ABSTRACT
Currently, across western societies, there is great anxiety that the existing gender settlement between men and women has broken down. In response, popular media images simplistically suggest a new social order in which old gender hierarchies of industrial society have been inverted with women emerging as late modernity winners. These accounts fail to engage with the increasing complexity of contemporary social relations. In contrast to such popular accounts, as this anthology illustrates, feminist and gender theorists have produced systematic investigations of the contemporary social organisation of gender and the cultural production of diverse images of femininities and masculinities. These critical inquiries demonstrate the complexity of gender relations and male and female positionings within contemporary educational contexts and the uneven and difficult effects on boys and girls of social and educational politics and power. Most significantly, in these analyses, gender has a central dynamic location in making sense of wider social and cultural transformation within conditions of late modernity (Connell, 1987; Haywood, 1996).
