Militant Manhood Revisited

Abstract

This discussion engages with Janet Conway's and Sian Sullivan's comments on our article, ‘Deconstructing Militant Manhood: Masculinities in the Disciplining of (Anti-)Globalization Politics’. First, we clarify our understanding of global capitalist forms of ordering and of the gendered scripts attendant to them as a response to Conway's call for a more intersectional analysis and to her point about the relationship between the situated practices we explore and the global order within which we locate them. In doing so, we defend our methodology based on an ascending analysis of power and the usefulness of our particular ethnographical approach to carry out such analysis. Second, we address Sullivan's concerns about our choice of an academic journal as the site for a discussion of the forms of gendered exclusion that we have experienced. While we have not been able to engender a space of active listening in the activist groups we analyse, developing our own tools of analysis of what had happened to us and finding this academic space to share them has been part of a process of making sense of our traumatic experiences both intellectually and emotionally.

Keywords:

• (anti-)globalization movements
• ethnography
• gender
• listening
• methodology
• resistance

Notes

Given that our discussion of Serena's involvement in the anarchist social centre addresses the politics and emotional consequences of the erasure of the genderqueer subject, we would like to query Sian Sullivan's characterization of the journal in terms of ‘women talking with each other about their experiences’ (this issue: 220).