Francesca Levy, Alex Mangus, Hannah White: Coffee Shop Conversations on Masculinity, 2019
How can men come to understand their place and power in relation to themselves, other men, women, their communities, and society as a whole?
Where, when, and how can masculinity be healthy or harmful?
Where and how do men “learn violence”?
The project Coffee Shop Conversations was created by a collective of socially-engaged artists (Francesca Levy, Alex Mangus, Hannah White) that sought to engage men in the process of confronting and counteracting harmful masculinity. Masculinity is a social construct defined by a set of cultural practices, norms, and expectations. Starting at a very young age, we are taught “what it means to be a man”; from our parents, from popular media, in school, on the sports field, in our workplaces, and beyond. Masculinity looks and feels different for men depending on their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, sexuality, and upbringing. We worked to get a diverse group of men to engage in conversations with each other in a coffee shop, creating a discursive space that encourages men to confront, deconstruct, and propose opportunities to counteract toxic masculinity, both in their daily lives and at a systemic level in our society.
Grounded in our research on masculinity that not only included a review of relevant literature, popular culture, media, but we also designed a survey of men’s general understanding of masculinity, which was sent out to a large group of men online. This research informed the set of communicative strategies and questions we developed to help facilitate these “coffee shop conversations”. We created a digital archive of all of the “coffee shop conversations” we facilitated. Additionally, our process led us to curate a set of topical guiding questions to be used in these conversations, as well as a document outlining strategies for fostering respectful, and empathetic dialogue.
For more information visit our website: https://masculinityconversations.weebly.com/