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 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.