Institute of Development Studies

Men, Masculinities and Power

On November 10, IDS and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Debt, Aid and Trade held a joint meeting in the Palace of Westminster exploring issues of men, masculinities and power.  Speakers included Jerker Edstrom of IDS, Kate Bedford of the University of Kent, and Alan Greig, an independent consultant. The event formed part of an ongoing series in Westminster entitled ‘Dangerous Ideas in Development’.

Edstrom explained that there is not just one but multiple ‘masculinities’, some of which enjoy positions of superiority or hegemony, and others which are subordinate. These hierarchies and structures of power are socially maintained within and by institutions such as schools, armed forces, and companies. These different ways of being male are linked to power structures, and they can be contradictory and at times impossible to live up to.  This internal conflict can contribute to external expressions of violence. Masculinity is not fixed, but amenable to change; young men often rebel against the versions of masculinity embodied by their fathers and grandfathers to create their own definitions of what it means to be a man.

These definitions tend to fit into binary gender contrasts; for instance, ideas that men are promiscuous and women faithful, or men are ‘predators’ and women ‘victims’.  This idea of gender as a series of polar opposites is misleading and creates many myths about behaviour. Vulnerability is an issue for many men, not just women; and ‘men who have sex with men’ are seen as a totally separate group form ‘normal’ men. UNAIDS went so far as to produce two guides – one for women, men and children and one for ‘sexual minorities’ – a very exclusive and oddly un-gendered way of dividing human behaviour. Men are usually absent from discussion as carers or as victims of sexual violence; and policymakers do not often seek to understand their potentially risky behaviour, such as refusing to wear condoms.

Kate Bedford spoke next, and began by showing a series of images that have been used in World Bank publications about men and masculinities. The majority of them featured depictions of men and women together ‘symbolising human wholeness’ in images of ‘gender harmony’. The emphasis created was of partnership between genders, and indeed most of the World Bank discourse on this topic has been about economic partnership, encouraging women into paid work and men to take on caring roles in order to make this possible. There has been an emphasis on ‘family’ and ‘family-strengthening’ in programming, notably ‘Pro-Fam’ in Argentina.

Bedford’s argument was that this focus on binary gender definitions and nuclear families does not reflect the realities of fluid gender roles and non-nuclear family set-ups, and indeed serves to stigmatise female-headed households and others who do not fit into this traditional mould. It has also led to distortion of work with vulnerable women; some domestic violence shelters in Argentina were led to think that they had to include abusers in their work if they were to receive any World Bank funds. Some of the motivation for this emphasis on the family is in order to build alliances with the Catholic Church; while all development activists understand that they need to co-operate with power-holders, Bedford was keen for the constraints and benefits to be more rigorously examined.

Alan Greig spoke next. He emphasised the wider effects of shifts in gender order, that ripple out to affect not just gender relations but also the broader social order, and other power relationships such as colonialism. He spoke of ‘the masculinity of hegemony’, how masculinity is used as a way to organise power within societies. Looking at current politics he noted the hyper-masculinism of some world leaders, including Zuma in South Africa and Ahmadinejad in Iran, and in Europe Berlusconi and Sarkozy of Italy and France.

His concerns included that some current work was only helping to ‘contain’ the challenges presented by feminism and work with gender, rather than utilise its full potential for change. Recent months have seen a ‘crisis’ in the neoliberal economic order, which has at the same time been a crisis of self and identity; there is, Greig said, a danger that a new orthodoxy is emerging which will only serve to re-secure established hegemonies. The emphasis on identity politics and on ‘micro’ level change can divert attention away from what is happening at a larger structural level. While work to hold men accountable for violence if they commit it is important, he also felt that it was not being located properly within a system of violence that reinforces this behaviour.

Related Events

Dangerous Ideas in Development ‘Media, Violence and Citizenship’

Dates: 24 Nov 2009

Dangerous Ideas in Development ‘Conservation and Poverty Reduction: Conflict or Sustainable Governance of Fisheries in Developing Countries’

Dates: 8 Dec 2009

Related Audio

Related Publications

• Greig, A., Edström, J. and Glyde, J. (2008) 'Men, Sex and HIV: Directions for Politicising Masculinities', IDS In Focus 4, Brighton: IDS