ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses findings from ethnographic research at Bronx High School. It outlines narratives of young men in order to present their gendered imaginings of the future; and the complex sense of personhood developed in relation to these imagined visions of future masculinity. The chapter focuses on the New York City phase of the research, at Bronx High School, to provide a critical assessment of how masculinity is enveloped into neoliberal framings of “aspiration”. It shows that how multiple, entangled, concurrent, and often uncertain imaginings of gendered future aspirations are collapsed, made invisible, or rendered tractable under the weight of a single dominant, taken-for-granted neoliberal reckoning of what the future will look like for young men coming of age through the recession. The chapter considers the broader discursive processes through which constructions of masculinity are fused into constructions of aspiration in the context of schooling. It also considers specific examples from the ethnography.
