Power Patriarchy and Feminism online course

We believe that it is critical to understand the concepts of power, patriarchy, and feminism in order to do accountable work with men and boys for gender justice. That is why we have developed an online curriculum to guide our members and anyone else interested to dive deeper into these topics.

Whether you have learned about these topics before or not, we hope the course will help you in your work to transform masculinities and work with men and boys for gender and social justice.

The course is in English. It can be done at any time, online, at your own pace.

Click here to enroll on the Power, Patriarchy, and Feminism course.

About the authors

This course is the result of a collaboration with CREA that started in 2019 with a pilot course in Nepal. CREA and MenEngage Alliance worked together to adapt CREA’s conceptual framework on power, patriarchy and feminism to the work on masculinities. The feminist analytical lens used to understand power and patriarchy was applied to the work of transforming masculinities with men and boys for gender equality.

Who will find this online course useful?

If you work with men and boys for gender justice, or plan to in the future, this course offers an important framework to understand the issues that you are looking to address in your work. Whether you have been working on masculinities for a long time, or are new to the area, the course covers key foundations for understanding and creating positive change.

The course will help you to recognize yourself as an agent of social change who is capable of critically analyzing the gender power structures around you. It offers the tools to influence the conditions that make change possible—whenever and wherever power is an obstacle to gender equality.

The course recognizes that there is a wide range of understandings around the fundamental concepts that the course covers—including within the field of transforming patriarchal masculinities and working with men and boys for gender justice. The course aims to strengthen our collective and individual understandings of the roots of the topics we work on.

Course content

The concepts of power, patriarchy and feminism are commonly used in everyday conversations among organizations and activists for social justice. They are also present in most public policy documents, government programs, social media campaigns, and the education and development projects of many organizations.

As a work in progress, the course explores some of the links between masculinities and  privileges that men and boys often enjoy, as well as how privileges become control systems and norms. It invites you to reflect on what transformation of such inequalities might look like.

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to clarify concepts related to power and patriarchal structures, resistance to patriarchy, and feminist transformative power. It offers you tools to use in a variety of gender equality and masculinities situations in your practice, group work, research or policy advocacy, and even in your daily life.

Course objectives

By the end of this course participants will be able to:

• Recognize and name the different types of power that patriarchy employs.
• Name at least one reason why the feminist analysis of gender norms focuses on power.
• Explain the role that gender and sex occupy in patriarchal systems.

Course structure

• 10-12 hours divided into 3 modules of approximately 3 hours each, and additional reading resources to complement the modules.
• 3 modules accessible for self paced learning, each include video lectures, powerpoint conceptual digest, expert prompts and comments on each theme, reflexive exercises and a quiz on basic concepts at the end of each module.