My feminist friends tell me that it is important to ‘locate’ myself when I write. And blog culture is very conducive to writing about ‘me’, so for this first post on this new blog I will take the hint and tell you something about myself and why I am taking the trouble to create this blog.
Professionally I work as a national security analyst. I work for a ‘think tank’ and I spend about half my time writing critical studies of U.S. defense policy (that should help you locate my political leanings) and the other half of my work goes to making information about national security issues available on the Web so that millions of people in the United States and around the world (we have actually reached millions with our Internet sites) are better informed and therefore better prepared to engage in the politics of security.
I am a male. My ancestry is primarily European-American. My family has accumulated and passed along considerable wealth over generations. I am sixty years-old. I have been married to the same woman for almost forty years. I have three children and two grandchildren. Pretty straight! At least you’d think so by the description so far. And I have been pretty lucky, in many ways! More about me in future posts...I promise.
Back to national security. Several years ago I started to get serious about gender and national security. I watched while George Bush and Karl Rove successfully called John Kerry’s masculinity into question around a war in which Kerry had served with distinction while Bush had used family connections to avoid going. Seemed like an unlikely formula for political success. But Bush and Rove used male insecurity and female attachment to the most fundamental of bargains in patriarchy (men protecting the women folk) to build an election victory.
It was then that I decided that in order to make it harder for men like George Bush to lead us into wars we need to free as many males as possible from the tyranny of wondering if they are ‘real men’ so that they can confidently say ‘no’ to war (as well as other destructive behaviors.) And that will take a movement of liberation of males from the confines of conventional masculinity.
A friend called my attention to the literature of people who have trans-gendered. Reading their stories really brought home to me how much of what we experience as our gender is socially constructed. If trans people can do it and if we just allow ourselves to think outside the confines of the binary Male/Female, the possibilities for liberating males is huge and obvious.
One day, inspired, I started to draft a manifesto about this type of male liberation. I showed it to some trusted feminist friends and the feedback I got convinced me that it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. And besides, a manifesto is a political document, and, as such, it is better if it represents the views of more than one person. So I will ask some others to help me revise and add their voices to it. When it appears in print I trust it will be the stronger for it.
Meanwhile, what about this blog? I imagine developing here, in a less formal way, some of the ideas that are in my draft manifesto and other essays I have written to date. There is so much that needs to be explored. I will also invite some of the wonderful people I have met in gender studies and in feminist politics to join me here with their ideas and comments. I invite your thoughts, dear reader, and will post those I judge to add something meaningful to a mutual exploration of promising new gender space. Write me at otherbeyond(at)gmail.com.
C.D.Knight
