The Philippines has a history of five decades of protracted violent conflicts and internal displacements, making it one of the world’s longest-running violent conflicts in the Southeast Asian region. Like the global literature on conflict and internal displacement, most of the Philippines’ literature in this context delves into the conditions of children and women. While the focus on these sectors is critical and cannot be overemphasised, an investigation into noncombatant men’s masculinities is imperative, as men’s masculinities have corresponding outcomes on women and gender-related interventions. This paper presents the case of noncombatant Filipino men’s masculinities, with a focus on their enactment of a compounded social masculinity. Given the conventional notion that the public arena is a man’s domain, it is inevitable that men encounter diverse personalities pre-, during, and post-conflict and internal displacement.
The 31 life story interviews with noncombatant Filipino men, supplemented by data from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with 26 women and community profiles from local officials, revealed that noncombatant Filipino men reconfigured their masculinities in relation to other personalities. Men’s complex social masculinity involved the enactment of good-natured masculinity and cautious masculinity. This finding is crucial because it complicates the usual victim-perpetrator binary when classifying men in conflict and forced displacement settings. Furthermore, the findings articulate noncombatant Filipino men’s agentic selves as they reconstruct their masculinities towards personalities that are unfamiliar, dangerous, or embodiments of internalised colonial demonisations. Considering these findings towards engaging men in gender-related programmes in conflict and internal displacement settings might encourage and gain more meaningful participation.
KEYWORDS: Masculinities; Violent conflict; Internal displacement; Noncombatant; Filipino men; Philippines; Social masculinity
Jennefer Lyn L. Bagaporo, a research affiliate at the Research Institute for Mindanao Culture (RIMCU) at Xavier University in the Philippines, holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Adelaide, South Australia. Her most recent publication is a study on conflict-induced internally displaced Filipino men’s enactments of masculinity, titled “Yes, I’m Doing It,” published in the journal Men and Masculinities (vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 523–543) in 2023.
