The Making of Violent Masculinities: Exploring the Intersections of Cultural, Structural and Direct Violence in Schools

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This paper employs Johan Galtung’s (1990) typology of violence – direct, structural and cultural – as an analytical lens to examine the ways in which schools, teachers and students draw on aspects of hegemonic masculinity to establish and endorse difference between boys’ and girls’ capacities to be violent, and willfully ignore performances of violent masculinities. It focuses on school values and policies represented in disciplinary structures, contact sports, and curricular knowledges, as well as practices of students and teachers, to explore the ways in which they collectively code violence in the script of masculinity. The conclusion proposes strategies for challenging the cultural violence of hegemonic masculinity in schools.