The call to critique 'common sense' understandings about boys and masculinity(ies)

Abstract

This paper is founded upon the premise that 'common sense' understandings about boys persist within schools and, given this continuing circulation of such understandings, advocates the need to critique such conceptualising. It does so on the grounds that such understandings, and the essentialist discursive knowledges informing these, fail to take account of the complex and multifarious ways in which boys come to construct themselves as masculine subjects. In demonstrating the short-comings of such 'common sense' understandings, and indeed to need to call these into question, the paper examines the ways in which a group of boys took up positions of dominance within their classroom and, more specifically, focuses upon the ways in which they came to perform as embodied masculine subjects. In doing so, it explores the repertoire of practices, or range of performance techniques, mobilised by these boys - a repertoire constituted by, and constitutive of, hegemonic versions of masculinity.