“Other” boys contesting hegemonic masculinities and violence in the primary school

Abstract

In South Africa, research on violent masculinity has often focused on how hegemonic masculinity subordinates girls and women and increases their vulnerability. Because of this intense focus on women and femininities, little is known about the dynamics of gender violence between hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. In this chapter, we thus address this gap by considering how violent relations play out between hegemonic and subordinated masculinities amongst primary school boys. We focus on “other” boys, the victims of bullying, known at the school as “cheese boys”, within a marginalised socioeconomic context in South Africa. We used focus group discussions to engage with this subordinated group of boys, and explored different aspects of their accounts of vulnerability to hegemonic expressions of masculinity at school. Hegemonic boys were known as the “bosses” and they subordinate the cheese boys through different forms of violence that occurred in the classroom during lessons, on the playground, during lunch breaks, and outside of school hours. We explore the social and material contours within which this violence manifested and argue that while the cheese boys are subordinated they are not simply passive victims of the violence. They have the capacity for agency as is evident in the ways they reflect upon how to resist and address the violent masculinities that plague them in the primary school.