Meet Division 51 Member: Kevin Hilke

Meet graduate student member
Kevin Hilke

When did you join Division 51? What made you interested in joining?

I joined about six months ago to become more familiar with expert research and theorizing around men and masculinity that takes a non-essentializing, intersectional approach to understanding male identity. As a clinician who works with a wide range of folks who were sexually assaulted as children, my practice has sensitized me to the need for such an intersectionally feminist approach as a prerequisite to developing psychological services that are humble toward and competently tailored to the full range of human beings—including men. Indeed, a solid chunk of my clients are male survivors of chronic child rape. This group of survivors has been rendered effectively invisible by our culture’s pseudo-delusional masculinist ideals of male hypersexualization, impenetrability, and strength, and by the persistently widespread heterosexist myths that a penis is both required to commit rape and magically protects one from rape. While innovations in feminist trauma theory and practice in recent decades have done a great deal to bring needed attention and treatment to female survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and sexual violence in general, research shows unambiguously that boys and men are sexually assaulted, too, and require psychotherapy treatments that are just as trauma-informed, developmentally-attuned, and radically individualized. I’m hoping that exposure to the thinking of Division 51 members will inform and improve my holding of men and masculinity and my clinical practice, and eventually assist me and colleagues working in this area to develop approaches that attend to male survivors’ universal humanity and vulnerability, but also to the idiosyncratic expressions of psychopathology we see clinically when the humanity of a specifically male-bodied person is violated.

What do you find most valuable about being a member of the division?

I avoided joining for a while—despite specializing in working with male survivors—out of what now seems a mistaken impression that the bulk of the membership is hostile toward intersectional feminist thinking on gender, a core element of my approach to ethical clinical practice, research, and theory. I have encountered some dismissive, retrogressive, scientifically questionable essentializing of this kind here, but for the most part this community seems to understand, value, and rigorously engage with theories that prioritize intersectionality, recognizing both the socially constructed realities of gender and their existence and constitution within a broader sociocultural context where gender is but one important index of power relations. I am relatively new to the Division, and so haven’t had long to assess comparative value across member benefits, but having located a community of scholars who are largely conversant in these ideas and expert in men and masculinities with whom I can confer on any number of research or clinical issues has already proven immensely valuable.

What are your clinical, teaching, research, or other applied interests relating to the psychology of men and masculinity?

My clinical work centers on psychotherapy with survivors of complex trauma of all forms, but I’ve come to specialize in working with adult survivors of chronic, severe child sexual abuse from a trauma-informed, intersectionally feminist, relational psychodynamic perspective. My research examines historical clinical mishandling of post-traumatic, dissociative presentations, especially in survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). I’m presently looking at the historical inability of many practitioners to correctly identify child rape when it presents in the clinical situation, particularly when the survivor is male, and particularly when the perpetrator is a female caregiver. This destructive masculinist tradition stretches back (at least) to Freud’s restyling of his own rape by a nursemaid as a toddler as a fortunate opportunity to which he sadly failed to measure up.