“I Just Can’t Imagine Leaving You in This World”
Yesterday was Mother’s Day here in the United States and many other countries around the globe. Last fall, I wrote about my own mother for the IRMS impact report, just a couple months after her passing due to pancreatic cancer. I post what I wrote then to our blog here, for this first Mother’s Day after her passing, a few weeks after what would have been her 75th birthday.
Until my mother’s last days, I couldn’t convince her to stop looking at the news. “I just can’t imagine leaving you in this world,” she told me, watching U.S. democracy crumble, when 10 years ago she was expecting to finally see the first woman elected as president in her lifetime.
IRMS was created to help make the world a better place. The pages of this impact report express in detail the specific approaches that we take to the complexity of dismantling a male supremacist global society and staunching the most extreme surges of misogyny. But like any organization formed “for good,” in the simplest terms, it boils down to this. I work so the next generation will suffer less, and thrive more, in life, in work, in love. Just as my mother–a daughter of Mormon conservative parents, who came of age when women needed a man to cosign for credit cards and loans, in a world dominated by rape culture and a country that slutshamed survivors on the stand–wanted for me.
IRMS was born of frustration, and of hope. Of anger, and of compassion. Of insecurity and doubt, and of confidence and trust. Of community, and of isolation. It is not the result of a major funding investment, or institutional backing, or an easy and straightforward path. It is the result of the passion and dedication of six emerging scholars—who decided that their voices and ideas and knowledge were worth being heard and to act on this; who were done with the neglect and the de facto silencing from journals and institutions; who wanted to create a space where others like themselves from around the world could find community, and support, and a platform for their ideas—and of the dozens of fellows and mentees who joined us and volunteered time and energy out of a belief in this organization’s value. In those first days of IRMS, what we heard more than anything else from the fellows who joined our institute, was how isolated they felt in their work, and how glad they were to find this space where they wouldn’t be alone.
Six years later, IRMS stands out as a community led and predominantly composed of women and nonbinary researchers, encompassing more than 70 fellows and mentees as of the summer of 2025. We’ve run everything on a budget ranging from $150/month via Patreon (mostly from friends and family, including my mom) to more than $100,000 per year. I hope that you will be impressed with what we have done with such limited funds paired with deep commitment and expertise, and will consider supporting our unique radical organization to find out how much more we are truly capable of.
Alex DiBranco, Fall 2025
Executive Director, Institute for Research on Male Supremacism
In memory of my mother, born Sheryl Christine Russell (who always hated that she changed her last name), 1951-2025
