‘Where’ ‘boys’ ‘are’: co-constructions of maturities-genders-bodies-spaces

Abstract

This paper is concerned with maturities, genders, spaces, and bodies as historicizable co-constructs, pluralized rubrics and gradients that emerge and function as interdependent ideas. This view allows reflection on nuances between children, boys, men, boyhood, and masculinities as anchors for geographic inquiry. Diverse contexts are reviewed with an eye on mutual if mutable reciprocities between ideas of gender and maturity, and between gender/maturity and locality. The body of boys importantly figures in, and is figured by, these reciprocal significations which is explored in anthropological descriptions of ‘male transition’, and in contemporary historical observations in the West, and ‘America’ more specifically. A rigorous and cross-cultural intersectional focus is required to anchor children's geographies not just to ‘childhood’ as a site of entitlement, but more inclusively to local and interpenetrated ideas of becoming, belonging, and embodiment.

Keywords:

• boyhood
• embodiment
• imagined geographies
• historical and postcolonial geography
• comparative and interdisciplinary approaches

Notes

Lit. ‘running around’, in Pennsylvania German. After age 16, Amish youth will venture outside the seclusive life of childhood and taste the outside ‘English world’, which in Amish views constitutes ‘the devil's playground’, before they make the choice whether to be baptized in the order of the Amish church and thus ‘settle down’. The kids may live in trailers, have large outdoor parties, and contemplate the heaven/hell dichotomy. In the documentary The Devil's Playground (Lucy Walker, dir. 2002), non-baptized boys agreed with baptized men the loss of motorized mobility (which the Amish reject) was the most challenging aspect of ‘settling down’.

This point is elaborated in Janssen (2007b).

The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Cambridge edition, ed. H. E. S. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894).

An interesting example is hikikomori, the ethnopsychiatric syndrome of ‘acute withdrawal’ among mostly Japanese male youth, locking themselves up in their rooms with their computer terminals. The phenomenon, comparable to the ‘Lolita’ and ‘kawaii’ (cuteness) fashions among teenage Japanese girls, is theorized as a reaction to demanding and gendered notions of social maturity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diederik F. Janssen

Independent Researcher