Poor neighborhood, school without windows, landlocked and forgotten area, under-educated young people, single-parent families, juvenile crime and pimping activities are all expressions that surface when we talk about Saint-Michel. All of this is unfortunately true: a palpable reality that cannot be ignored, because Saint-Michel is one of the districts in Montreal where unemployment among young people is the highest.
According to a recent territorial analysis carried out by Centraide of Greater Montreal and the Vivre Saint-Michel en santé round table, 40% of the population of Michel live on a low income, 43% of families are single-parents, 35% of young people are under-educated. , not to mention the 15% of them who are of working age face problems of discrimination and profiling. Despite these problems, which can be considered as the expression of social inequalities in Quebec, we have witnessed, over the past ten years, a transformation of Saint-Michel thanks to the implementation of a series of initiatives citizens.
Guys are actively involved in the socio-cultural life of the neighborhood with the aim of changing certain stereotyped discourses making Saint-Michel a “zone of lawlessness” which feeds a wait-and-see, permissive and assistanceist reflex among certain political and media actors. Developing a strong sense of belonging to the neighborhood, these guys want to understand, be understood and above all live, because to live, according to Romain Gary, “you have to do it very young, because afterwards you lose all its value and no one will give you gifts”.
It is important to emphasize that intervention programs intended specifically for young men are very recent in the Quebec community environment. Thanks to the emergence of masculinity studies in the 1970s and 1980s as a pivotal period in the historiography of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement, masculinity was no longer seen as an identity, but as the product of a relationship of power between men and women as well as between men.
The Maison d’Haïti’s Projet Gars program falls within this perspective. Existing for more than three years in Saint-Michel, the program refers to a safe space whose objective is to accompany boys aged 10 to 17 in order to guide them positively during the process of their adolescence with a view to (re)defining male identity in an intercultural context.
Based on a popular education approach, the program consists of equipping guys so that they can face the perverse and negative effects of the phenomenon of hypersexualization and toxic masculinity. Through a set of playful animation activities, it aims to encourage guys to develop healthy relationships not only with each other, but also with other people while promoting active listening, creativity, empathy and civic participation.
Each week, it is always a renewed pleasure and an intense joy to welcome them to the Maison d’Haïti to discuss positive masculinity, sexual consent, feminism, sexism, gender identities, emotions, friendship, self-acceptance, inclusion, diversity, homophobia, body image, bullying, romantic relationships, politeness and good manners. The Projet Gars program is a safe place to remind young people that the body, in all its diversity and complexity, carries dreams, desires, feelings and more specifically emotions; since we live in a society that conveys contradictory and stereotyped messages about the process of constructing masculinity.
Guys, more particularly those who face the famous “identity crisis” characterized by the world within and the world outside, constitute a social category most exposed to this phenomenon which is becoming a societal issue day by day. This is explained by the fact that these messages on the one hand ask guys to fit into the prototype of a “model of man” characterized by strength, performance, competition, authority, power, violence, trust, repression of emotions and feelings; and on the other, to be able to be sensitive, emotional, gentle, kind and open-minded.
To deal with these contradictory messages that fuel confusion about the process of constructing masculine identity, the Projet Gars space aims to be a space for unlearning all forms of masculinist excesses resulting from the patriarchal and virile standards that are in a big part of the root of male vulnerabilities; since patriarchy, to allude to the African-American writer Bell Hooks, is a complex social, political and cultural practice that radically prevents boys from being truly themselves, from feeling their feelings, showing their emotions and doing proof of an act of love.