ABSTRACT
Diversity has become a buzzword in the public discourse on today's world. In this article we talk about diversity within men's sense of self, and the repression of their sense of self by the imposition of a socially constructed “masculinity.”
Men who come for therapy in our clinic are often marginalized because they have trouble in assimilating to the cultural norms of patriarchy. Our ongoing discussions about the pains of men who resist a seductive social representation has helped us to identify our own dilemmas.
Our feminist perspectives, in terms of social, political, and economic analyses, led to a new paradigm in which to view our male clients. While we acknowledge a vast diversity in how men deal with 90self's diversity, we have chosen to talk about two specific ways many of our male clients contain it. In this article, we track these issues and this journey toward a new paradigm based on feminist analyses, our politics and our separate social locations in society as a racialized woman (NJ) and as a white woman (NG). Our personal struggles of raising our sons and our professional work with male clients is described in order to shed light on “border crossing and living our contradictions.”
