Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• Involving men in ending violence against women: Facing challenges and making change

  Michael Flood

  • No abstract available.
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  • pp. 12–29

• Why Study Men and Mascu­linities? A Theorized Research Review

  Tal Peretz

  • Abstract

    Feminist scholars have long made the important and valid critique that nearly all knowledge production not explicitly labeled feminist has implicitly studied men. Nonetheless, feminist scholars and activists are increasingly recognizing the importance of explicitly investigating men as gendered beings. This paper argues that gender-aware studies of men and masculinities are in fact necessary for an intersectional analysis of gender relations, and that a better understanding of masculinity is necessary to reduce men’s perpetration of violence and increase support for gender justice. It provides five mutually reliant reasons why studies of men and masculinities are necessary for understanding gender relations and beneficial for feminist projects for gender justice: that superordinate categories tend to go unmarked and thereby uncritiqued; that gender is relational; that investigating the social construction of masculinity calls men’s superordinate status into question; that masculinity is one of the primary social forces currently stalling egalitarian social change; and that investigating masculinity highlights contradictions and cleavages where masculinity can be most effectively attacked.

    Keywords

    men and masculinities, gender, superordinates, Theory

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  • pp. 30–43

• Militarization of Sikh Masculinity

  Aakriti Kohli

  • Abstract

    Critically reading the theoretical and descriptive scholarly work on colonial Punjab, Sikhs, Sikhism and the imperial British Empire, this paper traces how the formation of Sikh martial masculinity rooted in religious tradition was institutionalized into a particular form of militarized masculinity in the colonial period in Punjab, India. Additionally, it explores how the historical construction of masculinity intersects with the contemporary discourses on Sikh identity and masculinity in the diaspora, specifically in Britain. With reference to British Sikhs and their project of reclaiming recognition of their contribution in WWI, the paper goes on to argue that perhaps the projection of Khalsa identity as synonymous with Sikh identity and the performance of Sikh masculinity lies in projecting and representing themselves as warriors, to seek legitimacy from the military of their masculinity in exhibiting war effort.

    Keywords

    masculinity, military, martial, Sikhs, Punjab, Khalsa

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  • pp. 44–68

• The Invisibility of Men’s Practices: Problem represen­tations in British and Finnish Social Policy on Men’s Violences Against Women

  Stephen R. Burrell

  • Abstract

    This paper investigates British and Finnish government policy discourses around men’s violence against women. Finland and the UK were selected for comparison because of the historically contrasting relationships between the women’s movements and the state in the two countries. Two government policy documents from each country, published between 2008 and 2011, have been analysed using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach. The main finding of this analysis is that despite men being the perpetrators of the vast majority of different forms of violence towards women, in all four texts men’s practices are almost entirely invisible. This concealment is carried out through six core problematisations of men’s violence against women: as a problem of women; as a problem without perpetrators; as a problem without context; as a ‘gender-neutral’ problem; as an ‘agentless’ problem; and as a problem of the Other(s). With the policy focus restricted to victim-survivors, responsibility is placed on women for both causing and stopping men’s violence. The commonalities among the four texts suggest that there may be some convergence in contemporary problematisations of men’s violence against women by British and Finnish policymakers, where its systemic and gendered nature are recognised at a superficial level only.

    Keywords

    men’s violence against women, men and masculinities, problem representations, policy discourses, Finland, United Kingdom

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  • pp. 69–93

• Photo Series: Making Men and Man-Kind

  Damien Schumann

  • No abstract available.
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  • pp. 94–118

• Doing violence: Some reflections on research, affects, and ethics

  Mia Eriksson

  • Abstract

    This essay is about the embodied experience of writing a dissertation about Anders Behring Breivik and the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011. I will reflect upon what it was like to do research on material that recounts, with great detail, the life of a right-wing terrorist and the violence that he unleashed. My dissertation focuses on the ‘stories’ about Breivik, i.e. how his actions have been made sense of and how the violence of the terrorist attack has been narrated, but I also wrote a lot about how it felt to read and write about such a person and such an event. This emotional data became an important part of my research and in this essay I will elaborate further on the ethical and theoretical implications of this; the affective relationship between researcher and research material; and the practice of reading and the methodology of writing. I will argue that in order to analyze what a text does, it is not enough to deconstruct what it says. One also needs to deconstruct the relationship between text, the world it writes, and the feeling, reading body.

    Keywords

    Research Ethics, Violence, emotions, methodology, Breivik

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  • pp. 119–127

• Counselling as an intervention strategy for men who use violence in their intimate relationships

  Elzette Rousseau-Jemwa, Lynn Hendricks and Kerryn Rehse

  • Abstract

    International research increasingly highlights that if a significant reduction in intimate partner violence (IPV) is to be achieved, it will be important to establish interventions that include both men and women, and are aimed at addressing the social norms that maintain such violence. In South Africa 1 in 4 men report to use some form of violence in their intimate relationships. In some instances in South Africa it has been found that men do not view their behaviour as constituting violence since these harmful practices are ingrained in the culture as normal, culturally appropriate, and normative intimate relationship behaviour. In the current formative evaluation, an exploration into counselling services as an intervention strategy for men who use violence was done in Mitchell’s Plain, South Africa. This study included in-depth interviews with men (N=6) who used violence in their intimate relationships, and focus-groups with their counsellors (N=4). Men reported violence as a personal crisis aggravated by social environments. Furthermore, counsellors perceived help seeking of men to be based on individual choice. The conceptualisation of IPV, experiences of reciprocal abuse in relationships, help-seeking behaviour and masculinity, access to intervention services for men, and ultimately the preliminary outcomes of counselling on men’s violent behaviour were explored.

    Keywords

    intimate partner violence; counselling; help-seeking behaviour; masculinity; relationship abuse; qualitative research

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  • pp. 128–146

• “Man Up”: Observing the Social Construction of Boys’ Masculinity

  Elan Justice Pavlinich

  • Keywords

    Baseball, competition, play, Violence

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  • pp. 147–151

• Loving Conqueror: Psychologization of Masculinity in Contemporary Kerala

  Ranjini Krishnan

  • Abstract

    This paper tries to engage with the shift in the ways in which the idea of ‘man’ and the notion of the ‘intimate’ are imagined in their mutual imbrications in Kerala, South India. It is anchored around the idea, practice and experience of aadyaraathri or first night, a privileged moment of heterosexuality in the given culture. The paper treats first night as a distinct vantage point and as a ‘surface of emergence’ to study the contestations and re-negotiations over ideas, ideals and norms of masculinity. It argues that the surveillance around this practice which takes one particular form, the form of psychologization, is constitutive in the making of the gendered (male) subject and the intimate. The paper documents the diagnostic gaze deployed around the practice of first night which creates the figure of a ‘savage man’, who in turn embodies violent sexual impulses. The paper tries to show how the civilizing mission of the psychological discourses in Kerala displaces the violent masculinity with a carefully crafted rhetoric of intimacy which reproduces the mind-body dualism.

    Keywords

    masculinity, Sexual Violence, Pop Psychology, Psychologization, Mind- Body Dualism

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  • pp. 152–178

• “When they found out I was a man, they became even more violent”: Autoethnography and the rape of men

  Gcobani Qambela

  • Abstract

    It is important to understand sexual and gender based violence (GBV) in South Africa which has one of the world’s highest rates of sexual and GBV. In this paper, I focus and interrogate sexual assault and rape of men by other men. I consider harm done by boys/men not one dimensionally (i.e. boys/men harming women), but through the violence and aggression boys/men inflict on other men/boys. Through the qualitative research method, autoethnography, I look at the ways in which men harm other men through the prism of male rape. I demonstrate how autoethnography, grounded in personal experience, hindsight and reflexive writing is of great usefulness in exploring sensitive, traumatic and sensitive events. Through my own narrative, I show autoethnography is important in the analysis of individual experience to make sense of social phenomena. I contend male rape is used as a stopping device for men and boys who do not fit the hegemonic moulds of idealised masculinity, boyhood and manhood. I call for greater attention to the sexual violence of boys and men by other men, which albeit promising international work and scholarship, still remains scant and ignored in current South African literature outside of institutionalised settings like prison and military.

    Keywords

    male rape, South Africa, sexuality, masculinities, Violence

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  • pp. 179–205

• Introducing perpetrator counseling in Western Balkan countries: The challenge of gender-transformative action in a patriarchal society

  Maja Loncarevic and Roland Reisewitz

  • Abstract

    In cooperation with two locally based NGO initiatives in the strongly patriarchal contexts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, professional psychosocial counseling of perpetrators has been introduced. Through targeted skills development with professionals from psychosocial working fields and opening of two men‘s counseling services, a foundation has been laid for future system-integrated perpetrator treatment programs. Key lessons learned address the necessary basic prerequisites for successful perpetrator counseling. Experience shows that standardized training programs and proceedings for psychosocial perpetrator counseling are not sufficient to promote sustainable changes in the gender-related value and norm system of perpetrators of violence. For the counselors themselves, a personal reflection of their own experiences and socialization with gender, masculinity and violence is an important gender-transformative learning process that forms an important basis for empathic, competent and sustainable anti-violence counseling of perpetrators. The attentive consideration of intercultural dynamics combined with a clear human rights based approach are further relevant factors contributing to successful counseling.

    Keywords

    Gender-based violence, domestic violence perpetrators, psychosocial treatment, counseling skills, gender-transformative learning

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  • pp. 206–221