Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale

Abstract

Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale Kenneth B. Kidd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Kenneth B. Kidd's fascinating and well-documented book, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, outlines two distinct patterns of representation that have constructed the image of the in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first is boyology, a term that derives from Henry William Gibson's handbook Boyology or Boy Analysis (1916). It is a typical period piece of biological pseudoscience that epitomizes the American concern with the character building of boys, particularly through organizations such ' as Scouting, the YMCA, and 4-H. The second is the feral tale, a literary subgenre that Kidd has coined to suggest a resemblance between the fairy tale and a group of narratives that might not otherwise be intelligible as a genre (3). The feral tale describes the nature of the wildness of boys, and an ideology that insists on studying, managing, and controlling that wildness. The first pattern is peculiarly American and valorizes the white middle-class boy and our ability to reclaim bad white boys for democratic and capitalist ends, while the second is international and embraces the problems of cultural contact with the colonized other-boys who are darker, more exotic, and more dangerous than their white counterparts, but also boys (such as Mowgli in Kipling's The Jungle Books) who may be properly socialized as imperial subjects as long as they finally reject their animalistic behavior and typically Orientalized heritage. To illustrate these patterns of representations and the effects they have had in constructing the image of the boy, Kidd draws upon a breathtaking number of texts that range from the intricacies of theory (Michel Foucault, Eve KosofskySedgewick, Freud), to conduct manuals and serials (Rural Manhood, Farming For Boys), to literary works (Emerson, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain), to self-help literature and ethnography (Gurian's The Wonder of Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys), to cinematic popular culture (Boys Town, Teen Wolf}. Kidd's greatest critical strengths lie in cleverly historicizing such a disparate group of writers and texts as supporting the conservative social formations that persist in constructing the nature and evolution of boys. These writers and texts frequently assume the universal simplicity and innocence embodied in real boys, denying the complexities of boyhood, the nuances of being a boy. Boys who are queer or racially other will find themselves within a production of heteronormative masculinity (187). …