Allison Gonsalves' article on "women doctoral students' positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics" explores narratives of Canadian women physicists concerning their strategies to gain recognition as physicists. In my response to her rewarding and inspiring analysis I will reflect on her findings and arguments and…

Scholars have sought to identify the complexity and multidimensionality of the phenomenon of sexual identity formation since the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 (Bayer, 1981). This article addresses the manner in which the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ]…

This response to the articles by Diana Wallace and Samantha Pinto seeks to locate the negotiation of gendered identities in the classroom within the larger study of the dialogic relations between texts, teachers, and students. Teaching, it proposes, is not a second-order derivative of scholarship, but a cultural form in its own right. The article…

Beaches remain important places within indigenous coastal peoples' territories, although the silence about our ownership is deafening. Many authors have argued that within Australian popular culture the beach is a key site where racialized and gendered transgressions, fantasies, and desires are played out, but none have elucidated how these…

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated…

During the late twentieth century, Kanaka Maoli have struggled to push back against these representations, offering a rewriting of Hawaiian history, quite literally. Infused by Hawaiian nationalism and a growing library of works that investigate the naturalization of American colonialism in Hawai'i, innovative Kanaka Maoli representations in the…

In this commentary, the author reviews methodological and conceptual shortcomings of recent articles by K. D. Drummond, S. J. Bradley, M. Peterson-Badali, and K. J. Zucker (2008) as well as G. Rieger, J. A. W. Linsenmeier, L. Gygax, and J. M. Bailey (2008), which sought to predict adult sexual identity from childhood gender identity. The author…

O'Neil (2008) defines male gender role conflict (GRC) as a psychological state in which the socialized male gender role has negative consequences for the person or others. Building on this, many now realize that the mechanisms through which these negative consequences occur, rather than being global, are instead contextual. That is, different men…

This article examines recent claims by Jeffrey Smith that: (1) "hegemonic masculinity" is an expression of working class counter-school culture; (2) some teachers are "cultural accomplices" in constructing "hegemonic masculinities" of anti-school working class boys, thereby contributing to their underachievement; and (3) these "cultural…

Few men choose to become primary school teachers. Those who do move into a world often thought of as feminized and contend with a publicly-voiced rhetoric which simultaneously idealizes and demonizes them. This paper turns a spotlight on one student's stories of being a man and a student primary school teacher. It considers how he negotiates the…

This paper is basically about terminology. In it I discuss the terms "masculinity" and "femininity" and how they relate to being male and being female. My theme arises from an increasing difficulty that I am finding in understanding how individual identities relate to dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity. Christine Skelton and…

Introduces a special issue that is positioned against the backdrop of the current "boys in crisis" debate. It focuses on how the articles address embodied identities and material inequalities; social mobility and working class femininities; resisting individualism and rationality; power and responsibility; masculinity and the middle class; and…

In this essay, Morwenna Griffiths considers the effect of feminization on the practices of education. She outlines a feminist theory of practice that draws critically on theories of embodiment, diversity, and structures of power to show that any practice is properly seen as fluid, leaky, and viscous. Examining different and competing…

The ongoing moral panic surrounding adolescent boys continues to cause concern, proving pivotal in popular discourses centring on the "problem of youth". Drawing on ethnographic data from a large co-educational secondary school, this paper illustrates how school outcomes are adversely affected by working class boys' investments in peer…

This book explores the relationship between violence and masculinity within schools. It suggests that violence has been "masculinized" in such a way that boys often perpetrate violence as a means of demonstrating their perception of what counts as a valued form of masculinity. Chapter 1 looks at some of the ways in which violence has…