Sporty Boys and Fashion Girls: Manoeuvring Between Dominant Norms of Gender Identity

Abstract

The trigger for this article was the “Lévi-Straussian mythical formula” girls : boys = fashion : football, which came to the fore in the conversation with girls and boys aged 13 and 14 years. Amid the cacophony of ambivalent representations and meanings of modern masculinities and femininities which young people are facing, it schematically expresses traditional symbolic relations and gender differences. International studies at the crossroads of cultural, educational and gender studies, including critical studies of men and masculinities (Frosh et al., 2002; Zaslow, 2009; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2007) show that teenagers use clothing practices to assert an imaginary boundary in relational and binary self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The article analyses how teenagers deploy clothing practices, the strong attention they pay to their outfit and some other techniques of body self-regulation in order to negotiate social control and peer pressure related to the processes of the self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The analysis looks at the peculiarities of these processes in doing hegemonic or marginalised masculinities and traditional or alternative femininities. Comparison of boys’ and girls’ (in intersections with classed and ethicised social locations) attitudes to clothing and outfit demonstrates that both experience the pressure of performing normative gender identity through their body, however the techniques of body self-regulation are different for boys and girls and for specific social locations. In the conclusion, the author reflects on the implications of teenagers’ doing gender through body and their outfit for the pedagogical situation.