Rethinking ‘Healthy Masculinity’ Training From a Queer Boys + Perspective

Abstract

Contemporary discourses on feminism’s role in Australian boys’ lives focus on how feminism might guide strategies that train boys to resist negative or ‘toxic’ performances of masculinity and instead encourage them to strive for a ‘healthy’ or ‘positive’ masculinity. In this article, I question whether training young people to attach themselves to a particular masculinity is aligned with a commitment to queer politics or serves the interests of boys, particularly queer boys or gender-diverse young people. I begin by tracing unsettled contests over masculinity's ontological foundations, including the roles of biology, identification, ‘gendered’ traits, and affective attachments. Through the method of autoethnography, I then explore issues that arise in the logic and implementation of common desires to train boys into ‘healthy’ men. I argue that, drawing on a queer liberation tradition, feminism can be an invitation to solidarity and freedom as well as a ‘way out’ or ‘refuge’ from the regulatory policing of gender norms associated with boyhood. I suggest a detachment or disaffection with masculinity does not have to lead to an identity crisis and can instead be part of a feminist killjoy survival kit [Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press].