‘Undoing’ Gender and Disrupting Hegemonic Masculinity: Embracing a Transgender Social Imaginary

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the necessary and important role that male teachers can play in boys’ lives in school, particularly with regards to interrupting hegemonic masculinity and in their capacity to function as ‘role models’. This analysis is set against a critique of dominant discourses about the call for male teachers as role models for boys as a response to the need to counter the detrimental effects of the increasing feminization of schooling. Such debates about male teachers often cite recuperative and idealized notions of hegemonic masculinity which rely on a narrowing rather than a broadening of what it means to be a man or a boy in changing social and economic times. I also undertake a review of significant literature in the field which draws attention to the tendency for male teachers to be complicit in perpetuating hegemonic heterosexual masculinity in their pedagogical relationships with boys in school. The costs of such complicity are highlighted in terms of the capacity of such pedagogical relationships to hamper boys’ commitment and or willingness to embrace a boarder repertoire of masculinities. Queer, feminist and critical sociological theoretical perspectives are drawn on as basis for elaborating a perspective on male teachers and schooling as embodied and pedagogical sites, respectively, for interrogating the limits of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities in boys’ and men’s lives.