Boys engaging masculinities

How do boys define masculinity? How do they negotiate masculinity with their peers in the school setting? Participants’ responses during a year-long ethnography in a single-sex secondary school created a four-layered model of boys’ engagement of masculinity. They allowed the researcher to describe and analyse a complex hierarchy of forms of such engagement that ranged from a superficial level comprising a predictable picture of stereotypes, to an almost inaccessible layer of individual masculinities. The study found that many boys owned the impetus to explore egalitarian masculinities, but in terms of schooling, they required curricular support for this to occur.