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Paper short abstract

Thinking through the fieldwork conducted among men involved in antisexist and gender-aware activism in Italy and Spain, this article explores the possibilities and potentialities for men to follow Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-woman keeping in mind Braidotti's feminist nomadization of the concept.

Paper long abstract

The humanist subject, crafted in the modernist European colonial context of the scientific revolution, holds specific features: wealth, freedom, rationality, masculinity, whiteness, self-presence, disembodiment. Epistemological as well as political agency and subjectivity in the modern western context have been shaped according to these co-constitutive feature of the human, on the basis of the body/mind dichotomy and by excluding from the human realm all the differing less-than-human Others: children, women, people of color, animals, the earth, etc (Haraway, 1988). This modernist onto-epistemology gave rise to unequal power relations on a material and discursive level. This paper starts from questioning masculinity's dominant historical features: gender-neutrality, rationalist universalism and disembodiment. The point of departure is thus a critique of the universalistic discourse of politics and/or philosophy and the universalizing posture assumed by what Hartsock (1987) called Abstract Masculinity. Accordingly, thinking through the fieldwork experience of the author conducted among men involved in antisexist and gender-aware activism in Italy and Spain, this article explores the possibilities and potentialities for men to follow Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-woman (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), keeping in mind Braidotti's (2002) feminist nomadization of the concept.