Masculinity and respect in flux: Olli's story

This study examines change and the conditions of change in the masculinity of Olli, a working-class Finnish school boy. It explores respect as a status bound to masculine reputation, resources for obtaining respect in gendered identity work, and the negotiation of power in peer relations. I discuss how a ‘banal balancer’ discourse – a local, normalised, culturally idealised discourse and the most common discourse of school boy masculinity – has the power to induce school boys to balance their acquisition of the respect and peer likeability dimensions of status. Olli's story illustrates why locating oneself or being located in a ‘toughie’ discourse, in which the pursuit of respect through fear and violence is present, has limits in terms of peer relations and why it is crucial to make room for aspirational hegemony in schools instead of a dominant, regressive form of hegemony.     

'You're Hopeless I Swear to God': Shifting masculinities in classroom talk

In this article the author aims to problematise the discourse of masculinity in the co-educational classroom. Moving strategically sideways to focus on boys rather than girls, it is argued that 'masculinity' is not a fixed essence but a shifting gendered social identity. Although mass culture generally assumes there is a fixed, true masculinity, not all boys and men take up the same kind of masculinity, nor do they experience 'maleness' in the same way. Social class and subcultures (as well as other inflections of identity not discussed in this article) profoundly affect the presentation and representation of masculine identities. Moreover, masculinity as a particular configuration of gender is constituted in relation to local contexts within the meritocratic discourse of schooling. The ethnographic data in this article, which focuses on boys relating to girls in the classroom, show how varied the contexts of gender production can be even within the same roughly parallel configurations of task and location. It is concluded that masculinity is above all a social identity accomplishment.     

Peer regulation of teenage sexual identities

This article examines the teenage policing of heterosexuality in schools and contributes to debates about teenage sexual moralities and heterosexual male agency. It reports on a qualitative study in England of the collective sexual values of 12‐ to 13‐year‐olds and 14‐ to 15‐year‐olds. Focus group interviews indicated that pupils developed a consensual sexual morality through collusive sex talk. Homophobic and misogynistic views and verbal abuse were found to be key instruments of teenage peer regulation of sexual identities crossing class and ethnic boundaries. We found that the ‘official’ discourse of sex education did not relate to teenage lives. Anxieties about heterosexual masculinity and girls' sexual agency were conveyed by some boys through verbal sexual harassment—a form of behaviour regarded as intimidating yet normal. While white and Asian boys were more conservative in their views about marriage than girls, white and Asian girls struggled to resist heterosexual masculine power through career aspirations, by questioning marriage and being informed about sexual issues.     

Networked texts: discourse,power and gender neutrality in Ugandan physics textbooks

Research within science textbooks has dominantly focused on examining explicit representations of women and men using quantitative methodology. The assumption that gendered arrangements are necessarily explicit and therefore visible and countable, overlooks how power works explicitly and implicitly through discourse to produce specific gendered subjectivities. In taking up feminist post-structuralisms, this study contributes to textbook studies within sciences by illuminating both explicit and implicit representations of gender. Using discourse analysis, ‘gender-neutral’ and/or disembodied subjects and objects were ‘unmasked,’ revealing a generic male and/or masculine subject. Gender-neutrality, which is pervasive within the physics textbooks, was thus exposed as a mask for generic maleness/masculinity. I argue that this objectivist science, which remains compatible with a narrow range of student gendered identities, forecloses possibilities for a wide range of scientist subjectivities, to produce a more inclusive physics curriculum, with a greater possibility of developing physics using diverse subjectivities.     

Challenging Masculinity and Using Sexuality

Drawing from ethnographic research this paper focuses on how sexuality is deployed in regulative and tactical forms within Further Education. It examines how masculinity is institutionalised through the internal discourses of education. It demonstrates how, on the basis of the normalisation of masculinity, male teachers are able to regulate female students through the sexualising of situations. The resentment generated by being forced to confront their educational and feminine powerlessness leads the female students to develop a number of different coping tactics. One of these is a transformative attack on masculine hegemony whereby female students take up masculine subject positions and use strategies of masculinity to control male teachers. It argues that the refusal to give legitimacy and consent to masculine regulation, in education, on the basis of a cost‐benefit analysis, could engender challenges across the sites, thereby necessitating reconstructions of masculine power.     

Is That an Action Man in There? Masculinity as an Imaginative Act of Self-creation

The concept of masculinity has been critiqued either as an ideological effect of patriarchy or as a play of discourse. This occurs at a time when there is renewed interest in biologically reductive theories of gender, and in the context (in the UK) of public disquiet about boys' academic performance. This paper argues that while masculinity cannot be regarded as a foundational subject, the reality of the category 'masculinity' in the daily lives of students and teachers means that we have to take account of how it structures both the social and pedagogic life of the classroom. The paper demonstrates how an imagined sense of masculinity--the masculine social imaginary--appears as a reality in the boys' narratives of self. The paper also argues that while this masculine social imaginary provides the semantic logic of gender, it is in the moment-to-moment interactions that boys have to assert and seek recognition of themselves as male. 'Masculinity' continues to be a useful sociological concept.     

The Construction of Masculine Science

The masculinity of science can be studied as a topic in the cultural reproduction of gender. In this paper four distinct, but not necessarily contradictory, accounts of the way in which science comes to be seen as a masculine subject are examined. It is argued that schools could play a transformative, rather than a reproductive, role in the formation of gender identities.     

Deconstructing Masculinity in the English Classroom: A site for reconstituting gendered subjectivity

In this paper I claim that a particular investigative critique of dominant versions of masculinity based on an interpretive analytics of Foucault and Derrida can be elaborated through promoting a particular pedagogy in the English classroom. A particular deconstructive approach to reading pedagogy, therefore, is elaborated and an analysis of the way students responded to a particular text is provided to support claims made about the efficacy of such a pedagogical approach in the English classroom. In the first part of the paper I focus on elaborating a theorisation of gender in terms of multiple positionality within discourse. Such an approach is based on the understanding that subjectivity is socially, culturally and historically constituted within multiple discursive frameworks and that textual practices have a part to play in the structuring and regulation of gendered identity formations. I argue that it is in this way that a move can be initiated beyond what Armstrong terms an oppressive 'gender bind', which means thinking about masculinity and femininity outside of a binary oppositional semantic structure. By drawing on feminist psychoanalytic and post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity, claims are made about the feminist conceptualisation of masculinity as a unitary construct. Psychoanalytic feminists such as Scott and Alcoff, like Henriques et al., have also attempted to theorise gender and subjectivity in terms of positionality within multiple discourses, but have focused exclusively on questions pertaining to the construction of femininity. In their justified and exclusive emphasis on how dominant versions of masculinity as oppressive regimes have operated to constrain and limit women politically from realising their needs, however, I claim that these theorists have conceptualised masculinity as a unitary construct. This notion of the unitary masculine subject is problematised in this paper and an attempt is made to acknowledge alternative masculinities which are undercut by race, class and ethnic factors as well as questions pertaining to sexual orientation. I draw particularly on the work of Felski and her notion of the counter-public space within which multiple subject positions for women can be constituted as a point of departure for a discussion and exploration of how teachers might deal with questions of masculinities and the valorisation of alternative subjectivities in the English classroom. This paper, therefore, attempts to address the problems associated with constructing masculinity as a monolithic category, while elaborating a particular pedagogical approach designed to open up a space for the examination, legitimation and valorisation of alternative subject positions for boys in the English classroom.     

College Men and Masculinity: Implications for Diversity Education

The balance of empirical research on college men is a portrait of their maladaptive and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. Studies have demonstrated the correlation between college men's problematic behavior and adherence to gender role traditionalism. Educators have few composites of men's prosocial behavior nor the masculine ideology that accompanies it.

This article is based, in part, on a study where I explored college men's prosocial behaviors through their engagement in an educationally purposeful activity that has been operationally defined in the literature: diversity education (DE). DE was defined as opportunities to engage meaningfully with diversity through coursework or purposeful cross-culture interactions in pursuit of educational outcomes.

Using a basic interpretive qualitative methodology, I addressed the following research question: How do college men who have been engaged in diversity education understand and perform masculinity? Themes derived using the constant comparative method included (a) the persistence of hegemonic masculine ideology and (b) experiences of gender socialization. Findings confirmed other studies that demonstrated the influence of hegemonic masculine ideology on college men (Davis, 2002; Edwards, 2007; Harris, 2006). This study adds to the literature by ascertaining how hegemonic masculine ideology may permeate the diversity classroom or workshop, creating dynamics that social justice educators must consider when designing effective learning environments.     

'The Money's Good,The Fame's Good,The Girls are Good': The role of playground football in the construction of young boys' masculinity in a junior school

This paper looks at the influential part played by the game of football in the social construction of hegemonic masculine practices among a group of Year 6 boys in an English junior school, which is an area that remains under-researched. Football forms a large part of school life for many children (the majority of whom are boys) and is sated with masculinising associations: this paper argues that football acts as a model for the boys, and they use the game as a way of constructing, negotiating, and performing their masculinity. Football is seen as a key signifier of successful masculinity, and its practices are a major influence on hegemonic masculinities, which are performed and defended in relation to other masculinities and femininities that become subordinated and marginalised. Girls are excluded from the games, along with some of the boys in the subordinated group who become feminised by their lack of skill and competence, and are subjected to homophobic abuse, as the hegemonic group acts within the 'cultural imperative' of heterosexuality. The games of playground football are viewed as a series of ritualised and fantasised performances, and this paper proposes that the body plays an essential role in the formation of masculine identities, with competitive displays of skill and strength. The school policies and organisation of football are also considered, and the power struggles and tensions this causes, not only between pupils, but also between teachers and pupils, and between teacher and teacher.     

De Coubertin's Olympism and the Laugh of Michel Foucault: Crisis Discourse and the Olympic Games

De Coubertin developed the sport philosophy of Olympism and the Olympic Games as a response to social and political crisis to promote peace, fair play, and the development of Christian masculinity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how crisis discourse functions as an important shaper of contemporary understandings of Olympism and how conflicting discourses have mobilized crisis discourse to produce competing ‘truths’ in which to rationalize and understand the Olympic Games. In drawing from Foucault's work and de Certeau's text, Heterologies: Discourse on the other, I argue that ‘crisis’ as the rationalization for Olympism and the Olympic Games has proven an unsuccessful venture for de Coubertin; as the Olympic Games have produced conservative outcomes based on a neoliberal agenda focused on elitism, professionalism, nationalism, and commercialism. This historical case raises important questions about the role of Olympism and its power to act as a catalyst for change.     

Sharing the same world: boys' relations with girls during their last year of primary school

This paper explores the effect of cross gender relations on the construction of boys' masculine identities. The findings are based on data gathered from a year long empirical study of 10 to 11‐year‐old boys set in three UK junior schools. Although masculinity is defined against femininity and boys needed to mark out a set of distinctions from themselves and girls, I found that most boys categorized girls as different (they are not us) rather than oppositional, and the most common reaction was one of detachment and disinterest. Rather than maintaining that there are two separate worlds, I argue that there are two complementary gendered cultures, sharing the one overall school world, which are further nuanced by social class and race/ethnicity. Although there was a tendency of boys to dominate space and girls were often excluded from playground games, many girls refused to be dominated by boys, and some were able to deliberately exercise power over them.     

Preserving respectability or blatant disrespect? A critical discourse analysis of the Morehouse Appropriate Attire Policy and implications for intersectional approaches to examining campus policies

In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the Morehouse College Appropriate Attire Policy and discuss how issues of race, gender, and sexuality converge to reveal both overt and hidden meanings embedded in the policy. I also consider how power is used towards “other” black college men who neither fit neatly into prescribed gender norms, nor foster representations of “good” black men. I situate this critical policy analysis in the context of two ideas: bipolar masculinity and the politics of respectability, and offer implications for the use of intersectional frames in scholarship and research on men and institutional policies.     

Exploring the Availability of Student Scientist Identities within Curriculum Discourse: An anti-essentialist approach to gender-inclusive science

This article takes an anti-essentialist approach to the gendered construction of the science curriculum and its exclusivity. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, it examines the student subject positions that are generated within the dominant discourses and practices of curriculum science. A critical discourse analysis of student interview talk demonstrates the importance of both gender and ethnicity in the production of, or rejection of, scientist identities. While hegemonic masculinity can provide comfortable scientist identities for some males, femininity is less compatible with physical scientist subjectivities, although the 'otherness' of ethnicity can provide exceptions to this. Meanwhile, constructivist discourses of science, more often associated with biology, offer the possibility of a wider range of student scientist identities that transcend masculine/feminine dualisms. This approach to gender and science not only explains why physical science remains the preserve of a largely male elite without resorting to essentialism, but also offers evidence that wider inclusivity requires reconfiguration of the nature of science in the curriculum.     

Masculinity,educational achievement and social status: a social network analysis

This study utilises a quantitative case study social network approach to explore the connection between masculinity and scholastic achievement in two secondary, all-boys schools in Australia. In both schools two social networks representing social status are explored: the friendship network as a measure of status that includes emotional investment, and the influence network as a measure of status without emotion. Results demonstrate that for both schools the friendship network is not associated with academic achievement, though boys with similar levels of academic application cluster together. However, for the influence network there are effects related to achievement, application and attitudes toward an anti-academic/masculinity connection, as too toward ethno-cultural background. The results differ by school and show the importance of local context. However, similarities in the schools show that masculine identities may be engaged in the social interactions of students, ones which engage masculine stereotypes in public but not in private.     

Between a rock and a hard place: women and computer technology

This paper explores certain possible reasons behind the uneasy relationship between women and technology. The cultural identification of technology with masculinity has been well documented through previous research. However, we feel it is useful to revisit this complex relationship through the scope of a more subtle distinction between ‘users’ and ‘connoisseurs’, and the struggle over power, which revolves around a specific form of hegemonic masculinity. We draw on interviews that examine students’ experiences, emotions, and statements about gender, technology, mathematics, and education, and we try to offer an understanding of the ways women negotiate their position within the dominant discourse about computing and mathematics. Our analysis employs post-structuralist discourse theory.     

‘Playing with or like the girls’: advancing the performance of ‘multiple masculinities in Black boys’ childhood play’ in U.S. early childhood classrooms

Play is a gendered activity among young children, especially boys. Boys often tend to be more actively engaged in the (re)production of gendered play. However, most research studies and conceptual papers have misread, ignored, devalued, or scrutinized the gendered ways Black boys engage in play. This idea is particularly true for Black boys who may not play within the monolithic gendered expectations of childhood play. Drawing from [Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press] notion of multiple masculinities, I propose what I call the performance of ‘multiple masculinities of Black boys’ childhood play’ to embrace the ways some Black boys engage in play activities, which may not fit within the performance of hegemonic and Black masculine norms and expectations. In so doing, I call for educators to broaden how we view Black boys, and our definition of Black masculinity so that embracing what might be traditionally called ‘less masculine’ and/or stereotypically feminine could be valued male traits. Recommendations are provided for early childhood educators to support the confluence of ways Black boys engage in play experiences.     

Playing the game: critical literacy,gender justice and issues of masculinity

This paper explores issues of critical literacy, gender justice and masculinity through ‘Mr A’s’ story. Mr A is head of English at ‘Grange College’ – an all boys’ school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). The paper highlights how the privileging of rationality, control and ‘the masculine’ within Mr A’s ‘teaching‐as‐usual’ discourse constrains his efforts to pursue gender justice through critical literacy. While Mr A scaffolds his students’ critical analysis of gender and power in texts, his investments in teacher/student binary relations draw rigid boundaries between himself and his students in ways that delegitimise the terrain beyond the rational and ignore a theorising of the self. Drawing on Mr A’s story within Davies’ theorising about the possibilities of critical literacy, this paper adds to key work in arguing the importance of teachers’ interrogating their classrooms as lived texts where the relations of domination and power that derail the social justice possibilities of critical literacy can be made both recognisable and revisable. Such interrogation is foregrounded here as particularly urgent within the current moment where rationalist discourses within and beyond schools are increasingly working to circumscribe and constrain teacher practice in ways that stifle transformative social agendas.     

Issues of Power,Masculinity, and Gender Justice: Sally's story of teaching boys

Despite calls for a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and equity that recognizes how broader relations of gender and power continue to produce injustices for many females, essentialized accounts expressing concern about boys’ poor educational performance remain the most common refrain in dominant equity discourses across Western contexts. This common refrain characteristic of current large scale gender reforms, such as Australia's parliamentary inquiry into the education of boys, Boys: Getting it right, is driven by a standards rather than social justice focus and thus creates silences around issues of gender injustice, power, and constructions of hegemonic masculinity. In this paper, I present “Sally's” story as a disruption of these silences. Sally is a young English teacher at “Penfolds College”, an all boys Catholic school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). Her story, in illustrating how particular boys draw on broader discourses of masculinity to sexually harass and intimidate her, highlights the inadequacies of dominant public and policy discourse in terms of its failure to locate boys’ educational issues within broader contexts of inequitable gender relations.     

转型期我国青少年性别角色取向的偏移与引领研究

性别角色是后天形成的社会性别,不仅影响到个体的成长,也关系到民族人格特征和素质的发展。近十年来我国青少年性别角色发生了严重偏移,与性别一致的传统类型男性化和女性化大量减少,而男性正性特质和女性正性特质都弱的未分化类型则急剧增加。男性正性特质和女性正性特质都高的双性化是我国性别角色的理想类型,男性化特质则在双性化特质中起主导作用。在针对偏移现状及原因分析基础上,提出了针对性的引领对策：（1）在性别角色的认识和宣传上需大力纠偏;（2）大力进行未分化的预防教育和干预教育;（3）全面开展理想化类别的双性化特质塑造教育;（4）加强体育活动,增强男性特质。