ABSTRACT

This chapter examines both the reinstallation and intervention into, dominant gendered patterns after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. It focuses on advancement of men to positions of movement leadership and the promulgation and occasional subversion of dominant modalities of masculinity in movement values, visions and organizing styles. Within hours of Katrina's landfall, local and national grassroots social movement organizers coalesced in the effort author call the movement for a Just Reconstruction. The post-disaster social movement provides the opportunity to examine men and masculinity across other social positionalities; important intersections of race, class, place, age and political experience complicate reductive notions of gender while also revealing gendered patterns. It describes the reproduction of men's leadership, turn to an analysis of movement masculinity and then address instances of actual and potential intervention. Kai describes how the gendered experience of the disaster scape was reified in ways that promoted male leadership and naturalized masculinity.