The Personal Is the Political: Community Engagement With Men as Feminist Border Crossing

• In Event: 70.035 - Feminist Community Engagement: Achieving Praxis

Abstract

Through their work in one university’s women’s center, the authors, and their male allies, negotiate ongoing “border crossings” (Anzaldúa, 1987) between personal/political, past/present, staff/educator/student roles, service/activism, institution/community, insider/outsider, and the complexity of interactions of self-making/being made. In this paper, the authors analyze the processes and outcomes of social justice activism expressed in and through community engagement work with male allies. Employing an intentional feminist model of critical methodology and pedagogies, they examine how one women’s center’s engagement with men’s activism campaigns can be examined through a framework of border crossing and negotiating conceptual geographies. Describing the development of the center’s earlier Men Against Violence groups, as well as the present configuration of the Young Men’s Leadership Program, a multi-layered school based mentoring program, they explore the competing challenges and tensions of navigating the women’s center’s work with men. In sum, they seek to deepen our understanding of the “messiness” (Lather, 2007) of community engagement that endeavors to live in the in-between in order to contribute to a more equitable society.

Authors

• Lamea Shaaban-Magana, The University of Alabama

• Melanie Miller, University of Alabama