There is both gain and loss in early male formation: men gain a certain clarity, power, and even vision in their separateness, yet may pay the cost in mutuality, responsiveness, and connectedness. Mentors can help men heal their connectivity deficit while retaining the strengths of their distinctiveness by reminding them that they have within…

This article provides insights into the discourses that legitimate and perpetuate male undergraduate drinking cultures and considers the role of alcohol in communicating hegemonic masculinity within one British university. Taking laddishness as a template of hegemonic masculinity, the article contends that male students' heavy alcohol use is…

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the transport program, a vocational education with strong masculine tradition, in a Swedish upper secondary school. It looks at the ways that notions of intelligence and smartness are culturally produced and used in the daily practises of students and teachers. In the article, I discuss how such…

This article considers curriculum ownership, contestation and the relationship between curriculum and culture through the lens of the Exploring Masculinities (EM) programme. The programme was developed in the late 1990s to meet the social and personal needs of young men. As its dissemination was being planned, it became the subject of critical…

Through a feminist approach this paper illustrates how humour is used as a resource and strategy for status among Finnish school boys and in constructing culturally accepted masculinity in the field of informal school. Based on interview and observation material collected in three schools, the results suggest that although humour is often…

All good stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The related pair of articles that earned the author a place in this Special Section, "Masculine Instrumentality and Feminine Expressiveness: Their Relationships with Sex Role Attitudes and Behaviors" (Spence & Helmreich, 1980) and "Instrumental and Expressive…

With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective,…

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful "achieving" girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools…

Using a social ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner) to violence and including Hobsbawm's historical analysis of the collective uses of violence, this article shows how gender-based violence is experienced and used. Drawing on three distinct studies in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, it shows the commonalities and divergence of young people's…

Joe Bruns is currently a student in the Post-Baccalaureate Teacher Certification Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The series of work featured in this interview centers on the idea of relationships. Joe explores collective and implicated relationship to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres through the reuse of paper taken from…

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly…

Wen-wu is a Chinese conceptualization of masculinity that strikes a balance between wen (i.e., literary strength) and wu (i.e., physical strength). This concept can be readily applied to a mental health setting when working with male clients. The present treatise outlines the concept of wen-wu and provides suggestions for use in clinical work.…

Building upon conceptualisations of the sexualisation of space, this paper interrogates the ways in which heterosexual discourses are produced, enforced, legitimised and maintained as dominant within student accommodation. Analysis is derived from interviews with 17 gay male undergraduates attending a UK institution. I detail the micro-level…

Every day people are bombarded with information about romantic relationships. Magazine articles offer how-to advice on flirting, dating, and fixing relationship problems. Advertisements--from billboards to radio commercials to email marketing campaigns--feature products that promise to help people attract a special someone. Television and movie…

Muslim boys, once regarded as passive, hard working and law-abiding, have been recast in the public imagination in recent years. Now the stereotypical image is of volatile, aggressive hotheads who are in danger of being brainwashed into terrorism, or of would-be gangsters who are creating no-go areas in English towns and cities. This timely and…