Corporal Punishment and Masculinity in S PDF

EDITORS
Michael S. Kimmel, Sociology, State University of New York–Stony Brook

Robert Connell, Education, University of Sydney
Jeff Hearn, University of Manchester, UK, and Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Øystein Holter, Work Research Institute, Oslo, Norway
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Krin Gabbard, Comparative Literature, State University of New York–Stony Brook
MANAGING EDITOR
Gayle Green, Sociology, State University of New York–Stony Brook
INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY EDITORS

Michael Flood - Australia Uta Klein - Germany Jorgen Lorentzen - Norway
Wayne Martino - Australia Ursula Mueller - Germany Norma Fuller - Peru
Jim McKay - Australia Debbie Epstein - Great Britain Igor Kon - Russia
Bob Pease - Australia David Morgan - Great Britain Andrei Sinelnikov - Russia
Georg Tillner - Austria Lynne Segal - Great Britain Robert Morrell - South Africa
Michael Kaufman - Canada Harry Ferguson - Ireland Santiago Urios Moliner - Spain
Teresa Valdes - Chile Todaski Nakamura - Japan Lars Jalmert - Sweden
Soeren Ervoe - Denmark Irina Novikova - Latvia Sven-Axel Månsson - Sweden
Jeff Hearn - Finland Juan Guillermo Figueroa - Mexico Alberto Godenzi - Switzerland
Daniel Welzer-Lang - France Stephan Cremer - The Netherlands
U.S. ADVISORY EDITORS

Susan Bordo, Philosophy, University of Kentucky Allan Johnson, Sociology, Hartford College for
Robert Brannon, Psychology, Brooklyn College Women
Harry Brod, Philosophy and Religion, University Mark Kann, Political Science, University of
of Northern Iowa Southern California
Gary Brooks, Psychology, VA Hospital, Dallas Terry A. Kupers, The Wright Institute
Ken Clatterbaugh, Philosophy and Religion, Peter Lehman, Media Arts, Arizona State University
University of Northern Iowa Ronald F. Levant, Center for Psychological Studies,
Scott Coltrane, Sociology, University of Nova Southeastern University
California–Riverside David Lubin, Art History, Wake Forest University
John DeCecco, CERES/Psychology, San Francisco Maírtin Mac-An-Ghaill, Education, University of
State University Newcastle
Tom Digby, Philosophy, Springfield College Michael Messner, Sociology, University of
Martin Duberman, History, City University Southern California
of New York Joseph Pleck, Family Studies, University of Illinois–
Debbie Epstein, Educational Studies, University of Urbana-Champaign
London, Goldsmith’s College E. Anthony Rotundo, History, Phillips Academy
Thomas Gerschick, Sociology, Illinois State Lillian B. Rubin, Institute for Study of Social
University Change, University of California–Berkeley
Doug Gertner, Education, Colorado Donald Sabo, Sociology, D’Youville College
State University Alberto Sandoval Sanchez, Spanish, Mt. Holyoke
Matthew C. Gutmann, Anthropology, Brown College
University Michael Schwalbe, Sociology, North Carolina
Carol Hageman-White, Education, University of State University
Osnabrueck Martin Schwartz, Sociology, Ohio University
Sandra Harding, Education and Women’s Studies, Victor Seidler, Sociology, Goldsmith’s College,
University of California-Los Angeles University of London
Gilbert Herdt, Sexuality Studies, San Francisco Laurence Thomas, Philosophy and Political Science,
State University Syracuse University
Gregory Herek, Psychology, University of
California–Davis
Men
and Masculinities
Volume 4, Issue 2 October 2001
Special Issue: Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities:

An Introduction
Guest Editor: Debbie Epstein
Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities:

An Introduction
DEBBIE EPSTEIN 115
Articles
Real Footballers Don’t Eat Quiche:
Old Narratives in New Times
LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE and CHRISTOPHER HICKEY 118
Corporal Punishment and Masculinity
in South African Schools
ROBERT MORRELL 140
Boys and Girls Come Out to Play:
Making Masculinities and
Femininities in School Playgrounds
DEBBIE EPSTEIN, MARY KEHILY,
MAÍRTIN MAC AN GHAILL, and
PETER REDMAN 158
Bodies in School:
Young Men, Embodiment, and
Heterosexual Masculinities
MARY KEHILY 173
The Discipline of Love:
Negotiation and Regulation in Boys’
Performance of a Romance-Based
Heterosexual Masculinity
PETER REDMAN 186
Essay
Teaching about Being an Oppressor:
Some Personal and Political Considerations
STEVEN P. SCHACHT 201
Book Review
The War against Boys:
How Misguided Feminism Is
Harming Our Young Men
by Christina Hoff Sommers
R. W. CONNELL 209
MEN AND MASCULINITIES is a refereed journal publishing the most recent gender studies re-
search on men and masculinities. The journal presents empirical and theoretical articles that use both
interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, that employ diverse methods, and that are grounded in
current theoretical perspectives within gender studies, including feminism, queer theory, and multicultural-
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Printed on acid-free paper
MEN AND MASCULINITIES / October 2001
Epstein / INTRODUCTION
Disciplining and
Punishing Masculinities
An Introduction
DEBBIE EPSTEIN
University of London
This special issue of Men and Masculinities originates from a symposium

titled “Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities” given at the Gender and
Education: Voices conference held at the University of Warwick in April
1999. While drawing on Foucault’s (1977) work, the articles use his ideas as a
starting point rather than a strict framework. We are interested, here, in the
ways in which boys and young men negotiate, learn, and are positioned
within different versions of masculinity. The particular sites under discussion
are educational, whether the formal school or the informally educative foot-
ball team. In the course of the special issue, we move from the punishing
regimes of the Australian Football League and corporal punishment in South
Africa to the more internally policed and disciplined development of hetero-
sexual romance as a key issue in the development of particular forms of male
subjectivity.
Lindsay Fitzclarence and Christopher Hickey open the issue with a dis-
cussion of the bodily disciplines and punishments entered into by boys and
men in Australian Rules football—a version of the game that is strongly
marked by body contact and aggression. They explore the use of global media
in developing new (and building on old) narratives of sporting masculinity,
arguing that the new information networks have created a limited number of
sporting icons, focusing on “a restricted range of behaviors and social prac-
tices.” The violence of the game—the necessity for the men and boys playing
to be able to endure pain and even serious injury—produces a particularly
hard, macho version of masculinity. But Fitzclarence and Hickey argue that
this is not the only possibility available within Australian Rules football par-
ticularly and contact sports generally. They suggest that certain coaches, par-
ticularly in the junior game, are working to bring about change not only in the
game but also in the forms of footballing masculinity.
Robert Morrell, writing from the context of postapartheid South Africa,
focuses on the role of corporal punishment in the production of particular
forms of masculinity. He argues that its widespread use during apartheid
undoubtedly influenced both black and white masculinities in South Africa,
and he explores the impact of its banning by the postapartheid governments.
Men and Masculinities, Vol. 4 No. 2, October 2001 115-117
© 2001 Sage Publications
115
116 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / October 2001
Prohibition of corporal punishment has, however, not led to its being dropped
by teachers in schools. Furthermore, as Morrell’s survey of students shows,
many see corporal punishment as the most appropriate form of discipline in
schools, particularly for boys. At the same time, students talk of the pain and
humiliation of being beaten for misdemeanors in schools, and its use may be
beginning to diminish. In this context, Morrell argues, there may be possibili-
ties for the development of alternative versions of masculinity.
Debbie Epstein and her colleagues turn their attention to the disciplinary
effects on developing masculinities of different ways of organizing school
playgrounds. They contrast two primary schools in London to show the pos-
sibilities produced through different spatial and physical uses of the space of
play. When football is controlled and limited, when girls are allowed and
encouraged to play football, patterns of relating may emerge that permit
access to different versions of masculinity than the fighting and macho ver-
sions discussed by Fitzclarence and Hickey.
The final two articles of this issue focus on young men’s negotiation of
heterosexuality. Mary Kehily is concerned with questions of embodiment in
the relation between sexuality and schooling. She focuses, in particular, on
the strategies used by the young men she interviewed to constitute them-
selves as properly and desirably heterosexual. Her argument is that hetero-
sexuality can best be understood as a set of relational and institutional prac-
tices involving social performances by young men (and young women). The
disciplinary relations of social acceptance and/or disapproval in matters con-
cerning sexuality—from masturbation and the use of pornography to the
importance of appearing and, if possible, being experienced in heterosexual
penetrative sex with girls—form the substance of her article.
Peter Redman explores romance as a disciplinary practice that may be a
resource used by young men to position themselves within particular ver-
sions of middle-class, professional masculinity to which they are “appren-
ticed” in their postcompulsory but preuniversity college. He draws out the
links between these practices and the individuation that characterizes formal
education at this stage. Particularly generative is his turn from the
Foucauldian “disciplinary” to the Bakhtinian “dialogic” in trying to under-
stand the way these young men were positioned by structures of gender, eth-
nicity, class, and schooling and in which they positioned themselves. The
young men’s own agency, in this context, comes into play in a way that can
easily be lost in the context of a strict Foucauldianism.
Read as a whole, the special issue can be an exploration of the possibilities
and limits of notions of discipline and punishment in the particular contexts
of (broadly speaking) education in three countries. Taken together, the arti-
cles demonstrate the importance of specificity in understanding masculini-
ties while drawing out some threads that link the different versions and differ-
ent sites under discussion. Chief among these are the need for boys and young
Epstein / INTRODUCTION 117
men to prove themselves masculine and the existence of mechanisms for both
discipline and punishment when they deviate from local norms.
REFERENCE
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Debbie Epstein is a professor of education and head of the Education Department at

Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her previous publications include A Danger-
ous Knowing: Sexuality, Pedagogy and Popular Culture, Failing Boys? Issues in Gender
and Achievement, and Schooling Sexualities.
Fitzclarence, Hickey / REAL FOOTBALLERS
Real Footballers Don’t Eat Quiche

Old Narratives in New Times
LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE
University of South Australia
CHRISTOPHER HICKEY
Deakin University
In this article, the authors examine the way that sport acts as a contradictory and com-
plex medium for masculinity making. The analysis illustrates the way that many dis-
courses now unite in a cybernetic mix that offers both new opportunities and presents
complex challenges for educators, coaches, and administrators. The method used com-
bines a number of strategies and narratives pitched at the local, national, and interna-
tional levels. The analysis is grounded in the game of football, although it is argued that
the issues raised translate to other settings. At the same time, the authors demonstrate
that large-scale, macro level analyses miss an important force working within the
dynamics of masculinity making and sport, namely, peer group power. The analysis con-
cludes with insights from a junior coach who has consciously “worked” the peer group
dynamics to foster a strong sense of personal and group responsibility.
Key words: media image, narrative, global-local cultures, masculinity-making peers, re-
sponsibilities
This article was written on the eve of the 1999 Rugby Union World Cup.
This competition is heralded as the showpiece of world rugby and will be
televised to hundreds of millions of supporters all over the globe. In this con-
text, the stakes are inordinately high for players, coaches, administrators,
and, indeed, nations. The previous cup, won by South Africa, was used as a
nation-building exercise by the newly elected, racially integrated govern-
ment of the time. Nelson Mandela attended the final wearing the green jersey
of the South African team. The images of Mandela and the South African
team in celebration became icons in the rebirth of the nation.
Beneath its potential role in the expression of macro level politics, the
1999 World Cup will display the capacities and limitations of the world’s
Authors’ Note: This article has developed within the context of a project titled “Masculinity
Sport and Education” conducted at Deakin University between 1997 and 1999. We acknowl-
edge the work of a number of colleagues with the Deakin Centre for Education and Change and
the work of Russell Matthews in particular. A number of ideas and phrases in this article have
emerged from Russell’s thinking.
118
Fitzclarence, Hickey / REAL FOOTBALLERS 119
preeminent rugby players. In front of massive television audiences, players

will be expected to give every last ounce of effort for their teams. In the pro-
cess, these players will be seen in triumph and in tragedy. Some, like the
South Africans of 1995, will emerge as heroes. Others will be vilified and rid-
iculed for their mistakes, their hesitancy, and worst of all their “weakness”
under fire. Others still will be badly injured and have their sporting careers
interrupted or terminated. Within the discourses of “sporting achievement,” a
massive television audience will have an opportunity to pass judgment on
individual players in terms of courage, work ethic, and loyalty. At the per-
sonal level, players will be acutely aware that their performance will be scru-
tinized with respect to a cluster of “football” values that find expression in a
particular (dominant) form of masculinity.
At the center of this process is the sophisticated new media. Through the
use of multiple camera angles, slow-motion screenings, close wide angle,
and split-screen images, the media as never before construct powerful visual
narratives of sporting contests and of the identities of individuals and teams
participating within them. More than this, contemporary media have the
capacity to remake old narratives in dramatic new forms. In this process, the
media help shape the fantasy world of the next generation of participants.
Thus, the North American social theorist Stanley Aronowitz (1989) com-
mented that
television is not just a manipulation of popular culture, it constitutes a crucial

element in the construction of imaginary life and is appropriated, just like
rockmusic for young people, as popular culture, in the same manner as songs
and dances for rural populations in preindustrial days. (P. 199)
Rugby, however, is much more than a game played in the imagination. As

one of the major international forms of football, rugby is an intensely physi-
cal game. At the elite level, both rugby union and rugby league reveal highly
coordinated sets of strategic moves involving intense body contact in the
effort to secure forward yardage. Indeed, football in its various hues is a
“practice” that unites physical, mental, and social capacities. For neophytes
entering the world(s) of rugby, gridiron, soccer, or Australian Rules, the pro-
cess of learning the ways of football is an extended one that involves training
and mastering the codes of the game. At the same time, this process contrib-
utes to the construction of a very identifiable gendered identity. Our task in
this article is to explore the process whereby the “football factory” shapes,
disciplines, and controls its participants via an extensive network of dis-
courses. Our analysis demonstrates that the construction of a gendered foot-
ball identity is a complicated and cybernetic process whereby the local and
global, specific and cultural combine in multiple ways. We argue that the
sporting practices of football use and are used by the new information tech-
nologies to unite multiple discourses and construct distinctive and identifi-
able forms of masculinities. Our method is to examine the meeting point of

old and new narratives to demonstrate how the contemporary sporting world
offers many options for the construction of a distinctive gendered identity.
The following section is constructed around a description of a meta-style of
masculinity, which will be followed by three distinct narratives. Each story is
located at a different social level but at the same time contains a distinct and
unifying logic. Following this, we present the work of one junior coach
whose work we position as generating a “counternarrative” to the dominant
discourses of coaching. We conclude with a brief analysis and discussion.
A SOCIOCULTURAL BACKGROUND
In an edited extract from a text titled “John Wayne: The Politics of Celeb-
rity,” Garry Wills (1997) observed that in a 1993 poll, a representative sample
of Americans voted John Wayne second in response to the question of “who
is your favorite star?” This result was repeated in 1994 and then in 1995,
when Wayne was voted number one ahead of Mel Gibson, despite the fact
that he had died in 1979. In trying to explain this enduring appeal, Wills noted
that Wayne’s “body spoke a highly specific language of ‘manliness,’ of self
reliant authority. It was a body impervious to outside force, expressing a mind
narrow but focused, fixed on the task, impatient with complexity” (p. 21).
Furthermore, at a more structural, social level, Wills argued that in the
post–World War II period, Hollywood has valorized “radical individualism,”
of which Wayne is the quintessential icon, followed more recently by Bruce
Willis and Sylvester Stallone. Wills suggested that the Hollywood “action
man” provides what is seen to be the politically appropriate image for the
postwar period. This observation is instructive because Hollywood has
become an important social force in the identity formation of young people
the world over.1 More specifically, it has helped create the social context in
which certain forms of masculinity are valorized while others are
marginalized.
It is one of the paradoxes of contemporary cultural life that with several
billion people on the planet, the new information networks have managed to
create a comparative handful of global icons. In the areas of sport and enter-
tainment, these icons act to focus inordinate attention on a restricted range of
behaviors and social practices (Adams 1997).2 In contemporary male sport,
the quintessential “performers” include Michael Johnson in athletics, Tiger
Woods in golf, and Pete Sampras in tennis. Under the glare of the interna-
tional media spotlights, these personalities project a style and image that, in
certain senses, becomes universalized. Clearly, there are “local” stars in
regional areas; however, to return to Adams’s (1997) logic, the exploits of
such identities are increasingly viewed, and arguably measured, against
those of the global superstars. Fed a diet of elitism through the media
sensorium dedicated to the promotion and marketing of sport, consumers

develop an appetite for the “ultimate” performance that is unlikely to be sated
while viewing lower level performers (Goldman and Papson 1998).
The trend we are describing also suggests that the new and powerful infor-
mation technologies make it possible to link up many individuals and groups
that were previously kept apart. Or, in more specific terms, when Nike mar-
kets Michael Jordan globally, young people from many different cultures
actually converge on one set of images and are united by a vast economy of
signs and symbols and a veritable army of workers and marketing personnel.3
As a result of such developments, companies such as Nike have managed to
capture the hearts and minds of a global army of youthful admirers (read:
consumers).
On the surface, this description would suggest that the information net-
works of postmodern culture produce Michael Jordan acolytes in the four
corners of the globe and everywhere in between. However, such an observa-
tion is surely premature. Young males are produced not simply in the context
of new information technologies because these new patterns of producing
global markets operate within deep and complex cultural discourses that act
to reinforce certain preexisting values and practices. Games, including foot-
ball and cricket, are social practices designed to both develop certain forms of
desirable character (Hodgens and Matthews 2000) and to sift and sort partici-
pants according to their potential for different forms of “associated” work. In
the process, the incentive to fit a certain mold is developed via a combination
of “inside” and “outside” inducements. “It’s not just play that’s going on
here, its training, an arena for masculinity. There’s a lot at stake here and not
to conform is pretty terrifying for boys who aren’t good at these basic ‘mas-
culine’activities” (Grieve 1994, 158). The pressure to conform is nurtured by
football coaches who set out to construct an aggressive, physically dominat-
ing style of conduct that becomes consistent with the hegemonic form of
masculinity.4 Of course, such versions of masculinity are not restricted to
sport but rather are enshrined in many of the day-to-day practices of business,
the military, and government (Connell 1995).
The “hardness of body and mind” messages of coercive behavior are
unambiguous. In the most high-profile forms of football, violence and
aggression are up front and explicitly tied to the most validated form of mas-
culinity. This point is well demonstrated in an example from the Australian
Rugby League grand final to the 1999 national competition played between
St. George Illawarra and Melbourne Storm. The game ended in high drama
when Melbourne was awarded a penalty try in the final minutes of play. The
incident, replayed countless times on national television, was described in
the following way in the print media the day after the game:
Storm halfback Brett Kimmorley hoisted a cross-field bomb for winger Craig
Smith, who caught the ball in-goal, but was taken high by Jamie Ainscough as
he was landing to place the ball. Smith was knocked out and lost control on his
way to the ground. (Honeysett 1999, 40)
What the videotaped record makes clear is that, in the cauldron of physical
contact, neither player hesitated in this high-speed collision. Smith’s
response to his team’s desperate drive toward the goal line was to take posses-
sion of the ball in an attempt to score a goal. Ainscough’s aim was to make
heavy body contact on Smith. The result was unambiguous; Smith was
unconscious before he hit the ground. From a strictly technical point of view,
both players did what they were trained to do. The ethical and social implica-
tions are another issue.
The following section documents three narratives that are designed to
explore the way that football (in this instance, Australian Rules football), at
different levels, draws on, accentuates, and distorts the style of masculine
embodiment made famous by John Wayne. Each of our narratives looks at a
different layer of participation in Australian Rules football and how mascu-
line identity is constructed and practiced. The first narrative, titled “Violence
as Entertainment,” focuses on the amplification of particular versions of mas-
culinity from the elite level of the game. The second narrative, titled “Hit ’em
Hard and Make It Hurt,” illustrates a less glamorous side to the expression of
the widely celebrated versions of masculinity. The third narrative, titled
“Learning Not to Take Shit from Anyone,” chronicles the actions and interac-
tions of two young males who are learning to behave within the definitional
constructs of being “real footballers.” Our interpretation and conclusion syn-
thesizes the themes from the narratives to suggest the need for an alternative
“community of practice” for those associated with junior-level football.
VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT
In the opening images of the sports video titled 100 Years of Football
(Vuecast), the focus is directed at the first bounce of the ball at the 1989 Vic-
torian Football League grand final between Hawthorn and Geelong. In collo-
quial terms, the grand final is known as “the one day in September,” which
means it is the most important day on the football calendar. In the coded mes-
sages of the video, it is made clear that the events of this particular day are
deemed to be particularly significant in football folklore. In short, the video’s
narrator claims that the events of the September Grand Final of 1989 were so
significant that they are worthy of prominence in the visual record of one
hundred years of Australian Rules football.
As viewers, we witness the slow-motion movement of the ball at the start
of play. In Australian football, this occurs with a bounce down of the ball in
the center of the ground. As the ball rises high into the air, we are made aware
of the crowd noise and are thus drawn into the emotional intensity and
excitement that exists at this precise moment. Next, the videotape returns to
normal speed and pans back to provide a wider view of the contest at the start
of play. As the ball is bounced, Dermott Brereton, Hawthorn’s “strongman”
center half forward, runs into the center square and within seconds is left
lying prostrate on the ground. A Geelong defender has run directly at the
unsuspecting Brereton and has literally knocked him off his feet. With all the
dramatic effects of an action-based war movie, the video then highlights, in
close-up and in slow motion, Brereton’s attempt to get back into the battle. In
his own words, Brereton describes his reactions and feelings: “I remember
saying to myself ‘It cannot end here. This has got to be most probably the
most important two hours of my life. It just cannot end here.’ And I just men-
tally wouldn’t let it end there” (100 Years of Football, Vuecast). In the “defin-
ing moments” that follow, the wounded Brereton is characterized as display-
ing exceptional willpower and determination by getting to his feet and
eventually recovering enough to make an important contribution to his
team’s winning performance.
In 1999, Tony Wilson, writing in the Age newspaper, presented an account
of his memories of this same incident. At the time, as a young Hawthorn sup-
porter, Wilson attended the Hawthorn/Geelong game with his father and
brother. The following is an excerpt of his memories of the incident involving
Brereton:
The game was only 40 seconds old and tears of rage were welling in my eyes. “Dad
did you see what they did to Dermie?” I screamed.
But he wasn’t listening, just gritting his teeth and grinding out the words “get up,
get up” over and over again. He had locked Brereton in a brutal stare, and
seemed to be trying to lift him with his eyes.
“C’mon Dermie,” I murmured, but I didn’t want to distract Dad because he looked
like he might be making a difference. C’mon Dad.
Dermott rose and spewed and pushed away intelligent people looking after his
own best interests. It was sensational. If ever there was an advertisement for vi-
olence as entertainment, this was it. Brereton puffed his chest out, jogged down
to the forward pocket and was sick again. In years to come, someone would
slow this down, add a heartbeat and sell it for $29.95. (P. 13)
It is difficult to say whether this account represents an accurate account of

events as they happened or if they are heavily circumscribed with more recent
memories provided by the videotape. What is clear, however, is the way Wil-
son remembers himself as a young boy, “experiencing” these events as a vali-
dation of a desirable form of behavior and attitude. Wilson’s account is inter-
esting for another reason. Here, for the first time, is a suggestion that what
happened to the unsuspecting Brereton, while he was focusing on the ball,
was unjust. Wilson’s demand that his father pay attention to what “they” had
done to Brereton went unnoticed. What was more important to his father was
giving strict attention to what the wounded Brereton would do next.
Within the unwritten rules of football, it is more important to celebrate and

validate “courage under fire” than to be concerned about misdemeanors of
“cowards.” After all, another unwritten rule suggests that football produces
plenty of opportunity for a “square up” at a later time. Indeed, one reason
Brereton was placed under such scrutiny at this moment of physical duress
was the knowledge that he himself was probably the targeted victim of a
square up. Thus, his real test was just how he would cope with what he had
himself previously done to other players. As is made clear in these brief
excerpts, consensus of opinion is that Brereton passed the test with flying
colors.
In the voiceover that accompanied the images, the narrator makes no
attempt to represent Brereton as a victim or his assailant as a villain. Instead,
the narrative acts to position Brereton’s desperate struggle to reenter the con-
test as symbolic of the highest standards of those who have played the game.
The portrayal acts to evoke a representation of courage, fortitude, unflinching
resilience, single-mindedness, and, above all, exceptional mental strength. In
many ways, the narrative is a discourse that ignites memories of soldiers
wounded in battle who climbed back to their feet to fight on in the face of per-
sonal adversity. It is a discourse in keeping with the legacy of the ANZACs5
of old. As such, it is a representation about a certain form of revered mascu-
linity. In these “new times,” the football field becomes an important site for
defining cultural identity, whereby character forged of the right spirit will tri-
umph over personal and idiosyncratic needs. In commodified video format,
Brereton’s deeds are now etched in sporting mythology.
HIT ’EM HARD AND MAKE IT HURT
Unfortunately, the full weight of sport as a site of social and cultural repro-
duction remains relatively unacknowledged in mainstream discourses. By
perpetuating the mythology that sport is a site of equality, competition, and
meritocracy, positive aspects of its culture are disproportionately repre-
sented. Indeed, many questionable knowledges and understandings that take
place through an active involvement in football are kept off the record or posi-
tioned as petty compared to the benefits that are achieved. The following
transcript of a suburban coach’s address to his players reveals how the rheto-
ric of healthy competition can be distorted to harbor attitudes of aggression,
sexism, and violence.
Come on fellas, we’re playing like a bunch of girls. We need to hit em hard,
make it bloody hurt. . . . They bloody want it more than some of you blokes.
They’re fuckin’ weak, but they’re making us look soft. Come on, let’s get fair
dinkum, let’s go hard at the ball. Come on fellas . . . it doesn’t have to be pretty
we just have to fuckin win.6
Most football, as an organized social practice, occurs far away from the
glamour and hype of big crowds and close media attention. Nonetheless, in
the restricted codes of local football, the stock, standard rituals, and dramas
of the game are played out all over the country each weekend. Meanwhile, at
the general level, the extended code of football actively reproduces and mim-
ics the patterns of behavior established at the more elite level. Indeed, most
elite performers have served apprenticeships in minor grades as juniors
before starting their climb up football’s social ladder. At the junior and minor
league level, the sifting and sorting process involves demonstrations of the
same values and attitudes as demonstrated at the elite level, albeit usually
with less subtlety and finesse. As a result, incidents that occur at the local
level are often more pernicious and thus more likely to highlight sport’s
shadow character. The following is an account of an incident in a provincial
league game. This example is included to dramatize and problematize the hit
’em hard attitude.
On August 1, 1998, in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, an AFL [Austra-

lian Football League] game was played between the teams of Ainslie and
Campbelltown. At the time of this game, Ainslie was coached by Kevin “Cow-
boy” Neale, a Victorian Football League “legend” of the late 1960s and early
1970s. The crowd in attendance on that Sunday afternoon was only about two
hundred people. Despite their small number, the crowd was enthusiastic and
vocal before and during the game.
In the first quarter, a behind-the-play incident left a Campbelltown player
lying motionless while his teammates remonstrated with no. 22 for Ainslie. At
the time, Campbelltown people sitting in the stands expressed anger and agita-
tion at what happened, claiming it was an illegal “off-the-ball”7 incident. Dur-
ing this period of play, the umpires took no action against any players.
After a short time, while the game proceeded, the injured player was as-
sisted from the ground. He was bleeding badly from the nose and mouth, and
his escort provided support to his jaw. Both men walked directly from the oval
where an elastic bandage was wrapped around the injured player’s head and
jaw. Once this was completed, the player and escort walked slowly from the
ground. There was clearly some concern about the extent of the injury, as the
player did not even stop to collect a tracksuit or change of clothes, electing to
remain in his football gear.
Afterward, two Campbelltown officials met to discuss possible action and
to inquire whether the game was being videotaped. One of these men then
moved to comfort a young woman who was visibly upset about the incident.
Later, the woman proceeded to collect the player’s clothes, and then she, too,
left the grounds.
At the quarter-time break, Ainslie’s coach, Kevin Neale, spoke calmly
about the team game plan and directed his attention to a couple of players spe-
cifically. At no time during his commentary was any mention made of the “in-
cident.” During this address, no. 22 for Ainslie stared blankly off into the dis-
tance, showing no sign of any engagement with anything that was being done
or said. The only visible signs in no. 22’s behavior were of complete detach-
ment. Neale concluded his address by declaring “you’ve been good and hard at
the ball. Make sure you don’t relax and lose any intensity!”
The injured player, Campbelltown’s Nathan Lenton, spent nine days in hos-
pital including five days in intensive care. During this time, he had two opera-
tions to insert metal plates designed to repair his jaw. Surgeons advised Lenton
not to play football, or any other contact sport, again. (Lloyd 1998)
Almost four weeks after the incident, the league tribunal met to hear
charges against Saleem Kassem (no. 22 for Campbelltown). Kassem was sus-
pended from football for ten weeks.
The pattern of this event is quite familiar. In the course of the game, an
“off-the-ball” incident is normalized with a bit of pushing and shoving. The
game then proceeds. The injured player is given obligatory, yet minimal,
assistance. Once he is out of the contest and off the ground, he has no further
bearing on the outcome of the game. A female companion is left to pick up the
pieces.
In the grander scheme of football life, this incident would hardly rate a
mention. Normally, such an incident would go unreported,8 although in this
case the event did feature as a footnote to another report in the daily news-
paper the Canberra Times (Lloyd 1998). The “hardmen” of football would be
quick to point out that Australian football is a physical contact sport in which
there will always be injuries. They would also protest that football is a game
played with intense emotion in which passion and adrenaline run free. These
same people would debate the fairness of a ten-week suspension for such an
incident and refer to similar events with different penalties.
On the other hand, this sort of story is the type of scenario that is likely to
give nightmares to many parents of young footballers. Indeed, one account
by the prominent Melbourne sportswriter Caroline Wilson gives evidence of
this concern. In her article, titled “Now, As a Mother, the Bumps Hit Home,”
Wilson (1998) discussed the obvious risks and wear and tear associated with
playing Australian football. Wilson also expressed concern about the trend to
market the game via promotion of its physicality and violence.
Despite the public protests of a small number of football’s identities, there
is plenty of evidence that there are stronger forces at work. Marketing experts
working for the Australian Football League and for sporting goods compa-
nies provide a rich diet of sensationalism and media hype. If participation
rates are any guide, there is ample evidence that this marketing process con-
tinues to attract young males to the ranks of these modern gladiators. In this
sense, the marketing machine of Australian Rules football has tapped into a
deep reservoir of support for the very issues that Wilson is concerned about.
However, here we offer a caveat. It is not just the big stories that are so attrac-
tive to young players of the game. At the grassroots level, there are a host of
minor stories and unrecorded moments that act as the necessary inducement
to put one’s body on the line.
LEARNING NOT TO TAKE SHIT FROM ANYONE9
“Sonny” and “Mike,” twin brothers, were thirteen years of age when they
presented themselves at “Parkside” football club to join the under-fifteen
team. Although they were only just old enough to play at this level, the twins
had actually established themselves as something of “identities” at the club,
having been mascots to the senior team for more than three years. The secre-
tary of the junior division of the club recalled how two years previous to this
he had received a deputation from the senior players, including the head
coach, asking why the twins had not been permitted to play under-fifteen
football. In response, the secretary asked, “Did you know that there’s a rule
that you have to be thirteen years old to play at this level?” and then asked the
twins, “How old are you?” Sonny, the more assertive and aggressive of the
two, quickly quipped, “Yeah, that’s right, we’re thirteen!” “Oh,” said the sec-
retary, “Just remind me when you were born!” Mike’s answer soon made it
clear that the brothers were actually only eleven years of age. While this lie
about their ages was looked on as a minor indiscretion, the story soon circu-
lated that the twins were “as keen as mustard” and had the right attitude for
football.
When Sonny and Mike were legally old enough to play junior football,
they entered a community that they were already familiar with. As such, it did
not take long before they assumed some prominence within the group. In
team meetings, both boys were opinionated and outspoken, and Sonny
quickly developed a reputation for wanting to have the last word. Further-
more, both boys would frequently arrive late to training and often elect to
fraternize with their friends among the senior ranks. Meanwhile, their
under-fifteen teammates were on the training track practicing skills. In Sonny
and Mike’s world, being in a football club meant being with the “big boys.”
When the coach put pressure on them to join in normal training, Mike was
happy enough to comply and be one of the juniors. Sonny, on the other hand,
often produced sullen looks and snide remarks before offering conditional
compliance. Equally, peer pressure from the rest of the team for Sonny to
comply with established training routines was often met with aggressive
resistance. It soon became apparent that Sonny would respond to critical
comments with a punch, always delivered when no one was looking. Sonny,
more than his brother, was used to doing things his own way.
While Mike started to fit in with the team and develop cordial relation-
ships with other team members, the same could not be said of Sonny. He often
remained aloof and detached and paid little genuine attention to the coach’s
instructions. Where Mike seemed willing to learn and interact with his coach
and teammates, his brother’s motivations seemed to be in other places.
However, in spite of his apparent disregard for his membership within the
under-fifteen team, Sonny’s aggression and assertiveness seemed to ensure
his acceptance (at least overtly) within the group whenever he demanded it.
It was not long before Sonny’s aggression became an issue on game days.
He developed a habit of collecting “yellow cards” from the umpires. In junior
ranks, a misdemeanor meant a yellow card and a penalty of fifteen minutes
out of the game. A serious transgression brought a red card that resulted in
immediate expulsion from the game and a visit to the tribunal. The prob-
lem here, however, was that Sonny collected yellow cards as badges of
honor and used them to establish a reputation as someone who, in his own
words, “doesn’t take shit from anyone.”
When the coach took a late-night call from the mother of another of his
players, he knew that the “Sonny issue” was getting out of hand. Sonny had
damaged the other boy’s bike and then intimidated his victim with threats of
“a belting” if he told anyone. The victim’s mother, realizing something was
wrong with her son, eventually pieced together the story and demanded that
the club do something about Sonny’s behavior. The problem was that Sonny
and his brother were so ensconced within the culture of the club and had
impressed so many people with their “good football attitude” that there was
no support for serious discipline or suspension. In the end, the verdict was
that “boys will be boys” and that football clubs were designed to win games,
not do social work. As is often the case, the victim of the abuse was the one
who was forced out of the situation. Realizing that he did not have total sup-
port for dealing with the issue, the coach also resigned. Sonny would have to
become someone else’s problem and responsibility.
Despite their relative youth, both Sonny and Mike had become experts in
the ways of football. As prepubescent sporting “sponges,” they had soaked up
a myriad of the rituals and practices associated with the adult version of the
game. In their role as club mascots, they had been schooled in masculinity on
a diet of very candid interactions between coaches and players across a wide
range of football contexts. Sonny’s and Mike’s proximity to the adult version
of the game had clearly provided an insight into the rituals and mores of par-
ticipation, as delivered in some of their most unsanitized and unedited forms.
Sonny, in particular, seemed to have learned many of football’s less desirable
lessons. As a result, Sonny had mastered the restricted code of football in its
language and styles. In this sense, televised football acted to reinforce the
local knowledge that he had acquired in the local clubrooms. While the cul-
ture of junior football helped Mike to put these influences into perspective,
the same could not said for his brother. Sonny was busy marking out his mas-
culinity in the shadow of a Dermot Brereton, as amplified in his world
through the deeds and personalities of his immediate senior mentors.
FOOTBALL AS A MASCULINITY-MAKING DEVICE
In this section of the article, we will demonstrate that despite obvious dif-
ferences, there is a fundamental coherence to our three narratives. The glori-
fication of hard physical contact, in the capacity to both give and take it, links
the stories of Dermot Brereton, Nathan Lenton, Saleem Kassem, and Mike
and Sonny. Each of these participants in Australian football is engaged in a
practice that demands body-against-body contact in the attempt to gain con-
trol of or protect the football in pursuit of victory.
At its most basic level, football involves an array of rituals and codes
designed to deal with body contact. Players learn to use their body to win con-
trol of the ball and the contest. In the process, players also encounter the lim-
its of their own and others’ tolerance for body-on-body contact. As such, the
game is as much about dealing with fear and anxiety in oneself as it is about
dominating an opponent.
Football, as social practice, rarely deals with the ethics of taking too much
license. In most cases, football training is designed to take maximum oppor-
tunity in the effort to win and control the football. In a win-at-all-costs envi-
ronment, from the elite level down, finding ways to take advantage in the
body-contact stakes is part of the game. The line that connects our narratives
is captured in the comment by Miedzian (1992), who observed that “when
winning is everything violence is never far away.” It is left to policing and
sanctioning regimes, administered by rule makers, umpires, and tribunals, to
keep body contact under control. Coaches and players, on the other hand,
understand their task as simply trying to win the ball and the game. Thus, the
dominant narratives of football recruit and valorize participants who are pro-
ficient at the bodily craft of winning the ball and putting their stamp on the
contest. In the shadow of this, there is ample scope and encouragement for
those who are prepared to exploit the rules to project themselves forcefully
and violently onto the contest. Such actions, it seems, frequently attract
approval. If, as is the case in our narratives, this involves damage, abuse, and
intimidation, it seems that the unspoken rule is to avoid being caught.
Against such developments, we reach consideration of a primary issue.
Are activities such as football arenas for the confirmation of the “ugly logic
of hegemonic masculinity” (Kenway and Willis 1997, 18), or do they provide
avenues for the developments of alternative ways of being in the gendered
world? In posing this question in this way, we are eager to avoid the
reductionism that leads to a simple yes/no response. While it is clear that our
evidence suggests a leaning toward answering yes to the first and no to the
second question, we believe that it is important to be open to the possibility
that there are important redeeming aspects of the game. This view is in
keeping with an observation by Eitzen (1996), who described the paradoxical

nature of learnings from sport:
On the one hand, it (sport) inspires as it fosters the admirable traits of courage,
determination, hard work, fairness, respect, sacrifice, selflessness and loyalty.
But it also promotes rule breaking, selfishness, greed, contempt for opponents,
and violence on the field. (P. 1)
Our purpose in the final section of the article is to explore this tension through
further consideration of the issues that arise from our narratives. To undertake
this investigation, we are required to seek explanations outside of football.
Following Connell (1989), we note that while it is not possible to “choose”
a masculinity, it is possible to choose a community that engages in particular
social practices. As such, when young boys choose football, they are entering
a community of practice that demarcates particular forms of masculinity.
Indeed, the self-reproducing cycle of hegemonic masculinity in football is
nurtured by a number of forces. Successful footballers like Dermot Brereton
celebrate their masculinity, coaches act as gatekeepers of dominant forms of
masculinity, the media perpetuate the dominant discourses, and junior peer
group relationships confirm and conform to made masculinities.
Here, we employ the ideas of Lave and Wenger (1991), who provided an
account of the ways in which people learn new identities and new
subjectivities when they enter new social groups or “communities of prac-
tice.” To look beyond the restricted code provided by the discourses of games
such as Australian Rules football, it is, we believe, necessary to consider the
wider forms of institutionalization that occur. Connell (1995) noted that
when boys start playing competitive sport they are not just learning a game,
they are entering an institution. Only a tiny minority reach the top as profes-
sional athletes; yet the production of masculinity throughout the sports world is
marked by the hierarchical, competitive structure of the institution. (Pp. 35-36)
Thus, the community of practice associated with football involves definite

structural divisions. Ability to play (the beginnings of mature practice)
enables access to the inner circle of legitimate participation (the team) or rele-
gation to peripheral participation (the leftovers). Power in such a process is
often in the hands of the coach, who organizes skills hierarchically and sorts
players into a football hierarchy using competitive grading. A big part of the
sifting and sorting process is associated with the visible display of definable
character traits. Indeed, one of the reasons for Dermott Brereton’s installment
in football’s elite inner circle is associated with his well-documented display
of strong character, as discussed earlier. Because football success is associ-
ated with a particular form of masculinity, it brings social power to those high
in the hierarchy (the inner circle) while leaving others to seek alternative ave-
nues to social power.
In prior times, sports such as football were employed as a pathway to a

community of practice arranged for and by the military. The need for hard-
ened and disciplined soldiers was a strong imperative for the industrialized
nation states up to and including the cold war period. Sport and physical
training were used in schools as a general preparation for the more serious
demands of postschool military involvement. Since that time, military bud-
gets in these countries have been increasingly dominated by spending on
high-tech hardware. A legacy of the link between sport and military is the use
of the military-based language and training drills and methods that have their
origins in the science of war.
Phillips’s (in Connell 1995, 29) work on colonial developments in twentieth-
century New Zealand is an example of work that has studied links between
sport, gender politics, and nation building via military proficiency. In this
study, Phillips explored how, at the end of last century, a surplus of men cre-
ated unstable male subcultures, “which posed serious problems of social
order.” This particular problem was overcome by organizing “agricultural
settlement based on family farms.” In subsequent times, New Zealand’s
involvement in international conflict in support of Britain produced a need
for soldiers in conflicts in the Boer War and then the two World Wars. One
social mechanism that was used to produce this outcome was organized
sport. Team sport, in particular, rugby, became a state-supported activity
designed to prepare young males for life in the military. Connell (1995)
described this development as follows:
Team sport was being developed at this time, across the English-speaking
world, as a heavily convention-bound arena. The exemplary status of sport, as a
test of masculinity, which we now take for granted, is in no sense natural. It was
produced historically, and in this case we can see it produced deliberately as a
political strategy. (P. 30)
In other countries, different sports fulfilled similar roles in the preparation

of males for politically important tasks. Football (gridiron) in the United
States contains a division of labor that is in keeping with the competitive cor-
porate structure of many industrial institutions.
In the contemporary Western civilization, very few young boys are being
prepared specifically for military conflict. In this period of rapid globaliza-
tion, the former struggles affected by nation-states in direct military conflict
have been replaced by trade wars. Here, confederations of nations battle each
other in the marketplace to control maximum share of global markets. Along-
side these arrangements, there has been the emergence of massive multina-
tional corporations with strong economic and political interests in many
countries. In this emerging global economy of signs, loyalties are more
readily given to a brand or corporation before they are given to abstractions
such as a flag.
A COUNTERNARRATIVE ABOUT FOOTBALL
It is at junior levels that we feel most optimistic about the possibility for
young males to experience different, more socially responsible messages
about their participation in sport and wider society. Despite the fact that only
a tiny minority of junior participants reach elite levels of competition, defini-
tions of successful participation are overwhelmingly constrained by the val-
ues and practices associated with elite performance. Given the huge levels of
personal and financial investment that surround participation at the elite
level, any challenge to the values or practices that underpin these is almost
certain to encounter robust resistance. Of course, that is not to say that such
challenge would not be meritorious. Rather, it is a warning that those contem-
plating developing a counternarrative need to be ready for a long struggle
within which the gains may be modest.
Within the context of a world increasingly conforming to the customs and
mores of global corporations, different institutions, including schools and
sports clubs, help prepare young people for the challenges and demands of
the high-tech workplace. Indeed, it is increasingly argued that young people
who do not develop the capacities of enterprise, risk taking, and flexibility are
at risk of not securing a place in the new work setting. It follows that young
males, particularly from the professional middle classes, are encouraged to
learn enterprise skills from an early age.
Contemporary sport is well designed to give full expression to the
hyper-individualized world of competitive, corporate culture. Games such as
tennis and golf, at the elite level, are good examples of sports that suit the
logic of such a culture. On the other hand, games such as cricket and football
have had to be remade to adapt to such demands. That is, they have had to
adjust their image, through their work, training and coaching techniques, and
recruitment policies, to suit such purposes. Proof of this capacity to change
can be seen in the development of World Series Cricket in the 1970s, with its
symbiotic relationship with television. About twenty years on, the emer-
gence of a unified national competition for Australian Rules football (the
AFL) sees television increasingly defining the dominant narrative that valo-
rizes the hyped-up and individualized world and its aggressive competitive-
ness. The question then is, How is it possible to develop a narrative that stands
in opposition to the dominant one?
In our opinion, too many coaches of football, at all levels, overemphasize
the “hit ’em hard” attitude. It does not have to be this way! There are exam-
ples of coaches who work well with teams, experience success, and at the
same time understand that there is an opportunity to develop respectful and
responsible dispositions in their players. In light of this, we have focused our
work in the area of junior sport (in particular, junior football) with a view to
bringing about change from the bottom up. Given that the overall number of
participants in Australian Rules football is greater at the junior level than any
other level, even small gains are potentially widespread gains.
In our recent book, titled Where the Boys Are (Hickey, Fitzclarence, and
Matthews 2000), we make the point that, despite its numerous social and cul-
tural shortcomings, young males continue to be attracted to Australian Rules
football in robust numbers. Rather than viewing this phenomenon as some
sort of social disease that we need to immunize against, we see it as an oppor-
tunity to develop a counternarrative to the dominant ones of these times. That
is, it is an opportunity to the extent that it represents a forum within which a
considerable number of young males voluntarily commit themselves to be
coached and mentored by adults. In respect to the teenage years, this makes
sports like Australian Rules football somewhat unique. What beckons, how-
ever, is the development of more effective ways of working within this
situation.
Of course, change at even the junior level is not without its limitations. It
must be acknowledged that most young players, like Mike and Sonny, enter
the world of football with well-established expectations of what it means to
be a successful performer. The accomplishments and commemorations of
players such as Dermott Brereton are not unfamiliar to them. Indeed, many
young players dream of emulating the glorious feats of such heroes. The
extent to which young players will readily accept a sanitized (read:
watered-down) version of the game that did not accommodate their dreams
and expectations is problematic. What is needed, therefore, are more produc-
tive ways of working with young males within the constraints of their per-
sonal expectations and the parameters of participation. Within this context, it
has been the innovative (and often intuitive) work of some junior coaches that
has provided us with inspiration. It is here, we believe, that the greatest poten-
tial exists to incrementally transform some of the values and practices
entrenched in the dominant culture of games like Australian Rules football
and present young males with more socially responsible versions of
masculinity.
Leon Schram10 had been coaching junior football for nine years before we
met him and later interviewed him. Unfortunately, a comprehensive descrip-
tion of Leon’s accomplishments as an exemplary junior football coach is
beyond the scope of this article. His coaching exploits were well known in the
local region and beyond, culminating in him being awarded the title of 1998
Junior Coach of the Year for the Geelong & Districts Region. Interestingly, it
was not Leon’s success as a premiership coach that drew our interest to him
but rather a perchance conversation with a player in his team. We ran into
“Mike,” a sixteen-year-old young male, while attending a major league
game. Following an exchange of pleasantries, we began talking about his
own football this season. As he chatted about his team and his coach, it
became increasingly evident to us that Mike had a deep sense of pride and
commitment to his team. This conversation confirmed other messages we

had been getting about Leon Schram’s coaching prowess and prompted us to
observe and make contact with him. On the basis of our observations and dis-
cussions with Leon, we wish to draw on some of his coaching philosophies
and practices as examples of the sort of potential that exists for more
“transformative” approaches to the development of young males in the con-
text of football. In particular, we have selected three aspects of Leon’s coach-
ing to represent his work as a coach and mentor. Here, we refer to his
approaches to nurturing responsibility, communication, and affiliation.
Leon’s coaching philosophies and practices are structured around an
emphasis on individual and collective responsibility. At the beginning of the
year, Leon meets with his players and outlines his expectations of them. He
then invites them to counter or extend any of these expectations. From this
point on, it is expected that each player will respect the shared goals of the
team and make it their responsibility to play a role in protecting and forward-
ing these goals. To facilitate the notion of shared responsibility, Leon has a
practice of inviting the players to appoint four leaders from within their
group. Two of these will be chosen from the older cohort, and two will be cho-
sen from among the newcomers to the group. These players become commu-
nication conduits between the players and the coach (and his support person-
nel). Leon explains, “those four players bring the group closer together
because they all have input. They’re invited to have ‘a say’ on match day and
on training nights. I will always ask them what they thought we did well or
did wrong.” In establishing and modeling a rich dialogue with his team lead-
ers, Leon is also setting up a structure for developing a sense of mutual own-
ership. Communication structures, such as regular player meetings and
debriefings, are established to ensure that all players have their say. Within
this mosaic of formal and informal communication structures, all players are
invited, or may volunteer, to contribute to different aspects of team organiza-
tion, training, and/or coordination. Indeed, Leon attributes a good deal of his
success as a junior coach to his ability to get everybody to take some responsi-
bility for the team.
I say to them, “it’s your team, it’s up to you to make it work. If you want to have
a good year and be a good team then you all have to pull together. I’m here to
help you any way I can, and I won’t let you down on that one. But ultimately it’s
up to you guys.”
An integral aspect of Leon’s responsibility framework revolves around the

provision for effective communication. Leon believes that one of the core
reasons that groups break down or become ineffective stems from a lack of
communication between all of its members. In his own words, “everybody,
whether it be the dad running the water or the kid who didn’t get a game this
week, has got to feel like their contribution and input is valued by the group.”
To this end, Leon is always watchful of boys who “don’t want to contribute to
the group or don’t feel like they have anything to say. It’s usually a sign that
something is going on.” As well as developing their football, Leon also sees
his work with the boys as a pastoral one. To this end, communication within
the team is not restricted to the topic of football. “I explain to them at the start
that while I’m here as a coach but I’m also here as a parent.” Although Leon is
acutely aware that not all players will come to him to discuss personal issues,
he goes to considerable lengths to make sure they know that they can if they
want to.
I always say, if you’ve got a problem at home I’m here to speak to. And if I can’t
help you sort it out then we’ll go and see if we can sort it out with your mum and
dad together. It mightn’t be at home, it might be a teacher giving them a hard
time. If they don’t feel like they can unload it with their mum or dad they know
that they can unload it with me. With the new boys in it can take a while, but
word soon gets round that I am someone they can trust. . . . They can ring me at
2:00 in the morning if they need help, no questions asked; not until the next day
anyway!
As far as Leon is concerned, one of the benefits of being part of a club is

that you have people to turn to if you need help or support. In this sense, it is
clear that winning isn’t everything and that it is the work of a coach to help
develop respectful young men. In Leon’s view, the individual and the team
are inseparable, and it is to their own peril that many football coaches develop
the latter and ignore the former.
A further aspect of Leon’s work involves the development of a culture of
mutual respect. It is only within this sort of culture that he believes individu-
als will develop a genuine and sustainable sense of affiliation with each other.
Leon believes that, “at the end of the day, most of the boys have come here to
be part of a group.” The rest is obvious to him; “people would rather be part of
something good than something shabby, so you’ve got to create something
really good that they can be proud of.” As a member of Leon’s team, the boys
take on more than two training sessions and a match each week; they take on a
commitment to others, to identify themselves as a member of a team and a
part of a club—the same team and club that Leon Schram takes pride in!
I always say to the boys, no matter where you are someone is looking at you.
Whether you’re at school, walking to the bus, going to the shop or walking to
the letter-box, somebody can see you. I want them to say “oh, that boy plays for
the under 17s at South Barwon, gee they were a good team last year, or, what a
wonderful group of boys they have there, or, gee, he’s a nice young man.”
That’s what it’s really all about for me.
While coaching championship teams was clearly not something Leon

takes for granted, this is clearly not the only measure of success. For him,
there is a sense of achievement when any of his players do well at school, get
good jobs, settle down, develop stable relationships, and so on. That said,
Leon is convinced that where there is a strong team culture of responsibility,
respect, and affiliation, on-field success is never far away.
CONCLUSION
Football as one part of mass-mediated sport is big business, and thus play-
ers at all levels find themselves drawn into a complicated network of business
relations. Uniting these different periods is football’s investment in and con-
struction of a very durable form of hegemonic masculinity.
Our analysis has been constructed around three narratives that source the
many discourses of hegemonic masculinity. On the surface, it would appear
that there is little relationship between our narratives. The first is set in the big
time at the very apex of the hype and glamour that surrounds Australian Rules
football. Our second narrative, by contrast, takes place in the relative obscu-
rity of a footballing outpost and involves an incident that brings discredit to
one player and a premature end to further participation to another. Looked at
from another angle, there is a very small gap between these two stories. Both
involve off-the-ball incidents and damage to an unsuspecting player. Had cir-
cumstances been different for Nathan Lenton, the Ainslie player whose jaw
was badly broken, and had he remained in the game and played an active part
in his team’s victory, he, like Dermot Brereton, might have been feted as a
hero by his teammates. In football, withstanding physical pressure is test of
character. For those who pass the test, peer approval and acceptance normally
follow. Looked at from this angle, football involves a high degree of induce-
ment to play on and put up with pain and discomfort rather than to experience
separation from one’s peers. It follows logically that to be suspended and out
of the competition is much less a penalty than to be discarded because of
injury and damage.
Our third narrative involves young players entering football’s community
of practice. Within this context, the sum total of stories, myths, and rituals
that circulate about the game is on offer. In Sonny’s case, football’s darker
stories provide the greatest attraction. Accordingly, he begins down a path-
way that sees him traveling in the direction of those for whom football exists
as an arena to exercise excessive and unwarranted physical force. Why this is
so is not clear. What is clear to us is that unless there is a way of breaking the
cycle of abuse being practiced by Sonny, he is destined to finish up in a tribu-
nal, a court of law, or being “dealt” with by a someone with similar
motivations.
Despite our obvious concerns, we hold on to the belief that football is an
activity that offers a great deal of scope for making different (read: positive)
types of identities. Most young players entering the game will never reach the
elite level, such as Dermot Brereton. The reality is that many junior players
will not even play at the senior level with their local clubs. Many juniors sam-
ple the game and give it away before it becomes too serious. With this in
mind, there is no need for the game, at junior levels, to be turned into a
bone-crunching fight to the finish. Given the extent to which violence as
entertainment is actually “appreciated” and marketed, there is important
work for coaches and teachers to provide counternarratives. As such, junior
coaches have a warrant to encourage values and attitudes less in keeping with
the extreme, professional end of the sport. Our illustration of the coaching
practices and philosophies of Leon Schram serves as a brief insight into how
this warrant might be taken up. However, as Prain (2000) reminded us, “as is
all too clear, this ‘body work’ will only succeed through much larger institu-
tional and systemic change” (p. 64). Within the framework of analysis we
used in this article, that suggests the long and hard task of constructing an
alternative community of practice. We believe that the coaches, coach educa-
tors, players, administrators, spectators, and the media will have to play sub-
stantial roles if this aspiration is to mature.
NOTES
1. The eminent rock music historian Glenn A. Baker has declared that “20th Century life is
structured by ideas out of Hollywood; it’s the unifying medium.” (This comment was recorded in
September 1993 at the Victorian final of the Rock Eisteddfod contest in Melbourne, Australia.)
2. The details provided here were provided in a telephone discussion between Phillip Ad-
ams, ABC radio presenter and journalist, and Lindsay Fitzclarence about the themes that ap-
peared in a recent newspaper article.
3. The globalization of different parts of the social world has been described as the emer-
gence of the borderless world. In another sense, the pattern we are describing here has been used
as evidence of the “end of history,” whereby liberal democratic politics have come to dominate
globally, a development prompting President Clinton to declare that globally we have moved
into new times.
4. Hegemonic masculinity is the term given to the dominant and ascendant form of gender
politics. Connell (1995) described hegemonic masculinity “as the configuration of gender prac-
tice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriar-
chy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordina-
tion of women” (p. 77).
5. ANZAC is the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, soldiers who
fought together in WWI in France and, most significantly, in Turkey. Their deeds were immortal-
ized at the landing of allied troops at Gallipoli.
6. This excerpt is from the work of John Hodgens and Russell Matthews (2000) in language
education at Deakin University.
7. An “off-the-ball” incident is said to occur when aggressive contact is made to a player not
in the immediate sphere of play. The unfair (even cowardice) label attached to such contact is
based on the assailant’s breaching of the game’s (albeit unwritten) ethics that a player who is not
directly in the process of gathering or protecting the ball should not be open to or prepared for
contact.
8. The account provided in this article was written from notes taken by one of the authors
who happened to be in attendance at this game.
9. This narrative is a composite account of a series of incidents recorded while the writing
team acted as coach, manager, and “critical friend” of a junior football team.
10. Information about Leon Schram was gathered through the observations of both writers
and through an interview between Chris Hickey and Leon Schram on 10 October 1999.
REFERENCES
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culture: Schooling and everyday life, edited by H. Giroux and R. Simon, 197-218. Toronto,
Canada: OISE.
Connell, R. 1989. Cool guys, swots and wimps: The interplay of masculinity and education. Ox-
ford Review of Education 15 (3): 291-303.
———. 1995. Masculinities. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
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Goldman, R., and S. Papson. 1998. NIKE culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Hickey, C., L. Fitzclarence, and R. Matthews, eds. Where the boys are. Geelong, Australia:
Deakin University Press.
Hodgens, J., and R. Matthews. 2000. Late twentieth century Australian rules and nineteenth cen-
tury moral discourse. In Where the boys are, edited by C. Hickey, L. Fitzclarence, and
R. Matthews (pp. 41-54). Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press.
Honeysett, S. 1999. Dragons pay penalty in dramatic finale. The Australian, 27 September, 40.
Kenway, J., and S. Willis, with J. Blackmore and L. Rennie. 1997. Are boys victims of feminism
in schools? Some answers from Australia. International Journal of Inclusive Education 1
(1): 19-35.
Lave, J., and E. Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. London:
Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, C. 1998. Neale sacked, fires parting shot at Ainslie committee. Canberra Times, 13 Au-
gust, 18.
Miedzian, M. 1992. Boys will be boys: Breaking the link between masculinity and violence. New
York: Anchor.
Prain, V. 2000. “Playing the man” and changing masculinities. In Where the boys are, edited by
C. Hickey, L. Fitzclarence, and R. Matthews (pp. 55-66). Geelong, Australia: Deakin Uni-
versity Press.
Vuecast Pty Ltd. 100 years of football (AFV 132). Melbourne, Australia: AFL Productions.
Wills, G. 1997. Legends of the drawl. The Age, 24 May, 20-25.
Wilson, C. 1998. Now, as a mother, the bumps hit home. The Age, 21 August, C1.
Wilson, T. 1999. Dermie, dipper, dad, doughnuts and me. The Age, 24 September, 13.
Lindsay Fitzclarence is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Deakin Univer-

sity, before which he was a physical education teacher. He continues to maintain an inter-
est in the study of sport and physical activity and at the same time has published in the ar-
eas of education and violence and youth culture. He is currently studying the importance
of male peer culture within sport and education and is involved in a research project
about the Rock / Croc Eisteddfod, the use of popular music in educational programs for
schools, and the use of narrative therapy as applied to education.
Christopher Hickey is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University,

and his work involves teaching in the undergraduate teacher preservice course as well
supervision at the master’s and doctoral levels. Complementing his teaching duties is a
strong research interest in education and the development of young males. Here, he has
undertaken extensive work in masculinity studies as applied to issues related to
sport/physical activity, in particular, the behaviors and rationalizations of young males
as members of peer groups. This work has focused on the links between identity forma-
tion, masculinity, and the role played by sport, physical activity, and popular culture.
With colleagues Lindsay Fitzclarence and Russell Matthews he has edited a recently re-
leased book titled Where the Boys Are: Masculinity, Sport and Education.
Morrell / CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
Corporal Punishment and Masculinity

in South African Schools
ROBERT MORRELL
University of Natal, Durban
Corporal punishment has long been the most common form of punishment in South Afri-
can schools. Its widespread use undoubtedly influenced constructions of masculinity.
Key words: corporal punishment, masculinity, South Africa
I have argued elsewhere (Morrell 1994, 1997) that the purposeful and fre-
quent infliction of pain by those in authority in a formal and ritualized way in
an institutional setting historically promoted violent masculinities among
black and white, ruling and working-class men. Defenders of corporal pun-
ishment would argue that it was also a mechanism that instilled a work ethic
and codes of obedience in men. They would also argue, legitimately, that cor-
poral punishment alone was not responsible for violence and aggression
among men.
The new postapartheid government of South Africa has recently banned
corporal punishment. The South African Schools Act (1996) and the Aboli-
tion of Corporal Punishment Act (1997) have together made it illegal for cor-
poral punishment to be used in schools, reformatories, and prisons. The legal
steps are part of a broader national campaign by the state to develop a human
rights environment and to end cultures of violence promoted under apartheid.
Despite prohibition, corporal punishment continues to be used, particu-
larly in black1 schools. This article, based on a study of schools in Durban,
explores the reasons for and effects of the continuation of this practice. It
argues that an understanding of the current situation should take account of
existing constructions of gender. Although these are fluid, they are slow to
Author’s Note: This research project was conducted with the financial assistance of the HSRC
(now the National Research Foundation) and the University of Natal’s Research Committee. I
would like to thank the principals, teachers, and students who participated in this study, and I
acknowledge the assistance of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education and Culture in pro-
viding me with access to the schools. I would like to thank Mike Thurlow for his encouragement,
Steve Pete for comment on the questionnaire, Richard Devey for generously sharing his time and
expertise in the analysis and presentation of the statistics, and, most of all, Bongani Sithole with-
out whose help this project could not have been undertaken.
140
Morrell / CORPORAL PUNISHMENT 141
transform themselves, even in societies under transition. Changes in law can

and do affect the context in which gender identities are constructed. Such
changes, therefore, make it possible to frame experiences in a different way
and hence allow new forms of masculinity to emerge.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND

LITERATURE REVIEW
How are we to understand masculinities in relation to school beatings?

And what might be the changes in these gender constructions resulting from
the prohibition of corporal punishment in 1996? These are the questions that
inform the rest of this article.
Masculinities in school are currently underresearched. Apart from work
on white schools in colonial Natal, there is little work that examines gender
construction among boys. The limited work that has been done suggests that
schools were critical in disseminating ideals of masculinity within white set-
tler society and in this way were central in constructing a society-wide hege-
monic masculinity (Morrell 1994). There is a danger in seeing schools sim-
ply as Althusserian state apparatuses fulfilling a class and gender
reproductionist function. Schools were contradictory institutions. Those pro-
viding education for Africans under the Bantu education system were actu-
ally central in bringing down the apartheid system. If the position of schools
in relation to the gender order is unpredictable and fluid, this should not pre-
vent us from admitting that they may in some respects have been supportive
of gender inequalities. They may have provided the conditions under which
violent masculinities were constructed and enacted. But there is no reason to
believe that this need necessarily be the case.
Questions of masculinity in South Africa are powerfully bound up with
the history of the country. From the beginning of the nineteenth century,
racial segregation began to harden. With the discovery of minerals late in the
century, a racial hierarchy was overlaid with class divisions. White male set-
tlers by and large enjoyed stable, well-paid jobs or owned productive farm-
land. African men were concentrated in the ranks of the working class.
The construction of masculinity among the region’s indigenous (black)
men was shaped by history. In the countryside, African patriarchy main-
tained a relative autonomy, and masculinities reflected this. Men dominated
public space and decision making. Masculinity was located within the
unquestioned dominance of men over women, polygamy, independent
homestead subsistence (economic independence), and a gravitas that
demanded respect from younger men and women alike. In the cities, the
black man’s role was restricted to worker in the context of legislated racial
inferiority. An oppositional masculinity developed in the poverty-stricken
townships. It incorporated some aspects of the rural masculinities that had
been hegemonic in the precolonial period but was tougher, survivalist, and
more violent (Morrell 1998b).
Apartheid reduced the power of elders (adult African men) over juniors. It
has been argued that the introduction of Bantu education in 1953 was an
attempt to control this phenomenon by introducing compulsory education for
all black children of school-going age (Hyslop 1999). The new system insti-
tutionalized corporal punishment, which had, in any case, been widely used
in informal African education (Prins 1980, 94-95).
The system of Bantu education was highly authoritarian. In this respect, it
mirrored the parallel system of education (Christian National Education) that
provided for the country’s white youth. It was also masculinist in the sense
that senior positions were dominated by men (even though the majority of
teachers were women), decisions were made by men, and generally men and
boys were considered to be more important in schools than women and girls
(Sebakwane 1993-94).
In African schools, corporal punishment was used on boys and girls alike.
It both symbolized and secured hierarchical dominance (of adult over child,
learned over learner, male over female). In gender terms, bluntly put, it taught
boys to be tough and uncomplaining, and it taught girls “their place”—to be
submissive and unquestioning.
In white, English-speaking schools, the emulation of the British public
school model ensured that corporal punishment was commonly used on
boys. Schools that provided education for Afrikaans speakers were tough
too, and the rod was not spared.
In the context of violent living and working conditions—Soweto (the larg-
est black township in the country) became the murder capital of the world in
the 1960s, and fatalities among workers, particularly in the mines, continued
to be a source of embarrassment to capitalists and concern for the state—the
violence of corporal punishment was minor. In fact, with some exceptions
(Holdstock 1990), few educationists regarded it as a serious problem or as a
form of punishment that contributed to the climate of violence in South
Africa.
It was in the 1980s in the context of violent opposition to apartheid—
called by some commentators a “low-level civil war”—that the status of cor-
poral punishment was questioned. Township students were at the forefront of
confrontation with apartheid military forces. While their major demands
were an end to Bantu education and racial discrimination, they also
demanded an end to corporal punishment. This was not so much an objection
to its violence but a rejection of the authority of teachers to punish harshly
and arbitrarily. It was also part of a larger process in which the younger gener-
ation attempted to overthrow the rule of elders (Campbell 1992; Freund 1996).
Opposition to corporal punishment did not necessarily indicate a rejection
of a misogynistic gender order. Many of the African students who rejected
corporal punishment were committed to the perpetuation of unequal gender
relations and the dominance of men (Ratele 1998). Yet, in the context of the
end of apartheid in the 1990s and the installation of democratic government,
the establishment of a bill of rights, and an avowed commitment to policies of
gender equality, the opposition to corporal punishment became imbued with
different meanings and potential in the field of gender transformation.
In postapartheid South Africa, the role of schools in contributing to racial
inequalities (through the differential provision of education to black and
white), authoritarianism, and gender inequality was challenged. Schools
were to be the tools of liberation. The 1996 schools act set out some of the
changes necessary to effect this change in the role of schools.
Before moving to a discussion of the research on which this article is
based, it is necessary to make two points about the relationship of corporal
punishment to violence and masculinity. In the first instance, there is a rela-
tionship between the schools and masculinity. Work on the disciplinary
regimes in schools by Wolpe (1988), Mac an Ghaill (1994), and Connell
(1993) demonstrates that particular disciplinary regimes are implicated in
particular types of gender relations and identities that emerge in schools.
Aggressive and violent masculinities arise in schools with harsh and authori-
tarian school disciplinary systems (Kenway and Fitzclarence 1997). In the
second instance, one has to note that there is no necessary relationship
between corporal punishment and violent masculinities. The context of the
punishment is critical.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
In 1996, the passing of the South African Schools Act made corporal pun-
ishment illegal. The origins of this action can be detected in the human rights
culture that emerged in South Africa with the general election of 1994 and the
establishment of the Government of National Unity (de Kock 1996). This is
to say that the 1996 schools act really reflects arguments in the national politi-
cal arena rather than any heartfelt belief among teachers that corporal punish-
ment is a bad thing (Deacon, Morrell, and Prinsloo 1999). It is readily con-
ceded, privately, by teachers and educational bureaucrats that corporal
punishment still continues, despite the threat and, in rare instances, the insti-
tution of legal action against teachers so engaged. Among the reasons for the
continued use of corporal punishment is the failure to specify alternative
mechanisms for discipline, the rebelliousness of students, ongoing belief in
the efficacy of authoritarian teaching and management styles among teach-
ers, and very large classes that make it difficult to deploy alternative forms of
discipline.
In KwaZulu-Natal, where this survey was conducted, issues concerning
school discipline are part of a wider public debate about law and order. With
exceptionally high crime rates, calls for the return of capital and corporal
punishment are frequently made (Natal Bureau 1995). Even the provincial
minister of education, Eileen Nkosi-Shandu, has publicly called for the resto-
ration of “the old fashioned culture” and the return of corporal punishment
(Sunday Tribune, 7 February 1999).
THE STUDY
With South Africa’s apartheid past, it is not surprising that there are major
racial differences in the way discipline is administered and the way it is
understood. It is nevertheless important not to reify race and attach to this cat-
egory a set of attributes that may tempt essentialist interpretations. In South
Africa, being black was, and remains, strongly associated with social class
location, although one cannot equate “black” with a particular class location
(for example, working class).
The research was conducted between October and November 1998 in six-
teen public (government) schools in Durban, the biggest city (with a popula-
tion of four million) in KwaZulu-Natal, which is in turn the most populous
province in South Africa. There are a million students in its schools. In select-
ing a sample, account was taken of race, class, school types, and the historical
administrative structure that apartheid bequeathed to the province. The
Durban area is divided into two educational areas, North and South. Eight
schools from both areas were selected. Of these eight schools, four were
township schools, formerly administered either by the national Department
of Education and Training or the KwaZulu Department of Education and
Culture. Two schools were drawn from the former (Indian) House of Dele-
gates and (colored) House of Representatives and two were from the (white)
former House of Assembly.
Questionnaires were distributed to 750 grade 11 (formerly standard 9)
learners in October and November 1998. Despite some difficulties in gaining
access to certain schools and their students, the sample was quite representa-
tive. A total of 60.3 percent of the sample was African, 13.6 percent white,
13.5 percent Indian, and 12.6 percent colored. In analyzing the responses, I
took into account the major demographic changes that have occurred in
schools since 1986. In that year, House of Delegates (Indian) schools began
admitting African students, thus setting a trend that saw the breakdown of
mandatory racially segregated schooling. By the end of 1995, there were
approximately 200,000 African students in colored, Indian, and white
schools (Naidoo 1995). The number has in all likelihood increased substan-
tially, but it is no longer possible to know the extent as government depart-
ments have stopped keeping racially disaggregated figures (personal com-
munication, Monica Bot, 28 April 1998). The interschool migrations have
destroyed the neat overlap between race and class created by the Bantu edu-
cation system. It was for this reason that much of the analysis done on the
sample was organized by school type. A total of 48 percent of the sample was
located in township schools. While the facilities differ from school to school
and there is an astonishing variation in academic performance (of the town-
ship schools visited, the matric pass rate in 1997 varied from a disastrous 2
percent to 100 percent), it would be true to say that most of the children in
these schools are working class. And there is a very close correlation between
township schools and race—97 percent of learners in these schools were
African, and none were white. At the other end of the scale, ex–House of
Assembly (white) schools were quite mixed, although still white dominated:
the racial breakdown was 60 percent white, 24 percent African, 8 percent
Indian, and 7 percent colored. A good indication of the class composition of
the schools can be gained from the fees charged—at former white schools,
they range from R2,300 to R4,600 a year, whereas in township schools, they
range from R80 to R475 a year (and there are very high levels of
nonpayment).
The sample was gender balanced (45 percent male, 55 percent female) and
reflected higher female participation in the schooling system. Township
schools tended to have older students—14 percent of those in township
schools were twenty years of age or older. In the Indian and White schools,
there were no learners older than nineteen years of age.
LEGISLATION: RECEPTION AND RESPONSE
Half of the respondents reported a change in school discipline over the

past three years. Most of those who reported change noted that there was now
less caning and a concomitant increase in other types of punishment such as
detention. While corporal punishment remains widespread, particularly in
township schools, and is thus experienced disproportionately by African
learners, it is now used less frequently, with greater restraint, and via more
consultative processes.
The schools that have responded most readily to the prohibition have been
the former white schools, which appear to have ended corporal punishment
(caning) altogether. In the former white, single-sex girls’ school, most
respondents said there had been no change because corporal punishment had
not been used in that school.
Most African students who commented on the changes (if they perceived
any) were positive about developments. The following are some responses:
Before we use to be beaten, but now other methods of disciplining are used
such as being shouted at and discussing the issue with the teacher. (African,
male, seventeen to nineteen years)
Teachers have stopped hiting us with sticks and other objects like chalk dusters.
(colored, female, seventeen to nineteen years)
Everytime last three years we were punished hardly [i.e., hard] but now we do
not get lot of punishment because of the change of new South Africa. (African,
Last three years was allowed to beats you more than seven times but student’s
complain now it is only allowed two times no more than that. (African, female,
seventeen to nineteen years)
Surprisingly, not everyone welcomed the move away from corporal pun-
ishment. Some girls have mourned the ending of corporal punishment:
Detention is now not that strong and since boys are not beaten the school is
worse. (African, female, seventeen to nineteen years)
The changes are that some student have no more respect. If the teacher asked
you to do your work, they don’t want. (African, female, seventeen to nineteen
years)
One possible explanation for these responses is that schools are dangerous
places for girls (Morrell 1998a; Wolpe, Quinlan, and Martinez 1997). While
teachers are sometimes directly responsible for cases of sexual harassment,
they do appear to operate as a bulwark against the often-flagrant attentions of
fellow (male) students. The end of corporal punishment has been perceived
as the end of the capacity of a school to exert its authority and in some schools
has consequently been associated with an increasing disregard for the rights
of others.
For many white male students, particularly those in single-sex schools
where corporal punishment has long been revered for its character-building
qualities (Morrell 1994), the end of corporal punishment is lamented:
Since corporal punishment was banned the discipline of the school has
decreased. Now people are usually just give detention and normally don’t even
go. Before people would just be caned and the problem would be solved.
(white, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
Corporal punishment maintained respect and loyalty to one’s school, if you had
done something wrong you faced the consequences. It teached responsibility.
(white, male, fourteen to sixteen years)
Less harsher (now). I think that “flogging” should be implemented again
(much more effective). People are given easier punishment, like writing out
lines etc. (colored, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
These opinions reflected resentment about educational and social transfor-

mation and the romanticization of a lost era as schools formerly reserved for
whites have been opened to other races and in the process changed. A study
conducted a year later found that support for corporal punishment had
already declined as the advantages of the new system began to be felt and
appreciated (Swift, Pillay, and van der Merwe 1999).
Many teachers are unhappy about the ending of corporal punishment.
They believe that it can be effective in school governance. An African female
head teacher in Gauteng offered the following explanation for a very high
success rate in the matriculation examinations of 1997-98.
With good discipline we can lay the foundation to create an environment of

teaching and learning. Children are afraid of me. We thrash them when they
come late. Just one lash. Just a smack. We agreed with our parents when this sit-
uation was implemented. Parents said they also thrash their children at home as
long as we don’t kill them. We do use corporal punishment. (Nagan 1999, 82)
There is a widespread belief that corporal punishment is the most effective

punishment. Only Indian and white females did not share this view. One of
the major reasons given by those subjected to it (primarily African students in
township schools) was the association of pain with the correcting of behavior.
The responses below are taken from students who thought that being
beaten was the most effective punishment:
The most effective form of punishment for me is getting beaten up because

sometimes you get beaten up very bad eg punch on stomach, slap on the face.
So I think physical punishment is no good because it create anger and hatrede.
(African, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
To be beaten its affects me because my skin is very sensitive—this is the most
effective form of punishment. (African, male, fourteen to sixteen years)
Because many student we don’t care if tell them with a mouth. It is beter if will
beaten them and understand you. (African, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
Because a lot of learners are not understand when you talk like other people,
they want you to beat them and they will respect you as a teacher. (African,
When cained over in minutes and no time wasted. write lines—waste time with
something to do. Beat sense into people. (White, male, seventeen to nineteen
years)
There are many strands in the reasoning here, but two stand out: the
teacher knows best, and to learn about what is right and wrong, one has to suf-
fer. It will be shown in the next section that these are key aspects of masculine
identity in the school context, and they need to be understood if progress is to
be made in ending the discourse that rationalizes cruelty and force.
The most promising finding was that students prefer more consultative
and reasonable punishments. Students responded to the following question:
which of the following feelings do you have after being punished? This was a
Figure 1. Feelings after Being Beaten (multiple response)
Figure 2. Feelings after Discussing Issue with the Class (multiple response)
separate question from the one about what they thought was the most effec-
tive punishment (see figures 1 and 2). The findings here were astonishing. A
huge majority of students felt anger, hurt, sadness, and that they were being
wronged in relation to corporal punishment and almost the exact opposite—
positive feelings about consultative mechanisms of discipline—in relation to

discussing problems with the teacher or class.
SCHOOL MASCULINITIES
The masculinities encountered in this project all rested on the idea that
there are big differences between men and women and that men are harder
and harsher than women. As the responses below demonstrate, core values of
masculinity include toughness, ability and willingness to inflict pain and
receive it, and a reluctance to engage with difficult emotional issues.
Female teachers are weaker than male, a male just beat you strongly no matter
how you have not done. Male beat us more strokes than females and they like to
bet our bums regardless if the girl is in her periods or not. (African, female, sev-
enteen to nineteen years)
The majority [of] female teachers tend to be more lenient on the pupils while
male teachers really are strict. Maybe its men because their want to affirm the
masculinity. (Indian, female, seventeen to nineteen years)
The male teachers use strong language and do not want to listen to your com-
ments, while in female they are straight and understands the circumstances.
Male teachers can claute [sic] or hit the student very bad. They can hurt the stu-
dent. But female teacher they just shout at us, chase us out, or make us kneel.
The female teachers are more understanding than male teachers, male are very
strict, they make you do things even though they see that it is not appropriate.
Male teacher is very stricted for no reasons. Female teacher is for a reason
stricted. (colored, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
Male teachers are more agressive, arrogant and use a difficult form of punish-
ment, they even tend to assault pupils in the most distraut manner while female
teachers are more calm and sensitive on the issue of assaulting pupils. (Indian,
female, seventeen to nineteen years)
Pupils tend to be more afraid of male teachers than female teachers. (Indian,
Male are very much more discipline differently than women. They take punish-
ment as the way to revenge. They not punish a pupil in order motivate him. But
they punish a pupil inside with anger and hatrate. (African, male, seventeen to
nineteen years)
Male teachers are like to punish us in the bums, and they have mor spirit than
female and females are punish us on hands. (African, female, fourteen to six-
teen years)
Male teachers they punish us as they are fighting. (African, male, seventeen to
nineteen years)
There was a near universal acknowledgment that male teachers were more
strict, disciplined more severely, and were less tolerant and less reasonable
(not prepared to listen to reason). Reasons given to explain the gender differ-
ences attributed to male teachers a set of gender-specific behaviors: unbend-
ing, unfeeling, violent, egocentric, competitive, unsympathetic, and rigid.
These went with the perception that female teachers were prepared to aban-
don their formal positions of authority to create a climate of understanding
and negotiation. Male teachers, on the other hand, were seen as being dog-
matically wedded to their authority. The model of masculinity presented by
male teachers to students seems unlikely on this reading to generate alterna-
tive, more democratic, and gentler masculine identities.
Many respondents acknowledged fear in relation to teachers, particularly
male teachers. Yet, as has already been shown, many boys seemed to regard
fear as a necessary condition for effective discipline. It is therefore not sur-
prising that the preferences expressed varied for who should be responsible
for classroom discipline (see figure 3).
More female respondents believed that the principal should be responsi-
ble, although there was some support from male respondents as well. The
reasons given evoked authority and the father figure:
The pupils are more afraid of him than the others. He makes the rules in the
school. Without him there would be more chaos than ever. (colored, female,
seventeen to nineteen years)
He/she must be responsible discipline because if he will become the friend of
students they would not respect him and do what they like. (African, female,
fourteen to sixteen years)
Because he is the most dignified figure in the school and being referred to him
scares you before he even deals with you. (African, male, seventeen to nineteen
years)
There was some (but limited) support for the student representative coun-
cils (SRCs), but this came mostly from African male students in township
schools. At least part of the explanation would be the immediate past history
of the political prominence of SRCs and the influence of more senior African
students in them. Equally, the way in which African female students were
excluded from school governance would probably explain the more muted
support for this type of governance (Beall et al. 1987).
I think is right/good to discussing with SRC because he same as me because

those student like me. (African, male seventeen to nineteen years)
Because they now have to take [sic] to the people. (African, male, seventeen to
nineteen years)
The majority of respondents wanted their class teacher to be responsible:

Figure 3. Who Should Be Responsible for Discipline? (multiple response)
Because he/she [class teacher] is the one who took as your mother/father who
can trust. (African, female, fourteen to sixteen years)
Because our class teacher is so naise she understand what we fill and she sit
down with us and talk. (African, male, fourteen to sixteen years)
Because class teacher act as my parents they should be the one who punish’s
students. Class teacher’s understand his/her class know’s problems. (African,
Because teachers are like our parent because parents send us to teachers at
school to guard us. (African, male, seventeen to nineteen years)
The likening of class teachers to parents is revealing not just because it

talks of a trusting relationship but because it evokes the legitimate exercise of
authority. On one hand, discipline exercised from a position of trust is
accepted. In one of the schools visited (a township school that drew its stu-
dents from a very poor area), an excellent atmosphere prevailed. Students
were in class and attentive. This was in sharp contrast to other township
schools. In asking how this healthy learning environment had been created,
the male principal and a senior female teacher both confirmed two key points:
parents were readily consulted, and punishment was “lovingly” given. They
agreed that this punishment included limited beating, but they argued the dis-
tinction between what they called “assault” and corporal punishment. In an
entirely different context (a primary school in another location), a parent
made the same point after her seven-year-old daughter’s arm was broken
during a beating: “How could a teacher do that to a seven year old child. I do
not have a problem with corporal punishment but what this teacher did was
unforgivable” (Sunday Tribune, 12 July 1998).
A school’s disciplinary regime rests on a relationship (not always consen-
sual) between teachers and parents. Parents, particularly African parents, and
other members of the extended family responsible for discipline seem to
believe in corporal punishment. A total of 49.1 percent of male and 47.2 per-
cent of female African respondents confirmed that they were beaten in the
home before they reached school age. This should be contrasted with
23.1 percent white male, 14.8 Indian male, 10.9 percent white female, and 5
percent Indian female responses. The severity of the beatings also differed
across gender and race lines. A total of 58 percent of Africans (male and
female equally) were beaten with a stick compared to 5.4 percent of white
males and 0 percent of white females. And 29.2 percent African male and
25.6 percent of African female respondents said they were injured during
these beatings compared to 7.7 percent and 7.4 percent of white males and
females, respectively. Discipline in the home was still being meted out to a
significant number of this sample: 63.6 percent and 56.8 percent of African
male and female respondents, respectively, confirmed that they were still dis-
ciplined at home (compared to 79.5 percent and 80 percent of white males
and females, respectively). Of these, 18.8 percent and 23.0 percent of African
males and females, respectively, reported still being beaten (compared to
8.6 percent and 2.2 percent of white males and females, respectively).
Students interviewed in township schools happily conceded the right of
parents to exercise discipline, and the figures above show that little distinc-
tion is made between male and female in the treatment meted out. School
masculinity is constructed around the acceptance of legitimate authority (an
effect of the successful student campaigns in the 1980s to reduce the power of
principals) and legitimate punishment (Mphele 1997). It also is based on the
belief in the “natural” difference between males and females. A corollary of
this is that boys require more severe punishment. One African student
explained it thus:
Girls are not really the same as boys and their way of being brought up is not the
same so girls get a different discipline than the boys . . . if maybe you discipline
a boy by using a sjambok then you should use a stick or a belt for a girl. (Zulu
translation)
The ability to endure punishment is also an important feature of masculin-

ity. Boys of all races accepted that discipline is best maintained by the use of
physical force by somebody in authority on a subordinate. This suggests the
existence of a culture of callousness or acceptance—a legacy of apartheid,
patriarchy, and three decades of violent civil strife. A township schoolteacher
reflected on the situation: “The horror is no longer the violence. It is the
acceptance of violence as normal that is so tragic” (Sunday Tribune,

16 November 1997). This circumstance is in turn associated with what I have
elsewhere called “inscrutable masculinity”—the refusal or inability to emote
(Morrell 1999). It is not surprising, then, that disciplinary measures that
encourage discussion and, implicitly, an opening up are considered threaten-
ing, embarrassing, and humiliating by many male respondents.
The advent of adulthood or a claim of manhood among older African stu-
dents requires that punishment considered to be illegitimate is challenged.
For this reason, female teachers decline to beat older boys who will not accept
punishment “from a woman.” Principals are required by law to consult par-
ents in the case of serious disciplinary cases. Parents often insist that some
form of corporal punishment be given. Even older male students accept this.
It remains a major reason for the existence of corporal punishment in schools.
Maírtin Mac an Ghaill (1994) in his analysis of a contemporary British
school provided a useful schema for categorizing school masculinities. His
identification of four types of masculinity is suggestive for at least some of
the sample, primarily the English-speaking, white students in schools for-
merly privileged by unequal apartheid funding. In this vein, we can point to
an example of the “macho lad” (Mac an Ghaill 1994, 56-59). The antiauthori-
tarian cockiness of one of the students surveyed is reflected in his response to
the question, “Who should be responsible for discipline?” The student said,
“Nobody, because they are all fuckups.” Bob Connell (1989) pointed out that
in situations like this, dissident views can, in fact, be supportive of the gender
order. “A violent discipline system invites competition in machismo”
(p. 294). In the elite, single-sex boys’school, there were examples of Mac an
Ghaill’s “achiever” type, but the heavy emphasis in such schools on sport and
rugged masculinity means that this category fits the South African environ-
ment less well. Insofar as African students are concerned, I suggest that we
need to conceptualize masculinities with the specific local conditions in mind.
The data generated by this project show sharp differences in response by
race. This points to the need to consider how race has affected masculinity. I
have attempted a schematic typology (Morrell 1998b) that makes a distinc-
tion between rurally based African masculinities and urban-based,
oppositional masculinities. While the two cannot in reality be so separated,
they historically emerged from and were sustained in different settings.
Bantu education, along with the penetration of racial capitalism that attacked
the material base of patriarchy, was one of the major vehicles by which rural
African masculinity was eroded. Schools rivaled informal educational agents
(parents, age cohorts) with a new set of pedagogies that were strongly sex dif-
ferentiated (Truscott 1994). This should be contrasted with a preexisting situ-
ation in which the distinction between men and women was less rigid, even
though the sexual division of labor was firm.
Virtually, all the retired miners to whom we spoke said that a woman could
have ubudoda, although ubufazi, womanhood, was most proper for her. Since
these noncircumcizing Mpondo defined manhood morally rather than ritu-

ally, this was a logical inference. Sometimes, they explained, a women would
have ubudoda when the migrant male was away from home. They denied,
however, that a man could have womanhood, except in an explicitly meta-
phorical sense that implied cowardice. In speaking of female “manhood,” tra-
ditional Mpondo men were not denying male power in the last instance.
In the new context in which Christian values and styles of teaching (which
generally stressed corporal punishment) were brought by missionaries, it was
to be expected that an amalgam of masculinities would emerge. Parents and
age cohorts (or the urban gangs that replaced or substituted them) were
equally powerful as forces in the shaping of masculinity. The overlap
between parental beatings and the reliance of schools on such discipline have
produced a range of legitimations and explanations that can be witnessed
above in explaining why it is the most effective form of punishment. But
while the deference for parents is sometimes transferred onto the teacher or
headmaster, this is not always the case. A broad sociological explanation is
that during the 1980s and 1990s, a profoundly antigenerational movement
emerged among the comrades (young men) fighting against apartheid
(Campbell 1992). The authority and influence of the father was rejected, and
the discourse of people’s education that accompanied this movement stressed
the power of SRCs—in essence, the power of students. Yet, there is still a
strong belief in corporal punishment, testimony to South African masculini-
ties, black and white, which include heavy stress on toughness, physicality,
and endurance.
There are powerful integrative forces at work in South Africa. Their influ-
ence in racial terms at present is primarily felt in the middle classes. Among
Africans, economic forces and accompanying modernist discourses have
also worked to integrate, although in this case it is across ethnic lines and
tends to attack the urban/town divide that historically has been associated
with the division between modernity and “tradition” (Waetjen and Mare
1999). In time, there might well emerge gender identities in which race is not
so salient, but for the moment, it remains very important.
We know little about African masculinity in general and its form in
schools in particular. Yet, it is possible to begin to identify some key issues.
Violence in schools was identified by the Gender Equity Task Team as a
major problem (Wolpe, Quinlan, and Martinez 1997). It is particularly preva-
lent in township schools (Griggs 1997). It takes many forms (e.g., gang con-
flict, rape, damage to property, individual acts of revenge and robbery). The
reasons why students are prepared to use violence against one another (and
against teachers) are complex and not well understood. School masculinities
are implicated in school violence as is corporal punishment because they
both, in different ways, make acceptable certain forms of violence.
Recent studies are beginning to provide us with a picture of the extent and
influence of violence. It is well known that sexual crimes occur frequently at
school or affect students outside the physical confines of school. Many may
be tempted to argue that such violence has nothing to do with corporal pun-
ishment or masculinity. But Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson (1998)
have shown that “sexuality is intrinsic to the formation of individual and
group identities in schools and that schools are sites for the active making of
such identities and of meanings around sexuality” (p. 9). This being the case,
the existing presumption of male rights to female bodies is a school issue and
an issue of masculinity. A recent survey of adolescent sexuality in South
Africa revealed that “Boys frequently felt offended when girls fail to respond
to their approaches. This is perceived as girls’ ‘snobbishness’—not wanting
to mix with poorer boys. Girls are believed to only want relationships with
boys or men who are prosperous” (Unicef/NPPHCN 1997, 35). Sexual
approaches come with an insistence on sex, penetrative sex. And having full
sex is made synonymous with being male. For a female to refuse to have sex is
to call into question the male’s masculinity. And when this happens, violence
frequently results.
CONCLUSION
The continued use of corporal punishment in schools highlights the

importance of agency. Physical punishment cannot continue without the
willingness of students to receive it, the willingness of teachers to inflict it,
and the insistence of parents that it be given. Agency is gendered. This article
has approached the agency of boys by examining masculinity. This is the
product of history, schools, and the family. Within schools, there exist diverse
masculinities that reflect racially divergent experiences of apartheid.
Corporal punishment continues to be more commonly experienced
among African male learners. A key reason for this is that their families still
use corporal punishment in the home, and this legitimates its use in schools.
Constructions of masculinity also play an important part in perpetuating the
practice. These masculinities can be misogynistic, violent, and uncritically
accepting (and rejecting) of authority. While the current orientation of school
masculinities does not depend on corporal punishment, it is likely that some
of these qualities are promoted by corporal punishment. The illegalization of
physical punishment may affect gender relations in school positively by per-
mitting the emergence of consultative forms of discipline and gentler
masculinities.
NOTE
1. Black refers to all people who were not classified white under apartheid. African refers to
black people who are ancestrally indigenous and who tend to speak English as a second (or third)
language.
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Epstein et al. / SCHOOL PLAYGROUNDS
Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

Making Masculinities and
Femininities in School Playgrounds
DEBBIE EPSTEIN
University of London
MARY KEHILY
Open University
MAÍRTIN MAC AN GHAILL

University of Newcastle
PETER REDMAN
Open University
This article is based on the ethnographic study of children’s play at break time in two
contrasting primary schools in north London. Play in the two schools was differently
gendered, at least partly because of the different organization of the playground. The
article will argue that children will use the means available to them to construct gender
in their playgrounds and that this will frequently involve the reproduction of hegemonic
cultural identities and relations of power. However, the article will go on to argue that
local interventions at the level of the individual school can and do bring into question
such identities and power relations, in the process making available to children ways of
being that are more open to possibility and difference.
Key words: football, gender, masculinity, play, playground organization
This article is based on ethnographic evidence from two primary schools

in north London where research took place for the Children’s “Relationship
Cultures” Research Project. In it, we suggest that the geography and spatial
organization of playgrounds speak gendered power relations. We show how
the dominance of football (in the U.K. context, invariably soccer) and fight-
ing can marginalize not only the girls but also those boys who are not inter-
ested in or good at football. In a school context in which football is allowed to
dominate unchecked, we demonstrate that football and fighting
Authors’ Note: This study was designed in collaboration with the Sex Education Forum. We
acknowledge the financial assistance of the Economic and Social Research Council, award ref-
erence no. R000 23 7438.
158
Epstein et al. / SCHOOL PLAYGROUNDS 159
simultaneously solidify and cut across ethnic boundaries and that many boys
become deeply invested in these activities as the primary signifiers of mascu-
linity. For these boys, being a “real man” is established through their prowess
in both activities, and they gain popularity and status both with other boys and
with girls through them. Football and fighting become a measure of success
as boys/men and a more important achievement than academic success,
while relative failure or lack of interest in them becomes a marker of stigma-
tized effeminacy or homosexuality. In contrast, in a school context where
football is brought under control (but not banned completely, which leads to
disaffection), we show how boys turn to other activities to establish their mas-
culinity and that this can, in certain circumstances, open up different versions
of masculinity and femininity within the school playground.
The two London schools1 involved in the study were rather different in
their social makeup, although they also shared many characteristics.
Edendale was typical, in many ways, of London inner-city primary schools in
some of the poorer boroughs: it was multiethnic and multilingual, with
approximately forty different languages used by the children in their homes,
the most common being Turkish. There were many refugee pupils, particu-
larly Kurdish and Somali children, who constituted a shifting population as
their families were moved from place to place while applications for asylum
were considered or as they searched for affordable housing; the school was
struggling financially and in the context of marketization.2 When Debbie was
doing the fieldwork for our pilot study, the school had had a stable staff for
several years, but the head’s early retirement, at the end of the following year,
combined with the prospect of imminent inspection by the Office for Stan-
dards in Education precipitated the resignation of almost half the staff. Belle-
vue School, while still in the inner city, was situated in a more mixed area
socially. Close to leafy parks and smart inner-city suburbs, as well as to large
council estates, its pupils spanned the class spectrum. Children of academics
and media professionals rubbed shoulders with the children of unemployed
parents and some in the care of social services. The main home language of
the school was English, although the intake was multiethnic and included a
much smaller number of refugee children than in Edendale. It was reasonably
successful in terms of Standard Assessment Tests (SATS) and was much
more secure financially than Edendale. Both schools had Victorian, triple-
story buildings and small playgrounds, although the one at Bellevue was sig-
nificantly larger than that at Edendale, and, as we shall see, this made a differ-
ence to the social relations of the playground.
GEOGRAPHIES OF GENDER IN THE PLAYGROUND 1:

FOOTBALL RULES OK
School playgrounds are places where struggles for power among groups
of children and between children and adults (in the British context, teachers
and dinner supervisors) take place. It is a space that many children regard
with a horror captured by Adrian Mitchell (1982) in his short poem:
The Savage Average

I feel like a little girl of six
In a school built of two hundred thousand bricks
And every day, in the purple playground,
One child is chosen and killed by the other children. (P. 57)
As Whitney and Smith (1993) showed, most of the bullying that goes on in
schools takes place in playgrounds, in the spaces where the watchful eyes of
adults are easier to escape. Not all children experience playgrounds as horri-
ble places, however. For some, it is a place where they can negotiate friend-
ships, relatively free from the ever-present control of the adults. Blatchford
and Sumpner (1998) argued that
[breaktime] is a significant and generally enjoyable time for [most children]—

a time when they can play, meet friends and have freedom from adult control.
Breaktime can be a forum for enjoyment and activity, play and games, the
development of friendships, social networks, social skills and competence; the
opportunity for independence and freedom from teachers and classrooms; and
the management of conflict, aggression and inter-group relations. It can also be
a site of harassment, cruelty and domination. Pupils are the main participants at
breaktime and often the only witnesses of what goes on then. It is at breaktime
that children can develop a distinctive and vibrant culture, separate from class-
room life and not easily recognised by adults. (P. 81)
Blatchford and Sumpner’s account of the playground as a site both for

friendship and, by implication, the recognition of others on one hand, and
of “harassment, cruelty and domination”—and, by implication, misrecognition—
on the other, does not explore the dynamics of these processes in terms of dif-
ferences that make a difference such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
national identity. As we will show, these are complicated processes, and the
social networks and skills developed by boys and by girls differ in important
ways.
Barrie Thorne (1993), in her important study of the ways in which young
children do gender, drew attention to playground behaviors and games as an
important part of children’s everyday practices. She talked about how they
play in single-sex and in mixed groups and about how, in the latter, children
do what she called “border work” in which gender is emphasized while boys
and girls play together, particularly in a variety of games of chase (see, also,
Epstein 1997; Epstein and Johnson 1998). Valerie Walkerdine (1984) argued
that the physical organization and geography of classrooms both produced
and were produced by discourses of child-centered pedagogy. Similarly, we
would suggest that the geography and spatial organization of playgrounds
speak to gendered power relations. Our observations at Edendale reveal a use
of the playground that is typical of inner-city schools with little outside space.
During morning break, children were not allowed to play with balls. At
this time, there was a reasonably even spread of older and younger children,
boys and girls, across the playground, although even then, the older, bigger
boys would dominate the space through a variety of games involving running
and physical contact, and boys and girls would, with some exceptions, play
separately. Here, however, we wish to concentrate on dinner play, partly
because this is the longest period spent by children in the playground; partly
because this is the time when adults who are not teachers, and who have less
status than teachers, supervise them; and partly because this gives the biggest
contrast with the Bellevue playground. As can be seen in figure 1, the older,
bigger boys who played football dominated the space at this time. Those boys
who were not part of this game (because they were younger, smaller, did not
like football, or were seen as bad players) and all the girls were to be found,
literally, on the margins of the playgrounds, although one could interpret
their position, equally, as framing the football game, a point to which we will
return later.
The football players consisted of boys from years 5 and 6 who played reg-
ularly on the same sides. Teams were not formally picked each day, and the
boys seemed to simply “know” which side they were on. Neither did each
team consist of eleven players. Indeed, there were many ways in which the
playground football games did not conform to the rules of football: not only
were the teams nearly always larger (though sometimes smaller) than regular
teams, they were often of uneven sizes; the shape of the “pitch” was wider
than it was long; there were no goal posts, so arguments could, and often did,
arise about whether a particular “goal” qualified as a goal or not; there were
frequently two games going on in more or less the same space at the same
time; and the game played by the smaller boys, in years 3 and 4, sometimes
overlapped with the space occupied by the games of the bigger boys. The
football teams cut across ethnic boundaries and included boys from more
than one class and year group, with boys from the different year 5 and 6
classes joining in the same teams.
During Debbie’s time in the school, several girls complained about the
boys’ domination of the playground space. Sofia and Ruby, for example, told
her the following:
Sofia: Boys always play football.

Ruby: They take up all the space.
Figure 1. Diagram of Dinnertime Playground Use
Avnit, an eleven-year-old girl, longed to play football with the boys. She
would regularly stand at the side of the pitch, picking up the ball and kicking
it to the players whenever she could, but never got to join in. In response to a
comment that it looked as if she really wanted to play football, Avnit replied
as follows:
Avnit: Yeah, but the boys never let you join in. They’ll never pass to a girl.
DE: What happens if the girls start to play [their own game]?
Avnit: The boys come along and join in and then the girls are pushed out.
DE: Perhaps you could have girls’ games some days?
Avnit: I used to go to girls’ football and even Mr Snowden [the head teacher] says
boys play rougher.
In this interchange, there is a clear gendering of football, and the discourse

(including the practice) of “rough boys” goes some way toward explaining
the exclusion, including the self-exclusion, of girls, many of whom were
strongly invested in forms of what Robert Connell (1987) called “emphasised
femininity.” However, just as some boys did not wish to play football, there
were a few girls, like Avnit, who did and who were pushed out of the game by
the boys’refusal to pass to a girl as much as by the roughness with which they
might be physically pushed out of a game.
Although girls were ruled out of football in practice, there was a mythol-
ogy within the school about a girl who had attended the school a few years
previously and was a better football player than any of the boys. Indeed, the
story went that she had been selected to play for the girls’ team of a local pro-
fessional football club (which was, indeed, in the Premier Division). Several
of the teachers mentioned her prowess to me, as did some of the year 6 boys
(age eleven, the oldest children in the school) who remembered her. It is
worth asking what the salience was of this narrative, which produced a con-
stant retelling of the story of the girl who was “better than any of the boys” at
football. At one level, it can be read as a recourse to a justification, in terms of
fairness, of the fact that girls were not allowed to play football. The implica-
tion of the story from this point of view is that, if any of the girls in the school
were good enough at football, they would be allowed to play. However, most
of the boys who played football regularly were not particularly skilled, and it
is likely that, given the chance, girls would be just as good as (or, perhaps
more accurately, not less bad than) they were—and the example of Bellevue
bears witness to this possibility. Indeed, what the story indicates is that the
only way in which a girl could attain “equal” treatment in this context was by
achieving virtually stellar abilities in the game. In other words, there was far
more latitude for incompetence at football given by boys to other boys than to
girls—although this latitude certainly had its limits. For some of the teachers,
there seemed to be a kind of nostalgia with an underlying feeling that, if only
they could have such a good girl player again, then they would be able to take
action about the boys’domination of the playground through football. Others
used the story as a way of rupturing boys’ talk about how much better at foot-
ball they were than the girls, but without much success; for the boys, the story
of one outstanding girl player was seen as the exception that proved the rule.
And the (unwritten, informal) rule was that football was for boys.
Indeed, football in Edendale School, as in many other schools and in life
outside school, was a major signifier of successful masculinity (see Benjamin
1999; Fitzclarence and Hickey 1999). The boys were invested in the game as
both fantasy and practice. By the beginning of year 5 (i.e., ages nine and ten),
“doing boy” acceptably (to other boys and to many girls, too) involved play-
ing football as well as knowing how to talk about the professional game
knowledgeably. This cut across ethnicity, and one could read the boys’ play
as, in some sense, writing out the salience of ethnic and national divisions
among the boys in favor of team allegiances. However, this was not as simple
as it seemed on first sight. The teams included boys from all the different eth-
nic groups represented in the school, who played together amicably so long
as nothing went wrong. However, the fact that the school playground football
games were not played according to strict rules and, particularly, that it was
not entirely clear where the goals were led to fights breaking out from time to
time.3 When this happened, as it often did, between boys from different eth-
nic groups, then support for the protagonists would generally follow ethnic
divisions rather than those of the sides on which the boys had been playing.
Thus, in an instant, the team friendliness and solidarity that went across eth-
nic boundaries could suddenly become polarized into ethnic, even national,
divisions.4 Indeed, while the football games could be seen as breaking down
ethnic divisions, the fights they engendered could be seen as a kind of border
work through which ethnic/national boundaries between boys were
solidified.
Sometimes these fights were brought in from outside the school and were
replayed in the school playground. For example, Elias, from a Greek Cypriot
family, had an elaborated account of fights that he had with Turkish Cypriot
boys outside the school:
Elias: Usually I see Erkan [a Turkish Cypriot–origin boy in the class, who often
played in the same football team as Elias] all the time. I saw him yesterday. Me
and my cousin were arguing with those Turkish boys and he saw us.
DE: Right. What were you arguing about?
Elias: Well, we were going to the shops and he said something to us and my cousin
said, “What’s wrong? We’ll get him when we come back.” And as we were
coming back, they said, “Shut up” to us. I said, “D’you go karate?” and he came
up to me and went, “Huh, huh, huh” [making arm movements imitating a go-
rilla] and like that and then he got me and my cousin’s heads and bumped it to-
gether, and then I got up and said “Ken, we can’t let them do this to us,” cos they
didn’t know English. So I made three of them run away. They run across the
road from the traffic and that, cos they just ran across, they didn’t even look,
and my cousin made two of them fall on the floor.
What is particularly interesting about this conversation is that Elias did, in

fact, frequently find himself playing football in groups that included the
Turkish boys with whom, in other circumstances, he might be fighting. In this
context, both football and fighting were essential resources for the solidifica-
tion of masculinities that, despite playing together, remained ethnically
marked. Success in these activities was also an important criterion for a boy’s
popularity among both boys and girls. Establishing oneself as a good foot-
baller who was not loath to have a scrap established one as a “real boy,” and
Elias was one of the most desirable boys within the heterosexual economies
of the playground and classroom. Indeed, he was at the center of a group of
the most popular children in the class who were heavily involved in
discourses of boyfriends and girlfriends, dating and dumping, two-timing

and going out. Several of the girls said that they “fancied” him, and he was the
one most often reported as two-timing the girls, who did not seem to mind
this but rather used it as a bond between themselves.5
It is in this context that we can think of the activities of the girls, at the
edges of the playground, framing (rather than being marginalized by) the
boys’football games. While the majority of the girls spent most of their break
times talking to each other (often in groups that shared a home language) and
apparently not watching the boys, much of their talk was about the boys, their
prowess as footballers, and their general attractiveness. Skipping and clap-
ping games often evoked the names of particular boys (most often Elias in
year 5) as imagined love objects and future husbands or boyfriends. Further-
more, the talk of the girls, while it gave them practice in some of the activities
rewarded in the classroom (the ability to tell a story, for example), frequently
positioned the boys in relation to themselves and made narrow distinctions
between them based on looks, style, footballing ability, and general attrac-
tiveness. In this respect, the position of girls as objects of the male gaze was
reversed, and the boys became the all-too-sexualized objects of a female
gaze, embedded in notions of physical attractiveness and male beauty.
Another aspect of this was the rather dispiriting way in which the girls valued
boys who “treated them mean,” using their power to reinscribe themselves
and the boys in very traditional gendered relations.
GEOGRAPHIES OF GENDER IN THE PLAYGROUND 2:

CAGING THE BEAST
While it did not have an enormous playground, Bellevue had sufficient

space to provide a separate area, tellingly called “the cage,” for football (see
Figure 2).
As well as being controlled by being confined to the cage, football at
Bellevue was also organized according to year groups. Each of the four years
of the Junior Department was allowed one day a week on which they could
play football in the cage. On Fridays, only girls were allowed to play, and
girls from all years were allowed to join in. The football team and football
generally were organized by one of the women teachers, Alison Thomson,
reputed among the pupils to be the best teacher in the school. The after-school
club, from which school teams were chosen, was commonly known as
“Alison’s football,” and it was a significant punishment to be excluded from
it. Perhaps because of the fact that football was organized by a woman, but
certainly also because there was a space made for girls to practice in the
absence of boys, several of the girls had become quite competent football
players and could be seen playing football, together with the boys, when it
Infant playground
School building
School entrance Climing frame

and benches
The ‘cage’
Library
Figure 2. Bellevue Junior Playground (not to scale)
was their year’s turn. This did not mean that gender conflict was ruled out or
that boys did not try to exclude girls. Two of the girls told Debbie the
following:
Millie: Yeah girls, there’s girls’ football on Fridays.

Annie: Yeah, but that’s the kind they play, that’s the time girls play football most,
because on the class football days the boys don’t tend to pass the ball to girls or
anything, or let the girls do any of the work for the team. (Interview: 28 January
1999)
However, the boys’ attempts to exclude the girls were not always success-
ful and were certainly not as effective as in Edendale School. Observation in
the playground revealed that on the days of mixed football, there was always
a minority of girls playing, and, while the some of the boys may have
attempted not to pass to them, several of the girls could hold their own in the
team and gain control of the ball, scoring goals and defending their own goal.
Furthermore, while some of the boys complained about the girls having their
own football days, thinking it unfair, none of them expressed the view that
girls could not play the game, as was common at Edendale. While some of the
boys thought the arrangements were “a bit unfair,” they could also see a point
to the arrangement:
Martin: Ann encouraged all the girls to play football and she gave the girls a foot-
ball day to themselves and no boys.
DE: And so what do you think about that?
Martin: I think . . .
Olly: The girls in our class play [with us] and then when it’s Friday they play then.
Martin: It’s a bit unfair, I think some, the boys should play in the morning and the
girls in the afternoon.
DE: Every day?
Martin: Yeah. No. On Friday.

DE: Oh, on Friday. Right, okay. Erm, and you think that would be . . .
Martin: A bit fairer.
DE: A bit more fair.
Olly: Yeah, but if all the boys in the whole school played there, because every-
body . . .
Martin: Yeah, but . . .
Olly: Everybody likes football, so the pitch would be crowded.
Martin: But Alison bans certain people, because she bans people if they go through
the pitch and don’t play football there.
Olly: And sometimes when the boys and it’s the girls’football day, the boys go and
get a ball and they start playing outside the cage. (Interview, 23 February 1999)
However, at least as interesting as the impact that being encouraged to

play football had on the girls was the effect it had on the use of the playground
more generally and on the ways that boys and girls played together and sepa-
rately. Rather than being able to play football each day and to the exclusion of
other activities, boys were forced to find other ways of occupying themselves
on the Bellevue playground. This took three main forms: wrestling, games of
run and chase, and games played with the girls.
Wrestling was the preoccupation of a group of year 5 boys, and on most
days, they could be seen, in pairs dotted around the playground, involved in
stylized fights based on television shows of professional wrestling. These
boys were very invested in their favorite wrestlers and favorite wrestling
teams, for a variety of reasons:
DE: What else do you do in the playground?

Martin: Sometimes we talk.
DE: What do you talk about when you talk?
Martin: Erm, what’s been happening in wrestling.
DE: OK, so tell me about the wrestling, because I’ve seen, I saw you the other day.
You were doing wrestling and stuff like that.
Olly: Yeah.
DE: Tell me a bit about it.
Olly: My favourite wrestler is called The Jessie James . . . and he’s in a team called
DX.
DE: DX?
Olly: That stands for D Generation X.
DE: All right, yes, go on.
Martin: My one’s Stone Cold, he’s on his own, he’s in no group, but he uses his
middle finger a lot. (Interview, 23 February 1999)
This conversation, mainly about favorite television wrestlers, went on for

some time, during which the boys clearly explained that they understand that
these stars are involved in play fighting. They then went on to describe how,
when they wrestled at school, they pretended to be their favorite character in
wrestling. They explained that, although it was possible to be hurt while play-
ing wrestling, this rarely happened and that the moves they made were, for
the most part, planned, even choreographed. When someone was hurt, they
said, it was because he was too heavy and was dropped accidentally. The
teachers and dinner supervisors were not particularly keen on this game, as
can be imagined, and, much to the indignation of the boys involved, fre-
quently did not distinguish between wrestling and real fights, stopping them
both and taking the same sanctions against those involved. This meant that
pairs of boys would position themselves around the side and the back of the
library building, out of the main sight of the adults on duty. Sometimes, they
would collect a little group of girls around them, cheering on one boy or the
other, but, for the most part, they continued with their game, apparently obliv-
ious to the playground around them.
Adults were less likely to intervene in the various games of running and
chasing that were another alternative to football, although these were, in
some ways, more violent than the rather choreographed and stylized wres-
tling. Games like Bulldog and the alarming game titled “Kick in the Head”
involved teams running, catching, and bashing into each other at high speed,
often resulting in someone being hurt.6 Like football, both wrestling and
chase games clearly involved boys’ highly conventional and macho versions
of masculinity that they, literally, embodied in what Connell (1995) has
called “body-reflexive practices.” The hardening of muscles and spirit that
allowed the boys to endure being hurt constituted the often-repeated perfor-
mances of gender (Butler 1990) that inscribed particular gendered relations
on the bodies of the boys and inscribed them in particular kinds of masculine
identities.
A contrast to this was the third option adopted by boys during times when
they could not play football. In this option, boys (often including those who
were also keen on wrestling and running games) played with a large group of
girls in a game that might have involved border work but in which girls
appeared to be in control of the play. This ongoing game revolved around the
most popular girl in year 5, Morgan,7 and her boyfriend, Michael. All the year 5
children interviewed for the project insisted that Morgan and Michael were
girlfriend and boyfriend:
Annie: They’re in, well, if Morgan’s his girlfriend then he’s in love with her and if
Michael’s her boyfriend then she’s in love with him.
Millie: Sort of, yeah, so like they’re together down the stairs and stuff all the time.
DE: And when they’re together what do they do, just chatting or playing?
Annie: Yeah, just playing.
Millie: Chatting and playing and like normal people do.
DE: So it’s different, then, from having a boy who’s a friend?
Annie: Yes . . .
Millie: Yes, which I call friend boy instead of boyfriend.
Annie: Yeah, because everyone associates boyfriend that you’re in love with them,
but sometimes you just like them and you’re not in love with them. It gets an-
noying if everybody’s teasing you just because you’re their friend. (Interview,
28 January 1999)
These girls went on, in this interview, to explain that Morgan and Michael
were the two most popular children in year 5 and that this meant that, unlike
most children, they would not be teased about being boyfriend and girlfriend:
DE: And so, have lots of kids got girlfriends and boyfriends or is it all a tease?
Annie: A few of them have, but it’s mainly a tease because, if they have got boy-
friends or girlfriends not many people admit it, because they’re worried about
getting teased.
DE: Right, so . . .
Millie: But only if you’re, like, in some sort of band and you’re like one of the top
ones that everyone cares about and stuff, like Morgan, then she just admits it.
DE: Okay. So the kids who are, like, the most popular kids, is that what you’re say-
ing to me, the one’s who everybody likes, they admit it because they won’t get
teased?
Annie: Well, because everybody knows they’re the most popular. (Interview, 28
January 1999)
It seems from this conversation that the admission of being someone’s

girlfriend or boyfriend is safe only for those children likely to escape being
teased about it. There was another effect of this, however. Morgan and
Michael were two of the most popular children in their groups, and they regu-
larly wanted to play with each other. Because a large number of the girls
wanted to play with Morgan and a large number of the boys wanted to play
with Michael, this meant that on many of the days when they were not playing
football, a big group of year 5 boys and girls could be found playing together.
Most frequently, they played a version of a game instituted by Morgan, which
involved the construction of a narrative in imaginative play, more commonly
associated with girls than with boys. In this game, which continued from day
to day and even from week to week, Morgan and Michael played the
“mother” and “father,” while other children played bit parts: their children,
nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, family doctor—even social workers
appeared in the improvised script of the long-running game. While the chil-
dren do play gendered roles, and their play is, in that sense, border work, it
remains surprising to see boys and girls playing together in this way in a pri-
mary school playground. It seems that, in the context of Bellevue, the girls,
via the strong will and influence of Morgan, are able to lay down the terms for
a significant amount of play at break time. This throws open possibilities for
boys to include usually less visible masculinities within their school reper-
toires. Thus, boys (particularly Michael) may be seen at playtime acting the
role of child carer for part of the game. This does not mean, of course, that
more macho versions of masculinity have disappeared. Rather, they have
ceased to be the only possible recourse that allows the boys to maintain status.
CONCLUSION
What we have shown in this article is how children’s enactments and

embodiments of gendered, ethnicized, and sexualized subject positions are
more fluid than commonly appears to be the case in school playgrounds.
There appear to have been two key factors in the process that allowed this to
happen at Bellevue School. First, the organization of football by an extremely
popular female teacher meant that boys were compelled to find other activi-
ties during both long and short break times, while girls were enabled to join in
the more usually masculine activity of football on a more equal footing than
often occurs. Second, the establishment of what looked like a close relation-
ship by the two most admired children in the year (and both were, perhaps
significantly, good footballers!) who genuinely preferred to spend much of
their time playing together meant that their friends preferred to play imagina-
tive games with them for much of the time. Elsewhere, we have explored the
dynamics of girls’ and boys’ friendships in single-sex groups (Kehily et al.
1999; Redman et al. 1999). Here, we can see the possibilities of more fluid,
hopeful, and less rigidly policed and disciplined masculinities and feminini-
ties that accrue from girls and boys having mixed friendship groups at this
age.
NOTES
1. The names of schools, children, and teachers have been changed to protect anonymity.
Edendale was the pilot school for our project. Debbie Epstein did the fieldwork here. Bellevue
was one of the schools in the project itself, and fieldwork was carried out by Debbie Epstein
(working with nine- and ten-year-old children in year 5) and Mary Kehily (working with ten- and
eleven-year-old children in year 6).
2. Doing well on Standard Assessment Tests (SATS) is, of course, extraordinarily difficult
for children who are not only new to English but, because of their family situations, move
schools every few months for a period of years. The league tables through which the education
market in the United Kingdom operates are based on SATS scores. For further discussion of the
effects of marketization of education, see Epstein and Kenway (1996).
3. I do not mean to suggest that there would be no fights if strict rules were in operation. After
all, aggression and violence occur as part of the professional and rule-bound game (see
Fitzclarence and Hickey 2001 [this issue]). But lack of rules made fights more likely.
4. In some ways, this seems to parallel the way that professional football teams, especially in
the Premier Division, are made up of players from different countries, but the moment interna-
tional competition, such as the World Cup, comes into view, national differences polarize among
both players and fans.
5. For further discussion of this, see Epstein and Johnson (1998, esp. chap. 7).
6. We never managed to get a full explanation of how “Kick in the Head” worked. Repeated
requests to boys to explain how it was played produced either incomprehensible explanations or
evasion and changing the subject.
7. This name was chosen by the girl herself, interestingly taken from Morgaine of the Fairies,
in the legend of Arthur. Conventional versions of the Arthur legend have her as evil; however,
feminist versions see her as the victim of Christianity and the upholder of older, more
woman-centered religions.
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Debbie Epstein is a professor of education and head of the Education Department at

Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her previous publications include A Danger-
ous Knowing: Sexuality, Pedagogy and Popular Culture, Failing Boys? Issues in Gender
and Achievement, and Schooling Sexualities.
Mary Jane Kehily is an ethnographic researcher with interests in gender and sexuality,
narrative and identity, and popular culture. She is currently a lecturer in childhood stud-
ies at the Open University in the United Kingdom and is the director of a research project
that is exploring young people’s perceptions of drugs and drug use.
Maírtin Mac-an-Ghaill is professor of the Department of Education, University of New-

castle. He has published widely on questions of masculinity, racism, schooling, and Irish
identity. Together with Debbie Epstein he is editor of the Open University Press series
Educating Boys, Learning Gender.
Peter Redman is a staff tutor in the Sociology Discipline at the Open University. He has a
background in cultural studies and research interests in gender, cultural identity, and
psychoanalysis. Recent publications include the edited volume Identity: A Reader (Sage,
2000) (with Paul Du Gay and Jessica Evans).
Kehily / BODIES IN SCHOOL
Bodies in School
Young Men, Embodiment, and Heterosexual Masculinities
MARY KEHILY
Open University
This article considers the relationship between sexuality and schooling and draws on
data from an ethnographic school-based study. It considers the ways in which sexualities
are shaped and lived through pupil cultures that are often marginalized or overlooked by
teachers and rarely find their way into the official curriculum. It discusses the normative
power of heterosexuality in schools and, particularly, the relationship between mascu-
linities and heterosexuality. Themes of embodiment, physicality, and performance play a
part in the ways in which informal groups of students actively ascribe meanings to issues
of sex and gender. Through interviews with young men in school, it is suggested that
school processes produce sites for the enactment of heterosexual masculinities that sug-
gest the normative presence of heterosexuality and the fragility of sex/gender categories.
The article aims to contribute to an understanding of sexual majorities by focusing on the
processes that are constitutive of dominant practice in school arenas.
Key words: masculinities, heterosexuality, embodiment, schooling
In this article, I consider the relationship between heterosexuality and

masculinities in educational establishments. The focus is on the ways in
which young men in school constitute and consolidate heterosexual mascu-
line identities. Through an analysis of interviews with young men in school, I
suggest that school processes produce sites for the enactment of heterosexual
masculinities. Furthermore, these enactments demonstrate both the norma-
tive power of heterosexuality and the fragility of sex/gender categories. In the
lives of young men in school, heterosexuality is understood as a practice
involving a set of social performances in relation to young women and other
males. Among the young men I spoke with, there was little understanding of
heterosexuality as an institutional arrangement for the support and mainte-
nance of a particular sex/gender order. Rather, heterosexual relations were
viewed as a way of demonstrating a particular masculinity that could be used
to command respect and confer status on some males while deriding others.
As a theme of the article, I explore issues of embodiment as expressed by the
young men. In these exchanges, there is an emphasis on the physicality of the
body, often articulated in terms of activity and performance, in which the
physical sense of maleness is constantly recuperated as “doing”
heterosexuality.
173
METHOD
I draw on material from my doctoral research: an ethnographic

school-based study that aims to explore issues of sexual learning in relation to
young people. The study looks at two key areas in the field of sexuality and
schooling: first, the construction of sexual identities within pupil cultures,
and second, how school processes shape the domain of sexuality through the
curriculum and institutional practices. The research uses a wide range of
ethnographic methods including participant observation, group-work discus-
sion, and semistructured interviews. The fieldwork for this study was carried
out over a total of two years, beginning in 1995 and continuing in the aca-
demic year 1996-97. During this time, approximately 180 interviews and dis-
cussions were carried out with teachers and students.
Ethnographic research was conducted in two secondary schools in differ-
ent parts of the United Kingdom. Both schools were open-access secondary
schools for boys and girls aged eleven to sixteen, and both schools served a
largely working-class catchment area. Oakwood School was nondenomina-
tional and racially mixed with many pupils from South Asian and African
Caribbean backgrounds. Clarke School, however, was a Church of England
school, and the school population was mainly white. I supplemented the
ethnographic fieldwork with focus group discussions at an all-boys second-
ary school in a large city in the southeast of England. This school was
accessed through personal contact with a senior teacher in the school who
described the student population to me as “very mixed” with a high percent-
age of students from African Caribbean, mixed heritage, and South Asian
backgrounds. The material on which this article is based is drawn from
group-work discussions with young males at the school in the southeast of
England. The boys, aged between fourteen and fifteen years, were selected
for me by their teacher as representing a cross section of the student popula-
tion in year 10. Although the composition of the group changed during the
course of the school term, their social positioning can be described as work-
ing class and racially mixed, including boys who identified as African Carib-
bean, South Asian, black British, and white British. The one-hour discus-
sions I conducted with them can be described as open ended; although I
expressed an interest in talking to them about sex education, I was happy to
let the conversation stray into a range of themes and issues that emerged for
them as a group. Generally, my approach to discussions was to intervene as
little as possible in the flow of dialogue between the young men, only asking
questions as a response to their interactions and occasionally seeking clarifi-
cation and development of themes.
The ways in which students spoke to me about sex involved me in many
encounters that provided an opportunity to reflect on the relationship
between sexualities and the social context of the school. Students used
Kehily / BODIES IN SCHOOL 175
sexuality in a variety of ways in their interactions with teachers and with each
other. These sexualized exchanges provide an insight into the sexist and
homophobic practices of pupils to suggest ways in which sexual power is
played out in school (Mac an Ghaill 1991; Lees 1993). Anthony Easthope
(1990) suggested that talking dirty and particularly the sharing of dirty jokes
between men is an attempt to “master” women through discourse (p. 126).
The comments of young men in my study could be viewed as an attempt to
invoke a form of mastery capable of placing me in a subordinate position to
them through the use of a deliberately transgressive sexualized style. As a
former teacher of sex education, however, I felt familiar with the ways in
which young men talked about sexual issues and was not shocked or offended
by dirty talk. Furthermore, I came to understand the talking dirty discourse of
young men as a preliminary stage in establishing field relationships. Through
jokes, sexualized banter, and daring questions, young men collectively con-
tributed to a style of bawdy excess that tested the dynamics of social encoun-
ters with others. As a researcher interested in sexualities and schooling, pupil
peer groups provided me with a rich and valuable insight into the ways in
which young people spoke about and articulated issues of sexuality. I came to
understand these exchanges as constitutive of informal sexual cultures within
the school. As field relations developed, the sex talk of students provided me
with access into their perspectives and also opened up a space for me in which
sexual themes could be pursued in interviews and group-work discussions.
APPROACHES TO THE BODY
The idea that the body is an important site for the exercise of power can be
located within a Foucaultian framework in which the rise of capitalism can be
seen to create a new domain of political life, referred to by Foucault (1978) as
“bio-power” (p. 140). Here, power is conceptualized as decentralized and
productive of social relations in commonplace encounters and exchanges.
From this perspective, the politics of the body play an important part in disci-
plining individual bodies and regulating collective bodies such as popula-
tions or specific social groups. For Foucault, the body is discursively con-
structed, realized in the play of power relations, and specifically targeted in
the domain of the sexual. Foucault saw sex as a political issue, crucial to the
emergence and deployment of bio-power:
It [sex] was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire politi-
cal technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the disciplines of the body:
the harnessing, intensification and distribution of forces, the adjustment and
economy of energies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of pop-
ulations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity. (P. 145)
For Foucault, disciplining the body at the level of the individual has a histori-
cal trajectory that can be traced to the Christian pastoral tradition of the sev-
enteenth century. Christian spirituality encouraged individuals to speak their
desires in order to control them. The process of transforming desire into dis-
course in a religious schema has the effect of purifying the mind and the body
by expelling worldly desire and turning back to God. This spiritual experi-
ence produced, for individuals, “a physical effect of feeling in one’s body the
pangs of temptation and the love that resists it” (p. 23). Foucault pointed to
the links with the sexual libertine literature of the nineteenth century such as
My Secret Garden and the writings of de Sade in which sexual activities and
erotic attachments are described and documented in episodic detail. One way
of understanding this tell-all experience is to view it in terms of internal rela-
tions or psychic structures whereby the Other is produced within the Self.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this has the effect of heightening desire
by producing the “forbidden” and, simultaneously, heightening anxiety in
the constant struggle to expel the Other from within. It is possible to view the
homophobia of young men in school as part of this dynamic. Similarly, the
desire/repulsion expressed by girls in relation to sexual activity can also be
seen as an internal dynamic, variously played out in social arenas. In these exam-
ples, the desire for/fear of relationships is enacted within the peer group and
plays a part in the structuring of heterosexual hierarchies in school (Kehily
and Nayak 1997). In peer group interactions, individuals are active in the
control and regulation of their own bodies within a broader context of control
and regulation.
Colette Guillaumin’s (1993) study suggests that “the body is the prime
indicator of sex” (p. 40) in which external reproductive organs are ascribed a
set of material and symbolic meanings elaborated in the construction of sex-
ual difference. This separation of the sexes at the level of the body is dupli-
cated by a material social relationship involving the sociosexual division of
labor and the distribution of power. Guillaumin indicated that the sexing of
the body in society is a long-term project involving work at different levels:
physical and mental labor, direct and indirect interventions, and the exercise
of gender-specific social practices and competencies. Bodies are constructed
in societal contexts in which ways of being in/with your body have material
effects: “Restricting one’s body or extending it and amplifying it are acts of
rapport with the world, a felt vision of things” (p. 47).
For Guillaumin (1993), the materiality of the body plays a part in the pro-
duction of gender inequalities that can be seen in the different ways in which
boys and girls play, use space, and engage in bodily contact. Central to the
construction of the sexed body is, in Guillaumin’s terms, the “body-for-
others,” ways of relating to others in terms of physical proximity, which is
learned by both sexes but experienced differently. Bodily contact among
males in combat and play introduces notions of solidarity, cooperation, and
control of public space. However, for girls, the body-for-others is constructed
in the private domestic sphere in which the female body is both closed in on
itself and freely accessible. From this perspective, the materiality of the body
is constitutive and productive of gender inequalities in ways that are learned,
experienced, and lived.
Robert Connell’s (1995) study of masculinities is also concerned with the
ways in which gender is understood and interpreted in relation to the body.
He suggested that the physicality of the body is central to the cultural inter-
pretation of gender. In Connell’s analysis, as in Guillaumin’s (1993), the
materiality of the body is important to individuals and to societal arrange-
ments and can be seen to make a difference to the ways in which gender is
learned and lived. For Connell, masculinity can be defined within a system of
gender relations as “simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices
through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of
these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture” (p. 71). Fur-
thermore, Connell indicated that there is a need to assert the agency of bodies
in social processes (p. 60) to understand gender politics as an embodied
social politics. Connell used the term “body-reflexive practice” to suggest the
ways in which bodies can be seen to be located within a complex circuit as
both objects and agents of social practice. In this model, the body is located
within a particular social order in which bodily experience is productive of
social relations (and socially structured bodily fantasy), which, in turn, can
produce new bodily interactions (pp. 61-62). Body-reflexive practice cap-
tures the dynamic interplay of bodily interactions working within societal
and institutional constraints and also the sense of agency that suggests that
experiences at the level of the body offer possibilities for transgression and
change.
BODIES IN SCHOOL:
INSTITUTIONS AND THE EMBODIMENT
OF MASCULINITIES
Foucault (1978) pointed to the ways in which schools of the eighteenth

century were structured and organized to take into account the sexuality of
children:
The internal discourse of the institution—the one it employed to address itself,

and which circulated among those that made it function—was largely based on
the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active and
ever present. (P. 27)
In particular, the sex of schoolboys, Foucault indicated, is constructed as a

public problem in and through discursive strategies that encourage the
deployment of a range of medical and educational interventions for the con-
trol of adolescent boys. In contemporary schooling, pupils become the
objects of disciplinary regimes that aim to control and regulate the (sexed)
body as well as the mind. Rules govern the physical use of spaces where
pupils move—in classrooms, playgrounds, and corridors. The spaces, in their
architectural design and layout, also prescribe, to some extent, the type of
movement that is possible and desirable. For example, the subject of “class-
room management” taught at teacher training colleges suggests to student
teachers that the learning environment can be shaped in particular ways by
the strategic placing of tables, chairs, and classroom equipment. Bodies in
school can be seen in two ways: collectively as a student body, to be con-
trolled and moved about with ease, and as individual bodies to be, simulta-
neously, trained and protected. Sexuality, as Foucault pointed out, can be
seen as a feature that structures the ways in which bodies in school are orga-
nized and related to.
In secondary schools, through the social processes of schooling, there is
an associative link made between the body and sexuality, or, to put it another
way, the body is seen as a conveyor of sex, and sexuality is seen as an embod-
ied manifestation of the body/sex couplet. The body that emerges in relations
of schooling is predominantly heterosexual. Connell (1995) used the concept
of “hegemonic masculinities” to discuss the relationship between different
kinds of masculinity and the ways in which issues of sexuality and embodi-
ment feature in these accounts. Within the framework of hegemonic mascu-
linities, there are specific relations of dominance and subordination played
out between groups of men. In these interactions, heterosexuality assumes a
dominant status, while homosexuality acquires a subordinate position in the
sex/gender hierarchy. This article explores the ways in which heterosexuality
is constituted and consolidated by young men in school. The ethnographic
evidence discussed in this article suggests that heterosexuality is constituted
in the everyday practices of young men in school. Within the educational
institution, these practices have the effect of consolidating and validating a
particular masculinity.
CONSTITUTING HETEROSEXUALITY:
SEX TALK, MASTURBATION, AND PORNOGRAPHY
In the interactions between young men in school, heterosexuality can be

seen as a practice involving a set of social performances in relation to young
women and other males. Among the young men I observed and spoke with,
there appeared to be little understanding of heterosexuality as an institutional
arrangement for the support and maintenance of a particular sex/gender
order. Rather, heterosexual relations were viewed by the young men as “natu-
ral” and as a way of demonstrating a particular masculinity that could be
exercised to establish a position of privilege within the male peer group. A
central theme in the demonstration of an esteemed masculinity is the notion
of “knowing it already” in matters of sexuality. In conversations with young

men, I ask them how they learned about sex and was frequently met with
responses such as, “I already know about it. . . . I taught myself ” (Justin), and
“We already know it, I do anyway” (Blake). In these exchanges, certain
young men seemed keen to assert, to me and the other boys in the group, that
sexual knowledge was located in the self. In these declarations, Justin and
Blake suggest that achieving knowledge and knowing in the domain of the
sexual is acquired through self-activity. Justin elaborated on his sexual learn-
ing in the following terms:
Justin: Well, my Dad, he’s hinted at things, he has, yeah. He told me about, well, he
never gave me much explanation like, just hints, but they came together, all
things, by watching videos, magazines, listening to friends, older brother and
just getting to know for myself, you know.
Here, Justin indicates that “knowing it already” involves the active and pro-
tracted process of making sense of multiple sources. Sexual knowledge, far
from being easily assumed and embodied within the masculine sense of self,
is in fact learned in the piecemeal way described by young women (see
Thomson and Scott 1991). However, within the male peer group, the demon-
stration of competence and fear of ignorance become familiar tropes in the
articulation of a masculinity that is sexually knowing and heterosexually
active.
In the male peer group, heterosexual activity is valorized and frequently
spoken about in terms of conquest and prestige (Wood 1984). As Christian
put it, “All boys claim to be doing it with girls—everyone in the school.”
However, while males in school may engage in the sexual boast, there is evi-
dence to suggest that the performance is not always believed:
Christian: I listen to what they say but you can’t take it seriously, you can’t always
believe them ’cos they might just be saying that for their mates, to look strong
or to make them look bigger.
Here, the physical quality of looking strong and big in front of your mates can
be seen as a symbolic attempt to display an exaggerated and inflated mascu-
linity, capable of achieving status in the male peer group. Young men
reported speaking about sex with each other by recounting details of sexual
encounters with girls in terms such as, “I did this with her last night, then I did
that.” Such interactions indicate the need to maintain a masculine style pre-
mised on activity and performance. In these moments, the collective structure
of the male peer group offers a performative space where heterosexuality and
masculinity can be fused and displayed. This space can also be seen to pro-
vide a forum for a form of secular confessional in which young men disclose
details of their sexual encounters with girls. Transforming desire into
discourse, in this context, is turned into a boast that seeks valoration rather
than repentance. As other researchers have documented, sex talk between
males serves many purposes and can be seen to have a range of regulatory
effects: policing the boundaries of gender-appropriate behavior for young
men and young women, providing an imaginary ideal of desirable masculin-
ity, bolstering the reputation of particular males, concealing vulnerabilities,
and producing heterosexual hierarchies (Lees 1993; Wood 1984; Haywood
1996; Kehily and Nayak 1997).
The following discussion with a group of young men offers an insight into
the workings of male peer groups and the links made between masculinity
and heterosexual activity. In this context, they talk of the having a girlfriend
and sexual activity as natural and routine:
So, is it uncool to be a virgin?

Christian: Nah, I wouldn’t say that.
Justin: It depends, when you’re younger, no, but when you get to Year 11 man . . .
Christian: But with your friends, if you tell your friends you haven’t had sex, my
friends anyway, they wouldn’t like act up on you, I mean, they try to encourage
you to have sex, but—
Justin: My friends would be going [in low voice] go on then, go on now then, get
there now, have sex, go on then.
Christian: Nah, that’s no good.
Justin: What’s no good? It’s nothing to be scared of.
Matthew: But who wouldn’t want to do it?
Christian: No man, there’s a difference man, there’s a difference between wanting
to do it and people telling you to do it. Even if you want to do it from the start
man, but when people start telling you to do it, it makes you like, you want to
give them a challenge, makes you want to say no.
In this discussion, the young men indicate that the links between masculini-
ties and heterosexual activity are negotiated within friendship groups. Sex
with girls is presented as a general aim to be desired and expected, an
eroticized “getting there” for all boys. However, the reflections of Justin and
Christian suggest that heterosexual activity is differently appraised. While
Justin’s friends would urge “doing it” in a display of hyper-heterosexuality,
Christian’s friends would offer encouragement without “acting up on you.”
Christian’s comments suggest that other modes of behavior such as acting
autonomously and posing a challenge may also be incorporated into the mas-
culine repertoire and may exist as a counterpoint to heterosexual pursuit. In
such a discursive maneuver, Christian is able to resist pressure to engage in
heterosexual activity while presenting a masculine sense of self that seeks to
maintain his reputation in the peer group. In discussions with young men, it is
possible to see the male peer group as significant in negotiating meanings
attached to sexual activity, in which versions of heterosexuality and mascu-
linity are produced locally. In these interactions, heterosexuality is invoked
as a practice; an endeavor in which the “doing” is valorized by particular

styles of sex talk.
So far, the discussions with young men have focused on the practice of
heterosexuality in sex talk, in which girls become the object of desire and the
subject of a contextually constructed male sex drive. Further discussions with
young men, however, suggest that heterosexuality may be constituted in
other practices before girls are known and spoken about. In the absence of
girls, in relationships or in discourse, young men may fantasize about having
sex, imagining what it will be like and how they will feel. This fantasy space
is usually accompanied by bodily practices such as masturbation. Peter
Willmott’s (1966) study of adolescent boys in East London reported that
masturbation was “common, if not universal” (p. 54) among males between
the ages of twelve and fourteen. His study indicated that masturbation was
spoken about in terms of discovery or initiation into the domain of the sexual.
One of Willmott’s respondents spoke of masturbation in the following terms:
“I started at 14. When I first discovered it I went really mad over it. Then after
a while it turned me off a bit” (p. 54). Connell’s (1995) study also suggested
that masturbation plays a part in sexual learning for young males. One of
Connell’s respondents spoke of enjoying masturbation “too much”; the
intensity of pleasure was such that he felt compelled to stop for fear that it
would prevent him from enjoying sex with a woman (p. 104). Through mas-
turbation, young men learn about and experience sexual pleasure; however,
as Connell pointed out, they must then discipline their bodies to be heterosex-
ual, where desire is specifically associated with heterosexual sex rather than
with autoeroticism or homoeroticism.
In the conversations I conducted with young men in school, there was
acknowledgement that masturbation was a common practice that met with
routine acceptance and denial.
Christian: People have told me you go through a phase where you start, like,
wanking yourself off, stuff like that. I don’t think it’s true because I ain’t gone
through that phase yet and I don’t think I’m gonna.
Matthew: You don’t know though.
Adam: You don’t know that.
But don’t you think that’s one of the ways boys learn about sex?
All: [chorusing] Yeah, yeah.
Yeah man.
Admit it man.
You know, through finding sources that make them feel excited and—
Christian: Like the computer or something.
[laughs]
Matthew: Like my mate right, he’s always on the computer saying, “Look at this”
right and he gets mad excited over his computer.
Adam: The internet.
Justin: Consolation, that’s all it is, cut all that man, how people get like—obviously
they don’t care about sex. I know this boy who loves porno, guy’s mad about,
magazines everywhere, videos. He was telling me to watch one and I says,

“No, man, I ain’t watching that dirtiness,” getting excited for no reason, it ain’t
worth it.
In this exchange, the young men agree that masturbation forms part of
their sexual learning. Furthermore, they make a link between the bodily prac-
tice of masturbating and cultural resources such as pornographic magazines,
videos, and Internet pages. Justin appears keen to evaluate such forms of
excitement for young men as dirty, worthless, and second rate. His comments
draw a distinction between the “real thing,” intercourse with a woman, and
any simulations of it through pornography-fuelled fantasy. Justin’s domi-
nance in this discussion indicates that there is a need to recuperate sex as het-
erosexual and penetrative, a move that can reclaim heterosexuality as part of a
masculine identity. Rachel Thomson’s (1997) analysis of young men’s
accounts of pornography postulated that encounters with pornographic mate-
rial are “one of the ways in which young men are brought into identification
with a collective masculinity” (p. 2). In recounting their engagement with
pornographic material, Thomson documented the ways in which individual
young men attempt to evade agency by asserting that the magazine/video was
obtained or initiated by a friend or a group of mates or something they just
happen to stumble across. Significantly, both Justin and Matthew claim to
have a mate who is into porn while placing their own interests in such mate-
rial at a distance.
Thomson (1997) suggested that for young men, “there is something
potentially disempowering or emasculating about porn” (p. 10), as it involves
the practice of seeking sex without being desired. Justin’s insistence that por-
nography is “consolation,” a poor substitute for sex with a woman, can be
seen as an amplification of Thomson’s point. Negotiations with pornography
can be viewed as a way of policing the boundaries of acceptable masculinity
in which sexual pleasure is evaluated in hegemonic terms as male-female
intercourse. The recourse to such a hegemonic structure can be seen to have
disciplinary effects in the dynamics of masculine hierarchies.
Christian: I’ve never bought one, I’ve found one before, I’ve had a look, yeah, but
that’s all, I’ve never bought one.
[background jokes about Christian and porn]
Justin: This friend of mine, right, he’s got loads [of porn magazines] and I’ve
looked at them, nasty man, horrible. All them pictures man. I say put them
away, they don’t teach you nothing. He might get excited, but me, not exciting
or nothing. People who do that, man, they’re sad.
Christian: They’re sad, very sad.
[To Justin] And does he (your friend) have a girlfriend?
Justin: Yeah, he’s got a girlfriend, got a nice little woman. I wish I’d seen her, I’d
have liked her for myself. But them videos an’ stuff are nasty, man, they should
ban them videos.
Christian: Some people enjoy them though.

Justin: Yeah, but if a man watches them and they get all excited and then they turn it
off and they can’t get no ladies, that’s why they rape.
Christian: Can’t get no ladies that’s why men rape.
This discussion between Justin and Christian illustrates some of the ways
in which young men negotiate and evaluate masculinities in relation to issues
of sexuality. Investments in pornography are viewed as a bad thing. While it is
barely acceptable to engage with pornographic material, it is totally unac-
ceptable to buy it for oneself. Coveting your friend’s girlfriend is acceptable;
sharing his sexually stimulating literature is not. Men who use porn are
defined as sad, and having an attractive girlfriend, it seems, does nothing to
redeem them. Justin and Christian mobilize a moral discourse to underline
their view that porn is bad and dangerous. They suggest that there is a causal
relationship between pornography and rape. Men who use porn need women
as an outlet for their sexual urges, and if they cannot get a woman, they rape.
In male peer groups, young men shape the parameters of acceptable and
unacceptable sexual practice. Through such interactions, young men implic-
itly produce definitions of desire and deviance that can be used as a technique
for displaying certain versions of masculinity and deriding others.
CONSOLIDATING HETEROSEXUALITY:
RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN
Through engagements with sex talk, masturbation, and pornography,

young men constitute a version of heterosexuality that is associated with a
desirable masculinity. This heterosexual-masculine combination is negoti-
ated collectively by young men in peer group interactions and may be recon-
figured in different ways. Further discussions with this group of young men
suggest that it is in relationships with women that heterosexuality is actively
learned and consolidated. In this discussion, young men in the group criti-
cized their sex education in school as useless and a waste of time:
Would you have liked to have had a proper sex education?

Justin: Not now, it don’t make no difference to me.
Why’s that?
Justin: Umm, because, I taught myself.
So how did you teach yourself?
[muted laughter]
Justin: By getting a girlfriend.
Christian: And you explore her.
[mumbling from boys in the group]
Justin: Yeah, explore her and talk to her and learn about each other and you find out
about each other, you teach yourself. I can hear people, I dunno man, I think
they need a couple of lessons, think they need a couple of lessons.
Justin indicates that “getting a girlfriend” makes sexual learning possible.

Learning from girls, in the context of heterosexual relations, gives young
men access to knowledge that is highly prized and based on a “doing” that
enhances masculine identities. Talking to girls and having sex with them con-
solidates a privileged version of heterosexual masculinity. Here, females are
spoken about in terms of landscape—as strange uncharted territory that can
be explored and known. Seeking relationships with women in these terms
turns sexual learning into a form of territorial conquest that can be incorpo-
rated into the masculine repertoire. In this configuration, sexual knowledge is
acquired through doing, and doing gives young men status that makes them
feel powerful. This sense of male power and agency in the domain of the sex-
ual has been conceptualized from a feminist perspective as the power to con-
trol women. In this context, however, while controlling women may be
implicit, Justin uses power/knowledge as a way of controlling other young
men. His response to the undercurrent of boys’whispers and laughter implies
that experience gained through sexual relationships with women gives young
men confidence in the male peer group and the ability to put down others.
CONCLUSION
The consolidation of heterosexual masculinities through sexual activity

with young women can be seen in Connell’s (1995) terms as body-reflexive
practice—a circuit in which lived experience interacts with societal struc-
tures. The recognition accorded to male heterosexual activity may imply that
there is a comfortable relationship between dominant masculinities and male
bodily experience. However, the ethnographic evidence cited in this article
suggests that the links between heterosexuality and masculinity are not natu-
ral; they have to be naturalized through practices that incorporate them into a
particular version of masculinity. In this version, heterosexuality can be
viewed as central to an active masculinity premised on doing and displaying.
The young men I spoke with indicate that heterosexuality is constantly recu-
perated and drawn into the masculine repertoire through talk and action. For
these young men, heterosexuality is constituted for them through the prac-
tices of sex talk, masturbation, and pornography and consolidated in relation-
ships with young women.
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Foucault, M. 1978. The history of sexuality. Vol. 1, translated by R. Hurley. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin.
Guillaumin, C. 1993. The constructed body. In Reading the social body, edited by C. B. Bur-
roughs and J. D. Ehrenreich. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Haywood, C. 1996. Out of the curriculum: Sex talking, talking sex. Curriculum Studies 4 (2):
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Kehily, M. J., and A. Nayak. 1997. Lads and laughter: Humour and the production of heterosex-
ual hierarchies. Gender and Education 9 (1): 69-87.
Lees, S. 1993. Sugar and spice. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Mac an Ghaill, M. 1991. Schooling, sexuality and male power: Towards an emancipatory curric-
ulum. Gender and Education 3 (3): 291-309.
Thomson, R. 1997. “It was the way they were watching it”: Young men’s accounts of pornogra-
phy. Paper presented at the British Sociological Association annual conference, University
of York, April.
Thomson, R., and S. Scott. 1991. Learning about sex: Young women and the social construction
of sexual identity. London: Tufnell.
Willmott, P. 1966. Adolescent boys of East London. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Wood, J. 1984. Groping towards sexism: Boys’ sex talk. In Gender and generation, edited by
A. McRobbie and M. Nava. London: Macmillan.
Mary Kehily is an ethnographic researcher with interests in gender and sexuality, narra-
tive and identity, and popular culture. She is currently a lecturer in childhood studies at
the Open University in the United Kingdom and is the director of a research project that
is exploring young people’s perceptions of drugs and drug use.
Redman / DISCIPLINE OF LOVE
The Discipline of Love

Negotiation and Regulation in Boys’ Performance
of a Romance-Based Heterosexual Masculinity
PETER REDMAN
Open University
This article draws on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the relationship between
some of the more implicit disciplinary dimensions of schooling and a group of boys’
investments in heterosexual romance. It argues that romance provided the boys with a
cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set of discursive practices—through
which they negotiated and made imaginative sense of the “little cultural world” of their
college. In particular, the article suggests that romance served to police and discipline
relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the pupils’ culture while providing
for the boys a mode of subjective orientation to key disciplinary practices of schooling.
As such, romance may be seen as a resource through which the boys “worked themselves
into” the dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus.
Key words: romance, heterosexual masculinities, disciplinary practices, dialogics, cul-

tural negotiation
Nick: There was one day I spent the whole day with her. . . . I got over to her
house, and it was a really warm sunny day, and because [of where she lived,]
there was loads of fields around so we went off for a walk in the woods and
up into a field—a sort of weed field [laughs]—a cornfield or something like
that. And we just lay down in the grass and just messed about, you know,
having a kiss and just lying there talking to each other and stuff and it was
really, really great—a really great feeling. I’ve never experienced anything
quite like it, you know, it was almost like I say, “Mills and Boon.” It was like
“running through fields of corn” sort of thing, you know, it was like that.
But . . . I mean, that day was just really really special. It was really good.
I met Nick, the source of this quotation, while conducting a series of fif-
teen in-depth qualitative interviews focusing on boys’ experiences of hetero-
sexual relationships.1 As the quotation suggests, Nick, who was sixteen at the
time, had profound investments in romantic love. Over the course of three
separate meetings, he told me the details of an intense, and intensely
mourned, relationship that he had had the summer he left compulsory educa-
tion. I found Nick’s accounts of this relationship strangely moving, perhaps
186
Redman / DISCIPLINE OF LOVE 187
because I had expected the boys I interviewed to display a more sexually

predatory attitude toward girls. This is not to say that such attitudes were
absent. For instance, Nick told me of his experiences of one-night stands and
“copping off” (a term that encompasses anything from kissing to penetrative
sex but that does not imply a necessary commitment to a relationship).
Clearly, romance existed in parallel with a number of other relationship prac-
tices. Nevertheless, being in love figured strongly in Nick’s imagination and
profoundly shaped what he wanted from his relationships. Moreover, Nick
was not atypical of the boys I interviewed. Romance, it would seem, was a
common currency among them.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in romance as a subject of
sociological and cultural critique (see, for example, Featherstone 1999;
Pearce and Wisker 1998). In particular, a number of commentators have
begun to explore men’s investments in romantic love (see, for example,
Longhurst 1998; Oswell 1998; Rutherford 1999). In the course of this article,
I aim to add to this debate, but I propose to do so from a very specific starting
point, that is, by exploring the relationship between the boys’ use of romance
and some of the central disciplinary dimensions of schooling. Understood in
purely conventional terms, the subject of school-based discipline may appear
to have very little to do with heterosexual romance. After all, conventionally,
discipline refers to the formal procedures and sanctions through which the
school seeks to enforce particular standards of behavior. However, as a num-
ber of the other articles in this special issue demonstrate, discipline can be
understood in terms that are somewhat wider than this.
The key figure here is, of course, Michel Foucault, whose work on disci-
plinary practices has substantially revised thinking on this topic (see, in par-
ticular, Foucault 1977). Following Foucault, it has become increasingly com-
monplace to analyze schooling as a disciplinary regime, consisting of
“human technologies” operationalized through instruments of hierarchical
observation, normalizing judgments, and examination and training (see, for
example, the contributors to Ball 1990). In this vein, Nikolas Rose (1996)
wrote the following:
Human technologies are hybrid assemblages of knowledges, instruments, per-

sons, systems of judgement, buildings and spaces, underpinned at the pro-
grammatic level by certain presuppositions about, and objectives for, human
beings. One can regard the school, the prison, the asylum as examples of one
species of such technologies, those which Foucault termed disciplinary and
which operate in terms of a detailed structuring of space, time and relations
amongst individuals, through procedures of hierarchical observation and nor-
malizing judgement, through attempts to enfold these judgments into the pro-
cedures and judgements which the individual utilizes in order to conduct their
own. (P. 132)
From this perspective, a wide variety of schooling practices—for example,

setting, streaming, forms of assessment and examination, the spatial and tem-
poral organization of the school day, formal and informal codes of conduct,
and so on—can be termed disciplinary in that their aim is to produce a partic-
ular type of person (primarily, the self-disciplined and efficient scholar) via
specific techniques of ordering and categorization.
One of the central aims of this article is, then, to explore the relationship
between the boys’ cultures of romance and key disciplinary practices of the
college in which the interviews took place. However, as is perhaps indicated
by the term culture in the preceding sentence, my argument is not intended to
be explicitly Foucauldian in its theoretical orientations. Rather, I seek to trace
the ways in which disciplinary practices are negotiated by pupils’ cultures.
This argument follows a number of studies that, while influenced by
Foucault, have tended to read him through a broadly culturalist perspective,
focusing attention on the interactions between the disciplinary practices of
schooling, the gendered and (hetero)sexualized subject positions they
encode and produce, and the ways in which these are lived and negotiated in
pupils’ cultures (see, for example, Connell 1993; Epstein and Johnson 1997;
Mac an Ghaill 1994; Skeggs 1991; Wolpe 1988). In this light, the article
argues that the boys’ use of heterosexual romance can be seen as a means of
negotiating, making imaginative sense of, or composing a subjective orienta-
tion toward key aspects of the disciplinary practices of schooling, in particu-
lar the age hierarchization involved in the transition from compulsory educa-
tion and the individualizing drive of the “A”-level curriculum.2
If Foucault’s (1977) notion of disciplinary regime provides the article with
one entry point into a wider conceptualization of the disciplinary dimensions
of schooling, a second is to be found in the argument that gender and sexual
identities are inherently relational (see, for example, Dollimore 1991; Sedg-
wick 1985; Woodward 1997). As is well known, much work in this area has
been informed by a structuralist or poststructuralist emphasis on the central-
ity of difference to meaning (for an overview, see Hall 1996). However, an
alternative account is to be found in the dialogic conception of language and
social identity that is central to the work of the Leningrad circle (see, in par-
ticular, Bakhtin 1981; Volosinov 1973). As Volosinov (1973) famously
argued,
a word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge
depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is a territory
shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his [sic] interlocu-
tor. (P. 86)
The importance of this dialogic conception of language lies in the implica-

tion that our ability to speak from a particular social position or to lay claim to
a particular way of naming our experience is inextricably bound up with
power relations, specifically, the forms of social recognition that are avail-
able to us. Equally, from this perspective, the act of speaking from a particular
position of power can be said to confer recognition on or withhold it from oth-
ers. Ken Plummer’s (1995) study of the “sociology of stories” provides com-
pelling illustrations of this argument. For instance, he suggested that identity
of the survivor of marital rape or child sexual abuse became available to
women and children only in the 1970s and 1980s following the success of
feminist struggles to “put into discourse” women’s and children’s experience
of sexual violence. Previously, these experiences had lacked either a social
vocabulary through which they could be named or an audience willing and
able to validate them. As a result, Plummer (1995, 58) argued, they had been
literally unspeakable.
From this dialogic perspective, heterosexual masculinities—like all social
identities—can be viewed as deeply relational and struggled over, involving
intricate assertions of likeness to and difference from key social others, asser-
tions that are sometimes affirmed and sometimes contested. The argument to
be advanced in the second part of this article is, then, that romance provided
the boys in the study with a means of locating themselves (and thereby con-
structing a heterosexual masculine identity) in relation to a cast of hierarchi-
cally arranged social others. More particularly, I argue that this process had a
disciplinary function. Romance, I will suggest, was one way in which the
boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality were policed within the
pupils’ culture. It served to assert and validate a particular and socially pow-
erful kind of masculinity—white, heteronormative, and professional or mid-
dle class—that simultaneously contested (and in some cases, punished) those
forms of masculinity and femininity that failed to complement it.
This professional or middle-class version of heterosexual masculinity
made available by romance is at the heart of the article’s argument. Romance,
I will suggest, provided the boys with a route into a new form of masculinity,
one that in validating academic prowess and individualism orientated the
boys toward a professional and middle-class future. Of course, I am not sug-
gesting that romance can be “read off ” from the disciplinary practices of
schooling or that it is always deployed in the service of a professional or middle-
class version of heterosexual masculinity. Clearly, romance can and does
have a variety of meanings in a variety of contexts. However, I do argue that,
for these particular boys, romance played an important role in the means by
which they organized a gendered and heterosexualized sense of self and that
the forms and practices of schooling were deeply implicated in this.
ROMANCE AND THE DISCIPLINARY

PRACTICES OF SCHOOLING
As I have suggested, it is possible to argue that the boys’ investments in

romance were, at least in part, a means of negotiating, making imaginative
sense of, or composing a subjective orientation toward the disciplinary prac-
tices of the college. At least two factors lend credence to this argument. First,
investments in romance appeared to take on a particular salience in the boys’
transition, at the age of sixteen, from compulsory, secondary education to
A-level study in a sixth-form college. Second, romance appeared to be
closely bound up with a newly acquired sense of individuality that mirrored
the highly individualized demands of the A-level curriculum.
While a number of the boys reported having had relationships at the sec-
ondary level and earlier, there appeared to be a qualitative difference between
many of these and the relationships contracted at college and the latter years
of secondary schooling. In particular, relationships occurring in years 11, 12,
and 13 (that is, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen) were more likely to
involve greater levels of mutuality, commitment, intensity of emotion, and
sexual activity. Some sense of this can be gained from the following
exchange with Dan, a seventeen-year-old and self-confessed reformed
antischool rebel:
PR: You’ve had previous relationships that you describe as, like, having “proper”
girlfriends, erh, that were obviously less intense than [more recent relation-
ships]. Were they similar in terms of being organized round feelings or were
they more physical or what?
Dan: Not physical at all, really. Erm, I don’t know, I think it was more a case of,
“I’ve got a girlfriend, you haven’t” kind of thing. I know that sounds really bad
but, erh, I don’t know, you get pressures, especially when you’re that young and
you go, “Oh, you haven’t had a snog yet,” that kind of thing. And you’ve just
got to shut your friends up really.
PR: Right, so what kind of age are we talking about?
Dan: Second to fourth year [years 8 to 10]. And then in the fifth year it’s, “Ah,
whose slept with who?” and, “Oh, you haven’t slept with anyone.” And now it’s
not anything, ’cause like, hey, everyone’s grown up.
As Dan suggests, particularly in the earlier years of secondary school, sex-

ual and romantic relationships with girls appeared to be closely bound up
with the assertion of a heterosexualized masculine competence. While not
free from such assertions, relationships in the latter years of secondary school
and, more particularly, at the college level seemed more complex and more
focused on closeness and the experience of being in love. This point was
made by Dan in the following terms:
Yeah, I mean, now it’s sort of—if you exclude all the sex bit—it’s just like hav-
ing, being a friend with somebody who you care about and who you hope cares
about you. . . . With the girls before—third, fourth, fifth year—you would just
go round to their house and watch TV [or] go out somewhere—party, pub,
somewhere like that.
It is thus possible to argue that the shift toward more serious romantic rela-
tionships—which, among the boys interviewed, began around years 11 and 12—
can be understood as being centrally related to the transition from compul-
sory education. Age stratification is an important feature of the disciplinary
practices of schooling, involving, as it does, the discursive construction of
age as a claimed marker of developing “mental capacities” (see, for example,
Walkerdine 1984). However, it is clear that age stratification also affects
pupils’ cultures. In particular, leaving school would appear to mark a key rite
of passage or cultural transition from childhood into the early adult world,
one that is likely to have resonance for young people even where it leads to
further and higher education, training, or unemployment rather than the more
traditional working-class route of trade apprenticeship or employment in
local industry. In fact, Dan commented explicitly on this issue:
Dan: I think you grow up a lot when you get to college. Just in stupid little
things like, you don’t see any fights, or you don’t, you don’t see anybody
messing around. . . . I think you do undergo a lot of changes. I mean, for me
it would be the way I dressed—the way I used to dress—and just my manner
I suppose. Before my sense of humor used to be very immature. And I mean
it was good in school because you could get a laugh out of everybody, and it
was really easy. But now it seems everyone has moved on a step so you’ve
gotta move on a step and sort of grow up really.
In this context, it can be argued that heterosexual romance can act as a

resource through which to “make up” a new, more adult form of heterosexual
masculinity. From this perspective, the boys’ investments in serious
romance—with its emphasis on the connotatively adult attributes of commit-
ment, mutuality, emotional intimacy, and penetrative sex—can be under-
stood as part of their attempt to work themselves into a new age-related cul-
tural identity, one demarcated by the transition from compulsory education.
However, it is also possible to argue that the boys’ investments in romance
had something to do with the highly individualized nature of an academic
sixth form. A striking feature of some of the boys’ talk about their romantic
relationships was the fact that they involved a move away from a strong
homosocial identification and male friendship group and a reorganization of
time, allegiance, and identity around their new girlfriends. For instance,
Chris commented as follows:
Well, to my [male] friends, they think I’ve turned into a real swot and I hardly
go out with them now and it’s all because of her really. . . . They don’t think I’m
so much of a lad any more, because I’ve got my girlfriend. . . . I don’t go out
with them as much, like go out to the town to go to the pub or something, but I
do hang around with them at college, . . . because I don’t want to def them out
[that is, betray them].
Similarly, Philip used the acceptance of romantic coupledom at college as an

example of a new individuality in college-based pupils’ culture compared
with the pupils’ cultures of secondary school. He said, “[At college,] you
wouldn’t have people talking about two people going out anymore—so
[there’s] a lot more respect for individuality once you’ve left school.” This
suggests that being in a heterosexual relationship was part of a new
micro-cultural formation in which notions of individuality became closely
bound to the articulation of a form of heterosexual masculinity “appropriate”
to the specific context of the college.
A driving force behind this individualization might be found in the content
and processes of the formal curriculum. All the boys I interviewed were,
more or less, voluntarily studying for A levels, and all expected to go on to
university. As a result, they had bought in to a highly competitive and strati-
fied assessment process and a limited and specialized grouping of subject
areas. Through its emphasis on the production of single-authored written
work in continuous assessment and examination, the A-level curriculum is
expressly organized to demarcate candidates on the basis of individual aca-
demic aptitude and performance. While this is also true in earlier years of
schooling, for those opting into the A-level system, the stakes are somewhat
higher. A-level certification not only rewards or punishes individual aca-
demic achievement or failure, it simultaneously controls access to higher
education in the United Kingdom and, thus, the forms of cultural, social, and
economic opportunity and power this confers—in particular, potential access
to a high-waged, middle-class employment future.
Moreover, the specialized nature of A-level choices (for university
entrance, candidates tend to take two or more courses in discrete subject
areas) arguably reinforces the individualizing character of A-level assess-
ment and examination. “Doing A levels” means making an identification
with particular disciplinary areas, ones that are likely to shape future univer-
sity choices and career options. Thus, in very concrete ways, choosing
A-level subjects entails a narrowing of options and a life-shaping decision
about who to be in the future.
In the sixth-form college where I conducted the study, these individualiz-
ing tendencies were further strengthened by aspects of the informal curricu-
lum. One of the teachers described the college as a halfway house between
school and university, being more relaxed than school and more structured
than university. This more relaxed approach was reflected in such matters as
students being expected to work to a certain extent as independent learners,
having a more equal relationship with teachers than they would at secondary
school, and being allowed to wear their own clothes and smoke in designated
areas. Similarly, rather than being overt and external, discipline was largely
focused on producing “disciplined subjects” (Foucault 1977), students’

being expected to control their own behavior in accordance with recognized
norms.
In the context of an academically orientated sixth-form college, it is, then,
hardly surprising that the boys’ I interviewed were actively engaged in pro-
ducing new, more individualized ways of being. Of course, this found expres-
sion in a variety of things other than romance. For instance, the boys were
often noticeably invested in academic work. As Dan commented,
You don’t need to be here. If you don’t like the lessons you can just get up and
walk out. I mean, it won’t do you a lot of good. . . . But you’ve got that option.
You don’t have to be here. . . . And I think that makes a lot of people think, why
am I messing around? I’m the only one whose going to be wasting two years.
More implicitly, the students’ culture in the college appeared to place a

high priority on its own form of individuality articulated through a self-
consciously “student” or “bohemian” style organized around street fashion
and popular music but also the use of specific drugs (especially, cannabis,
alcohol, and tobacco) and, to a lesser extent, overtly intellectual, political, or
artistic interests (see Aggleton 1987; and Mac an Ghaill 1994, for parallel
school-based cultural formations). This version of individuality was explic-
itly articulated by Philip, who commented,
Erm, I think at a sixth form college . . . sort of, people will respect you for what
you are. You don’t have to, you don’t feel so much of a need to conform and its
less sort of, erm, less sort of frowned upon if you’re different. I mean, one of the
things I noticed, you could wear anything you like and nobody would say any-
thing, nobody would breathe a word. And you can listen to any sort of music or
things like that. I suppose it was just in the variety and, sort of, in a broad sort of
way, people was more accepting it a lot more.
Thus, the pupils’ culture in the college can be seen to have validated such
attributes as a perceived self-expression in clothes and music, creativity, and,
to a certain extent, an acceptance of diversity.
In this light, the boys’ increased investments in romance can be located in
a wider negotiation of the disciplinary practices of the college. The move
away from a more or less exclusively homosocial life to one much more orga-
nized around a heterosexual couple can be understood as indexing a more
general shift toward individualized modes of masculine identity. In turn, it is
plausible to argue that these shifts are orientated toward the acquisition of
middle-class or professional forms of cultural and economic capital.
Although mass higher education in the United Kingdom may be slowly
changing the status of degrees, at the time of the study, A-level certification
held out the promise of university entrance and, thereafter, access to a profes-
sional or managerial career and to forms of cultural capital associated with an
educated elite. Thus, it is possible to suggest that romance was being used by
the boys as part of a wider process in which they sought to work themselves
into a version of masculinity orientated toward a middle-class or professional
“habitus” (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). If we understand habitus to refer to the
socially acquired cluster of “dispositions” (from outlooks, opinions, and
habitual ways of categorizing the world to inflections of speech and modes of
deportment) that make up the “taken for granted” cultural world of a particu-
lar social group, then the boys’ increasing investments in romance and other
more individualized cultural practices suggest an attempt to assert and
achieve social recognition for a masculine identity spoken through the
habitus of a social elite, one coded as middle class, heteronormative, and
almost inevitably white.
HETEROSEXUAL ROMANCE AND THE POLICING

OF IDENTITIES IN THE PUPILS’ CULTURE
As suggested in the introduction, if heterosexual romance was implicated

in the means by which the boys sought to produce a new heterosexual mascu-
line identity in response to their transition from compulsory education and
the disciplinary practices of the A-level curriculum, then it was inevitably the
case that this version of masculinity existed in a dialogic relationship with a
number of key social others. In the work of the Leningrad circle, the bound-
aries of the category “social others” is drawn deliberately wide, encompass-
ing whole social groups and publics as well as the immediate addressees of
micro-interactions. In this vein, Bakhtin (1986) argued,
An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being

directed to someone, its addressivity. . . . This addressee can be an immediate
participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of
specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or less
differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, like-minded people,
opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower,
higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can also be an indefinite
unconcretized other. (P. 95)
From this perspective, the most obvious addressee for a romantic version of
masculine identity was the middle-class habitus from which the boys sought
recognition and in whose terms they were seeking to produce themselves.
However, they doubtless sought recognition from other, more immediate,
addressees, for example, other boys in the college who inhabited similar ver-
sions of masculinity, individual teachers, and elements of the college’s for-
mal culture (for example, validation of their academic ability in terms of high
grades, college prizes, and so on).
At the same time as the boys’ enactment of a romance-based heterosexual

masculinity sought recognition from specific addressees, it clearly afforded
recognition to and withheld it from social others. These processes are partic-
ularly important to the current argument because they are central to the means
by which romance can be said to be implicated in the policing and disciplin-
ing of the gender and sexual relations of the pupils’ culture. Perhaps the most
obvious social other to whom a romantic masculinity was addressed was that
of the “lad,” a masculine identity characterized by its sexual objectification of
women, commitment to homosociability and homophobia, and oppositional
or casual attitude to school (see Willis 1977; Mac an Ghaill 1994).
The dialogic relation between the romantic hero and the lad was referred
to explicitly by Chris (quoted above) when he commented, “to my [male]
friends, . . . they don’t think I’m so much of a lad any more, because I’ve got
my girlfriend.” Discovering a serious romantic relationship appeared to have
similar consequences for Ed, who commented,
And by the Christmas when I was sort of hanging around sort of more or less
exclusively with my girlfriend, outside school, because I’d really got fed up
with all, just being drunk all the time and just being generally idiotic, you
know? . . . and then after I had been going out with her for a while, you know, . . .
it just made me realize what a bunch of sexist, chauvinist idiots they [his male
friends] all were.
Intriguingly, in narrating themselves in terms of romance, both Chris and Ed

appear to position themselves in ways culturally coded as feminine. Ed
rejected the sexism of his male friends; Chris became more scholarly (“they
think I’ve turned into a real swot”). Such sentiments echo the domestication
or feminization of the romantic hero in the conventional romance genre. For
example, Mr. Rochester, the prototypical romantic hero of Jane Eyre (Brontë
1847), marries the eponymous Jane only after being rendered dependent by
losing his sight in a terrible fire.
Chris’s and Ed’s responses thus suggest that, in this context, the feminized
or domesticated identity of the romantic lover was in dialogue with, spoke
against, and sought to replace the lad as an alternative masculine identity.
However, the extent to which this can be understood in class and ethnic terms
is open to question. Chris clearly saw “laddishness” as an alternative mascu-
line identity, one that was open to him and his friends as white, middle-class
boys. On the other hand, Willis’s (1977) classic work on this subject under-
lined the extent to which the attributes of laddishness (in particular, its
antischool bias) connote a working-class cultural opposition to intellectual
production and an affirmation of the value of manual labor and homosocial
solidarity. In this light, it may be possible to argue that the boys’ self-
conscious opposition to the lad did have class connotations and was part of
their attempt to work themselves into the dispositions of a middle-class or

professional habitus. Since this habitus is almost inevitably coded as white, it
is equally possible to argue that it “speaks” whiteness, even if implicitly. This
argument need not imply that laddishness and romance have a necessary
class or ethnic belonging. Rather, it suggests that, for the boys concerned, the
identity of the romantic hero could be deployed as a resource and given spe-
cific class and ethnic inflections as they negotiated both the “little cultural
world” of the college and wider social relations.
The fact that the boys used romance to locate themselves in opposition to
the figure of the lad does not, however, indicate that it placed them beyond the
boundaries of heterosexual power relations. On the contrary, romance was
deeply implicated in the reproduction of these. Some of the boys interviewed
did position themselves inside antisexist and antiheterosexist discourse. This
is apparent in the quotation from Ed (see above) in which he explicitly con-
nects the fact of having a girlfriend with his growing awareness that his for-
mer male friends were “a bunch of sexist, chauvinist idiots.” However, while
romance can clearly accommodate and perhaps reinforce forms of
antisexism and antiheterosexism, there is nothing inevitable about this. In the
course of the interviews, several of the boys made explicitly homophobic
comments or displayed explicit homophobic anxieties. Dan, for instance,
related a tale of queer bashing with evident relish, while another boy, Matt,
expressed anxiety about two friends widely perceived as gay.3 He said,
I mean, if they—if it turned out they were gay then fine, but I don’t like the fact
they’re openly - that they were openly sexual in front of us. I didn’t think it was
appropriate at all. . . . Like, people started talking about them round the college,
saying, “he’s strange, he’s strange.” And I didn’t really want to be branded with
their—tarred with the same brush sort of thing. . . . My opinion is that if they’ve
[got] their emotional feelings [then] they are natural, they can’t help them,
they’ve got them. But, I mean, their acts, the acts they commit is unnatural.
That’s obvious because . . . what they use wasn’t meant for that.
Equally, it is arguable that the vocabulary of romance made available to

the boys a means of positioning girls as less powerful than themselves. While
the boundaries of the romance genre are necessarily subject to pressure and
change (see, for example, Stacey and Pearce 1995), the relationship stories
told by the boys demonstrated a frequent—although not uniform—attach-
ment to traditional romance conventions. Conventional romance narratives
(see Belsey 1994) tend to revolve round an active hero who must overcome a
series of obstacles, including the temptations of an “inappropriate” (because
too sexual or too powerful) love object before finally winning the hand of a
“true” love (traited as pure and passive). The following is a relationship story
told by Nick in which he deploys romance conventions (including overcom-
ing various obstacles and confusions) to cast himself as a questing romantic
hero and to position the two girls involved as variously forward and pure:
Nick: I never thought she’d go out with me. At the beginning.

PR: Mmm. . . . Why was that?
Nick: Because I thought she was well out of my league. Because her friend at the
time, Mandy, was reckoned to be a lot prettier than she was. And she was a very
nice girl, you know, she fancied me. And she made a lot of hints towards me,
but I couldn’t sense the hints because I was fixed on Helen. I actually asked her
out because I thought she was a nice girl.
PR: Who? You asked Mandy out?
Nick: No Helen, and Mandy was very upset about it. But Helen wasn’t. . . . She fan-
cied me but she never made it known. She didn’t think I’d go out with her be-
cause I was above her station you see. So I thought she was better than me; and
she thought I was better than her.
PR: Oh right, and what was it about her that made you think she was out of your
league, what in particular?
Nick: Because she wasn’t like Mandy. Mandy was, you know, she’d be touching
me all the time, you know, like, you know. And you can sense, you know, bla-
tant hints like that, you know? Helen was very reserved and she was very pure,
almost. But she didn’t make her feelings known towards me because she
thought I fancied Mandy. Which wasn’t the case.
PR: When you say she was “pure” was that part of the attraction?
Nick: Yeah, she was so innocent to an extent. She’d had experience, like, with
other lads but not a full relationship sort of experience. And that posed a chal-
lenge almost. But like I was saying before, I only asked her out because I
thought she was a nice girl, I thought she was nice. Sex wasn’t on my mind at
all. It just didn’t play a part. I didn’t even think it would last that long but it re-
ally did. I really hit the nail on the head, I got it, what I wanted, bang on, you
know. But I wasn’t out for it, if you know what I mean. . . . It was just one day
she was there. She was really nice, I wasn’t really friends, I didn’t speak to her
and say, okay we’re friends, I’d like to go out with you. I run up to here. I was in
chemistry—I was talking to my friend John—I run up to her after the lesson. I
was frantic, I was trying to find her because I’d really worked myself up to ask
her out. So I really was expecting a rejection. And I ran outside and she was just
walking along and I skidded on my knees and got on one knee and said, will
you go out with me? And she was like really taken aback. And like loads of peo-
ple were watching. And she went red, like, and said, “Oh I don’t know. I’ll have
to think about it.” I was like, “Damn” you know. . . . And erh. . . . She thought I
was actually taking the mickey. She thought I was joking. And she rang me that
night, she said she’d speak to me tomorrow, but she rang me that night after
speaking to her friend, Sara, and erh . . . she said, “Yeh, it’s true.” And she rang
me back, and she said, “As long as you’re not joking,” and I said, “No, I’m not,”
and that was it [laughs].
This use of romantic genre conventions—clearly echoing paradigmatic

examples of the genre such as Jane Eyre—suggests the ways in which con-
ventional romance can be deployed to define and limit the boundaries of an
“acceptable” femininity as well as to assert a more powerful masculinity. In
the process of telling the story, Nick can be seen to be positioning himself in a
romantic heterosexual masculinity that is both active and powerful and that is
defined in opposition to Helen’s acceptable femininity (traited as pure and
innocent) and Mandy’s unacceptable femininity (Mandy is traited as the
“base foil” against which the “truth” of Nick and Helen’s love can be demon-
strated). This is not to say that girls accept or leave uncontested this version of
heterosexual gender relations (although they may also, to some extent, buy in
to it) or, as was suggested by the example of Ed (cited above), that boys them-
selves are not capable of questioning it. However, it does indicate the ways in
which the narrative practices of heterosexual romance can operate to “disci-
pline” and regulate relations of gender and sexuality in local cultural sites by
granting recognition to and withholding it from different versions of
femininity.
In light of the above, it is clearly possible to argue that the narrative prac-
tices of romance appeared in dialogue with a range of social others, including
the lad, the Madonna, the whore, and the queer. As such, it can be argued that
romance served as a regulatory or disciplinary repertoire, policing class, gen-
der, and sexual relations in the college. Romance appeared to define a rela-
tional subject position for the boys, one that sought to claim a range of attrib-
utes to itself—agency, authority, sexual probity, maturity, masculinity,
cultural capital—while distributing disparaged qualities among those others
against which it defined itself.
CONCLUSION
In the course of this article, I have sketched some of the ways in which
romance both negotiated and acted as a disciplinary or regulatory practice in
the life of a group of boys in an English sixth-form college. Romance, I have
suggested, provided a cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set
of discursive practices—through which the boys performatively enacted a
particular version of heterosexual masculinity (Butler 1990, 1993). As sug-
gested in the introduction, this argument necessarily involves an expansion of
conventional ways of thinking about school-based discipline, suggesting the
need to address the ways in which masculinities are produced in relation to
both disciplinary practices (in its Foucauldian sense) and the forms of
contestation and policing that occur informally in pupils’ cultures. In this
vein, I have sought to argue that romance negotiated or helped make imagina-
tive sense of the transition from compulsory education and the individualiz-
ing aspects of the A-level curriculum while policing those forms of identity
validated in the pupils’ culture of the college. As such I suggest that romance
may be seen as a resource through which the boys worked themselves into the
dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus. In the process, they
can be said to have been constructing a subjective orientation toward the
forms of economic and cultural capital promised by A-level certification and
entrance to higher education.
NOTES
1. I conducted fifteen in-depth qualitative interviews with ten boys ages sixteen to eighteen
years between December 1993 and April 1994. I met and interviewed the boys—all of whom
self-identified as white, English, and heterosexual—while carrying out research (with Debbie
Epstein) on pupils’sexual cultures (see Redman 1996). The majority of the interviews took place
on a one-to-one basis in a private room in the sixth-form college the boys attended. This particu-
lar sixth-form college was situated in a mainly white, middle-class suburb of a large English city
and catered to postcompulsory education students. The interviews lasted forty-five minutes to
two hours and were taped and transcribed. All details have been anonymized. It is impossible in
an article of this length to provide sufficient detail for readers to assess the rigor of the research.
Anyone interested is directed to chapter 4 of Redman (1999), which includes full details and an
extensive evaluation of the research method.
2. In the United Kingdom, compulsory education ends in year 11 (at age sixteen). In England
and Wales, the main academic qualification available to students after this is the A-level certifi-
cation, which involves two years of study in specialized academic subjects. A levels (and their
equivalents in Scotland) are the main entry route into U.K. universities at the age of eighteen.
3. For further discussion of this theme, see Redman (2000).
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Schacht / BEING AN OPPRESSOR
ESSAY
Teaching about Being an Oppressor

Some Personal and Political Considerations
STEVEN P. SCHACHT
Plattsburgh State University of New York
I believe the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are
put together, and all their different meanings make a new one. Each writer
writes the missing parts of the other writer’s story. And the whole truth is what I
am after.
—Alice Walker (1983, 49)
Women’s studies programs have been established on the vast majority of

college and university campuses in the United States over the past twenty-
five years. While the founding and continued existence of these programs has
frequently been met with resistance, they have also realized untold successes.
Women’s studies programs have seriously challenged every academic disci-
pline’s conceptualizations of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. These
programs have also reinvigorated several fields of studies’ ongoing dia-
logues— many of which had long since grown tired and stale. Correspond-
ingly, it has been one of the fastest growing academic fields. In many ways,
women’s studies has forever changed the face of academia.
A perhaps somewhat latent but nevertheless important outcome of this
transformation has been the impact that women’s studies (and feminism in
general) has had on people like myself. That is, being a white, heterosexual1
male from an upper-middle-class background meant that I was born into a
social status that afforded me limitless opportunities to obtain immeasurable
amounts of male prestige, privilege, power, and concordant wealth. Yet, as I
enter my middle-age years (often another privileged male social status in our
society), I find myself covertly and overtly rejecting the oppressive roles a
male-dominated society has cast for me and replacing them with a feminist
center and personal way of being (Schacht and Ewing 1998; Schacht 2000a).
Author’s Note: I thank Michael Kimmel and the participants of my sociology of men and sociol-
ogy of women courses this past semester (spring 2000) for their helpful comments and sugges-
tions on an earlier version of this article.
201
This article explores my attempts as a white male to meaningfully contrib-

ute to the women’s studies programs on the various campuses I have taught
and to the larger feminist movement. Recognizing that I must travel a dispa-
rate path than women to realize a feminist worldview (Schacht and Ewing
1997), I similarly acknowledge that as a male (pro)feminist2 instructor, the
potential contribution I can make to women’s studies is also quite different
than the one female instructors can make (Schacht 2000b). The experiential
knowledge I bring into my classes is very much that of an incredibly privi-
leged societal member (Haraway 1988). While being privileged has signifi-
cantly decreased the likelihood of me being oppressed—as defined by Young
(1988), I honestly can claim no experiences of being oppressed—it has corre-
spondingly increased the likelihood of me being an oppressor. That is, both in
action and mere presence, much of my life has been spent being oppressive to
others. Accordingly, much of my privilege and status has been purchased at
the expense of societal subordinates, as they were the real estate and obvious
requisites for me being superior and doing masculinity: it was through the
humiliation and degradation of others (sometimes in the form of their bruised
and bloodied bodies),3 the resultant terror and pain in their eyes, and the typi-
cal powerlessness and helplessness of their response that I came to experi-
ence and fallaciously believe myself to be superior to so many others.
A great deal of what feminists have written about and what is taught in
women’s studies courses, however, is about experiences of being oppressed
and the unjust basis of these all-too-common societal realities. Since I lack
any experiences of being oppressed, it would initially appear that I would
have little to contribute to women’s and other subordinated people’s emanci-
pation. Yet, I believe that it is exactly through my experiences of being an
oppressor that I can contribute to the creation of a more just world. By telling
my different story of the how’s and why’s of being an oppressor, I hope to
become a meaningful collaborator in the “whole story being written,” ulti-
mately done in hopes that new, nonoppressive stories might be envisioned
and acted on.
ON BEING MALE AND OVERPRIVILEGED
As I have written elsewhere (Schacht 2000a, 2000b), I increasingly try to

teach my classes using a feminist pedagogy. This has meant that both the
materials I use in my all my courses and the way I approach the classroom
have changed significantly over the past fifteen years that I have been teach-
ing. While I have previously explored in detail how I have personally bene-
fited from a feminist instructional approach and students’ positive responses
to my attempts, I have yet to clearly consider what exactly it is that I am per-
sonally trying to accomplish as a man professing feminism in my classes.
Schacht / BEING AN OPPRESSOR 203
There are obviously numerous ways I could answer this question. More-
over, I would guess that many of my answers would be quite consistent with
what women feminist instructors hope to accomplish in their classes. Ulti-
mately, however, I hope to teach the participants in my courses that the reason
that women, people of color, the poor, and so forth are truly disadvantaged is
that certain individuals, such as myself, are truly overprivileged in our soci-
ety. More specifically, combining the feminist materials I use in my classes
that explore the various ways certain people are categorically oppressed and
exploited with my experiences as a white male from an upper-middle-class
background, I attempt to share with the participants in my courses the ways in
which much of the privilege that has been conferred on me has been
unearned, how I have benefited from others’ oppression, the often unjust
nature of the rewards I have received, and what I am personally trying to do to
change this.
Peggy McIntosh (2000), in her classic and frequently reprinted article,
“White Privilege and Male Privilege,” explored the numerous ways that
white people enjoy unearned skin privilege. Since I frequently use this article
in my classes, I believe it provides an excellent model of how I attempt to
explain the oppressive basis of my being (male, in particular, as this is the pri-
mary focus of my article) to the participants in my classes. Her article listed
numerous (although far from exhaustive) ways that her being white confers
unearned privilege to her on a daily basis. As she also noted, the conditions
she chooses “attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, reli-
gion, ethnic status, or geographical location,” and, as far as she can tell, her
“African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances . . . cannot count
on most of these conditions” (p. 477).
In her analysis, McIntosh (2000) made the important distinction between
“positive advantages” and “negative advantages.” Positive advantages are
things such as adequate housing, nutrition, and health care that all people
should be entitled to. As she argued, we should work to extend these types of
advantages to all people and make them the norms of a just society. Since
many of these positive advantages, however, are only available to certain peo-
ple, they remain an unearned and unfair privilege. On the other hand, negative
types of advantage are ones that, because of certain people’s blind acceptance
of and/or unwillingness to reject them, further reinforce the hierarchical real-
ities of our society. These are privileges that not only subordinate and oppress
people but also often further reinforce and enhance the status of the dominant
party who is exercising them.
Although I explore both types of advantages in my classes, I most strongly
emphasize the negative privileges that men have bestowed upon women in
our society. The following list is a sampling of status-conferring conditions I
discuss in my classes that through my own past experiences—as either a wit-
ness or an active participant—I have learned I can count on during any given
day. As such, although academic research can be found in support of all these
conditions, since they are based on my experiences, I accordingly prefer to
list them as just that, my observations and realizations. In keeping with
McIntosh’s (2000) framework, these are all unearned privileges granted to
me that women are largely and, in some cases, entirely denied. Because of the
limits of my own partial and situated perspective, this list obviously should be
considered far from exhaustive.
1. I can be reasonably sure that, for most jobs I might apply for, I will not only
have a better chance of getting them than a comparably qualified woman, but I
will be paid more than a woman doing the same job. In addition to having
more and better paying employment opportunities available to me than
women, should I decide to venture into a traditional female vocation (e.g.,
nursing or schoolteacher), I can still count on being paid better and promoted
more often than my female counterparts.
2. When I go to lease or buy a car or home (or to have work done on them), I can
expect to not only be treated in a far more professional manner than a woman
(who is often patronized in these business transactions) but in most cases to
ultimately pay less for the product or service.
3. When I read the newspaper or watch the nightly news, I can largely assume
that the vast majority of the stories will be about the accomplishments of men.
Moreover, throughout the media, I can rest assured that most positive portray-
als are about men and their importance. Conversely, when women are made
visible, it typically will be in a trivializing manner: as models (sex objects) to
sell some good or service or in the form of some self-help/defective-being
product all “real” women need (e.g., cosmetics and weight-loss products).
4. Should I enjoy watching sports, I am virtually guaranteed that all the impor-
tant, most skilled participants will also be men who are paid unbelievable
sums of money to reinforce my masculine and seemingly superior sense of
being. Alternatively, I am almost equally guaranteed that when women are
presented at these events, it most often will be in the form of them being
sidelined cheerleaders for the far more important men on the field. And in the
few events that women are exclusively found, they will most typically be pre-
sented in a manner that largely denigrates their skills in comparison to men’s.
Moreover, I am virtually guaranteed that all the sporting teams I might cheer
for will have virile names to further reinforce my masculine sense of impor-
tance. Sometimes, when these same names are applied to their female coun-
terparts, one’s left with quite strange results: the women’s basketball team at
my alma mater is called the Lady Rams.
5. If I am sexually active, even promiscuous, I can largely count on not being
seen as a slut, whore, or prostitute. To the contrary, most typically I will be
held in high regard, perhaps seen as a “stud,” with such behavior attesting to
my superior sense of being.
6. I can largely count on clothes fashions that ensure my mobility and reinforce
my status as an important person, whereas women often are expected to wear
restrictive clothing designed to objectify their status as a subordinate in our
society. Moreover, since women’s fashions are largely designed by men, I am
virtually assured that the fashions available to me will both stay in style longer
and cost less money.
7. I am not expected to spend my discretionary income on makeup, skin lotion,
and age-defying potions to cover my flaws, nor am I expected to spend money
on dieting products (unless severely obese), all so I can be seen as attractive

and socially acceptable.
8. If I am married or even cohabiting, I can count on my “wife” doing most of the
housework and being responsible for most of the child care should we have
children, regardless of whether she works.
9. Should my wife unexpectedly become pregnant—or for that matter, any
women I might have sex with—I can rest assured that it will almost entirely be
seen as her fault and responsibility to take care of, especially if the pregnancy
is not desired on my part.
10. Should I decide to rape a woman in my quest to feel superior, I can rest assured
that it is highly unlikely that she will report my misogynistic criminal activity
to the police. If, however, I should incur the unfortunate charge of rape, unlike
any other crime, I can count on my accuser’s life and status to simultaneously
be on trial to determine if she is worthy of being named my “victim.”
11. To demonstrate my superiority, should I feel the need to physically assault my
wife (or other women that I might purport to love), even to the point I might
kill her, I can be reasonably assured that I will largely not be held accountable
for my actions. Conversely, should a woman partake in these same actions
against me, especially murder, I can count on her being held far more account-
able for her actions.
12. Moreover, should abusing my wife not be sufficient, I can additionally turn
my perversely exercised authority on my children. Should I get caught, unless
it is someone else’s child, I know that the most typical punishment will be for
my children to be removed from my home and that my wife will also largely
be held accountable and blamed for my actions, thus diffusing some, if not
most, of my responsibility for what I have done.
13. Should I decide to divorce my spouse, or have this decision forced on me, if
children are involved, I can count on her being the primary caretaker of them
(unless I should desire otherwise) and to correspondingly experience an
increase in my standard of living often with the full knowledge that hers will
significantly drop.
14. Should I not have a woman immediately at my disposal to denigrate and fur-
ther support my false notions of superiority, I can easily and cheaply go out
and purchase or rent pornographic depictions to serve as a surrogate for this
purpose. If this does not sufficiently reinforce my feelings of superiority, I can
go to a strip club, peep show, or mud-wrestling/wet T-shirt contest to have live
depictions of female subordination (in the flesh) or, even better yet, go out and
purchase a prostitute for these same purposes.
15. When venturing out in public, I can reasonably rest assured that I will not be
sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. Conversely, should I come across a
woman in these same contexts, I can largely count on a simple terrorist/manly
man stare on my part to make her feel uncomfortable in my presence. The
same also holds true for most public drinking places. If I am especially brave,
I can expose myself to a woman or masturbate in front of her to even further
reinforce my masculinity and forever implant this image into her head, yet
largely count on not getting caught or punished.
16. Should I have specialized medical problems, I can rest assured that the major-
ity of research dollars being spent are to find cures for male health problems
using largely male research subjects.
17. Should I feel the desire to search for positive role models in positions of
authority, nearly everywhere I look I can easily find men to fill this need. If my
identification with these specific male role models is not sufficient to bolster
my perceived self-importance, I can easily further reinforce this perception by

largely seeing most women in subordinate positions throughout our society.
18. When I listen to my radio or watch music videos, I can be assured that most of
the performers I listen to will be males who often explicitly denigrate women
in the verses of their songs. Moreover, most of the few female artists who
make it on the air will be conversely singing songs that reinforce male domi-
nance and female subordination.
19. When attending school, I can often count on the teacher (he or she) to perceive
my inquiries and presence as more important than the females that are in
attendance.
20. At the schools I attend, I can count on more monies being spent on the activi-
ties men traditionally partake in, especially sports (even with the passage of
Title IX more than twenty-five years ago), and in general have a wider array of
activities available for me to participate in.
21. I can also be pretty confident that my parents will be supportive of a wider
array of activities for me to partake in, spend more money on them, and give
me more freedom to explore my surroundings.
22. When undertaking conversations with women, I can largely count on my
voice being heard more often by both of us and my comments being more vali-
dated, and should I feel the need to interrupt a woman while she is talking (fur-
ther reinforcing the importance of my voice), I will in all likelihood be gener-
ously forgiven for my transgression.
23. Should I ever feel the need to verbally denigrate someone to boost my mascu-
linity and false sense of being, I will have available an endless cache of derog-
atory terms that refer explicitly to women to accomplish this task. Conversely,
the few derogatory terms that refer explicitly to my male gender I can often
use in a positive, affirming manner: “Scott, you’re such a ‘dick head’ or
‘prick,’ buddy.”
24. If I so choose, I can count on numerous all-male contexts to be available to me
for my pleasure and affirmation. And although there are a few exclusive female
settings (some auxiliaries to men’s groups), I can still count on the ones I
might attend to almost always be perceived as more important, replete with
activities to support this assertion.
25. Finally, should I choose not to partake in any of the above conditions, the mere
fact that I can make this choice is in itself indicative and quite telling of the
privilege on which it is predicated. Moreover, I can still count on other men
partaking in them, which ultimately still maintains my superior status in soci-
ety. All that is expected of me is to remain silent, and I, too, will cash in on my
patriarchal dividend.
I am guessing that it is quite easy for you to see the unjust nature of each of
the above conditions. Although a handful of participants in my classes will
sometimes challenge their prevalence and/or applicability to their own expe-
riences, most easily ascertain the unjust nature of these and numerous other
privileges. Once each of these unfair negative advantages are presented and
discussed, I always reserve a significant amount of class time to discuss what
each of us might do to resist their occurrence. For the female participants of
my classes, this is usually accomplished by exploring the various attitudes
women hold—internalized oppression—and corresponding behaviors that
women often undertake to support such outcomes. For the male participants,
this usually involves me exploring ways men might release the firm grip they
have on maintaining their existence—quite literally in some cases—and
coming up with more just approaches to life.
RELEASE THE PENIS AND LET THE BLOOD FLOW TO

THE BRAIN: ISN’T IT AMAZING THE THINGS ONE
MIGHT ASCERTAIN?
We live in a society where ignorance truly is bliss, especially for those

with unearned male privilege and status, which in turn often provides men
with an excuse to deny the existence of the very real and harmful sexist hier-
archical realities that surround us and the active role men must play in their
maintenance. While some men are willing to admit that women are disadvan-
taged in our society, very few men are willing to acknowledge that they are
overprivileged (McIntosh 2000). After all, to actually do so would mean that
men would not only have to admit the unearned and unjust basis of their
advantage but perhaps even personally change and give up some of their priv-
ilege. In the highly competitive world we live in, giving up any advan-
tages—earned or unearned—one might have in the game of life would seem
foolish at best to the vast majority men.
And yet, as a partner, mother, sister, daughter, or just a friend, most men
have significant women in their lives that they deeply care about, love, and
sometimes even view as equals. I believe herein lies the true promise of the
feminist pedagogy that I bring to my classes. Instead of abstractly talking
about male dominance and women’s subordination, I attempt to put a face on
oppression. I offer my own experiences of doing unearned male privilege and
recognize the harm it inflicted on others—both female and male. Often, cou-
rageous male students will also offer their experiences of doing male domi-
nance. In all classroom discussions, female students freely and frequently
offer their experiences of being oppressed by men. Combined with constant
reminders by me that the “who’s” and “what’s” we are talking about are our
partners, parents, siblings, children, friends, and each of us, lived images
emerge of the oppressor and oppressed. These faces demonstrate how all too
common oppression is, how harmful it is for so many, and why each of
us—women and men—should join together to bring about its end.
By making men aware of the unearned advantages that society confers on
them, coupled with the knowledge of how this is oppressive to the significant
women in their lives, many men are left in an ideological bind: how can they
personally express concern and respect for the welfare of these women, all
the while supporting realities that cause women’s oppression in larger soci-
etal settings? While I realistically have no meaningful way to measure the
answer to this question, I have witnessed many men (although admittedly not
all) in my classes very much loosen the otherwise firm grip they have on
justifying and living the male privilege that society so unjustly confers on
them. A world without unearned male privilege would be a significant step in
the pursuit of a nonoppressive, egalitarian future.
NOTES
1. Although in my classes and personal interactions, I increasingly refer to and identify my-
self as queer and/or simply sexual, because my partner is a woman, and acknowledging that most
people still view and treat me as heterosexual, I am using the term accordingly here and through-
out this article.
2. I use “(pro)feminist” as an inclusive way to recognize both men who identify as
profeminist and a perhaps an equal number of other men who think of themselves as male
feminists.
3. The ethos of the various male groups I belonged to prescribed that one should never be vio-
lent toward a woman. Accordingly, although I have severely injured innumerable men, I never
have been physically violent toward women. Nevertheless, when I was younger, I often did use
economic resources to be controlling and abusive to many women.
REFERENCES
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privi-
lege of a partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14:575-91.
McIntosh, Peggy. 2000. White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see
correspondences through work in women’s studies. In The social construction of difference
and inequality, edited by Tracy E. Ore (pp. 475-85). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.
Schacht, Steven P. 2000a. Paris is burning: How society’s stratification systems make drag
queens of us all. Race, Gender & Class 7 (1): 147-66.
———. 2000b. Using a feminist pedagogy as a male teacher: The possibilities of a partial and
situated perspective. Radical Pedagogy 2 (2).
Schacht, Steven P., and Doris Ewing. 1997. The many paths of feminism: Can men travel any of
them? Journal of Gender Studies 6 (2): 159-76.
———. 1998. Feminism and men: Reconstructing gender relations. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In search of our mothers’ garden. New York: Harcourt-Brace-Janovich.
Young, Iris. 1988. The five faces of oppression. Philosophical Forum 19:270-90.
Steven P. Schacht is an associate professor of sociology at Plattsburgh State University

of New York. His primary areas of research and teaching interests are race, class, gender,
and sexuality. He is author of many articles on feminism and men and the importance of
drag performers in various communities, as well as several books, including the recently
coedited volume with Jill Bystsydzienski, Forging Radical Alliances across Difference:
Coalition Politics for the New Millennium (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young
Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
251 pp., $25.00.
This book, which has gained wide publicity, addresses the recent concern
with the education of boys and tells a startling tale about the source of the
problems. Feminists in education, following the ideas of Carol Gilligan, are
spreading false ideas about the educational difficulties of girls. Gender equity
programs oppress boys by constructing them as psychologically disturbed.
Nonsexist teaching practices oppress boys by trying to reverse natural sex
differences. Sommers calls for a rejection of “socially divisive activists,”
more support for boys, recognition of natural difference, and more moral
education.
Readers familiar with gender equity work in schools or with research on
boys’ education may find this version of the issues surprising. One-third of
Sommers’s book is devoted to an extravagant attack on a small body of
research that actually has little influence on current gender equity work.
Other bodies of research, more relevant to practice, are ignored, including the
field research on gender interactions in schools, research on teachers and
gender, research on gender and curriculum, and close-focus research on
boys’ experience of schooling.
Readers may also be surprised at the issues Sommers omits from her dis-
cussion of the education of “our young men.” The book has only two brief
mentions of African American boys; no mention of Latino boys; no mention
of indigenous boys or other ethnic minorities; no discussion of working-class
boys, the collapse of vocational education, or the class dynamics of educa-
tional selection; and no discussion of immigration. There is no discussion of
gay youth, homophobia, disability, or boys marginalized in peer group
dynamics. The problem is not just that there are gaps in Sommers’s coverage.
These are huge gaps and strategic ones. A book seriously concerned with
evaluating the impact of feminism on boys’education must look closely at the
groups of boys potentially benefited by feminist agendas and more broadly
by equity policies. But these are precisely the groups Sommers ignores.
The reason is that Sommers is not actually trying to understand the prob-
lems of boys’ education. Her text uses the problems of boys’ education for a
different purpose: to discredit feminism. Sommers announces at the start, and
repeatedly thereafter, her aversion to “advocacy research.” This is a truly

209
startling claim given the character of her own work. The book is written
throughout in a sneering tone and with a relentless focus on the weaknesses
of feminist work. On the thinnest of evidence, Sommers constructs a sinister
picture of American schools bullied into antiboy practices by a militant elite
of “gender experts” who are biased, untruthful, and above all antimale. The
reason for her emphasis on Gilligan, a notably humane developmental psy-
chologist, is not that Gilligan’s ideas are really the key to gender equity mili-
tancy in schools. Rather, Gilligan is a media icon in the United States for the
feminist academic, and attacking her is a good way to bring feminist thought
into disrepute with readers who do not have a detailed knowledge of this
subject.
Sommers wrote the book while funded as a fellow at a far-right think tank,
the American Enterprise Institute. Her work has gone out through the now
well-established media networks of the Right. It fits the pattern of
neoconservative intellectual work that since the 1970s has attacked the wel-
fare state and social justice programs across a broad front. In this literature, it
has become common to attack equity provisions as special deals for a particu-
lar group, which must disadvantage other people. Thus, affirmative action for
blacks is presented as unfair to whites, unionism as unfair to nonunionists,
taxes to support public schools as unfair to families using private
schools—and feminism as unfair to boys.
It is quite a clever piece of rhetoric. Lots of parents are worried about their
boys; lots of boys do have educational problems (although in reality these
have much more diverse sources than the book admits). Feminists, led by the
“Demon Queen” Gilligan, are easy to blame. The media image of feminists
as humorless man haters is already well established and needs only a little
modification to become humorless boy haters. And the solutions Sommers
offers are familiar: more authority and discipline in schools, more values
education, more competition, and more gender segregation.
However, the argument is thin. In an entire book devoted to trashing femi-
nism in education, Sommers never produces a single piece of research that
shows that feminist programs have actually harmed any boys. Her main argu-
ment is pure speculation, presented as fact.
Furthermore, the argument is based on a huge overestimation of feminists’
power in the education system. Her discussion of gender issues rests on a
remarkably primitive model of gender, in which males and females are two
homogeneous blocks whose traits are naturally different from each other as a
result of biological forces—a model in which “boys” appear as an undifferen-
tiated block. The book displays a spectacular double standard, denouncing
gender education programs for their bias (mainly for inviting boys to take a
critical look at conventional masculinity), then demanding the imposition of
authoritative moral standards on boys as a solution to the problems of vio-
lence and disorder. The solutions offered do not actually come from evidence
BOOK REVIEW 211
about boys (of which there is very little in this book); rather, they come from
the general social rhetoric of neoconservatism.
As a contribution to understanding the education of boys, this book has no
value. It contains no new information, no intelligent critique, no new con-
cepts (unless one counts the idea of a feminist conspiracy as a concept), and
no new practical ideas. The main reason that masculinity researchers should
take note of it is to be aware that (1) well-funded right-wing think tanks are
putting resources into attacking feminism, (2) they have begun to use issues
about boys and masculinity for this purpose, and (3) academic research is
now an arena for this attack.
R. W. Connell
University of Sydney
Men
and Masculinities
Submission Guidelines
Editor
Michael S. Kimmel
State University of New York–Stony Brook
Men and Masculinities seeks empirical and theoretical articles, written for a multidis-
ciplinary audience, that explore issues in masculinities. Topics of particular interest
include
• construction of masculinities
• male/female relationships
• sexual behavior or sexual identities
• representation of gender
• issues of diversity among men (such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class)
The journal subscribes to principles of nonsexist, nonheterosexist, and nonracist publish-
ing, and the editors are also committed to publishing significant empirical work that chal-
lenges conventional wisdoms. Book reviews are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should be sent to the editor in four high-quality photocopies and an IBM-
formatted computer diskette with the word processing program used clearly labeled on the
diskette. Manuscripts should conform to relevant stylistic guidelines of the Chicago Man-
ual of Style, Documentation 2 (14th edition). Each manuscript should be accompanied by
a title page including complete author name(s), affiliation(s), mailing address, phone, fax,
and e-mail information (for multiple-author papers, provide complete information for
each author and indicate the corresponding author).
Submitted articles will undergo blind peer review. Authors are requested to place no form
of identification either on the body of the manuscript or on the required abstract of
150 words or fewer. A biographical note of 100 words or fewer, indicating the author’s af-
filiation, research interests, and recent or major publications should accompany the
manuscript.
Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal. Manuscripts
should not be under consideration by any other publishers while being reviewed by Men
and Masculinities or have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with
substantially similar content. Every effort will be made to complete the editorial review
process in a timely manner. Submitted manuscripts will not be returned. Submit manu-
scripts to:
Michael S. Kimmel
Department of Sociology
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4356

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EDITORS

Michael S. Kimmel, Sociology, State University of New York–Stony Brook

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY EDITORS

U.S. ADVISORY EDITORS

Special Issue: Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities:

Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities:

This special issue of Men and Masculinities originates from a symposium

Debbie Epstein is a professor of education and head of the Education Department at

Real Footballers Don’t Eat Quiche

preeminent rugby players. In front of massive television audiences, players

television is not just a manipulation of popular culture, it constitutes a crucial

Rugby, however, is much more than a game played in the imagination. As

able forms of masculinities. Our method is to examine the meeting point of

sensorium dedicated to the promotion and marketing of sport, consumers

It is difficult to say whether this account represents an accurate account of

Within the unwritten rules of football, it is more important to celebrate and

HIT ’EM HARD AND MAKE IT HURT

On August 1, 1998, in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, an AFL [Austra-

LEARNING NOT TO TAKE SHIT FROM ANYONE9

FOOTBALL AS A MASCULINITY-MAKING DEVICE

keeping with an observation by Eitzen (1996), who described the paradoxical

Thus, the community of practice associated with football involves definite

In prior times, sports such as football were employed as a pathway to a

In other countries, different sports fulfilled similar roles in the preparation

A COUNTERNARRATIVE ABOUT FOOTBALL

commitment to his team. This conversation confirmed other messages we

An integral aspect of Leon’s responsibility framework revolves around the

As far as Leon is concerned, one of the benefits of being part of a club is

While coaching championship teams was clearly not something Leon

Lindsay Fitzclarence is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Deakin Univer-

Christopher Hickey is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University,

Corporal Punishment and Masculinity

Key words: corporal punishment, masculinity, South Africa

transform themselves, even in societies under transition. Changes in law can

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND

How are we to understand masculinities in relation to school beatings?

THE CURRENT SITUATION

LEGISLATION: RECEPTION AND RESPONSE

Half of the respondents reported a change in school discipline over the

These opinions reflected resentment about educational and social transfor-

With good discipline we can lay the foundation to create an environment of

There is a widespread belief that corporal punishment is the most effective

The most effective form of punishment for me is getting beaten up because

Figure 1. Feelings after Being Beaten (multiple response)

positive feelings about consultative mechanisms of discipline—in relation to

I think is right/good to discussing with SRC because he same as me because

The majority of respondents wanted their class teacher to be responsible:

Figure 3. Who Should Be Responsible for Discipline? (multiple response)

The likening of class teachers to parents is revealing not just because it

The ability to endure punishment is also an important feature of masculin-

acceptance of violence as normal that is so tragic” (Sunday Tribune,

these noncircumcizing Mpondo defined manhood morally rather than ritu-

The continued use of corporal punishment in schools highlights the

Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

MAÍRTIN MAC AN GHAILL

Key words: football, gender, masculinity, play, playground organization

This article is based on ethnographic evidence from two primary schools

GEOGRAPHIES OF GENDER IN THE PLAYGROUND 1:

The Savage Average

[breaktime] is a significant and generally enjoyable time for [most children]—

Blatchford and Sumpner’s account of the playground as a site both for

Sofia: Boys always play football.