Goals

Problem statement:

Gender equality does not only benefit women who are often victims of visible and invisible discrimination. While men as a group do exercise power over women, patriarchal structure also affects men, and pressures them to conform to social expectations of masculinity.

Unfortunately the issues of masculinity are not widely discussed here and male domination over women here is seen as machismo, as a norm. The reason is that there is lack of interest and information in the wider society as well as in academic circles.

Nonetheless, there are several gender researchers who have started working on the issue in Georgia, conducted research, produced academic courses and translated academic papers. But this knowledge is dispersed and not organized and systematized. We as a students of masculinity studies want to bring this local knowledge together, create a single platform where all the materials will be organized and enable others to access this information.

Proposed Solution:

We want to build an website which will bring all the materials on masculinity together, create a database of theories and papers on the subject, collect related studies from different individual researchers and different universities and make them accessible to all.

We will continue translating texts on the issue and publish them. The papers will be carefully selected as we want to make the right focus, to let the society and especially men understand what gender equality is really about, and how it is going to benefit men as well as women and how it is going to serve their rights and interests and not endanger them.

We want them to understand how their behavior is influenced by the norms of masculinity and make the patriarchal culture visible to them – the culture that provides them with some privileges but also dehumanizes them. Therefore, we believe creating the website and promoting it will generate interest into society into this issue.

Sustainability:

The advantage of this project is its sustainability. It’s not going to be a short term project which will stop functioning. The books granted to the group which we will translate papers from, will be used by students of masculinity studies at Ilia University and the website will continue functioning and posts will be updated.

Equal gender opportunity:

The website which focuses on masculinity will contribute to gender equality and will be interesting and benefit to both men and women. It will also help women realize that male domination is not a norm but a learned behavior that can change.