(hopefully) Masculinities

     Just looking at the title of this again--I put together this web page as a compendium of masculinities and GAD resources, but seeing that title has made me think about my own experience of masculinities and development in the IGO/NGO world.  It's an established and discouraging fact that some huge percentage (around 80, I believe, but I'm going to assume it's changing and not look up the number!) of masculinities/development researchers in the world are female.  While that doesn't matter to the research, it does highlight the fact that research on masculinities and development has grown out of gender and development work, a field that itself grew out of Women and Development.  Women and Development research and work was devoted to elevating the status of women in LDCs and redressing the inequalities of their lives--unsurprisingly, there was much overlap with the feminist movement and almost everyone working in the field was female.
     My thesis at Bristol was on the evolution of this system--now apparently organizations are supposed to be concentrating on "gender" and the interconnectedness of relationships in a society.  At UNESCO and other UN organizations gender is a "cross-cutting" issue--it's supposed to be involved in the planning and mobilization of every project.  Too often, however, it's simply a box to be checked--"I have thought about gender in the creation of my project"--and plays no real role in project planning or execution.
      In this system, which makes gender (along with HIV/AIDS and various MDGs, depending on the organization) an issue that hangs over everything, real thinking about gender disappears in the nebulousness of responsibility.  A "cross-cutting" issue is certainly everywhere, but there is no real responsibility to implement it, just to acknowledge that you've thought about it.  As such, Gender and Development work is limited to the small sections of IGOs and NGOs that deal with gender.  These sections, understandably uncomfortable with the marginalization of their supposedly all-important issue, concentrate on something very concrete--women's rights.  Issues of masculinities and development, which grew out of an all-encompassing gender and development outlook, do not even enter the picture.
     There are newer, specific masculinities-focused organizations now, but as for MAD entering the overall mindset of UN organizations or international NGOs, we still have to hope.