In the Diaspora
(This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guy-ana and the Carib-bean)
By D. Alissa Trotz
Editor of the In the Diaspora Column
On May 4th, Stabroek News reported on a special initiative launched at the Barbados campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) called Males at Cave Hill Operations (MACHO). MACHO aims at reversing decreasing male enrolment at UWI, where women account for over 60 per cent of the student body. UWI Chancellor Sir George Alleyne noted an immediate increase in male university applications, but there is no information on when MACHO was started, what it entails, how success rates are being evaluated. I found nothing on the UWI website. People I contacted at the various campuses knew little about MACHO. Has it not been the subject of broad deliberation at the University itself?
Let me begin by categorically stating that I agree that we have to address the issue of boys under-performing and dropping out of the school system. I have a problem, however, when the response might end up reinforcing certain ideas about masculinity. Choosing the term MACHO was no accident, because in the Caribbean we take our acronyms very seriously. So a definition is in order, especially since none has so far been offered. The Oxford English Dictionary defines macho as ‘aggressively masculine’, and notes that the current understanding derives from Mexico (as in machismo). This is a racist stereotype, for as anthropologist Matthew Guttman has shown for Mexico City, the term machismo makes it appear as if there is only one way to be a man if you are Latin American, when in fact among women and men on the ground it is not always associated with absolute dominance over women.
These complexities escape us, however, since our dominant understanding of the word macho coincides with the dictionary definition. Given that the term comes with so much baggage, so many assumptions of real and manly men, men who don’t take orders from women, men who are categorically not anti-men, why would UWI Cave Hill call its program MACHO? Are they trying to shift its meaning? In an article in the Barbados Advocate, Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal Sir Hilary Beckles implied that an uprooting of the ideology that school is for girls is urgently needed. Perhaps from this we can conclude that the acronym is meant to reinforce the connection between being macho and being educated. But what does macho consist of? Sir George Alleyne advocates an aggressive approach to the problem, and both he and Beckles speak of dispelling the notion that school is for nerds. Aggressive? Not nerdy? Do these stand for boyhood and masculinity?
A program that calls itself MACHO and describes itself as responding to the ‘problem’ of low numbers of males in higher education (is this another way of saying that the ‘problem’ is that there are too many women?), runs the risk of reproducing dominant notions of what women and men are or should be. It can lead to the conclusion that women are taking over, a conclusion not supported by the available data. Sir George Alleyne’s general claim about male under-representation was qualified by Sir Hilary Beckles, who acknowledged (in the May 1st issue of the Barbados Advocate) that boys were in the slight majority in the Barbados science faculty, and were continuing to do well in medicine, engineering and law. In other words boys were continuing to apply to programs that were perceived to lead to good jobs (lower numbers of women in science at Cave Hill raised no eyebrows; it is clearly male enrolment figures that are the cause for concern).
Nor is the visibility of women in education translating into male disadvantage beyond the university campus. To be sure, the uncertainty that men are experiencing is real, for the economic shifts that have dealt blows to the Caribbean since the 1980s have profoundly altered all kinds of relations in society, but what we are seeing is not women gaining at the expense of men. Studies consistently show that the labour market continues to be highly segregated, in ways that work to the benefit of men. Women experience higher unemployment rates, while women who head their own households experience among the highest levels of poverty in the region.
This is why one would have hoped that the leaders of our institutions of tertiary learning would have put this whole MACHO business into a wider context, relating declining male enrolment to broader social and economic shifts, to the loosening relationship between education, stable jobs and social mobility, to how this has affected ideas and practices of male and female responsibilities. Instead, what has been left open is the distinct possibility that the general public will see MACHO as a necessary – macho – move to stop women from tekkin’ over. The dangers of scapegoating women are real, and can provoke all kinds of responses to put ‘manly women’ in their place. At the risk of being taken to task, I want to suggest that we need to think seriously about the ways in which these responses are linked, from those that are called official policy and appear to be the outcome of rational deliberation, to those actions that we easily and stupidly dismiss as individual instances of excess and madness.
A cross-section of Caribbean newspaper headlines reveals horrific levels of violence against women, mostly at the hands of men they know. In Guyana, the Stabroek News reported that from February to May eight women had been killed, the most recent of whom, Gertrude Edwards, had her throat slashed and her daughter’s and niece’s throats cut just two days before Mother’s day. Reports of homophobia are also a regular media occurrence. Behind all this lurks the figure of the real Caribbean man, who strengthens his back with steel drops and knows who is in charge. Maybe it is this model of aggressive masculinity that is the problem, which is why the term MACHO comes too dangerously close to endorsing the stereotype.
Some years ago Tracy Robinson, a law lecturer at UWI Cave Hill, published an article detailing extensive sexual harassment and stalking of women on campus and in neighbouring communities in the late 1990s. Robinson quoted one young female student as saying ‘Mostly I am numb to violence…my attitude now is, for the most part, that if anything else were to happen to me, I hope it does not take too long before it is over.’ Despite student protests, the establishment of a Standing Sub-Committee on Safety and Security of Students, the holding of meetings with administrators, media coverage, and the dispatch of letters to government officials, little was accomplished to alleviate the sense of insecurity that continues to be felt by female university students and Barbadian women in the neighbourhood. This is the same campus where, one decade later, MACHO is being launched at UWI’s highest levels. I wonder where the voices of those women – and the men who support them – are in this.
One hopes that the information we have so far on this university initiative is piece-meal, and that in fact consultations are happening across the campus, to address the connections across these realities, and to ensure that MACHO does not become a program which reinforces ideas about masculinity that are deadly to many, and damaging to everyone.
