Men who work with boys in gender norms change programs often experience transformations of their own. A new paper by Niharika Ravi and Akshat Singhal, drawing on the work of The Gender Lab (TGL), explores how young men facilitating gender and masculinities programming with adolescent boys begin to reflect on and renegotiate their own masculinities.
Published in Development in Practice, “Facilitating Change: Personal Journeys of Male Facilitators in Gender and Masculinities Programming with Adolescent Boys” draws on TGL’s experience of working to redefine masculinities since 2017 through its Boys Program. This practitioner's note captures stories from four young male facilitators of The Gender Lab Boys Program in India, suggesting that working with boys as role models could support young men in discovering a changed narrative of masculinity in their lives.
The note captures facilitators' stories of employing vulnerability, humour and local slang to connect with adolescent boys through a program to redefine masculinities, and the reflections on their own masculinities that these efforts evoked. The note attempts to sift evidence of ongoing relational re-constructions of masculinity between the young men and the boys from these stories, revealing shifts in facilitators' own performances, expressions, and exercises of gender and masculinities alongside their negotiations with the pressure of masculine norms across contexts.
This work hence suggests that working with boys as role models could be an intervention for young men towards discovering a changed narrative of masculinity in their lives. The tensions shared by the facilitators, including living intervention values across spheres of life and facing isolation as men in feminist masculinities work, lead the note to call for compassionate spaces to hold the experiences of facilitators of norms change work on gender and masculinities. To read this paper, click here.
