Adolescent Masculinity Research Articles

Eric Anderson: 21st Century Jocks: Sporting Men and Contemporary Heterosexuality

21st Century Jocks is an ambitious, engaging and fundamentally successful examination of social trends relating to gay and straight adolescent men in a culture of decreased homophobia. This is a summary of an impressive amount of data collected over 14 years, and develops Anderson’s theoretical and empirical arguments presented in his previous book, Inclusive Masculinities (Anderson 2009). It is for these reasons that 21st Century Jocks serves as a strong addition to the literature on sport, sexuality and masculinity in adolescence. 21st Century Jocks draws upon this body of qualitative, quantitative and ethnographic research to appropriately generalize a gendered shift in millennial young men. Anderson uses 40 of his own studies, alongside a comprehensive review of the literature on adolescent athletes throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. While Anderson focuses on athletes, he does so to make broader arguments about adolescent masculinities. He contends that ‘‘jocks’’ are commonly understood as exhibiting a range of behaviors and attitudes that collectively portray teamsport athletes as being homophobic, sexist, violent, stoic, and physically distant from one another. The central thesis of 21st Century Jocks is that this is no longer the case. By the turn of the millennium, Anderson found athletes engaging in behaviors that once would have socially homosexualized them, a trend that spread to nonathletes as well. This is because teamsport athletes were not immune from the larger cultural changes occurring in relation to homosexuality around them. Having positive relationships with gay men and positive attitudes toward homosexuality, young heterosexual male teamsport athletes now partake in a range of behaviors that were once socially taboo. Anderson theorizes this as a matter of decreasing cultural homohysteria—which he defines as the fear of being socially perceived as gay. Central to Anderson’s notion of homohysteria is that, unlike gender or race, sexuality is not socially marked. Accordingly, heterosexual men cannot prove that they are straight. In a homohysteric culture straight men are thus compelled to prove that they are not gay, and they rely upon all the traits and characteristics of ‘‘the jock’’ in order to dispel suspicion that they might be. Yet, in a culture that is inclusive of homosexuality, straight men no longer need to prove their sexuality, and more gendered space is open to them. It is Anderson’s argument that athletes first engaged in behaviors that were once coded as feminine/gay, and that as they continued to recode these behaviors as being acceptable for heterosexual men, non-athletes were also permitted to follow. In this sense, Anderson says that this is a political project. He describes contemporary adolescent male culture as a progressive victory in the cultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In the opening chapter, Anderson begins by explaining the birth of the jock. Here he describes the jock as a product of industrialization, Christianity, and as a backlash to the first wave of feminism. Highlighting the social construction of adolescence and gendered behaviors, Anderson discusses how advanced democracies used sport as a way to make young men into heterosexual factory workers and soldiers. He emphasizes the importance of the mass appeal of sport, arguing that it reflects a cultural zeitgeist—suggesting that changing attitudes to adolescent sexuality and health mean that the ethos we attach to these sports is under rapid change. Jared Rimmer, Independent Scholar, London.

Pranking Peter Pans: Performing Playground Masculinities in Extreme Sports

In this essay, I explore how extreme sporting athletes and reality prank programming stars perform adolescent masculinities that comply, resist, and transform traditional codes of masculinity. In the phenomenon I dub “pranktainment,” I analyze MTV's Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Nitro Circus to reveal how extreme stars use language, embody attitudes, and construct dramas in adolescent performances of masculinity. Even as the white, heterosexual, male pranktainers resist hegemonic masculinity, their mocking adolescent performances refuse to challenge the power and privilege assigned to their positions. In parodies mocking dominant masculinities, pranktainers sustain power at the expense of non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male identities.

Masculinity in adolescent males' early romantic and sexual heterosexual relationships.

There is a need to understand better the complex interrelationship between the adoption of masculinity during adolescence and the development of early romantic and sexual relationships. The purpose of this study was to describe features of adolescent masculinity and how it is expressed in the contexts of early to middle adolescent males' romantic and sexual relationships. Thirty-three 14- to 16-year-old males were recruited from an adolescent clinic serving a community with high sexually transmitted infection rates and were asked open-ended questions about their relationships-how they developed, progressed, and ended. Participants described a high degree of relationally oriented beliefs and behaviors related to romantic and sexual relationships, such as a desire for intimacy and trust. The males also described a more limited degree of conventionally masculine beliefs and behaviors. These beliefs and behaviors often coexisted or overlapped. Implications for the clinical care of similar groups of adolescents are described.

Meat, Masculinity, and Pathologized Adolescence in Michael Logan’s Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps

Drawing on Carol J. Adams’s observations about discourses of meat and masculinity, this paper examines the role of flesh consumption in Michael Logan’s zombie satire Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s pseudo-vampire novel Peeps . By analyzing the discursive strategies that Westerfeld and Logan employ to reflect upon adult and adolescent masculinity, the paper reveals the radical potential in as well as the cultural limitations of consumptive epidemics in literature for and about young men. This potential and these limitations in turn reflect contemporary dialogues between different models of masculine subjectivity.

Meat, Masculinity, and Pathologized Adolescence in Michael Logan’s Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps

Drawing on Carol J. Adams’s observations about discourses of meat and masculinity, this paper examines the role of flesh consumption in Michael Logan’s zombie satire Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s pseudo-vampire novel Peeps. By analyzing the discursive strategies that Westerfeld and Logan employ to reflect upon adult and adolescent masculinity, the paper reveals the radical potential in as well as the cultural limitations of consumptive epidemics in literature for and about young men. This potential and these limitations in turn reflect contemporary dialogues between different models of masculine subjectivity.

Irregular Readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, Boyhood and Literacy in Contemporary Sherlockian Children’s Literature

Young adult (YA) literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction using the Conan Doyle canon as a context and vocabulary for stories focused on the Baker Street Irregulars as figures of identification. This paper reads YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a strategy for negotiating anxieties of adolescent masculinity, particularly in relation to literacy and social agency.Keywords: Young adult literature; detective fiction; masculinity; literacy;adolescence; intertextuality

Irregular Readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, Boyhood and Literacy in Contemporary Sherlockian Children’s Literature

Young adult (YA) literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction using the Conan Doyle canon as a context and vocabulary for stories focused on the Baker Street Irregulars as figures of identification. This paper reads YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a strategy for negotiating anxieties of adolescent masculinity, particularly in relation to literacy and social agency.Keywords: Young adult literature; detective fiction; masculinity; literacy;adolescence; intertextuality

Construction of ‘tough’ masculinity

Drawing on narrative data collected during a three-year ethnography of a Scottish high school, this article examines the construction of working-class adolescent masculinities. More specifically, the analysis focuses on how adolescent male speakers negotiate, reject and align themselves with the hegemonically dominant ideology of ‘tough’ masculinity, the role socially low-risk discourses of ‘tough’ masculinity play in interaction, and how speakers integrate a range of discursive strategies which help maintain homosociality when ‘tough’ masculinity is at stake. I argue that discourses which appear to be about ‘being tough’ do a great deal more social work than might be expected.

Adolescent Masculinity in an Age of Decreased Homohysteria

Adolescent masculinity in the 1980s was marked by the need to distance oneself from the specter of “the fag.” In this homohysteric culture, compulsory heterosexuality and high rates of anti-gay sentiment necessitated that adolescent boys distance themselves from anything associated with femininity. It was this zeitgeist that brought Connell’s hegemonic masculinity theory to the vanguard of masculine studies. However, homohysteria has diminished among adolescents today. Accordingly, in this article, I foreground research extracts from multiple ethnographies on groups of 16-year-old adolescent boys in order to contextualize the repeated and consistent data I find throughout both the United States and the United Kingdom. In explaining how the diminishment of homohysteria promotes a “One-Direction” culture of inclusive and highly feminized masculinities, I suggest that new social theories are required.

Bullying among adolescent football players: Role of masculinity and moral atmosphere.

Identifying practices of masculinity socialization that contribute to the establishment of gender privilege can help address violence and bullying in schools (Connell, 1996). Because the sport of football is considered an important contributor to masculinity construction, establishing peer networks, and creating hierarchies of student status, this study examined the influence of social norms (i.e., moral atmosphere, meanings of adolescent masculinity) on bullying beliefs and behaviors of 206 high school football players. Results demonstrated that moral atmosphere (Peer Influence, Influential Male Figure) and adherence to male role norms significantly predicted bullying, but the strongest predictor was the perception of whether the most influential male in a player’s life would approve of the bullying behavior. In addition to prevention interventions highlighting the role of influential men and masculinity norms in this process, implications for practice suggest that football players can use their peer influence and status as center sport participants to create a school culture that does not tolerate bullying.

“Out by Sixteen”: Queer(ed) Girls in Ginger Snaps

“Out by Sixteen”: Queer(ed) Girls in Ginger Snaps Tanis MacDonald (bio) Gender, like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also of its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation. —Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender Something’s wrong. I mean, more than just you being female. —Brigitte Fitzgerald to her sister Ginger, Ginger Snaps Gender Bites; Sexuality Snaps Released to the cinematic public in 2000, John Fawcett’s Canadian cult-horror film Ginger Snaps was marketed—with an adolescent female audience in mind—as a wry and wrenching female version of classic B-movie transformation narratives like I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Fawcett’s film, scripted by Karen Walton, retains the convention of conflating puberty and monstrosity, but instead of examining the body-changing dynamics of adolescent masculinity, Ginger Snaps holds the satirical magnifying glass up to the biological changes attending the onset of menstruation and focuses on social constructions of heteronormative femininity, including a horrified, comedic look at what manufacturers of depilatory products would call “unsightly and unwanted hair.” The sardonic wit of the film reveals that the excesses of representation alter the “effect” of gender as a technology of female identity, in Teresa de Lauretis’s terms. Corporeal excesses and the accompanying ruptures of maturation pile up early in the film, when the eponymous Ginger Fitzgerald is attacked by a creature that has been attracted by the smell of the blood from her first menstrual period. [End Page 58] Initially, the film seems to cast the Fitzgerald sisters in the conventional horror-film postures of sexualized monster (sixteen-year-old Ginger) and heroic “Final Girl” (her fifteen-year-old sister Brigitte), to use Carol Clover’s now-ubiquitous designation from her classic study, Men, Women and Chain Saws. In some ways, Ginger’s transformation into a werewolf remains well within the heterosexual norms of horror tradition: she becomes a beautiful female monster whose animal appetites are both eroticized and vilified, and she dies in order to preserve the social and sexual mores of the community. Ginger Snaps also complicates these conventions, however, by emphasizing the problems that attend the depiction of a female monster and by troubling the usual antagonistic relationship between monster and heroine, complicated within the film by the Fitzgerald sisters’ devotion to one another. Walton’s script seems to suggest, at a number of points throughout the film, that the sisters’ relationship includes incestuous homoeroticism, an undercurrent first evidenced in their blood pact to be “out by sixteen or dead in this scene: together forever, united against life as we know it.” The sisters’ promise to stay “together forever” crystallizes the intense romantic intimacy of adolescent female relationships and also acts as a covert sign for an erotic connection that is an open secret among fans of the film. While Fawcett and Walton did not necessarily set out to make a teen lesbian film, Walton states quite clearly on her commentary track on the DVD of Ginger Snaps that Ginger “loses her discretion” as she transforms, and that Walton intended at least one scene between the sisters—in which Ginger implies that her transformation erases their sibling relationship—to be even more explicitly incestuous. Despite the number of covert—and overt—lesbian encodings in the film, a queer(ed) reading of Ginger Snaps has been noticeable by its absence from scholarly criticism about the film, an absence made obvious in part because fan writing about the film has considered a number of nuanced ideas about the role that desire plays in the sisters’ relationship. For example, Xavier Mendik notes that Ginger Snaps brings “lesbian iconography to the werewolf genre” (81), and Sady Doyle’s feminist popular culture blog Tiger Beatdown praises the intense, “transgressive” eroticized relationships that the film highlights. Doyle’s discussion is especially interesting for the ways that it extends discussion of the reception of the film to a reading of relationships between female adolescent horror-film fans. Doyle’s assessment of Ginger Snaps as a film “specifically for women who used to be awkward teenage horror fans, and have ingested a substantial amount of...

Coming of Age: How Adolescent Boys Construct Masculinities via Substance Use, Juvenile Delinquency, and Recreation

This research aims to uncover aspects of adolescent masculine development among adult substance abusers. In-depth interviews and the resulting narrative provide the data for this exploratory analysis. Three main areas of adolescent masculinities are discussed: substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, and recreation. The findings are interpreted in light of Connell's conceptualization of hegemonic masculinities. Based on this sample, masculinities are constructed via a menu of adolescent behaviors that are descriptive of a working class lifestyle. It is the cultural context that sets the stage for substance abuse and its meaning to identity formation in adolescence, as well as in adulthood. Substance abuse in adolescence, along with other forms of juvenile delinquency and recreation, is a means of achieving masculinity. Unfortunately, for these men the use of substance abuse to achieve masculinity in adolescence becomes problematic later in adulthood. This article concludes that to successfully recover from substance abuse and addiction, these men must revisit and reframe their adolescent constructions of masculinity to better fit the problems and challenges they face as adults.

Boys' bodies and the constitution of adolescent masculinities

In the social transition between childhood and adolescence, boys draw on discourses of masculinity that address the male body in constituting themselves as adolescents. They make themselves as no longer children and acquire a sense of themselves as adolescents by performing bodily practices that position them within some of these discourses. Repeated personal interviews conducted during the course of several years with 14 boys from an inner city area of Oslo provide the data for analysing the way the becoming as an adolescent boy affects possible and impossible ways of becoming an adolescent male. Some boys enacted the strong body discourse while exercising in the gym, others did so through improving their technical skills in competitive sports, and still others did so in aiming to achieve a body that was able to defend itself when encountering trouble in the city centre. In positioning themselves within discourses of masculinity that address the male body, and performing practices that constitute them within some of these, the boys were able to produce masculinities that could be valued and challenged in contexts such as schools.

Migration, Masculinity and the Fugitive State of Mind in the Irish Emigrant Footballer Autobiography: the Case of Paul McGrath

Copyright (c) 2010 by Marcus Free. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access. Abstract. The 'confessional' autobiography has become a popular variant of professional football autobiography in Britain. Co-written 'autobiographies' by prominent former emigrant Irish or Irish descended international footballers have featured prominently in this sub-genre. Their 'confessions' of alcoholism, gambling, infidelity, irresponsibility towards partners or dependents, or underlying ontological insecurity might be seen as an insightful engagement with their lives as male footballers in Britain. However, focusing on two autobiographies of Paul McGrath, and reading these 'troubled' accounts using psychoanalytic perspectives on sport, migration and masculinity, it is argued that they are contradictory texts which embody a peculiar variation on the emigrant fugitive state of mind (Davar, 1996), both approximating and deferring mature, reflexive engagement with the social and cultural construction of identity, allowing them to occupy a liminal but discontent imaginary space in which adolescent masculinity can be indefinitely extended. The homosocial world of men's professional football is a key factor in this.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Cultural Approaches to Understanding School Violence

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Cultural Approaches to Understanding School Violence

The development and validation of the meanings of adolescent masculinity scale.

Although conformity with traditional male gender role norms has been linked to psychological and social adjustment in adolescent boys, most studies have relied on either qualitative research or measures of male role norms developed for adults. This study sought to develop and conduct preliminary validation of a multidimensional scale assessing endorsement of male role norms among adolescent boys. The content validity, clarity, and format of scale items for the Meanings of Adolescent Masculinity Scale (MAMS) were generated from interview data and through focus group discussions with adolescent boys. The resulting questionnaire, along with convergent validity scales, was completed by a diverse group of 193 7th- through 10th-grade boys. Factor analysis supported a 4-factor model: Constant Effort, Emotional Restriction, Heterosexism, and Social Teasing. Subscales derived from this analysis yielded good internal reliability. Convergent validity was supported by significant correlations between MAMS subscales and existing measures of male role norms and psychological adjustment.

From Fags to Dudes

Book Review| January 01 2009 From Fags to Dudes: Rethinking the Construction of Adolescent Masculinities Through Sexualizing Discourses Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School C. J. Pascoe Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xii + 227 pp. Mary L. Gray Mary L. Gray Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (1): 183–185. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-027 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary L. Gray; From Fags to Dudes: Rethinking the Construction of Adolescent Masculinities Through Sexualizing Discourses. GLQ 1 January 2009; 15 (1): 183–185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-027 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

She's the Man (review)

She's Man. Dir. Andy Fickman. DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount. 2006. Over course of so-called Bard Boom--which began with Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and continues unabated with his recently released As You Like It--cultural manifestations of Shakespeare have become increasingly populist. In 2005, an extract from A Midsummer Night's Dream was used to advertise that most iconic youth-oriented product, Levi's jeans; and in 2007, playwright himself battled intergalactic demons in an episode of third series of hugely successful, revamped BBC television program Doctor Who. I chose to study this popular appropriation of Shakespeare in my doctoral research because, as a teenager, I witnessed how my generation's attitudes towards our exam texts and their author were changed films like William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996), Shakespeare in Love (Madden, 1998), and 10 Things I Hate About You (Junger, 1999). For this reason, I was interested to see a new addition to burgeoning Shakespearean teen film sub-genre, She's Man (Fickman, 2006), which declares itself inspired by Twelfth Night and was written Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, duo behind 10 Things screenplay. The key element of Twelfth Night reproduced in She's Man is central plot involving gender masquerade and romantic complication. Viola Hastings disguises herself as her twin brother Sebastian, taking his place at a new boarding school while he is on an unauthorized jaunt to London with his band, in order to win a place on boys' soccer team and thereby prove that she is capable of competing with stronger sex at the beautiful game. There Viola falls for soccer captain and roommate Duke Orsino, who has a crush on her lab partner, recently dumped and vulnerable Olivia Lennox, who is in turn attracted to unusually sensitive new boy in class. Viola-as-Sebastian offers Duke insights into female mind and receives extra soccer coaching in return. The situation reaches a head when real Sebastian returns and, unaware of his sister's deception, is astonished to find himself first assailed Olivia and then ushered onto soccer pitch. During course of this crucial match, truth emerges and Viola establishes her right to play with boys scoring winning penalty kick. Duke recovers from shock of discovering that his teammate and dorm confidante is also a hot chick, and he escorts Viola--now in her woman's weeds--to debutante ball, where Sebastian partners with Olivia. In this way, makers of She's Man follow Shakespeare's blueprint in homage to Twelfth Night, as they explain in a DVD featurette. The film's cast of supporting characters and subplots gesture towards play, but relationship is fairly loose. Duke has two soccer playing friends named Andrew and Toby, who serve a comic function as idiotic embodiments of contradictory impulses of today's adolescent masculinity. Olivia, meanwhile, attracts unwanted attentions of Malcolm Festes, a preppy and obsessive fellow student, who has a pet tarantula named Malvolio and who shows up at climatic soccer match wearing yellow, diamond-patterned golfing socks. The addition of extra players to romantic game, in form of Viola's dumb jock ex-boyfriend Justin and Sebastian's high-maintenance girlfriend Monique, seems intended to emphasize difference between unsatisfactory, transient modern relationships and timeless true love. Other references are made to film's Shakespearean intertext through diegetic detail: school is Illyria Preparatory; debutante season is organized Stratford Junior League; there is a billboard advertising school play What You Will; and students' favorite eating and meeting place is Cesario's Restaurant. The only lines from Shakespeare's text that are cited in She's Man are now proverbial ones concerning greatness, which here feature as a sporting pep-talk, with Duke quoting his coach rather than original source. …

Dislocated Masculinity: Adolescence and the Palestinian Nation-in-exile

Taking as its starting-point emerging discussion about gender and nationalism this article considers the masculinities constructed by and for adolescent males born into a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. I consider the relationship of these masculinities to the construction of the camp as a moral and sociopolitical space. Through the employment of ethnographic material the article demonstrates the ways in which young males-through the performance of a particular dominant vision of masculinity termed mukhayyamji-serve to reproduce the camp as authentic location of an exilic national community. The article also examines the implications for individual young men of this interplay between masculine performance and the reproduction of the camp as a moral and socio-political space. It explores the consequences both for those who fail or choose not to uphold the idealized mukhayyamji adolescent masculinity and for those who evince the skills and qualities that this entails. It is argued that while the former risk marginalization from the camp as a moral and sociopolitical community the latter face marginalization from the economic life of wider Jordanian society and with that endanger the transition to social adulthood. Thus a set of paradoxes emerges for young males that reflects the ambiguous position of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan at a specific moment in the history of Jordan and the Palestinian national struggle. (authors)