Critical Social Work with Men: Challenging Men’s Complicity in the Reproduction of Patriarchy and Male Privilege

IntroductionIn the last twenty years of literature on radical and critical social work, notwithstanding the important contribution of feminist social work during this time, there have been only six key texts focusing on engaging men from a critical gender perspective (Pringle 1995; Cavanagh and Cree 1996; Christie 2001; Scourfield 2003; Featherstone et al. 2007). This limited attention to profeminist practice by men in social work is surprising, given the extensive literature on critical masculinity and gender studies. The social work texts cited above are informed by this wider critical scholarship and are contrasted with the more traditional therapeutic approaches to engaging men in the human services (Rowan 1997; Brooks and Good 2001; Glicken 2005; Wexler 2009). In this article, I identify some of the implications of this critical theoretical work for understanding patriarchy and male privilege and outline one approach for engaging men about their complicity in the reproduction of gender inequality.Critical masculinity and gender studies is differentiated from the wider men's studies literature which draws upon socio-biological, psychoanalytical, Jungian and sex role theories (Pease 2000: 19-22). It is informed by both materialist and discursive approaches and is concerned with the multiple levels of men's dominance manifested through the structural relations of patriarchal gender regimes, patriarchal ideologies, male peer group culture, men's sexism and coercive control, and patriarchal subjectivities of men (Pease 2014: 31-33). It also recognises the importance of the intersection of gender with class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, able-bodiedness and geo-political location as it plays out in specific contexts and with specific groups of men.Drawing upon this critical literature, for some years now, I have been making a case for the importance of developing profeminist practice with men in social work (Pease 2001, 2003, 2009a), engaging men in men's violence prevention (Pease 1995, 2011, 2014) and locating critical practice with men in the context of male privilege and its intersections with geo-political, class, race, sexuality and ability/disability regimes (Pease 2004, 2009b, 2010a). I thus argue that critical social work practice with men must be situated within the context of patriarchy and the divisions of class, race, sexuality and other forms of inequality, while at the same time exploring ways in which patriarchal belief systems become embedded in men's subjectivities. In this article, I outline the key pillars of patriarchy, as I argue that men need to understand patriarchy before they can find ways of acknowledging their complicity within it.The Structural Relations of PatriarchyOver twenty-five years ago, Walby (1990) identified six sites of patriarchy for analysing different forms of gender inequality: household (where women's household labour is exploited by husbands and male partners); paid work (where women are excluded from high status jobs, receive less pay and are often employed in segregated sections of the labour force); the state (where there is a systematic bias in favour of men's interests); male violence (which is legitimated by the state); sexuality (where compulsory heterosexuality and sexual double standards reign) and cultural institutions (which represent women in negative ways in the media, religion and education).More recently, DeKeseredy and Schwatz (2013: 54) differentiate between social patriarchy involving men's domination at the societal level and familial patriarchy which refers to men's control of women in domestic settings. These two levels of patriarchy are interconnected and the interpersonal dynamics of men and women need to be considered in the macro-level gender order. Much interrogation of gender power at the family level focuses on the interpersonal dynamics of men in relation to women, ignoring the patriarchal power structures in the wider society within which men and women are located (Yllo 1984: 308). …