Self-Organizing Man

Since the mid 1990s many great books have been published addressing notions of masculinity, maleness, gender and feminism. From Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Messner’s Men’s Lives to R.W. Connell’s Masculinities, to Mark Allister’s Eco Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature conversations have begun around this thing called “masculinity.”

This work has continued into transmen/ftm/trannsexual male communities with the work of Morty Diamond’s From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FtM and Beyond and Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man. DJ Katastrophe, poet and hip hop artist Tim’m West and performance artist and activist Imani Henry also represent progressive forces investigating, interrogating and reorganizing understandings gender, masculinity, race, class and feminism.

Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space seeks to complicate these dialogues. Rather than masculinities existing somewhere outside of us, or in words or labels, I want to collaborate on what I describe as “masculinities in motion." In this space, we constantly reorganize our understanding of our masculinities (and learn how to learn about our masculinities) as we interact with other human, sentinent beings and physical spaces in the world.

Our bodies move through space and time. How we understand and practice our masculinities shifts through various contexts. How do we organize our understanding of ourselves through space and time?  Self Organizing Men examines how masculinity shifts, changes, works back onto itself as we interact in different social contexts; how these new understandings change us and may create new forms of affinity politics Self Organzing Men seeks complications, paradox, irony, multi/poly vocals. Self OrganizingMen seeks submissions of critical essays and cultural critiques, interviews, creative non-fiction and personal narratives, fiction, poetry using words or graphic formats. Language must be accessible. Submitted works using academic jargon will be returned.

Considerations (or add your own. Email me with your ideas/queries):

How have you arrived at your various understandings of your masculinities(y)?  How have your concepts of masculinity changed?

How has your impairment supported your masculinity?  How have you addressed stereoptypes about confinement, dependency, the role of pity as these feelings/modes of treatment connect with masculinity?

If you partner with women, how have you come to terms with liking your partners to act sexually submissive, particularly if you identify as male/man most of the time?

What, if any, experiences do you have of “complex hybridization” with your body and prosthetic devices (from penises, to heart valves, to limbs). 

How have you interrogated the language of masculinity (broadly: he his him man, male) and remarked and rewritten it for your own good ends?

How has your revolutionizing of masculinity created more opportunities for affinity politics and/or oppositional consciousness? 

How have you mourned people, places, things, behaviors, world views, bodily artefacts you have lost, or never had, as you assume/interrogate/live in your masculinity?

How have you celebrated people, places, things, behaviors, world views, bodily artefacts you have gained as you live in a conscious masculinity?

If you have adopted hormonal strategies to address bodily concerns, how have you addressed and reformed stereotypes about “dependency,” “medicalizations” and “masculinity”?

As your understanding of your masculinity changes, have you reorganized your understandings of men, males, women, females? People of so-called “different races”?  People living with impairments?  Your own “race”?

How has being read as a man (whether some, most or all of your time) increased, decreased, shifted, redirected, transformed your physical movement through the streets and roads of your worlds whether by foot, bus, car, chair, singlely or as part of a group?  Does this shift change depending on the context?  (For example as a white [all the time] man [some of the time] I move away from all women moving through the world alone at night.  As a woman [some of the time] I did not make these choices.

How has your skin color impacted your movment through the world as a man?

How has your sexing changed?

How has your spirituality changed?

What does the phrase “ironically masculine” mean for you?

If you “pass” as a man or wear the guise of masculinity, how do you use these strategies as “a decisive tool in the overthrow of heteronormativity and partriarchy” (Tim’m West)

"I’m interested in redefining masculinity with a marker of vulnerability, love, passion I’m talking about some real challenges to our need to control, especially our emotions, intuitions and desires.” (Tim’m West)

Describe how you live with paradox/irony.  For example, how I live as white, heterosexual man in a transsexual body requires me to live with extreme privilege and disadvantage all in the same body.

Contexts

Self Organizing Men may or may not adopt surgical and hormonal strategies for bodily necessity; may or may not have prosthetic penises; may or may not live as men all the time; may or may not be an xy coded organism; may or may not find useful or descriptive terms such as transsexual, transgender, tranny fag, gender queer, man, masculine.  Some, none or all may apply.

“Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play.”  Donna Haraway

Self Organizing Men moves through time and space in flesh and blood bodies interacting with our physical, social, psychic, communal, religious, sexual enviornments. Self Organizing Men creates sites of oppositional consciousness with all sentinent beings not labels  We create survival strategies based on affinities - like minded beings - rather than on identities - like bodied minds.

Self Oranizing Men interrogates, reinvents, reinterprets, revolutionizes “man” and “masculinity." Self Organizing Men may or may not have always existed in the margins. Yet the interrogation of “man” and “masculinity” may shift us to the margins, where “identity” becomes partial and conditional.

Here, in and from the margins, we teach about the power of the margins.

Submit

Complex, ironic understandings of one’s bodily existence will be given precedence over works that do not do this. Of particular interest are stories which critically address racialized assumptions about the supremacy of gender which predominates in white communities or which present understandings about living in a white, male [some of the time] body. Also of interest are pieces which discuss complex, ironic understandings of movements in spiritual/religious communities and movements between disability communities and TAB (temporarily able bodied) communities, up through class, down through education, around bathrooms, political organizing and back home.

For other topics please submit your ideas to me at jay@jaysennett.com

Word Count/Page Limits:

Personal Narratives – 20 pages/5000 words
Fiction – 20 pages/5000 words
Critical Essays and Cultural Critiques – 20 pages (including bibliography) 5000 words
Interviews – 10 pages/2500 words

Poetry/Rhymes – No more than 3 pages per poem/rhyme and 3 poems per poet/mc
Graphic Stories – No more than three pages per submission (number of panels up to you) Up to three pieces per artist (B and W only!)

Deadline: November 15, 2005

All rights revert to the author upon publication

Submit your stuff as either a word or pdf attachment PLUS a bio and valid email address to jay@jaysennett.com

Jay Sennett is a writer, artist, husband, activist and yoga practitioner living in Southeast Michigan. His understanding of his masculinity has changed many, many times since he started his masculine journey eleven years ago. You can read more about him at www.jaysennett.com or www.jaysennett.typepad.com.