Men’s violence against women (MVAW) is a severe and pervasive problem driven by individual acts, harmful gender norms, and structures of inequality in the US and around the world. An increasingly popular way to address this violence has been to directly engage boys and men in feminist-informed gender justice and violence prevention work, otherwise known as ‘engaging men’ (EM). The focus of this study is on primary prevention group education programs which work with men from the general public in school and community settings, rather than solely focusing on those identified as perpetrators of MVAW. Research shows that these programs can foster positive changes in men’s violence-supportive attitudes and behaviours and promote their involvement in gender justice work. However, the field has also faced a range of calls for reform and innovation, including concerns about a reliance on overly didactic approaches and cognitive-centric pedagogies. Building on a small but promising body of literature, this thesis examines the integration of arts into EM programs as an alternative. This research asks: How are the arts used in efforts to engage men in the US context? How do practitioners and participants perceive the advantages and limitations of such approaches? And how, if at all, might arts-integration support changes in the way men think about masculinities?

Drawing on interviews with fifteen practitioners and a year-long case study of one US program, this thesis argues that arts-integration approaches have several potential benefits for the field to consider. First, they can facilitate more holistic mind, heart, and body pedagogies that support learning in these programs. Second, the arts can make the work more personal and collective, thus aiding the men in applying the knowledge to their own lived experiences and communities. These findings reveal arts-integration can help engage more men and engage men more – increasing the potential for larger mobilisations of men as allies for gender justice and deepening the learning in their efforts. Third, a holistic and humanising arts-integrated praxis drives a productively discomforting imaginative process which can help men stretch their understanding from a singular rigid idea of masculinity into a more expansive engagement with masculinities beyond gendered boundaries. However, an arts praxis also includes complex challenges, including limitations on access to resources, time, and training; individual and institutional resistances; the risk of decentring and diluting feminist analysis through uncritical art; and the potential to cause harm to participants, facilitators, and the feminist movement to prevent MVAW. This study calls for first- and second-order reflexivities to help address the risks of doing harm within programs and for the field as a whole to examine the limitations of approaches that rely primarily on individual change.

This thesis explores these benefits and challenges through a transdisciplinary lens that draws together insights from feminist approaches to gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM), and peace education to illuminate EM scholarship and practice from multiple perspectives. Moreover, it weaves together traditional qualitative methods and analysis with poetic inquiry through spoken word poems to present research findings that are both analytic and affective on and off the page. Overall, this research is the first of its kind to document the diversity, or what this study calls the kaleidoscope, of arts-integrated approaches in practice in the US. Furthermore, this research reveals both practical curricular and pedagogical insights and provides a conceptually rich portrait of how the arts can animate a holistic, humanising, and productively discomforting process of reimagining masculinities towards more feminist-informed possibilities.