About the Author

As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I was inspired by the mass movement to end the U.S. War in Vietnam.  When I was a graduate student from 1978-1985, I became increasingly focused on the importance of the women’s movement, and I aimed to better understand the range of men’s responses to feminism.  Over the next decade, I learned from feminist women of color like Maxine Baca Zinn, Bonnie Thornton Dill and Patricia Hill Collins, who pointed to the limits of a feminism that implicitly bases its analysis and actions on the experiences of white, middle class women.  It would be another decade before the emergent perspective was named “intersectionality,” but I have long sought to understand the ways that gender helps to constitute, and in turn is constituted by other forms of social inequality, particularly race, social class, and sexuality.  In recent years, intersectionality has emerged as the analytic language of progressive organizations and connective tissue of movement coalitions. 

Around 2010, I decided to focus less of my research and writing on revealing the sources of ongoing injustice, inequalities and violence, and more on everyday individuals' and progressive organizations’ efforts to move the world toward equality, social justice and peace. 

The first of these efforts was Some Men:  Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women, a 2015 book I co-authored with Max Greenberg and Tal Peretz. The next book, Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace (2019) explored the lives of five U.S. combat veterans, chronicling their trajectories through war, physical and emotional trauma, anger and “manly silence,” toward re-shaping their lives and committing themselves to healing, serving others, reconciliation with former enemies, and joining in collective efforts to promote peace and oppose militarism and war. 

While working on Guys Like Me, a book devoted almost entirely to understanding men veterans, I noticed that a younger cohort of “post 9/11 veterans” were gravitating toward leadership positions in Veterans For Peace and About Face.  This younger cohort, I noticed, included an increasing number of women, people of color and queer-identified veterans.  As I observed and listened, I learned that—especially in VFP—this diverse cohort of younger vets was bumping up against patterned race and gender microaggressions, embedded assumptions about what a “leader” looks and sounds like, and even sometimes overt sexual harassment that deterred their full participation.  What’s more, this younger cohort of vets tended to share an analysis—intersectionality—that informed their views of how organizations should work, and of the importance of building coalitions.

This book is connected with the major themes that have animated my teaching and research, spanning four decades—inspired by feminism and other progressive social movements of the late 1960s, early 1970s and beyond—that focuses on gender relations, men and masculinities, gender and sport, violence and anti-violence. 

During most of that time I have worked as a professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California.  I invite readers who would like to know more about this larger body of work to explore my web site, michaelmessner.org.