No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The subterranean masculinities of elite private boys’ schools
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Recent studies on boys and young men's heterosexual practices point in contradictory directions. On the one hand, boys and young men seem to be placing less value on "hard", overtly aggressive masculinity and compulsive heterosexuality, in keeping with their adoption of more egalitarian attitudes in their sexual relationships. On the other hand, the hegemonic masculine notions that associate "real" men with sexual prowess persist as well. In this article, we argue that this contradiction indicates careful (re)calibration in doing respectable heteromasculinities. We draw on a small-scale qualitative study located in Helsinki, Finland, in illuminating how cis-gendered boys and young men with less privileged backgrounds construct their heteromasculinities as respectable, which requires context-specific balancing between distancing themselves from and embracing hegemonic notions of manhood. Through this balancing, the boys and young men reconfigure not necessary the substance but the style of respectable heteromasculinity; therefore contributing to sustaining masculine hegemony by at-tuning it according to the claims of the "#MeToo era".
Amid seemingly endless media reports of sexual misconduct in our various institutions and particularly our schools, calls for better addressing gender injustice through education have again proliferated. In light of these calls, it continues to be important to appreciate the difficulties of teaching and activism in this area within the context of education. This paper highlights some of these difficulties from the perspectives of a small number of senior students at an elite independent school in the United States of America (USA). Drawing on a broader project that sought to identify new educative approaches to addressing gendered violence, the paper considers difficulties associated with (1) the adult-centred ways in which particular issues and knowledge about sex and sexuality are explored; and (2) the limits of student-only spaces for gender justice work especially given the discomforts of examining the gendered dimensions of sexual consent. Recognising these difficulties and tensions, the paper highlights the significance of feminist-informed adult allyship.
This paper draws upon a qualitative study with 144 young people in seven different research schools in England, exploring how cis-heteronormative homosocial masculinity practices shape digital sexual image exchange. We examine three types of practices: 1) boys asking girls for nudes (pressurized sexting, which we position as online sexual harassment); 2) transactional nude solicitation (boys sending dick pics and asking girls for nudes, which we position as image based sexual harassment and cyberflashing); 3) non-consensual sharing of girls and boys nude images (which we position as image based sexual abuse, showing the differential impacts with lasting sexual stigma worse for girls). Our findings confirm earlier research that demonstrated homosocial masculinity currency is gained via the non-consensual sharing of images of girls’ bodies. We also investigate the more recent rise of male nudes (dick pics) and how a homosocial culture of humour and lad banter tends to lessen the sexual stigmatization of leaked dick pics. We argue providing boys with time and space to reflect on homosocial masculinity performances is crucial for disrupting these practices and our conclusions outline new UK school guidance for tackling online sexual harassment, cyberflashing and image-based sexual abuse.
Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some feminist scholars use the concept, it is often left under-defined. I argue that talk of toxic masculinity provides an intriguing window into gender politics in any given context. However, feminists should not adopt toxic masculinity as an analytical concept. I consider the term’s origins, history, and usage, arguing that it appears in individualizing discourses that have historically targeted marginalized men. Thus, accusations of toxic masculinity often work to maintain gender hierarchies and individualize responsibility for gender inequalities to certain bad men.
This paper examines activist spaces for gender justice within two elite independent schools situated in an affluent part of the USA. Drawing on student interview data gathered as part of a broader study that sought to identify new educative approaches to addressing gendered violence, the paper explores attempts at these schools to engage boys in such spaces. With reference to two activist stories, the paper highlights the driving concern for including boys in discussions of gender justice (and, in particular, sexual misconduct and assault) as about ensuring their comfort. This concern is critically examined in light of the necessity of discomfort as central to gender transformative work. The paper examines how the emotional intensities of this work can both close down and open up conversations about gender justice and argues the significance of finding ways to support boys to critically explore these intensities towards engaging them in gender activism.
This process-sociological study compares developments since the 1880s, when in Dutch and American good societies, courtship activities were under strict parental control. It outlines the emancipation of younger people from parental dominance, via the dating system in the USA, in the Netherlands through verkering (an informalised ‘engagement’ similar to ‘going steady’), and through the diffusion of parental policies of staying ‘in the scene’. From 1945 to 1965, as ‘going steady’ increased in the USA, the two national trajectories converged. However, after the sexual revolution the traditional taboo on sex before marriage remained dominant in the USA, but it reduced dramatically in the Netherlands as Dutch parents increasingly allowed teenagers to have sex, even at home. Drawing from sexology research and his study of manners books, Wouters describes the two trajectories in the regulation of premarital sexuality and explains how they are connected to national differences in the regulation of social competition, the balance of power between classes, genders and generations, and levels of social integration.
Hybrid masculinity refers to men's selective incorporation of performances and identity elements associated with marginalized and subordinated masculinities and femininities. We use recent theorization of hybrid masculinities to critically review theory and research that seeks to make sense of contemporary transformations in masculinity. We suggest that research broadly supports three distinct consequences associated with recent changes in performances and politics of masculinity that work to obscure the tenacity of gendered inequality. Hybrid masculinities (i) symbolically distance men from hegemonic masculinity; (ii) situate the masculinities available to young, White, heterosexual men as somehow less meaningful than the masculinities associated with various marginalized and subordinated Others; and (iii) fortify existing social and symbolic boundaries in ways that often work to conceal systems of power and inequality in historically new ways.
In this article, the author details how 16–18-year-old boys ascribe to the tenets of inclusive masculinity in a U.K. secondary school that the author calls "Standard High." Drawing on five months of participant observation and twelve in-depth interviews, this article demonstrates that the boys' masculinities are predicated in opposition to the orthodox values of homophobia, misogyny, and aggressiveness. Accordingly, the practices of subordination and marginalization described in hegemonic masculinity theory are not used to regulate masculine behaviors or obtain dominance in this setting. At Standard High, boys ascribing to different masculine archetypes can each maintain high social status. Nonetheless, a social hierarchy still exists. Here, boys are stratified in accordance to a popularity ranking, which is determined by the possession of a matrix of variables: namely, charisma, authenticity, emotional support, and social fluidity.
That women tend to see harassment where men see harmless fun or normal gendered interaction is one of the more robust findings in sexual harassment research. Using in-depth interviews with employed men and women, this article argues that these differences may be partially explained by the performative requirements of masculinity. The ambiguous practice of “girl watching” is centered, and the production of its meaning analyzed. The data suggest that men's refusal to see their behavior as harassing may be partially explained through the objectification and attenuated empathy that the production of masculine identities may require. Thus, some forms of harassment and their interpretations may more accurately be seen as acts of ignoring than states of ignorance (of the effects of the behavior or the law). Implications for anti-sexual harassment policies and training are explored.
Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in the public sector. Amid rhetorics of excellence and accountability that pervade discourses of private schooling, however, recent high‐profile incidents of violence involving students at elite private schools provide a powerful provocation to these dominant discourses, and call into question a range of cultural practices associated with elite schooling. In this paper, the author draws on data generated from a three‐year study of sexually violent incidents that took place at an elite boys’ school in Sydney, Australia and their representation in the public domain, to consider how discourses of elitism, heteronormativity and violence circulate in dialogue. Through analysis of school‐ and media‐generated texts, and interviews with a former student and parents of the school, it is argued that the education marketplace is a site of disjuncture and contradiction, in which the privileges of private school consumption are simultaneously upheld and revoked in a complex interplay of school, media and social discourse. In so doing, the author considers how a range of cultural and institutional practices are complicit in the production of violence.
Over the last decade, education researchers have been concerned with the "impression management" activities of schools in the current climate of school corporatisation. Among these activities is the dissemination of school prospectuses that, far from being merely arbitrary sources of information, are seen as strategic texts that communicate the ethos of educational providers to potential clientele. Through sociocultural, feminist and post-structuralist frames, we consider how the positioning of masculinities is utilised as a marketing technique in such texts and, in turn, how such texts are implicated in the discursive construction of idealised schooling subjectivities. We undertake a semiotic analysis of the prospectuses of six private boys schools in the Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia, considering how masculinities are represented within binaries that position older boys as hard, strong and capable, and younger boys as small, weak and vulnerable. We argue that schooling is depicted in these texts as providing the necessary training ground for boys making the transition from boyhood to manhood. We argue that these images of masculinity continue to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with narrow notions of social privilege.
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.
Schools have seldom been examined by scholars in studies of organizational sites. Yet
schools and the educational context in which they operate, offer potentially important
insights into how organizations use rhetoric in their communications to persuade
audiences and leverage advantage in the marketplace. This study, which utilises
rhetorical analysis to examine the persuasive, yet ambiguous strategies used in 65
school prospectuses in Australia, revealed six strategies consistently used by schools
to leverage competitive advantage and persuade internal and external audiences:
identification, juxtapositioning, bolstering or self-promotion, partial reporting, selfexpansion
and reframing or reversal. As well as illustrating how schools operate in the
context of marketisation and privatization discourses in 21st century education, the
organizational theory and methods utilised for the research demonstrates how
rhetorical strategies draw on, as well as reproduce, socio-political and cultural
discourses around economic and social privilege.
Scholars in critical masculinities studies argue that we need men involved and engaged in gender equity movements for gender justice to be realised. Yet we need to know more about how different groups of men are understanding gender equity and what the barriers might be. Amidst significant media interest in elite private boys’ schooling and its possible (re)production of sexist cultures, this paper explores how 13 men who attended such schools in Australia between the 1970s and the 2000s understand gender justice, revealing a diversity of positions and practices across the different generational groups. We argue the men’s engagements with gender justice are shaped by a broad ‘curriculum of privilege’ including school and non-school based experiences that mediates their lives. Further research with both elite boys’ schools and their alumni is needed to better understand generational change in their engagements with gender justice.
While consent forms part of the Health, Wellbeing and Relationships strand of the New South Wales (NSW) Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) curriculum in Australia, it is not consistently or effectively delivered within schools. The recent e-campaign, Teach Us Consent in NSW, drew attention to the alarmingly high rates of sexual assault experienced by young women during their school years or shortly after. The campaign called for mandatory, inclusive and comprehensive consent education in schools. This paper presents research from a case study of an elite, same-sex, Catholic boys’ school in NSW, Australia, examining the types of knowledge and attitudes young men and their PDHPE teachers had about sexual consent and the types of consent pedagogies mobilised. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with the five male PDHPE teachers, and a focus group was conducted with five Year 11 male students (aged 16–17). The findings highlight that while participants recognised the importance of sexual consent in intimate relationships, consent pedagogies were grounded in individualising discourses of risk, responsibility and care, which rearticulated hegemonic gender norms. Findings from this study contribute to discussions of how schools approach consent education, and the limitations presented by outsourcing relationships and sex education.
This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys’ private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these accounts, as there are also female teachers in the study who appear to successfully circumnavigate these issues. However, this apparent wherewithal of some female teachers speaks to the internalisations of gender oppression as much as it does to the teachers’ agency. This paper illuminates these gender oppressions, which are made possible because they remain hidden and unchallenged. The findings of this study raise thorny issues for school-based leadership, but also for educational policy-makers, because gender oppression is seemingly inextricable from the social practices that elite private boys’ schools both advocate and rely on for positional advantage in schooling markets.
Elite universities are often believed to represent education’s gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places leading all the institutions that matter in societies across the world. We begin by explaining how this is so. Then we discuss what we call monster methodologies, suggesting why and how we employed them to disrupt the seductive appeal of elite universities. Deploying zombie, werewolf, and vampire metaphors, we identify various ways that elite universities are monstrous and the kinds of student monsters that they produce, honour, harbour, and reject. Exploring the zombie culture of elite universities in the Global North, we highlight how the monstrous dynamics of perfectionism place unhuman demands on many students which lead to them becoming the walking dead. Next, we examine the werewolf identities of elite universities and highlight the ongoing dialectical interchange between their highly reputable public and deeply disreputable private abodes. We also acknowledge the magnificent student monsters who challenge these monstrous institutions. We then turn to the Global South and South African elite universities. Illuminating the ways they are infused with the remains of the monstrous alliance between capitalism, colonialism, and apartheid, we analyse the vampire curriculum that sucks the strength, vigour, and energy from students. And we show how students have sought to become vampire slayers. Overall, we illustrate the merits of deploying monsters to disrupt the allure and expose the injurious practices of elite universities.
In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life.
Table of Contents:
Paul O’Connor, Introduction: The Technologisation of the Social: A 21st-Century Megamachine?
Arpad Szakolczai, Chapter 1. Communication as Theatricalisation: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age
Tom Boland, Chapter 2. Parasites of the Social: Digital Disruptions of the Labour Market
Agnes Horvath, Chapter 3. Possessed by Technology: The Metastasis of Absence
Daniel Gati, Chapter 4. Technologisation of the Social: Symbiosis, Parasitism, or Predation?
Ray Griffin, Chapter 5. J'accuse Zéro: The Technology of Zero and the Making of a Personal Void
Stephen Turner, Chapter 6. Digital Affordances and the Liminal
Marius Ion Benta, Chapter 7. The Smart Womb: Digital Technologies and the Maze of Trickster Politics
Thomas S.J. Smith, Chapter 8. Brave New Industry? The Dark Side of Dematerialisation and Industry 4.0
Janos Mark Szakolczai, Chapter 9. ‘What Have You Caught?’: Nannycams and Hidden Cameras as Normalised Surveillance of the Intimate
Paul O’Connor, Chapter 10. Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena
Marius Ion Benta, Conclusion: Is There a Way Out of the Technologisation of the Social?
Prevalent cultural representations of masculinity depict men as aggressive, emotionally distant individuals whose hard and muscular bodies epitomize these traits. These traditional representations of masculinity have also been linked to sexism and male dominance, which has encouraged many men to distance themselves from these representations. This study employed grounded theory methods to analyze interviews with twenty-five men about their understanding and construction of their masculinity. The analysis revealed that some men construct a hybrid masculinity by describing themselves as caring or being in touch with their feminine side to create social distance between themselves and men who adhere to traditional representations of masculinity. While men incorporated what they viewed as feminine characteristics into their identities, they reinforced, rather than challenged, the symbolic boundaries of gender and the resulting gender hierarchy. Ultimately, the men in this study were able to co-opt the language of caring to gain more prestige while reinforcing gender inequality and male dominance.
Elite schools have always been social choreographers par excellence. The world over, they put together highly dexterous performances as they stage and restage changing relations of ruling. They are adept at aligning their social choreographies to shifting historical conditions and cultural tastes. In multiple theatres, they now regularly rehearse the irregular art of being global. Elite schools around the world are positioned at the intersecting pinnacles of various scales, systems and regimes of social, cultural, political and economic power. They have much in common but are also diverse. They illustrate how various modalities of power are enjoyed and put to work and how educational and social inequalities are shaped and shifted. They, thus, speak to the social zeitgeist. This book dissects this intricate choreography.
Elite schools claim an enticing array of virtues – superior educational standards and an elevated morality. This paper examines their moral claims and their relationship to such schools’ social class practices. Through research at seven elite schools around the world, we distil their appeals to moral discourses and show how they involve both class avowal and disavowal. We incorporate insights from Karl Marx on the ideological functioning of capitalist social relations and Alasdair MacIntyre on modern moral understanding. We argue that while elite schools profess particular virtues in claiming and disclaiming their elite-ness, in both cases virtues are employed to assert status and to deflect criticism.
A problem with the current conceptualization of youth sexual violence is its exclusion of chronic, “low-severity” forms of violence known as gender microaggressions. A review of the sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender microaggression literatures is undertaken to identify the unique and overlapping characteristics of each construct. A theoretically grounded conceptualization of youth sexual violence is presented with gender microaggressions, sexual harassment, and sexual assault existing along a continuum from chronic, low-severity to infrequent, “high-severity” offenses. In this reconceptualization, gender microaggressions exist as a unique form of youth sexual violence and function as a potential “gateway mechanism” to legally actionable offenses.
This article draws on new social-scientific research on masculinity to develop a framework for understanding gender issues in the education of boys. Gender is constructed within institutional and cultural contexts that produce multiple forms of masculinity. Normally one form is hegemonic over others. Schools are active players in the formation of masculinities. Schools' overall gender regimes typically reinforce gender dichotomy, though some practices reduce gender difference. Masculinizing practices are concentrated at certain sites: curriculum divisions, discipline systems, and sports. Pupils are also active in constructing masculinities. Pupil cultures commonly emphasize heterosexual relationships and construct gender hierarchies. Boys take up the offer of gender privilege in diverse ways, ranging from protest masculinity to anti-sexism. The goals of educational work with boys include pursuing knowledge, improving relationships, and pursuing justice. Programs may be either gender-specific or gender-relevant. Experiential methods have been most common, but are vulnerable to disruption; other methods are being explored. The main groups who shape the process of change - the pupils, their parents, their teachers, and social movements - have divided interests. Yet their interaction, plus pressure from the wider world, is likely to produce growing educational attention to issues about boys and masculinity.
How can teachers bridge the gap between their commitments to social justice and their day to day practice? This is the question author Adam Howard asked as he began teaching at an elite private school and the question that led him to conduct a six-year study on affluent schooling. Unfamiliar with the educational landscape of privilege and abundance, he began exploring the burning questions he had as a teacher on the lessons affluent students are taught in schooling about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are.
Grounded in an extensive ethnographic account, Learning Privilege examines the concept of privilege itself and the cultural and social processes in schooling that reinforce and regenerate privilege. Howard explores what educators, students and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book illustrates the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege,not, fundamentally, as what they have, but, rather, as who they are.
As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality. In Privilege, Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul's students continue to learn what they always have--how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul's students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life--from Beowulf to Jaws--and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.
The dominant market logic in contemporary education produces social inequalities in education, through new mechanisms. To create markets in education, services and resources have to be rationed, so inequality is built in. To motivate parents to buy privatised services, losers have to be created and publicised – this is the function of NAPLAN testing and the MySchool website. In neo-liberal rhetoric, the actual pattern of social inequality is misrepresented, e.g. the idea of ‘pockets of poverty’, while institutional restructuring embeds the new mechanisms. Neoliberalism seeks to close down arenas for debate and create a monopoly for the market perspective; it is important to sustain other agendas.
This Briefing looks at the ways in which sport plays an influential role in the social construction of hegemonic masculinity among a group of 13- and 14-year-old boys at an elite private boys' school. Because sport forms such a vital segment of school life for many boys and is riddled with masculinising associations, this study argues that sport serves as a means through which many boys can construct, negotiate and perform their masculinity in a process of identity formation in which sexuality is embedded. This data is collected from an ethnographic study and exploration into the construction of masculinities in a single sexed boys' school. The boys use participation in sport as part of their masculinising process by drawing on their bodies' sexualised and gendered power, and by subordinating femininity that they associate with boys who do not play sport or who lack sporting competencies. Boys' investment in sport is, therefore, highly sexualised and in the heteronormative school environment they confront the inequalities of the gender hierarchy which marks soft boys from tough boys. It is argued that in choosing which sports to play there is already pressure on boys to distance themselves from homosexuality. Whilst much of the focus in South Africa is about encouraging sports, this Briefing argues that boys' meaning of sport is both gendered and sexualised contributing to the making of unequal gender relations among boys as well as the uncritical acceptance of homophobia as normal in a private boys' school.
IMPRESSION management strategies have become an important dimension of the educational endeavour. Their recent upsurge can be traced to the context of marketing and consumer choice that is now part of the prevailing orthodoxy of the modern school. In this paper, various types of ‘impression management’ (Schlenker, 1980) strategies are described, including those associated with school prospectuses and advertisements. These are the subjects of textual analysis, more specifically that of social semiotics which highlight the degree to which symbolic processes are influenced by context, and by the changing political economy. It is argued that the employment of a social semiotic framework to analyse educational promotional materials highlights the degree to which schooling, particularly private schooling, continues to be shaped by market forces.
Rita Nakashima Brock, Carter Heyward and Susan Thistlethwaite intend, in their respective theological projects, to create a vision of feminist eros uncomplicated by violence. They envision feminist eros as a means to bring theology back to earth and into the body, and encourage women to seek the good within themselves and their relationships with others. Brock, Heyward and Thistlethwaite resist social injustices, particularly the intertwined structures of patriarchy and multi-national capitalism. According to these feminist theologians, the structures of injustice have sedimented into a seemingly intractable and unobserved geography of habits and attitudes. Brock, Heyward and Thistlethwaite want to expand theological imagination to territories that lie beyond these oppressive systems through a critical feminist perspective, and to recover possibilities inherent in a hitherto unattended and constant feature of the landscape, the connections between all that exists, inanimate, animate, animal, human. This revisioning constitutes a new and dynamic gospel of feminist eros.
School violence has not been studied widely across schools and communities. This article examines hegemonic masculinity and its relationship to violence through the peer disciplining (hazing, teasing, bullying) that occurs among students who attend an elite suburban boys'school. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis suggests that violence is embedded in the social fabric of the school and implicated in power relations between both peers and their institution. Emotionally ambiguous, “you're either in or you're out” distinctions made by peer disciplining can produce shame, fear, and hurt alongside friendship, intimacy, and bonding. The normalcy with which hegemonic values are practiced makes it difficult, though not impossible, to contest. If we are to find viable alternatives to dominant masculinities, which are restrictive for most, it will be important to ask which boys and under what conditions are they able to resist its mandates.
Most educational work concerned with changes in gender relations has been addressed to girls, justified on ‘equal opportunity’ principles, and governed by ‘sex‐role’ theories. This framework is not very relevant to educational work with boys, yet gender issues arise here too. The paper presents retrospective data on schooling from the life‐histories of two groups of men, drawn from a larger study of contemporary changes in masculinity. Unemployed working‐class men recall ‘getting into trouble’, a process of constructing masculinity through conflict with the institutional authority of the school. Here, the school, as part of the state represents a power they cannot participate in. However, the school is also a site of the differentiation of masculinities. Some working‐class boys embrace a project of mobility in which they construct a masculinity organised around themes of rationality and responsibility. This is closely connected with the ‘certification’ function of the upper levels of the educational system and to a key form of masculinity among professionals. Some young men from this background, however, reject the connection with abstracted knowledge and bureaucratic authority, among them men interviewed who are in the environmental movement. A number of these men had encountered feminism first‐hand, for instance through feminist texts. Where there are low levels of literacy, especially political literacy, feminist influence on men is slight. On the other hand, a common reaction among men who do study feminist writing is a demobilising guilt. A major opportunity for educational action exists, but there are difficulties in designing it. Broadly, the strongest effects of schooling on the construction of masculinity are the indirect effects of streaming and failure, authority pattern, the academic curriculum and definitions of knowledge—rather than the direct effects of equity programmes or courses dealing with gender. This is a major strategic problem for reform. Two criteria for action can be suggested: curricula need to be designed to broaden boys’ sources of information about sexuality and gender; programmes need to be designed that allow for practical accomplishment on these issues, not open‐ended problem identification alone.
The data in this article come from an ethnographic exploration into the construction of masculinities in three junior schools in the UK between 1998 and 1999. The author argues that the construction and performance of masculinity is inextricably linked to the acquisition of status within the school peer group, and he delineates the specific series of resources and strategies that the boys draw on and use in each setting to achieve this. The different meanings and practices at each school, and the different array of resources available, means that there is a different set of options and/or opportunities within each school setting to do boy, and the author classifies these as being either open (possible), restricted (more difficult), or closed (almost impossible). The principal and most esteemed resource used by the boys was physicality and athleticism, and the author highlights the link between masculinity and the body.
In this paper, a Foucauldian interpretive framework for analysing the production of subjectivity serves as a basis for investigating the ways in which boys fashion their masculinities at one particular school. Interviews conducted with a group of adolescent boys, aged 15-16, in a catholic co-educational high school are drawn on the document certain social practices and behaviours, which become identifiable as particularised instances of masculinity. Data are used to investigate how these boys learn to relate to themselves and to others within the context of peer-group relations and dynamics at this particular school. Possible implications of this research for educational in schools are indicated.
This paper, based on the perspectives of young men, explores the relationship between dominant constructions of masculinities and the sexual harassment of young women in Australian secondary schools, within a feminist poststructuralist theoretical framework. Of particular importance in this process are the ways in which sexual harassment is integral to the construction of hegemonic heterosexual masculine identities; the importance of popularity, acceptance and young men's fears within male peer group cultures; and the utilization of sexual harassment as a means through which to maintain and regulate hierarchical power relationships, not just in relation to gender, but how it intersects with other sites of power such as ‘race’ and class. It is highlighted that sexual harassment is considered a legitimate and expected means through which to express and reconfirm the public and private positions of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ within a heterosexualized, racialized and classed gender order.
Picking up on Norman Denzin's and Yvonna Lincoln's articulation of the concept of bricolage, the essay describes a critical notion of this research orientation. As an interdisciplinary approach, bricolage avoids both the superficiality of methodological breadth and the parochialism of unidisciplinary approaches. The notion of the bricolage advocated here recognizes the dialectical nature of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary relationship and promotes a synergistic interaction between the two concepts. In this context, the bricolage is concerned not only with divergent methods of inquiry but with diverse theoretical and philosophical understandings of the various elements encountered in the act of research. The insights garnered here move researchers to a better conceptual grasp of the complexity of the research act—a cognizance often missed in mainstream versions of qualitative research. In particular, critical bricoleurs employ historiographical, philosophical, and social theoretical lenses to gain a more complex understanding of the intricacies of research design.
This paper examines a local and specific instance of the effects of neoliberal markets on individual and institutional subjects of schooling. It reviews a court case between a prestigious private girls’ school and an ex‐student who sued the school for failing to provide adequate supervision on a school trip to Europe during which she was raped. It considers the incident in relation to the legal and discursive complexities of school excursions and turns towards neoliberal imperatives that drive school competition for an explanation of how the crisis was managed. Through analysis of print media reports during the week of the trial it traces how discourses of femininity, sexuality and sexual violence came into collision with ideals of reputation, control and proper behaviour, upon which elite schools depend for their marketing. Finally, the paper explores how figurations of the ‘family’ were mobilized by the school and those involved in the events.
What is it like to be a master of the universe? The authors have researched the desires and fears of the world's most powerful men. The Murdochs, Packers, Kennedys, Agnellis and other men like them, directly determine the fates of thousands and influence the future of the world like no other people. Described as 'sacred monsters' by one of their own, they are carefully created to be what they are and to enjoy shaping the world in their own likeness. To learn about these often reclusive men, the authors extended the life-history technique to interrogate autobiographies, diaries and biographies and have created a composite picture, a collective portrait, of tycoons over three generations. The book carefully explores the childhoods, schooling, work and play, sexual activities, marriages and deaths of the wealthiest men who have ever lived. It exposes the nature of ruling-class masculinity itself.
This article describes the masculinities engaged by male leaders of an Australian agricultural organization, CANEGROWERS, during interviews with a young, female, doctoral student. The masculinities displayed involved the men emphasizing their heterosexuality, presenting themselves as powerful and busy, and positioning themselves as having expert and superior knowledge. It is argued that important in shaping the interview process was the gender focus of the research topic itself, as well as the gendered research context of CANEGROWERS. Thus, to understand the impact of gender on interviewing, we need to go beyond a simple focus on the gender of the interviewer and interviewee, and undertake a more sophisticated analysis which explores the intersection of the mediating influences of ‘who, whom, what and where’.