Educational Trajectories and Different Displays of Masculinity in Post-industrial Wales

Abstract

While the work on men, masculinities and gender identities has exploded across the social sciences and in feminist and pro- feminist geography since the mid-1980s, very little of this work has looked at masculinities and what is means to be a young man in Wales. In this article, drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study, conducted in a post-industrial community in south Wales, I focus on how young men's masculinities are performed across a variety of educational and leisure spaces. I show how expectations and transitions to adulthood are framed through geographically and historically shaped class and gender codes. These codes underpin expectations of manhood in this post-industrial place, and there are consequences for those young men whose performances of masculinity deviate from what is deemed as socially acceptable. In order to fully examine men and their behaviours, I suggest that Welsh men must be analysed within separate historical and geographical contexts and within the social construction of gender within a specific place.