Men and Masculinities in the Caribbean
course engaged in pro-feminist men’s movement building on the University of the
West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago. They created games,
posters, pamphlets and popular theatre that tackled issues related to
fatherhood, violence, pornography, suicide, health, homophobia and popular
culture. This assignment aimed to create peer learning outside of the
classroom, challenging students’ real-life capacity to explain patriarchy as a
source of both men’s privilege and pain.
There
are many kinds of men’s movements, differentiated by their politics regarding
race, sexuality, capitalism, militarism, religion and women-led feminist
struggles. Pro-feminist men’s movements, which are also called feminist men’s
movements, are not motivated by a desire to return women to ‘traditional’ or
subordinate roles. They are not compelled by competition with women in the
struggle for rights nor by an empirically-unfounded position that women now
have too much power and men are the ‘real’ victims. Thus, such men’s movements
are best for achieving gender justice, which requires us to dismantle and
transform the hierarchies created by our ideals of manhood and womanhood.
While masculinity studies seems new, the
study of men in the Caribbean emerged in earlier studies on the family. Since
at the least the 1930s, anthropologists looked at Afro-Caribbean families,
which didn’t fit colonial nuclear-family models, and concluded that men were
marginal to them. Later feminist scholarship debunked that, arguing that while
Afro-Caribbean fathers may not reside within families, which may therefore end
up mother-centred, other men such as sons, uncles, brothers and grandfathers
were not marginal to family life at all.
By the 1980s, a new discourse, not of
marginality, but of marginalization was introduced. It argued that women’s
gains were a direct consequence of black men being held back from advancement
in the teaching profession in Jamaica. Men were being marginalized to keep them
subordinated and prevent them from threatening colonial rule, it claimed.
Despite the inaccuracy of this interpretation, and its denial of women’s own
efforts to advance in the labour market, the myth of male marginalization
caught fire across the Anglophone region as those who saw women’s advances in
terms of men’s feelings of emasculation found a flag to wave in backlash to
Caribbean feminism.
Nonetheless, from Jamaica to Trinidad were
experiments with pro-feminist men’s organizing. Anyone active in men’s movement
building in 1990s Trinidad and Tobago would remember MAVAW, Men Against
Violence Against Women. UWI Lecturer Jerome Teelucksingh revived International
Men’s Day commemorations on November 19th, his dad’s birthday, to
mobilize men to improve gender relations and promote gender equality, through a
focus on men’s health, positive male role models, and men’s contributions to
community and family.
Unfortunately, the turn of the century
witnessed an about-face by campus principals, state bureaucrats, politicians,
policy makers and fathers’ groups. A language of ‘balance’ began to
displace one of equity. A vocal men’s rights movement emerged, increasingly
attacking rather than collaborating with feminists. A once visible (pro-)feminist
men’s movement shrank, leaving those men who continued to invest in challenging
patriarchal relations feeling isolated, and reproducing the fear, shame,
silence that Michael Kimmel describes. That said, a vibrant gay men’s movement
emerged in this very period, but it too gets little love from the men’s rights
approach. This is one example of where pro-feminist men’s movements can take
responsibility for challenging men’s rights groups as well as discrimination
that men still face.
This turn ignored women’s long solidarity
with men’s movement-building, and men’s solidarities with women’s rights in the
region. In the 1990s, I often worked with young male activists from the YMCA
who sought to transform masculinities to create a kinder, gentler world for
subordinated boys. Women in UN organizations and university departments generated
funds and developed curricula for masculinity studies, facilitated workshops
for men, established peace-building programmes, and supported networking
amongst men across the region. Neither the women nor men always got it right,
but we were not enemies. Rather, we shared struggles from different,
contradictory and shifting sites of power.
In a globally right-wing moment, it remains necessary to mentor men and women to change the nexus of power, privilege, pain and powerlessness in boys and men’s lives. My students engage in pro-feminist movement building to better understand the project of men’s movements, like women’s movements, to fairly and lovingly value us all simply because we are human. When that pedagogy works, it garlands the bread of solidarity with roses of hope.
