The queer in masculinity: Schooling, boys, and identity formation

Abstract

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 intervention that may disturb, contest, and challenge some of the basic assumptions that underpin gender studies. With reference to recent research we have undertaken in UK schools, we use an interplay between empirical examples and queer theory to facilitate a re-consideration of current approaches to masculinity. More specifically, the chapter conceptually ‘twists’ the (commonly ascribed) constituent elements of masculinity that include heterosexuality, homophobia, and anti-effeminacy. Furthermore, we argue in a deconstructive sense that masculinity itself contains the possibilities of its queerness-or, in other words, the theoretical underpinning of the concept of masculinity produces the possibility of a gendered alterity. In conclusion, the chapter suggests a continual re-alignment between research that is sensitive to the multiplicity of young men’s meanings and experiences and the conceptual frameworks that are deployed to explain and understand the experiences.