Summary
Contents
Subject index
Studies of masculinity have been largely absent from educational research. This book presents a collection of current critical scholarship on the creation of masculinities in schools. Contributors examine experiences in North American, Australian and British schools at all levels from preschool to graduation, and from school settings such as computer labs to the football field. The result is a thoughtful analysis of how masculinities are related to competing definitions of masculinity and femininity. The chapters show how masculinities are constructed among teachers, students and administrators, and locates these analyses within broader social, economic and ideological contexts.
Topologies of Masculinity: Gendered Spatialities of Preadolescent Boys
Topologies of Masculinity: Gendered Spatialities of Preadolescent Boys
Connell (1995, 1996) has argued that masculinities and femininities are produced in “body-reflexive practices” that articulate sensuous experiences with discursive constructions of the body. Bodies are thus “both agents and objects of practice”:
Particular versions of femininity and masculinity are constituted in [body-reflexive practices] as meaningful bodies and embodied meanings. Through body-reflexive practices, more than individual lives are formed: a social world is formed. Through body-reflexive practices, bodies are addressed by social process and drawn into history, without ceasing to be bodies. (Connell, 1996, p. 159)
This view of gender as a “social practice that refers to bodies and what bodies do” (Connell, 1996, p. 159) raises the question of just what ...
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