‘Last year we used to call it a man's hammer’: (un)doing masculinity in everyday use of working tools within vocational education

Abstract

This study focuses on how masculinity is oriented to in everyday interactions where both female and male students are learning how to use working tools in an auto-mechanics environment in an upper secondary school in Sweden. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a beginner's level workshop within a Vehicle engineering program. The study contributes to research on masculinity and technology. An ethnomethodological approach is taken in order to explore how gender is oriented to in everyday teacher–student and student–student interactions within everyday auto-mechanic practices. It is demonstrated how the handling of auto-mechanic devices in the beginning of term becomes associated with conventionalized understandings of what it means to be a man. However, when students start to work together in mixed gender teams any social actions that link auto mechanics with masculinity are downplayed or playfully challenged. We argue that the shifting enactments of gendered forms in everyday auto-mechanic work suggest certain openness for future changes in the gendered relations of vocational practices.