One for the boys: an affirmative feminist boys studies

There is no shortage of attention paid to boys. Nor is there any lack of privilege afforded them collectively as boys. Yet, for obvious reasons, boys have not been a major focus of either gender studies or feminist cultural studies. Where gendered formations of youth are under consideration, there has been comparatively little work on either boys’ experiences of gender or representations of boys’ genders (Laurie et al. 2021). This special issue has been compiled to suggest that there is much to gain from affirmative feminist approaches to boys: from problematizing the categories of boy and boyhood; examining the multiplicity of boyhoods through historical, comparative, and intersectional lenses; and examining boys’ social and emotional lives as boys, rather than for the adults they will become.

Masculinity studies’ foremost scholar, Raewyn Connell, describes that her own book, The Men and the Boys, ‘had a good deal to say about boys (including teenagers) but little about boyhood’ (2020, 16). This orientation is reflected in public discourse on boys too, dominated by essentialism on the one hand and the at-risk boy of policy problematization on the other. Related research is typically located in the fields of education and sociology, in scholarship on risk and harm reduction or on pedagogies of masculinity (Janssen 2015), and associated interventions aimed at developing ‘a healthy masculine identity’ (Gwyther et al. 2019). This focus on the social production of men undermines sustained consideration of the changing meanings or experiences of boyhood.

The affirmative feminist boys studies demonstrated throughout the articles in this special issue is in debt to the prior achievements of girls studies, which has demonstrated the importance of investigating what we mean by categories like ‘girl’ and ‘boy’, and to respect differences within those categories and experiences that blur their distinction (Driscoll 2019). Similarly, girls studies’ critique of the reduction of girls to femininity is useful for highlighting the equally problematic reduction of boys to their experience of or engagement with masculinity. Girls studies as a self-aware field is tied to the analysis of girl culture and girlhood, whether as historical object or social category. The research that cleared the ground for girls studies – such as Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s iconic essay ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’ (1975) – was interested in girls’ cultural practices, in what specially afforded and limited them, and in how they were valued (by girls and others), without depending on any essential claim or being tied to any particular social outcome. For Shauna Pomerantz, for example, girlhood is ‘neither an age nor a stage, but … an ironic and iconic performance infused with youthful energy, style, fun, and capaciousness’ (2009, 154). An expanded field of research is required to establish an equivalent set of identifications for boyhood – one that is both coherent and flexible enough to capture intra (among boys) and extra (among young people) categorical continuities and differences.

Such an expansive project will not be achieved without the scholarly and conceptual contributions of feminism. Yet to date there has been relatively little feminist research that investigates the role of gender within the diverse experiences of youth subsumed under the category boy, or that engages ‘with boys in terms that do not reduce boys to an obstacle to improvements in gender equality’ and that might ‘consider how the impact of feminism might be … productive for boys’ (Driscoll 2019, 235). There is significant potential for feminist inquiry here. Ideas about boys and boyhood have considerable currency in shaping understandings of the causes of gender inequality, and significantly impact any efforts to transform gender-based hierarchies. They thus warrant ongoing feminist inquiry, and that inquiry should reflexively acknowledge that all boyhood today is lived in relation to the influence of feminist projects, including where those projects are actively rejected.

The group of essays collected in this special issue arose from the formation of a Feminist Boys Studies research group, and an application for Australian Research Council funding for expanded research on Australian boys and boyhood under the title ‘Beyond the Boy Problem’. They are united by the primary aim of addressing the relative absence of feminist research on boys and the need, moreover, for feminist research which does not take boys as problems simply because they are boys. As products of the exploratory stage of calling for new research of this kind the essays focus on representations of boys and boyhood – but representations of very different kinds. Catherine Driscoll and Liam Grealy begin the issue by considering boys in relation to feminism, particularly through ideas around ‘toxic masculinity’ and other antagonistic frameworks, and contrast this to an affirmative engagement with boyhood as represented in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Jessica Kean and Timothy Steains explore how boys are taken up in campaigns designed to prevent domestic violence and, in doing so, how boys and boyhood are imagined in the problematization of gender norms underpinning such violence. Grace Sharkey’s essay takes the incel as its object to think about how some ‘boys’ represent their unhappiness as a result of the impacts of feminism in the early 21^st century. Shawna Tang’s essay is concerned with the imagination of transmasculine boyhoods, using the example of the Israeli documentary Transkids. And Timothy Laurie closes the issue with an exploration of masculinity as a collective practice through popular representations of boys or young men and violence in two examples of Australian true crime cinema.

It is not only arguable but integral to the imagination of feminist futures that gender equality is in the interests of society at large, including boys and men, and that the transformation of gender expectations disrupts important established ways of living. All of the essays in this special issue thus adopt what we collectively call an ‘affirmative feminist’ approach to studying boys. Given that distinctions between girls and boys continue to have urgent contemporary socio-cultural force, feminist scholars need to more clearly engage with the research that is generally produced on boyhood, and investigate its assumptions with regard to both gender and feminism. This approach does not mean finding only or more positive things to say about boys, but it does involve imagining boys in more complex ways, with careful attention to their lived contexts and diversity. It involves resisting the urge to reduce boys to sites for the reproduction of, or intervention in, patriarchal power, in favour of seeking opportunities for productive feminist engagement with boys and for boys.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).