Sociopolitical perspectives on boys and boyhood have been very useful in highlighting the importance of culture and historical context in how boys learn to define and negotiate their masculinities. For example, the framework for theorising masculinities provided by Connell has led to important insights and research being conducted into the impact of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities in boys’ lives, with its implications for developing a deeper understanding about gender and experiences of boyhood that move beyond the limits of sex-role socialisation theories. Carrigan et al. (1987) offered a critique of sex-role theory that provided the foundation for developing an alternative conceptual framework for gender theorising. This spoke to the dynamics of power and the sexual politics implicated in gender relations and argued for the need to address issues of interrelated factors such as class and sexual orientation. While sex-role theory offered a limited and static view of identity formation, the new sociology provided a more fruitful analysis of the complexities and contradictions involved in negotiating gender and relations of what Connell (1995) termed hegemonic, complicit and subordinated masculinities. This theoretical perspective has been instrumental in producing more nuanced analyses of the experiences of boyhood, particularly in relation to documenting the interplay and dynamics of masculinities in boys’ lives.
However, while there has been an explosion of studies into boys and masculinities in the last decade, this has been accompanied by what might best be termed a neo-liberal and neo-conservative political agenda that has impacted on and continues to impact significantly on social and educational policy. This has had major implications for establishing and authorising certain truths about boys and men as the ‘new disadvantaged’ who have suffered as a result of feminism and the feminising influences of women. This is represented by the media in terms of a ‘moral panic’ and a ‘masculinity crisis’, which Lingard and Douglas (1999) claim is driven by a recuperative ‘masculinity politics’. This anti-feminist politics of backlash has been manifested most significantly in terms which invoke essentialised notions of boys and of boyhood as a rite of passage thwarted by the absent father and, more broadly, by men’s absence as role models in boys’ lives. For example, Bid-dulph (1995) claims that boys with absent fathers are more likely to use violence, get into trouble, do poorly at school and join a teenage gang.
Hoff Sommers (2000) also reiterates the need for fathers to help boys become apparently proper or normal men and stresses the ‘misery’ that is caused for boys by those in schools who deny what is natural or in boys’ nature:
It is obvious that a boy wants his father to help him become a man, and belonging to the culture of manhood is important to almost every boy. To impugn his desire to become ‘one of the boys’ is to deny that a boy’s biology determines much of what he prefers and is attracted to.
(Hoff Sommers 2000)
Unfortunately, by denying the nature of boys, education theorists can cause them much misery.
Flood (2000) claims that while feminist reform agendas were committed to critiquing sex-role expectations define d f or gi rls an expanding their skills beyond the limits imposed by traditional femininities, this has not been the case for boys and men. He draws attention to the problematic tendency or failure to address the impact of hegemonic masculinities on boys’ lives in much of the populist literature and that driven by a neoconservative and backlash agenda. Within the limits imposed by such political frameworks, Flood (2000:4) argues that boys ‘are still universally encouraged to purge themselves of any hint of softness or femininity’:
In contrast to the new situation that prevails for girls, many male role models in the world of athletics and the media continue to support stereotypes of masculinity. It is no wonder, then, that males grow up attuned to and comfortable expressing themselves with violence.
This tendency to invoke gender polarisation, and hence to assert that boys are essentially different from girls, as a basis for recuperating or reinstating dominant forms of masculinity, has a long history. As Petersen (1998) has illustrated, this reflects a deep anxiety about the status of masculinity under threat by the perceived gains made by women at certain historical points in time. For example, he claims that following the rise of liberal democracy and the accompanying threat posed by the increasing demands of women for equal rights, male political philosophers began to support a political ideology of sex role differences as grounded in the biological sexed body.
Sexton (1969), a sociologist who set out to study the impact of the feminisation of boys and men in the 1960s, represents a response to the feminisation of schooling and men/ boys that parallels the resurgence of a ‘masculinity crisis’ that characterises much of the moral panic about boys and boyhood in the past decade. As Petersen has illustrated, these sorts of responses need to be contextualised within historically specific milieux of social change in which challenges or threats to the established male order are manifested though an intensification of anxiety surrounding the expression and/or definition of ‘proper’ masculinity. This moral concern about the feminisation, and hence the emasculation, of boys and men, as it is expressed by Sexton, needs to be understood as a response to broader social changes of the time in terms of the impact of the second wave feminism and gay/lesbian rights/activism within the context of the sexual revolution and its impact on the changing roles of men and women in society. For example, Sexton equates feminisation with female dominance over boys, claiming that it occurs ‘as males fall under the dominance of women who have been consigned to home and school’ (Sexton 1969:18). In fact, for Sexton, women—both mothers and female teachers—emerge as potential figures of fear and loathing in their capacity to castrate and hence emasculate men and boys. This, she stresses, has particular devastating psychological and emotional consequences for both boys and male teachers, particularly within feminising contexts such as school that threaten ‘normal masculine growth’. Sexton argues that the school enforces a form of passive conformity, which is equated with femininity and conflicts with the natural expression of healthy masculinity. This results in rebellion and anti-social behaviour, she argues, leading boys to be cast as ‘outsiders and misfits’.
This discourse about the inimical effects of the feminisation of boys resonates with current concerns about boys and boyhood, in which introducing more male role models and boy-friendly curricula in schools is seen as a panacea for addressing their educational and social needs (see Martino et al. 2004, for a critique of these approaches). Set against the tide of such recuperative masculinist approaches, however, is a body of research literature which continues to highlight a more nuanced analysis of power relations and differences amongst boys (Mac an Ghaill 1994; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998; Archer 2003). Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003) in their book So What’s a Boy? focus on a range of different boys’ experiences in Australian schools to foreground how relations of masculinity and gender impact on their lives. The aim of such research is to problematise the ways in which adolescent boys, from diverse backgrounds and locations, negotiate and perform their masculinities, both at school and in the wider society (see also Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2005). Set against a critique of moral panic about the status of all boys as the ‘new disadvantaged’, the emphasis is on those boys who are positioned on the margins in terms of their cultural backgrounds, sexuality, indigeneity, disability and socio-economic status. They negotiate social systems of identification that are often grounded in hierarchical and dichotomous classifications. These social relations impact on their relationships and attitudes to schooling in very significant ways. However, in providing the perspectives of a diverse range of boys positioned on the margins, the concern is to foreground the various ways in which some of these boys also invest in particular versions of masculinity to compensate for their inferiorised positioning—at the bottom of the social hierarchy—by other boys at school. Such hierarchical power relations also impact on and are actively negotiated by white Anglo-Australian middle socio-economic status boys.
Such scholarship provides further insights into the intra-group dynamics governing boys’ social practices of masculinity and experiences of boyhood at school. For example, ‘cool’ dominant white boys in this Australian study used a variety of strategies to maintain their position at the top of the social hierarchy. They played a major role in assigning and policing the inclusion and exclusion of other boys’ membership into groups. Many of these criteria were classified into neat hierarchical binaries such as being thin or fat, being ‘sporty’ or ‘nerdy’, having a ‘big dick’ or ‘small dick’, or being seen with popular girls or unpopular girls. However, many other boys actively challenged and questioned these normalising practices and policing techniques which circumscribed their experiences of boyhood and schooling. Boys from all backgrounds questioned the limits imposed by normative constructions of gendered relations of power, with some highlighting the significant role played by adult men and particularly their fathers in trying to enforce a particular version of masculinity built on a rejection of certain forms of emotionality read as weakness.
Boys themselves may offer sophisticated accounts of the multiple social relations which shape and constitute gender and sexual relations in schools. For example, in Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli’s (2003) interviews, an Italo-Australian boy describes the hierarchical power relations that are inflected by homophobia and heterosexism and which cut across class, ethnic and racial boundaries. He draws attention to the pecking order of ethnicities at a single-sex Catholic boys’ school where the Asian boys were positioned at the bottom of the social ladder, but were only too ready to taunt him in homophobic ways on the basis of his sexuality. This boy also talks about other Italian boys who were unable to reconcile ‘being Italian’ and ‘being gay’, given that his particular expression of straight-acting masculinity confounded their stereotypes of the gay male as essentially effeminate.
Such boyhood experiences highlight the significance of critical theoretical frameworks that examine the complexities and intersections of masculinity, sexuality, class, geographical location and ethnicity in boys’ lives. In addition, by including the voices of those boys who are marginalised and who are also willing to interrogate hegemonic constructions of masculinity, such research foregrounds the extent to which ‘masculinity’, as a set of social practices, is governed by historically and culturally specific norms for determining what are to count as legitimate expressions or experiences of boyhood.
Such literature represents an attempt to elaborate a theoretical framework that builds on that provided by Connell by drawing on theorists such as Foucault, Anzaldua and Minhha. These theorists provide useful conceptual frameworks for placing boys and boyhood under a particular kind of investigation. They enable a focus on analysing normalisation, surveillance and regulation in all boys’ lives, while directing particular attention to those positioned on the margins or borderlands. Given the tendency to homogenise boys, and hence the consequent failure of the media and much current educational policy to engage with more nuanced and complex understandings of boyhood and what it means to be a boy, research which provides the perspectives of those boys positioned at the margins has much to offer. In addition, such research represents a commitment to a transformative social agenda committed to fostering gender justice.
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