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"Unconventional Combat illuminates the current generational transformation of the U.S. veterans' peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of older, White men of the Vietnam War era, to one increasingly driven by a younger and much more diverse cohort of "Post 9/11" veterans. Participant observation with two organizations (Veterans For Peace, and About Face) and interviews with older men veterans form the backdrop for the book's main focus, life-history interviews with six younger veterans-all people of color, four of them women, one a Native Two-Spirit person, four of whom identify as queer. The book traces these veterans' experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service (some of it in combat zones), centering on their collective "situated knowledge" of intersecting oppressions. As veterans, this knowledge shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans' peace movement, and also holds the potential to provide a connective language through which veterans' anti-militarism work organically links them with movement groups working on racial justice, stopping gender and sexual violence, addressing climate change, and building national and international anti-colonial coalitions. This promise is sometimes thwarted by older veterans, whose activism includes a commitment to "diversity" that often falls short of creating and maintaining organizational space for full inclusion of previously marginalized "others." Intersectionality has increasingly become the analytic coin of today's emergent movement field, and the connective tissue of a growing coalitional politics. The younger, diverse group of veterans I focus on in this book are part of this larger shift in the social movement ecology, and they contribute a critical understanding of war and militarism to progressive coalitions"--

"Men, masculinity, and militarism are so often seen to be in such close (and mythically heroic) correspondence, the war veteran-as-peace-advocate is sometimes viewed as an oxymoron. This is precisely what interests sociologist Mike Messner. In Guys Like Me (a reference to the phrase his own WWI veteran grandfather used to describe ordinary working-class soldiers), Messner writes, war veterans are rendered simultaneously invisible (due in part to the lack of a draft, which makes the dangers of war ever more distant from the privileged classes), and hyper-visible (mostly through a highly choreographed "honor the troops" public mantra promoted by commercial interests and politicians). The actual experiences of war veterans are rarely visible to the general public, except perhaps in occasional human-interest profiles of vets as jobless, limbless victims. Least audible still have been the voices of combat veterans who become advocates for peace. In this time of apparently permanent warfare, it is as important as ever for the general public to engage in informed discussions of past, current and future wars. Guys Like Me illuminates the intergenerational stories and voices of five men--veterans of five wars--who became lifelong advocates of peace. Messner uses life history interviews to bring forward the voices of five such men" --

Frontmatter --Contents --Prologue --Chapter 1. Projects of Peace --Chapter 2. There Is No "Good War" --Chapter 3. Being Honorable --Chapter 4. Paying Off My Karmic Debt --chapter 5. You Clock In, You Go Kill People --Chapter 6. Laying the Tracks --Chapter 7. This Is Our Service --Acknowledgments --Notes --Bibliography --Index --About the Author

How do men respond to feminist movements and to shifts in the gender order? In this paper, I introduce the concept of historical gender formation to show how shifting social conditions over the past forty years shaped a range of men's organized responses to feminism. Focusing on the US, I show how progressive men reacted to feminism in the 1970s by forming an internally contradictory 'men's liberation' movement that soon split into opposing anti-feminist and pro-feminist factions. Three large transformations of the 1980s and 1990s – the professional institutionalization of feminism, the rise of a postfeminist sensibility, and shifts in the political economy (especially deindustrialization and the rise of the neoliberal state) – generated new possibilities. I end by pointing to an emergent moderate men's rights discourse that appeals to a postfeminist sensibility, and to an increasingly diverse base for men's work to prevent violence against women.

How do men respond to feminist movements and to shifts in the gender order? In this paper, I introduce the concept of historical gender formation to show how shifting social conditions over the past forty years shaped a range of men's organized responses to feminism. Focusing on the US, I show how progressive men reacted to feminism in the 1970s by forming an internally contradictory 'men's liberation' movement that soon split into opposing anti-feminist and pro-feminist factions. Three large transformations of the 1980s and 1990s – the professional institutionalization of feminism, the rise of a postfeminist sensibility, and shifts in the political economy (especially deindustrialization and the rise of the neoliberal state) – generated new possibilities. I end by pointing to an emergent moderate men's rights discourse that appeals to a postfeminist sensibility, and to an increasingly diverse base for men's work to prevent violence against women.

A scholarly literature on the intersectional realities of race, class, gender, and sexual privilege exists, but professors often struggle with how to teach it, especially given our own (often) privileged positions. Here, the author describes how he uses self-reflexive story-telling as a point of entre to encourage students to think about their own lives within a matrix of privilege and subordination. He shows how stories can illuminate the central role played by ideologies of individual meritocracy in privileged peoples' narratives. The author argues that personal stories are limited unless they also are contextualized within structural analyses that illuminate collective agency. He ends by describing an undergraduate study of USC janitors that reveals how the institution constrains these low-wage workers, while putting into stark relief the relative privilege of students and faculty. He concludes that a pedagogy of privilege should always be grounded in the standpoints of subordinated groups of people.