Rethinking conceptual representations of masculinity in international development gender equality training

Training men to become advocates for gender equality and to prevent violence against women is increasingly seen as an important aspect of international development work. Many international curricula have been developed that aim to improve gender equality and prevent men’s violence against women by teaching (male) participants about gender relations, However the extent to which feminist and critical masculinities literature has influenced the pedagogical content is not well known. This paper explores a sample of training programmes focussing on both the explicit and implicit conceptual representation of ‘masculinity’ as it is taught to participants. A range of shortcomings of the operationalisation of ‘masculinity’ in the curricula is revealed and a proposal for moving to a profeminist pedagogy is presented.