Conference Agenda

There is a prevailing feminist critique that the reductionistic and mechanistic approaches currently dominating science are the result of patriarchal tendencies to divide, abstract, hierarchise and control (e.g. Plumwood 1993). Part of this critique is that many women, owing to their positionality in patriarchal societies, are for a variety of complex reasons, more attuned with caring approaches to relationships (Gilligan 1982), and therefore better able to offer a different way of encountering and knowing the world. What is offered is a more participatory view, where the knower interacts with the world she seeks to know and is therefore responsible for/with it (Haraway 1988); or perhaps one where caring is replaced as the fundamental mode of interaction, with knowing a mere dimension of it. In either case, knowing is repositioned as inseparable from being, or from ethics (Barad 2007). In making this move, such critiques both call out and seek to repair pernicious dualisms that reinforce specific kinds of antagonistic power configurations.

We do not question the significance of feminist care ethics, or that the positioning of women within patriarchy affords certain kinds of attunement with caring and relational ways of being. What we want to challenge is another implicit dualism we have felt resides in some ways of positioning the problem. We want to claim that despite patriarchy's role in normalising reductionistic and abstractive modes of engagement, and despite the dark marriage such engagement has had with scientific methods, men can and have also brought relational approaches into their encounter with people and the world. We know such relational approaches are possible for (cis, white) men in patriarchal society because we are ourselves two males filled with love for their topics, their students and the world.

However, we are also acutely aware of the threats to such dimensions of male experience. First, there is the potential problem that many feminist critics themselves recognise: that positioning abstraction, reductionism and so on under the male archetype might inadvertently re-enforce those very characteristics in men. The second is that men bringing love into encountering the world and students can be viewed as having suspicious motivations not necessarily presumed for women attempting the same. The result is a kind of double-bind that pinches away at the possibilities for a renewed and different mode of relation.

That said, while such circumstances present challenges, we are adamant that a 'masculinist' exploration of love, in curriculum and pedagogy, but also in theory and practice, is not only possible, but necessary. We are proposing a Dream Team session to open discussions into what this might be. The aim would be to share stories of male experiences engaging with love as part of a scientific or pedagogical practice, to discuss challenges, and to find ways of forming communities of practice to support the development of love in these fields. We would take the lead by sharing some of our own stories and struggles before facilitating a discussion and writing-exploration of these core aims.

The session encourages people identifying with any sex and gender, to come to recover a masculinist love or to ally in the recovery, or both; and the session will be set up to facilitate such collaborations. To be clear, however, it is not our intention to argue for specifics about how or what patriarchy does to enable the possibility of male love despite its well-known problems, nor to argue for any essential distinctions it has owing to its arising from the 'male experience' within patriarchy. 'Masculinist' is not taken to presume a specific quality other than its being oriented on the intrinsic relational possibilities in men's experience. How men can learn from and share in feminist politics and theory is therefore also a core question. Finally, though this should be obvious by now, 'masculinist' is not an attempt to recover male power-over under some alleged zero-sum threat from feminists. It is however, an attempt to recover new kinds of power-with (Follett 1942) de-emphasised by contemporary framings.

Come explore with us.

References:

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning Duke University Press.

Follett, M. P. (1942). Dynamic administration: The collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brothers.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge.