ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on teenage boys’ embodied learner identities and educational aspirations, contributing to an understanding of working-class masculinities as complex rather than monolithic constructs. It explains diversity and complexity in boys’ embodied performances of masculinity even when they operate within a hegemonic framework. The chapter discusses the possibility for heterogeneity and how such possibilities are bound up with the construction of learner identities and the aspirational self in a white working-class Belfast community. It draws on the accounts of two boys, Henry and Brendy, from similar social backgrounds who, as aspirational subjects, present themselves in different ways, paying attention to “complex and multifarious processes by which masculinities are constituted”. The chapter outlines the dominant understandings of masculinity in educational research, arguing that boys are often presented in monolithic ways as “lads,” which sometimes shuts down the possibilities of nuanced, conflicted, and complex identities. It highlights the lack of salience of class analysis in relation to masculine identities and aspiration.
