Young working-class men do not read: or do they? Challenging the dominant discourse of reading

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the majority of the research on boys’ and young men’s relation to reading, it is argued that boys and young men read too little, read poorly and in all the wrong ways. However, few studies focus on how boys and young men read the texts they do encounter. In particular, there is a lack of research on young men of working-class background, whose relationship to reading is stressed as particularly problematic in many studies. In this article, we approach the reader histories of three young working-class men from a life story perspective, on the basis of a broad definition of text and reading, to capture how reading and texts are used in their identity construction. Our analysis shows that the young men engage in reading in different ways, from listening to audio books and reading aloud to watching films. We argue that our approach makes it possible to re-envision working-class men as readers who, among other things, use reading to construct softer masculinities, thus challenging the dominant narrative of working-class masculinity and working-class men’s relationship to reading and texts.