Good Guise Alliance: Healthy Masculinities Initiative

The Good Guise Alliance is a collaboration between the Center for Women at Emory and the Respect Program that aims to cultivate, support, affirm, and create allies to allies to women and girls and advocates for gender-based justice. Through skill-building, story sharing, and hands-on application, this initiative unpacks what it means to be masculine and explores issues of masculinity and gender. This alliance asserts that men must do more heavy-lifting in combating sexism and provides a proactive means of doing so.

This initiative seeks to combat toxic masculinity by building a new generation of leaders who will serve as positive change-makers in society. The Good Guise Alliance highlights the ways in which masculinity itself is a guise, a front, and a façade that is built around a set of social constructs that dictate the behavior of men and masculinity identified people. We also chose the name to reflect our decision to be inclusive of all genders. As a result, we employ the homophone “guise” to include anyone who self-identifies with manhood or maleness, while celebrating that those identities are part of the spectrum of gender.