Young Men and Feminism: Gendered Struggle and Sense-Making for Australian University Students

This paper explores feminism as a site of explicit struggle and implicit sense-making for young men. Through an analysis of interviews with twenty young people at two Australian universities, it considers how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape discussions of men, boys and masculinity. Actively grappling with the place of boys and men in certain high-profile feminist debates, participants’ responses revealed core sites of tension around their collective and individual responsibility for gendered harms, tensions reflective of those present within feminist debates themselves. The impact of feminism could also be seen in the gendered analysis so many participants produced to make sense of limiting emotional norms, even though they did not recognise this analysis as a feminist inheritance. Moving beyond an approach seeking to categorise young men’s responses as either pro- or anti-feminist, this paper highlights the entanglement of feminism in young men’s sensemaking around gendered issues.