Brave New Worlds: A Post-Colonialist Perspective on Western Masculinities

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to discuss, based on a post-colonialist perspective, therole of Western masculinities in two moments of the expansion of the international order: thecolonial and imperialist expansion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and the construction of a global international order in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Although the conceptsthat define such masculinities vary based on differences of culture, time and local identities, theyestablished hierarchies between identity and difference. Still, it is possible to think about therecognition of diversity and the exploration of alternative possibilities of psychological andsocial “contact zones”. That would occur with the sharing of experiences and of criticism as to theproduction of otherness consolidated by binary relations of power in social and politicalinstitutions, aiming to overcome those exclusionary practices in thought and in behavior. Thissharing allows for a conversation among traditions that respond to the oppression generated inthe process of the reproduction of Western masculinities.