Out of the Man Box: Notes on Feminist Leadership

Monday, March 31, 2008

Notes on Feminist Leadership

by Charles Knight, 31 March 2008

These are some aspects and common themes of feminist leadership that I recognize from a few years of practice. I have compiled these here from a quick survey of literature:

1. Awareness of self as part of a larger whole -- both in the present moment and through generations and cultural legacy. Attention to history (ancestry). Greater attention to interconnectedness and collectivity than to autonomy and independence. Understanding that leadership is rooted in communities and histories and therefore one person or group cannot define it for another (Women’s Theological Center - Spiritual Leadership). Self/community knowledge and discovery is a necessary part of the process.

2. Shared leadership. Attention to bringing the collectivity/community along. Affirmation of emergent leadership qualities inherent in all (“training more about affirming skills than imparting skills” – Susan Eaton). Mentoring. Collective support for challenging each person toward the best practice of leadership.

3. Relational. Building strong trusting relationships. Relational/Cultural models. Importance of storytelling in affirmation of the person and the community.

4. Inspirational/Spiritual (with depth). Oriented to the protection and nourishment of the human spirit in everyone wherein the capacity for leadership resides – thus increasing the capacity to transform the individual, their relationships, organizations, and communities.

5. Clarity of purpose with an orientation toward the transformational (of the individual and the whole).

6. Explicit awareness and attention to power dynamics and their varied meanings in the context of different cultures and identities. Critical attention to the role of fear and the need for control in the power relations of dominance. Sympathetic recognition of fear in the individual and the community. Much of leadership is about bringing people through their fears toward collective goals.

7. Attention to learning the practice of ritual, celebration, and the personal and community expressions of joy and sadness. Joyful expression is highly valued.

8. Creating safe environments for expression, self-care, participation, and growth of leadership skills. Welcoming and affirming the presence of the whole/complete person in the community.

Sources
Disabled Women’s Network Ontario (DAWN Ontario), Feminist Principles - Leadership, http://dawn.thot.net/feminism11.html (31 March 2008)

Women’s Theological Center (Boston), What is Spiritual Leadership?, 2004 http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/womenstheologicalcenter.pdf (18 April 2019)

Judith V. Jordan and Linda M. Hartling, The Development of Relational-Cultural Theory, http://otherbeyondrealmen.blogspot.com/2006/10/jean-baker-miller-celebrating-her-life.html (31 March 2008)

Seminar in Honor of Susan Eaton, MIT Faculty Club, 14 May 2004.

Jean Lau Chin, References, 2003
http://www.feministleadership.com/discuss/read.php?22,270 (31 March 2008)
http://www.feministleadership.com/

Charles Knight edits the blog called OBRM – other & beyond real men http://otherbeyondrealmen.blogspot.com/

about the editor, this blog & associated publications

I have been following the engagement of men in changing gender relations for a couple of decades now.

I have experienced both the difficulties and the great benefits of change. I have contributed a bit to the literature. I am on the advisory board of Voice Male Magazine and BKNation. I am a founding associate of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinity.

I have worked [now semi-retired] as a national security analyst. I am a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.

In that work I write critical studies of U.S. defense policy. I also spend time making information about national security issues available on the Web so that millions of people in the United States and around the world are better informed and therefore better prepared to engage in the politics of security.

In 2004 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. Given conventional gender performance expectations of men this 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.

I realized that in order to make it harder for men like George Bush to lead us into unnecessary 'wars of choice' 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 men organizing their own liberation from the confines of conventional masculinity.

A friend called my attention to the literature of people who have trans-gendered. Reading their stories brought home to me how much of what we experience as our gender is socially constructed and can be reconstructed by our own agency.

If we allow ourselves to think outside the confines of the binary Male/Female, the possibilities for liberating males is huge and obvious.

In this blog I have sought to build out ideas and practice for the liberation of positive new masculinities. I call attention to instances of the expression of new masculinities and to collective action in support of liberation and an end to gender violence.

I started this blog in 2006. In 2015 I associated it with a curated publication called Out of the Man Box (on the Flipboard platform.)

This publication collects the best writing (also videos) I find on liberating masculinities from the so-called man box of conventionality.

Out of the Man Box is published in association with Voice Male magazine.

Charles Knight

Out of the Man Box

Man in Box

Monday, March 31, 2008

Notes on Feminist Leadership

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