Resisting and committing to schooling: intersections of masculinity and academic position

Abstract

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.

Notes

1. The author would like to thank the editorial group of this issue and the referees of the article for many constructive comments and suggestions.

2. My overall analytical endeavour with this material within my PhD project is to explore the intersections of sociocultural categories, pedagogical regimes and pedagogical architecture in and across time and space, and to make an effort to explore/make spatiality, materiality and temporality analytically ‘salient’ to work as forces of constitution in processes of subjectification in everyday life (Juelskjær 2005, 2007a, 2007b).

3. As the analysis unfolds, we will hear about Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. But I must emphasize that I do not explain who Ryan is and what his aspirations in life might be. My empirical material does not allow that, and neither does my theoretical framework. ‘Ryan’ is a case of dynamics of schooling, dynamics of resisting and of accepting schooling as it is made (im)possible in social interaction, interaction which is co‐constituting what and how it is possible to have liveable lives in school. ‘Resisting’ and ‘committing’ co‐produce and interfere with other categories in school – and the possibilities of living and learning through/while being positioned through these intersecting categories.

4. A central research agenda for Frosh et al. was furthermore to analyse the intersections between masculinities, ‘race’ and class.

5. The analysis is based on the case that was introduced in the beginning of the article. The case will not be reintroduced at this point.

6. Of course, a lot of other processes of exclusion were going on in terms of building up friendships etc., but looking through a lens of ‘gender equality’ the positions established were somewhat positive.

7. I do not imply that the conditions of possibilities are not fierce (see for example Myong Petersen (2007) for analyses of identity processes of Asian adoptees living in Denmark). Had the analysis concerned Amelia, the dynamics of minoritizing and majoritizing would have looked different and that would to some extent have recast the story of the social positions and material‐discursive practices of Ryan. Another analytically thought‐provoking element in these maneuvers of re‐constituting masculinity here is the possible importance/impact of heteronormativity in relation to school commitment, and that processes of heteronormativity could be something to analytically unpack much further in the analysis.