Steeling the Junior Body: Learning Sport and Masculinities in the Early Years

Abstract

Of what significance is the body in the learning of masculinities amongst eight and nine year old South African boys? By drawing on elements of an empirical-based study of gender in the early years of schooling, this chapter illustrates the central role that the body plays in the learning of junior masculinities. By focusing on sport, the chapter illustrates the embodiment of junior masculinities and the social processes through which this embodiment is negotiated. In doing so it seeks to expand the “exemplary status” (Connell in Masculinities. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, p. 30, 2005) of sport in the steeling of junior bodies and the gendered effects. The chapter argues that sport is an embodiment of and opportunity for learning to become a boy. The chapter focuses on the interacting forces of boys, bodies and sport in two socially distinct settings in South Africa. The chapter elaborates upon boys’ investments in muscular power, physical skills and sporty postures as key to the signification of masculinity. Fitness, physical pain and strength, as the boys in this study indicate are key to steeling, shaping and sexualising a successful junior body. The chapter also shows how social processes inform the embodiment of sport where steeling the body is key to economic success and imagining a life out of poverty especially for boys located in conditions of socio-economic deprivation. The sporty body is thus an important resource not only to signify successful masculinities but through which class inequalities can be challenged. Boys’ developing relationship with sport operates as a strategic means to establish status and prestige and through which gender relations and inequalities are produced. The chapter concludes by arguing that attention to the manifestation of gender inequalities in the early years of schooling requires a focus on boys, bodies and sport embedded within and intertwined by complex social processes.