“Do it for all Your Pubic Hairs!”

Abstract

The literature on masculinity lacks thorough and sustained in situ examinations of how diverse boys employ their bodies to construct masculine identities during pubescence. To address this gap, the present article examines how a group of 10 sixth-grade Latino boys, who publicly acknowledged that they were experiencing puberty, employed their bodies at school to construct their masculine identities. The data suggest that among the boys, puberty was a social accomplishment connected to masculine enactments informed by the dominant gendered expectations of peers at school and in their neighborhoods, the hegemonic masculine practices espoused by commercial hip hop rappers, and the dominant gender orders in the U.S and both Dominican and Puerto Rican societies. With physical displays of corporeal strength and tolerance for pain, the boys sought to signal that they were entering adulthood and preparing their bodies for a social world wherein physical confrontations between males were commonplace. The findings contribute to our understanding of how second-generation children who reside in low-income, working-class neighborhoods and have social ties to their nations of origin and their respective cultures construct masculinities in the United States. The article concludes with a call for longitudinal ethnographic studies examining how boys from various social backgrounds construct masculine identities during their pubescent development.