ABSTRACT

In dialogue with previous chapters, this chapter contributes and develops a range of themes from interrupting public discourses that homogenize and normalize school-based masculinities by providing a more nuanced analysis of the impact and effect of masculinities on boys (and, I would argue, girls’ lives) to critiquing the discourses that essentialize gender and sexual difference by engaging with poststructuralist and queer theories of gender identities and relations. Regarding the latter, this chapter directly responds to and addresses Judith Halberstam’s (1998) observation in “Female Masculinity” that studies of masculinities are confined to boys and boyhood rather than focusing specifically upon what it means for girls to “do boy.” Directly confronting and disrupting the notion that “masculinity” can be desired and displayed only by male bodies, this chapter explores girls’ appropriation of hegemonic masculinity and the seduction of contemporary tomboyism within an increasingly sexualized girlhood (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2005). In so doing, I problematize schoolbased programs that encourage the pursuit of hegemonic constructions of masculinity (see Mills, 2001). Moreover, by exploring ways in which even non-dominant gender experimentations can subvert and reinforce dominant and normative gender configurations, I suggest there is nothing straightforward about the promotion of diversity and difference when it comes to gender. It pivots awkwardly and problematically upon a complex configuration of context-specific and embodied power relations.