The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Thinking About Men and Masculinities

Urgent climate and disaster challenges and widening patterns of inequality and injustice at the outset of the twenty-first century call out for new ways of thinking and new partners for action. This volume offers both. Our analysis rests on an understanding of disasters as anything but "natural." Hazardous conditions and events are part of human experience, but the embedded vulnerabilities and power relations within which they occur reflect specific and discretionary development decisions. Disasters, then, are fundamentally social events that reveal social, political-economic and environmental history.

Disaster risk, in tum, is best understood as a function of social and physical vulnerabilities in the face of exposure to environmental, technological, biological and human-induced or purposive hazards, both modified by people's capacity to mitigate, anticipate, adapt, resist and recover from disasters (Wisner et al., 2004). Gender and sexuality matter because these social systems inexorably shape the social worlds in which disasters unfold-never unilaterally or identically, but in the complex and diverse ways illuminated in this book. It follows that how we conceptualize gender and sexuality is central to the question of disaster risk and how to reduce it. In our view, critical analysis of men and masculinities is imperative, both to flesh out the "official" gender and disaster story and as a promising platform for radical change.

We welcome readers to this volume, first with brief self-introductions and then by introducing what we mean by a critical men's studies framework for thinking about men and disasters. To further contextualize the chapters to follow, we offer a b1ief overview of the subfield of gender and disaster research, identify trends and gaps in past research on men and disaster, and suggest how this body of work can be used. The introduction ends with a roadmap to the organization of the book.