ABSTRACT
Feminist approaches have played a key role in transforming the welfare state as well as social work. Given this, in a social work degree, there is a tacit assumption that over the course of their enrolment, social work students will find their professional identity in this symbiosis of feminism and welfare and, possibly, become feminist allies. How this is negotiated in the classroom and what that means in practice is the focus of a growing discussion. Drawing on recent academic literature on this topic, this chapter attempts to ground key terms, such as male feminist allyship highlighting tensions as well as opportunities that might assist students to position themselves in relation to political and professional identities that are strongly contested. The chapter takes a comparative approach focused on allyship in relation to social movements and developmental social work education. This departs somewhat from the main-stream debate in social work that is focused on masculinity and associated societal norms and structures. We believe that bringing social psychology and sociological contributions to the discussion offers a different perspective to the social work allyship literature that tends to draw on feminist ethics and associated narratives and norms that define (male) moral agents. The chapter takes a chronological approach providing a very brief summary of both historical and theoretical trajectories that, organised around an ethics of care, increasingly de-centre essential difference, gender, and the human at the centre of allyship rendering visible the need to critically reflect on what feminist allyship means within a contemporary social work context.
