Beyond 'working with men and boys': (re)defining, challenging and transforming masculinities in sexuality and health programmes and policy.

In the 21 years since the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, those working in the fields of health and sexuality have seen changing ‘men and masculinities’ as central to struggles to improve the health of women and men (Cornwall, Edstrom, and Greig 2011; Peacock and Barker 2014). Efforts to respond to men’s violence and HIV, in particular, have focused on understanding the links between masculinities and men’s health-related behaviour, and increasingly on engaging men and boys as a pathway to transforming masculinities (Jewkes, Flood, and Lang 2015; Mane and Aggleton 2001; Peacock and Barker 2014). Perhaps as a consequence of these efforts, the phrase ‘We need to work with men and boys’ has become something of a mantra dominating health and sexuality programmes. In the past few years, there have been a number of reviews of interventions that have sought to work specifically with men and boys to promote health-enhancing behaviours. These reviews have highlighted the important role that interventions engaging men and boys can have in reducing men’s use of violence against women (Dworkin, Treves-Kagan, and Lippman 2013; Jewkes, Flood, and Lang 2015), increasing access to HIV-testing (Hensen et al. 2014), reducing HIV-risk behaviours (Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento 2007; Dworkin, Treves-Kagan, and Lippman 2013) and, more widely, enabling men to become more engaged in supporting partners and children (Levtov et al. 2015). However, these reviews also highlight that working with men and boys does not always translate to changes in their behaviour, that changing attitudes about gender does not always lead to behaviours that support gender equality and that intervention effectiveness is dependent on the approaches used and the process and context of implementation (Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento 2007; Dworkin, Treves-Kagan, and Lippman 2013; Jewkes, Flood, and Lang 2015). Given the growth in the number of programmes and interventions working with men and boys globally, research exploring the processes involved, the challenges, problems, limitations and politics of this kind of work is surprisingly limited. The ways in which women are and could be involved in this work, so as to support and not hinder efforts at changing masculinities, has also received limited attention. It was against this backdrop that this special issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality was conceptualised. A call for papers led to 55 abstracts being submitted for consideration;