Guest Post: Masculinities? An essential question for freedom (reproductive and otherwise)

This guest post is from Davi Zielinski Koszka. It’s part of our partnership with the 2010 From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building a Movement for Reproductive Freedom Conference–happening this weekend!
I sit at my local coffee shop and gaze out at the street of the hippy-enclave of a small town, Olympia WA to jot some notes for my upcoming panel, “Masculinities,” at the annual CLPP conference – From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom. The conference begins in just under a week (April 9-11, 2010) and I, as always, am experiencing the ever-increasing, self-imposed and societally supported pressure to:

• Produce a product (in this case a perfect, packaged analysis that other consumer-activists can feel good about spouting at their next non-profit staff meeting)
• Authoritatively present a complete, critical, innovative, and otherwise perfect answer to everyone’s question of what to do with masculinity, gender roles, and gender.

Both are functions of my male socialization.
Before I attempt the above tasks, I want to share who I am and thus what experiences I bring to my relationship to masculinity. I am queer, male-bodied, genderqueer-identified, multi-gender presenting, and mixed-class experienced with an unclear racial background socialized as white. I make no pretension to have a clear understanding of all complexities regarding masculinity – masculine socialization and presentation – and its effects on the world in which it functions.

I have worked at a community sexual assault program and domestic violence shelter (SafePlace) and a queer youth organization (Stonewall Youth) here in Olympia and around issues of reproductive justice outside of the traditional nonprofit setting, and I am continually confronted with the unanswered questions regarding masculinity in social justice movements and organizations. We currently have more questions than answers.
I believe the construct of U.S. masculinity is unsustainable and violent. It demands capitalist consumption and ownership for validation, holds with it entitlement to its own existence and ultimately asserts its own necessity with increased violence when threatened. Capitalism necessitates the overvaluing of one over the other. It creates a class from which capital is created and stolen and a class where this stolen capital is accumulated. In this way US masculinity is a gendered mirror of capitalist dominance.
Ask yourself: What is essentially masculine? Why? What is emasculating? Why?
Or perhaps more interestingly: If one is emasculated, what remains? Is what remains bad? Is what remains “not masculine?” Do then “masculine” and “feminine” remain useful adjectives for anything?
And of course the complication: How do we move beyond gender essentialism and a binary rooted in and supportive of extortionist, capitalist modalities without erasing the real gender -identities of people? How are these ideals internalized in queer relationships and enacted on each other. What happens when you super-impose top/bottom dynamics over a series of internalized sexism and sexist messages?
Please bring your dialogue to the CLPP conference! These are questions that must be worked out to create space and freedom for ourselves! Reproductive freedom is justice and a free world.

Guest post by Davi Zielinski Koszka