Is There More to “Antischoolishness” than Masculinity?

Abstract

Boys behaving “laddish” and “macho” are dominating ethnographic research on secondary school, and a number of studies during the past years focus on school rejection as a matter of masculinity. Despite calls for research to include a wider range of student groups, there are still few studies of secondary schoolgirls and even of schoolboys cultivating other subcultures than “laddish” ones. Including groups of students often left out in existing studies, this article presents a multiple set of student styles: the golden boy, macho boy, geek, nerd, golden girl, mouse, babe, and wildcat. It discusses how this set of student styles complicates notions of intrinsic connections between school rejection and masculinity. It argues the need for a more complex approach to gender and school orientation, recognizing that even though students “do” school rejection in gender specific ways, educational self-exclusion is not in itself a gender specific phenomenon.