The Potential of Feminist Participatory Action Research to Encourage the Display of Feminist Subjectivities in Young Men

This thesis explores the potential that feminist participatory action research (FPAR) offers to stimulate the creation of feminist subjectivities in young men. FPAR is a process whereby participants use a gendered focus to reflect upon, investigate, and challenge the conditions of their own reality (Reid & Frisby 2008). While it has previously been proposed that FPAR with young women can stimulate the creation of feminist subjectivities by participants (Cahill 2007), this study aims to investigate whether similar effects are observed when working with young men. To do this, the research involved two groups of young people in two FPAR projects - one in a school setting, and one in a youth group. Throughout both projects, interviews and observations of the young people were conducted in order to track the effect of involvement on the participants' relationships between the self and feminism. Consideration of the two projects, and the nature of the engagement of the young people with them, centres around three themes. In the first, the detailed nature of conducting FPAR with young men and women is examined. In the second, the nature of feminist subjectivities displayed by the young men within the space of the project is scrutinised. Finally, the analysis considers the extent to which these displays existed outside of the spaces of the projects, by exploring the ways in which the feminist subjectivities of the young people existed in the spaces of the school and youth group. From this analysis, the thesis concludes that not only did involvement of young men in FPAR projects create rich and diverse projects which encouraged the display of feminist subjectivities, but that these displays of subjectivities extended out of the project space, and into the wider spaces of the school and the youth group.