This article focuses of 13 high school boys' experiences of getting into "trouble" in a former Coloured township high school in KwaZulu-Natal Province. This ethnographic study explored the reasons for boys being considered "troublesome" at school. Data collection included focus groups, semi-structured open-ended individual…

Drawing upon a post-structural ethnography of boys' constructions of gendered and sexual identities in one South African high school, this paper empirically seeks to theorise how 20 Grade 8 boys, identified as The Jokers, The Achievers, The Outcasts and The Average Ou's, simultaneously seek out spaces in male peer culture to cultivate, police and…

This paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted between 2012 and 2014 with a group of 64 boys and girls aged 6-10, all attending the same township primary school in South Africa. The paper explores how the young children construct gender "boundaries" and "police" gender "transgressions" on the school playground…

This paper explores the salience of sport in the lives of eight-year-old and nine-year-old South African primary school boys. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I argue that young boys' developing relationship with sport is inscribed within particular gendered, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Throughout the paper I show…

This article presents elements of an ethnographic study of gendered identities among boys and girls in the early years of primary schooling. Foregrounding group work in mathematics as a key arena for the production of young masculine identities, this article goes some way to addressing what is absent from sociological portrayals of young children,…