Seeing the Invisible Knapsack: Feminist Men’s Strategic Responses to the Continuation of Male Privilege in Feminist Spaces

Abstract

Privilege has been primarily conceptualized as invisible to those whom it benefits, but research on whiteness has suggested this is an oversimplification. Through interviews with fifty-two men who engage in gender justice projects and twelve women who work with them, this article investigates the complex ways some men do see, understand, and critique male privilege, as well as the ambivalent feelings and strategic decisions of both the men and women in response to the continuation of male privilege in feminist spaces. Many describe a “pedestal effect,” wherein men receive disproportionate rewards for their work as feminist allies. Emergent themes include five types of benefits, as well as internal conflict among interviewees who recognize that these added benefits conflict with their egalitarian ideologies. These men negotiate the contradiction between their anti-sexist commitments and the unequal appreciation they receive for these commitments in situationally specific ways and tend to be more satisfied with their responses at the microlevel than at the macrolevel. These results support a retheorization of privilege to recognize that it operates at multiple analytic levels and that individual action is often insufficient to address structural privilege.