Men and Masculinities

This article examines the relationship between discussions of responsibility in and for financial crisis and the locations and effects of gendered power and privilege in the global political economy. Most of these discussions have absented the ways in which power in the global political economy was, is and might continue to be gendered, which has served to reinforce the ‘natural fact’ of economic liberalization, integration and human progress through the expansion of Western-style financial capitalism and has obscured the highly masculinized and ethnocentric model of human activity on which this has been built. This article suggests that accounts of crisis that do not interrogate the ways in which organizations, actors, ideas and norms interact to actively construct the social setting(s) of financial discourse will fail to see contributory factors to crisis as a whole. This article takes seriously the effects of the culture of privilege, competitive success and masculine prowess that contemporary financial discourse has created and sustained and interrogates, against the abstractionism of contemporary neoliberalism and its advocates, where gendered configurations of power, knowledge, representation and identity have enabled contemporary global financial discourse to configure and reproduce ideas and practices of individual, collective and moral responsibility.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, a major change has occurred in the public understanding of prostitution, with the focus shifting from the sex worker to the client. On the social scientific side, studies on clients have growingly shed light on motivations and behaviors of men who buy sex. On the juridical-political side, in many countries across the globe a trend has emerged towards the criminalization of clients, represented as responsible for the perpetuation and proliferation of the sex market and for its oppressive and victimizing effects on sex workers. The aim of this paper is to retrace this turn and to discuss its political and cultural meaning, showing how the discourse on male responsibility in prostitution involves the risk of unilateral stances and partial views on the sex market. What I argue is that new gender-sensitive thinking on prostitution is needed, context-rooted and free from prejudicial understandings.

Men in the contemporary Middle East suffer from high rates of male infertility, and are generally willing to acknowledge their reproductive impairments. “Taking responsibility” for infertility means seeking a diagnosis, trying assisted reproductive technologies, and engaging in a retrospective process of etiological assessment. Infertile Middle Eastern men's etiological narratives reveal five perceived answers to the “why me?” question: heredity, illicit sex, war, stress, and pollution. Although only one of these factors --heredity --is routinely invoked in the biomedical literature on male infertility, at least three of the other factors may, in fact, be linked to men's infertility in the Middle East. To ameliorate these various factors would require many fundamental improvements in Middle Eastern social conditions, including the elimination of all forms of political violence and oppression. Furthermore, the Reproductive Health Initiative initiated in Cairo in 1994 has done little for the infertile men of the Middle East, as no direct health education programs or treatment services have been made widely available to them. Thus, Middle Eastern men must “take responsibility” for their infertility on their own, seeking out diagnoses, paying for private treatment, and acting as lay epidemiologists in their search for the root causes of their infertility. In the end, Middle Eastern men prove to be astute observers of the social conditions that have produced their reproductive life histories and embodied subjectivities.

This paper explores the male batterer's account of his violence based on a qualitative study of a sample of working class men, alleged batterers, conducted in Caribbean island of Trinidad demonstrating that the violence that they perform is integral to their masculine gender identity and that they take little or no responsibility for this violence. The findings are congruent with the international literature on the male account of battering which consistently reveals patterns of denial, minimization, excuses and justifications - tools through which the batterer may deny responsibility or accept limited responsibility for his violence. The paper also highlights the international and regional trends in responsibility in relation to masculinity and men's violence against known women particularly in the context of battering. In this study the complexity of the issue of responsibility in relation to local masculinities is further developed in the question of men taking responsibility for their violence against female intimate (ex)partners if not the men themselves.

As the majority perpetrators of sexual violence, it is plausible to see men as responsible for war rape not only as individuals, but also as collective bystanders, facilitators and beneficiaries. Following recent criticisms of individual legal and moral responsibility for rape as a war crime in international law, this article examines how we might think of war rape as a collective action in moral and explanatory terms. First, it assesses existing moral arguments for the responsibility of men in groups for rape, primarily with reference to the work of Claudia Card, Larry May and Robert Strikwerda. Critiquing elements of these arguments, it explores the difficulties in talking about `men' as a coherent group and in discussing `collectives' themselves. Second, the article draws out the connection between accounts of moral responsibility and accounts of causal responsibility. Drawing on critiques of collective responsibility and the long-standing agency/structure problem, it argues that causal accounts focusing on structure pose a serious challenge to ideas of both individual and collective moral responsibility. The complexities of the relationship between moral and causal claims are illustrated through a discussion of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon's influential perspectives on rape. The seeming paradox of responsibility is emphasised as a problem to be addressed by gender and feminist perspectives that seek to pursue both ethical and explanatory inquiry into the workings of masculinity and the political means for undoing gendered wrongs.

Inspired by the themes of violence, masculinity and responsibility, this article investigates the visibility of male victims/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in war. Despite the passing of UNSCR 1820 in 2008, the formulation of UN ACTION (United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict), and the appointment of a United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General to lead policy and practice in this issue area, we argue here that male survivors/victims remain a marginal concern, which has, among other consequences, profound implications for the facilities that exist to support male victims/survivors during and after periods of active conflict. In the first section of the article, we provide an overview of the contemporary academic literature on rape in war, not only to act as the foundation for the analytical work that follows but also to illustrate the argument that male survivors/victims of sexualised violence in war are near-invisible in the majority of literature on this topic. Second, we turn our analytical lens to the policy environment charged with addressing sexualised violence in conflict. Through a discourse analysis focussed on the website of UN ACTION (www.stoprapenow.org), we demonstrate that this lack of vision in academic work maps directly to a lack of visibility in the policy arena. The third section of the article explores the arrangements in place within extant peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction programmes that aim to facilitate recovery with victims/survivors of sexualised violence in war. We conclude with reflections on the themes of violence, masculinity and responsibility in the context of sexualised violence in war and suggest that in this context all privileged actors have a responsibility to theorise violence with careful attention to gender in order to avoid perpetuating models of masculinity and war-rape that have potentially pernicious effects.