Chris Haywood

• Newcastle University

With a world that appears to be on an uncertain precipice, with wars and conflict occurring across the globe, increasing threats of environmental damage, and unparalleled political transformations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that discussions of bodies, masculinities and sexualities are merely a distraction to what is “really going on” i...

The increased popularity of swinger clubs across the UK in the past two decades has not been met with commensurate public health initiatives or interventions that engage with the relationship between swinger clubs and sexual health. Consequently, the responsibility for sexual health promotion within these establishments largely depends on the discr...

There is often a suggestion—or direct accusation—that academic work is somewhat removed from the goings-on of what is labeled “the real world.” These charges can come from a variety of places, and there is plenty of fertile ground for such criticisms. One needs only to think of the many many hoax articles to try and demonstrate the silliness of sch...

Since our first Issue, the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities has sought to find ways to meld our form with our content. This has come in the shape of trying to publish unique research articles, pushing the boundaries of the book forum genre, and—something that has been consistent—in continually working towards having a cover image t...

The chapter focuses on the racialization of black men within sex clubs. It begins by recognizing the ways that clubs promote thematized events. Such events create a way of promoting fantasies that may lead to the satiating of desires. The chapter moves from discussing the commodification and fetishization of the body to considering how it is practi...

This chapter begins by framing sex clubs as a place of secrecy and discretion. It then begins to define what a sex club is, a potted history of sex clubs and their position within the law and planning permissions. The chapter then provides a short discussion of methodology, before moving on to provide information on who visits sex clubs, what their...

This introductory chapter welcomes readers to the sex club. This chapter explains what the book is about and what readers should expect. The book then highlights the ethnographical research method that is used predominantly throughout the book. In so doing, it critically reflects on the limits of using ethnography to describe sexual encounters. The...

In this final chapter, the key themes of the book are drawn together. It begins by summarizing how sex clubs are part of a broader process of capitalism and its pursuit of capitalist realization. It also highlights ways that class representations may differ from the lived experience of the club. The chapter takes up its final theme of exploring the...

In this chapter, we focus on a specific event that is often advertised at a sex club: a Greedy Girl night. ‘Greedy Girl’ nights are promoted by clubs to encourage men and women to attend a specific event where a woman has sex with multiple men and couples either at the same time or one after another. A key theme that is explored throughout this cha...

This chapter explores how dark rooms within sex clubs shape and configure men and masculinities. Using interviews with men who have used and visited dark rooms, this chapter explores the erotic subjectivity of men. The starting point for this chapter is that the norms and values of the club that are embedded in the erotic hierarchies that circulate...

This chapter begins to unpack what is understood as cultures of desire. The chapter begins by suggesting that sex clubs are places that project different forms of public intimacy. Public intimacy provides the contours through which cultures of desire emerge. The chapter then begins to explain how sexual encounters are often initiated and traces tho...

This chapter explores how transgressions take place within the sex club. First, using a group sex encounter, it highlights the ways in which different forms of heteroeroticism can be understood as contesting the everyday routines of the club and broader notions of heteronormativity. Embedded within this section of the chapter is the notion of gaze...

Current research has suggested that sex, sexual practices and sexual identities are increasingly being folded into people’s leisure and recreational activities. One area that has witnessed growing popularity has been sex clubs that market themselves as places that enable heterosexual casual, anonymous sexual encounters. Traditionally called swinger...

Within a British context, the South Asian Muslim community is currently a significant media spectacle with a millennial generation of British-born young men inhabiting public personae that officially are perceived as being a ‘suspect community’. An epistemological assumption of this perception appears to be that religion is the dominant and exclusi...

The chapter disputes what we highlight to be a reductive existing gendered literacy on masculinity which, we suggest, projects a normative viewpoint of manhood, wherein boys are perceived to be the sole perpetrators of violence in educational settings against other young people. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a small sample of ten you...

Within British schools over the last few decades, we have witnessed a policy move from multi-culturalism to counter-radicalization. In response, this article examines an ethnographic project that illustrates both the relative autonomy of methodology from broader theoretical and substantive questions, as well as the internal creative logic of method...

Nota bene: This introduction was written near the end of 2020, a year that saw the world struggle with COVID-19. These issues make up the primary body of the below text. Yet, as we moved into the new year, perhaps thankful that 2020 had come to a close, on 6 January, and before the introduction was sent to publication, the US Capitol building in Wa...

On the cover of this issue is an image taken from the Wellcome Collection. Titled “Dance of death: death and the pedlar”, the image shows a skeletal personification of Death picking through a basket of goods. In the basket are included masks, crosses, a deck of cards, swords, and a variety of other items. Published in the 18th Century, it is based...

Recently, national populist politics has been translated with the emergence of two overlapping narratives of Islamophobia and anti‐EU immigration media discourses. Such discourses have been made highly visible in the increased spike in hate crimes that have been a hidden cost of the national(ist) debate about Britain leaving the European Union (Bre...

On the cover of this issue, we have another image from the Wellcome Collection. This image by ABIA (Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinar de AIDS/Grupo) is a not-for-profit organization mobilized in response to the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980's. The image is a reworking of the “Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo and was used as part of HIV/AI...

Men’s prostate orgasms, cuckold culture, breastfeeding fathers, and erectile dysfunction technologies have epithetically signaled how men’s bodies, sexualities, and masculinities have exceeded the gender and sexual order of modernity. A proliferation of practices, discourses, and affects that appear to denaturalize and decenter Western epistemologi...

As noted in our introduction, the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities hopes to do things differently. One of these differences, which perhaps may not be all that different, is that our journal will have a rotating cover image. Each issue will include a different image that is reflective of the journal or perhaps of a particular articl...

This chapter provides an insight into the sexual world of ‘dogging’; that of anonymous sex between men, men and women usually carried out in car parks. Drawing upon interviews with 12 men who engage in dogging practices, this chapter provides insights into the micro-negotiations of the dogging encounter and men’s masculine subjectivities. The chapt...

Since the emergence of mass tourism, holidays have been a leisure activity that have increasingly been associated with dating and romance. One of the characteristics of mass tourism is its associations with pleasure and the view that it is a time when the formal and informal rules that regulate behaviour at ‘home’ have little purchase in ‘foreign’...

Drawing upon the semi-structured interviews with 15 men aged 30–54, this chapter explores men’s experiences of speed dating. Beginning with theories of partner choice, the chapter engages with the ways that men navigate speed dating events by focusing on their anxiety and vulnerability. This provides a pretext for the articulation and demonstration...

The conclusion of the book draws together the key inter-related themes—how men are experiencing contemporary dating practices and the impact that these practices are having on their masculinities. It also picks up some of the other principal themes of the book, that of neoliberalism, the pursuit of authenticity and markets and consumption. The book...

Whilst online dating has witnessed a dramatic rise in popularity as a form of dating, the incredibly fast rise of mobile applications points to a new method of relationship initiation. This chapter explores the accounts of 15 heterosexual young men aged 18–24. Using Tinder as a case study, this chapter argues that the affordances of the app create...

This chapter provides an overview of the key themes of the book. It provides a working definition of dating and the focus of the book. In doing so, the book explores the relationship between masculinity and heterosexuality. The chapter then provides information on the research dynamics for the book and specifically explores the relationship between...

This chapter builds upon the discussion in the introduction about the range of meanings that surround how we understand dating. It introduces the idea that ‘Dating’ is one of a number epistemes that configure how we make sense of relationship initiation. The chapter is different from the others in that it primarily relies on historical accounts to...

This chapter explores the world of online sex seekers. The chapter focuses on men who use the internet specifically to have sexual encounters. The semi-structured telephone interviews with 11 publicly identified heterosexual men highlight the difficulties of describing sexual encounters organized online as lacking emotional depth. The chapter begin...

At a time when traditional dating practices are being replaced with new ways to meet potential partners, this book provides fresh insights into how are men responding to new ways of dating. Drawing upon original research, this book examines a wide range of contemporary dating practices that includes speed dating, holiday romances, use of dating app...

The last 15 years have seen a remarkable shift in the educational representation of British-born Muslim young men. In the media-led reclassification of them, from South Asian to Muslim, they have moved from ideal student to potential jihadist. This article draws upon a three-year ethnographic study with young Muslim men located within the West Midl...

This article provides an insight into the sexual world of ‘dogging’; that of anonymous sex between men, and between men and women, usually carried out in car parks. Drawing upon interviews with 12 men who engage in dogging behaviours, this article provides insights into the micro-negotiations of the dogging encounter and men’s masculine subjectivit...

This chapter explores the use of representations of masculinity within Thai alcohol advertising as the basis for expanding the global reach of brands across East Asia. In short, multi-national companies are embarking on the subjectification of East Asian markets through particular (heterosexual) masculine codes. Interestingly, these codes are stron...

At present, contemporary agendas around men and masculinity are overwhelmingly driven by discussions in Europe, the USA and Australia. Although such work is providing an invaluable contribution to the theoretical and conceptual developments in the field, these agendas tend to be limited by the duplication or modification of existing models and appr...

Popular culture is awash with discussions about the difficulties associated with being a man. Television talk shows, media articles and government press releases discuss not simply the problem of men, but have more recently focused on the problems of being a man. The Conundrum of Masculinity challenges highly advertised beliefs that men are in cris...

Mac an Ghaill and Haywood explore late modern Muslim young men’s experiences of schooling to examine what inclusion/exclusion means to them. Qualitative research was undertaken with 48 Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men living in areas of the West Midlands, England. The young men highlighted three key areas: the emergence of a schooling regime ope...

This edited collection brings together international leading scholars to explore why the education of Muslim students is globally associated with radicalisation, extremism and securitisation. The chapters address a wide range of topics, including neoliberal education policy and globalization; faith-based communities and Islamophobia; social mobilit...

This article explores late modern Black and Muslim young men’s and women’s experiences of higher education. Carrying out qualitative research with 14 male and female young people, these students claimed that their Youth and Community Work course at their university made available an alternative representational space, enabling them to develop a maj...

Queer theory is a highly productive approach that has facilitated critical interventions into understanding sexual identity configurations. However, the aim of this chapter is to disturb the conceptual and empirical privileging of the “sexual” that queer theory often provides. In response, this chapter uses queer theory to examine the interplay bet...

In Asian societies, the framing of contemporary masculinities and femininities remains under-theorized. This article critically examines the interplay between schooling, Indonesian Chinese ethnicity and the (re)production of male entrepreneurial masculinities manifested in teenage boys’ sexual / gender subjectivities and identity formation. The qua...

The 1st International Conference on Men and Masculinities was organized byInitiative for Critical Studies of Masculinities focused on militarism, nationalism,literature, media studies, culture, identity, politics and social construction ofmasculinities and how these phenomena characterize the transformation of masculi-nities in a global world. The...

The re-publication of Christine Hoff Sommers’s book on the War Against Boys (2000, 2013) continues to feed into a widely circulating premise that feminist inspired pedagogical strategies are having a detrimental effect on boys’ experience of education. It resonates with a UK newspaper article whose author asked: “Why do women teachers like me treat...

Much recent academic work on making sense of the changing public profile of the Muslim community in Britain operates within an explanatory framework that assumes a shift from ethnicity to religion and an accompanying shift from racialization to Islamophobia. A key limitation of this work, often grounded in media representations, is that it tends to...

This article explores Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men’s experiences of schooling to examine what inclusion/exclusion means to them. Qualitative research was undertaken with 48 Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men living in areas of the West Midlands, England. The young men highlighted three key areas: the emergence of a schooling regime operatin...

Across media, academy and popular culture in western societies there is much talk of an implosion of the modern gender order. Education is often presented as a key site in which a crisis of masculinity is played out, and schools have become a focus for practical attempts to reconcile social and cultural transformations through the recalibration of...

The rapid rise in the number of studies on men and masculinities has led to an increasing visibility of the role of masculinity within the research process. Feminist research approaches have provided crucial insights into how gender informs the research process, including epistemological approaches, data collection strategies and analysis (see Jagg...

Over the past 30 years, sexuality and schooling has been subject to increasing media coverage that has been central to activating political, educational and popular concerns. Such concerns have circulated through a number of ‘sex scandals’ that include sex education, pupil sexual relations, technology and pornography, sexual relations between teach...

Research on masculinity has become an important area of gender and education that includes a wide range of empirical concerns and theoretical approaches. This article identifies a number of studies that are asking questions about the conceptual usefulness of masculinity within educational contexts. The first section explores how educational researc...

Studies of education and masculinity have provided highly productive insights into young men’s identity formations, subjectivities, and social practices. Work in this collection adds to the field by connecting the study of masculinity with queer theory. However, this chapter argues that such a connection incites a potentially transgressive interven...

In the UK, the media are reporting increasing rates of childhood suicide, while highlighting that increasing numbers of pre-adolescent boys (in relation to girls) are diagnosed as mentally ill. In response, academic, professional and political commentators are explaining this as a consequence of gender. One way of doing this has been to apply adult...

The retreat from social class within the sociology of education has been accompanied by the intensification of socio-economic and cultural inequalities. This paper seeks to draw upon cultural analyses of social class by addressing a classificatory shift of white English working-class males, who have moved from an ascribed primary socio-economic sta...

This article critically engages with the concepts of home, nationality and belonging by evaluating explanations of (e)migration of mid-20th century Irish working class men. We do this by suggesting that contemporary approaches to Irish (e)migration employ ‘containing’ categories that frame the possibilities of knowing and understanding. We problema...

Over the past three decades educational research has provided an exciting and dynamic theoretical engagement with gender and sexuality. While acknowledging this contribution, this article is a conceptually‐led exploration of a number of theoretical and methodological tensions contained within this research. More specifically, it argues that current...

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable explosion of knowledges across the academy, media and political discourse, generating a wide range of representations of men and masculinity. In this paper, we interrogate the failure for an accompanying understanding of the epistemological and methodological implications of the research process in this ar...

Across media and academic accounts in western societies there is much talk of an implosion of the modernist gender order. One way of capturing this shift is through the deployment of the concept of feminisation and an accompanying masculinity crisis. This paper draws upon empirical work in a specific context, that of the contemporary English school...

This article explores the experiences of second generation Irish young men living in Britain. Drawing upon theories of globalization, diaspora and subjectivity, it considers how ethnic invisibility (in Britain) and national exclusion (in Ireland) are shaping young people's specific experience of cultural peripheries. At the same time, such a positi...

The academic representation of social transformation in Britain has underplayed the key contribution of sexual politics. More specifically, sociological accounts of changing social relations within institutional sites has served to make invisible sexual identities. From research on a Modern Apprenticeship in the mid 1990's, empirical material is us...

Identity is one of the defining terms of the 1990s in England. Currently, academic, political and popular discourses highlight the pervasiveness of the term. However, what is missing from these accounts is an awareness of its philosophical roots. Consequently, most of these accounts are theoretically under‐developed, marked by conceptual confusion...

This paper outlines the current crisis in the anti-oppressive problematic in English schooling in the mid-1990s. Locating the argument within a socio-historical context, the development of the anti-oppressive problematic is critiqued from a differentialist position exploring its limits within the inter-related arenas of theory, practice and policy....

Sex education in 1990s England is surrounded by controversy. Some of this controversy rests on a series of tensions that have been articulated into and by state legislation on sex education in schools. The main purpose of this paper is to consider how, through these articulations, sex education policy frameworks form a range of ways in which young...

This paper highlights the impact of recent state and employment changes upon young people in vocational and educational training. We take the position that within the context of de‐industrialisation, changes around youth labour markets are helping to shape new formations of masculine identities. For particular groups of working‐class young men thes...

This paper arises out of our recent work investigating the construction of masculinities. During the research, the issue of the interplay between masculine subjectivities and social destinies became a major concern. This paper seeks to complement parallel studies being conducted with young women on the fashioning of feminine identities. It is sugge...

This study draws on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 2 months at aco‐education sixth form. By considering gender identities as performative, ethnographic material is used to illustrate how male students use talk to fashion heterosexual masculinities. It is argued that the relationship between male students and the formal curriculum...

This paper arises out of our current work investigating the construction of male and female students’ sexual/gender relations within school arenas. A main concern is to explore recent empirical and theoretical work on sexuality, in an attempt to critique the New Right moralism with its own contradictory form of pluralism. At the same time a critica...