In Western countries, discourses concerning "boys failing school" are circulated in media as well as in schools. Research is conducted that offers sweeping sociological, societal or biological explanations, or context-sensitive ethnographic or social psychological and variable explanations on the relation between boys and school life. In this article the author outlines her research into boys in school, based on her empirical studies of subjectification processes in the institutionalized context of school life. The case study is "Ryan", who switched schools and left a school life in which he was "resisting schooling". At the new school, new possibilities were available. The analysis shows how complexly the dynamics of resisting and committing to school are intertwined with local, shifting and intersecting categories of masculinity, academic learning, race and the struggles of power within and between these categories, and also with struggles of what is pedagogically relevant. (Contains 7 notes.)