Deconstructing the Experiential Bar

Abstract

This article revisits the issue of male experience and its possible relationship to gender politics. Traditionally, feminism has viewed male experience as representing a bar to the development of feminist knowledge and consciousness. This conceptualization of male experience continues to inform the contemporary debate on male feminism. The article argues that this experiential bar emerges from a theorization of male experience as singular, fixed, and organic. Challenging this conceptualization, the article retheorizes male experience as a diverse, shifting, and contested category that produces different political outcomes. Through an analysis of men’s group discourse, the article illustrates how particular interpretations of male experience produce both feminist and antifeminist effects. It concludes that feminism needs to examine male experience as a multifaceted category that can act as the material upon which male feminist resistance operates.