Call and response: how narratives of black queer youth inform popular discourses of the ‘boy crisis’ in education

Abstract

The shift in attention to the ‘boy crisis’ has been fuelled by a spate of popular trade books dealing with raising of boys and the alleged failures and deceptions of feminist educational reforms. This article argues that from a black feminist perspective the ‘boy crisis’ depicted in these texts is a misnomer because no social problem can be understood through a single lens of difference. Rather, through an analysis of the narratives of gay and gender non-conforming black male students, the article argues that the ‘boy crisis’ needs to be approached from an intersectional perspective that rejects essentialist notions of boys and embraces the sociocultural differences among them. In the conclusion, the author provides suggestions for ways teachers can practise this kind of inclusion, termed ‘making space for diverse masculinities’.

Keywords:

• boys' education
• intersectionality
• black queer youth
• masculinities
• narrative inquiry

Notes

I define black queer youth as youth of African descent as young as 12 years old and as old as 26 who express their gender and sexuality in non-normative ways or who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex or queer.

Barrie Thorne (1993) uses the term gender non-conforming to describe children who do not adhere to the norms or rules of dress and other cultural practices based on a person's perceived biological sex. A gender non-conforming boy may choose to present or be perceived as effeminate or not hegemonically masculine.

Many black feminist theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins (2000), believe that people construct knowledge from particular standpoints, where a standpoint is defined as a place from which human beings view the world. A standpoint influences how the people adopting it socially construct the world. An individual's social group membership affects their standpoints and therefore inequalities between different social groups create differences in their standpoints.

See Note 2.