ABSTRACT
Since at least the 1990s, the need for men to be engaged in addressing gender inequality has been on the global agenda. A Gender and Development rubric typically frames knowledge about relations of gender in the Global South. Men enter this conversation as threats to modernizing gender systems in developing countries. In fact, calls for men’s inclusion in gender and development policy and programming have highlighted men’s power brokering as the reason for their inclusion, with arguments that seem more concerned with programme efficacy – the instrumental engagement with men to ensure their support for development initiatives – than with challenging masculinist relations of power. Using the narratives of five activist men from four English-speaking Caribbean countries, this chapter complicates discussions on men as partners for gender equality in the Global South. It investigates men’s contradictory consciousness embedded in the polyvocality of the men’s narratives; and the multiple, competing and contested ways in which they position themselves relative to other men, to gender equality activism and to women and feminist activists. It is attentive to both the residual coloniality of this discourse in the Caribbean, as well as the new ways that activist men shape advocacy aimed at producing more gender-just futures.
