Constructing the (il)literate boy: Crisis talk, literacy promotion websites and the simplification of boyhood literacies

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ‘boys’ literacy crisis’ and the demand for more boy-friendly literacy practices. Contemporary approaches to promoting reading for boys are commonly underpinned by sex role socialisation and recuperative masculinity theories. In this article, I critique open-access websites created by pseudo-experts for the purposes of promoting reading for boys and explore how they contribute to and perpetuate constructions of a hegemonic masculinity. In analysing these websites, I draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to foreground how the recommended strategies suggested on these websites contribute to essentialised understandings of masculinities. Interventions which are focused on stereotypical understandings of boys as messy, naughty and subversive and unmotivated due to a feminised education system are highly problematic. The article draws attention to how these strategies perpetuate social myths created within the boys’ literacy crisis discourse which, rather than supporting boys’ reading, serves to create further alienation from literacy classrooms and practices.