ABSTRACT
This chapter is part of a much larger project called ‘Everyday Masculinities’ (Frank, 1987; 1990; 1991; 1992; 1993; 1995), an examination of the ordinary, routine, everyday/everynight activities of boys and men in the practice of masculinity in schools. The analysis includes the messiness of the lives of men and boys, with all the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions, as well as the privilege and the pain (Kaufman, 1993). My concern for doing this work arose out of my experience as a teacher, where I saw and experienced the social terrorism of boys and men in schools. Increasingly upset by the sexism, the homophobia and heterosexism, the racism, the violence against property, self and others, I wanted to talk to men and boys about what it means to be men and boys. Recent analyses in masculinity since the mid-1980s (Brittan, 1989; Brod, 1987; Clatterbaugh, 1990; Connell, 1987; Kaufman, 1987; Kimmel, 1987; Kimmel and Messner, 1992; Messner and Sabo, 1990) begin to make visible how past theorizing, particularly socialization theory with its reductionistic notions of how ‘boys become men’, is inadequate in explaining the complexities of getting gendered. No longer is there the ‘possibility of a general or universal account of the nature of human experience which ignores or limits both the social context and the status of the knower’ (Alcoff and Potter, 1993, p. 1). Rather, all theory and knowledge are social products, contexted by and relative to specific circumstances and surroundings (Smith, 1990), but always informed by a larger set of social relations.
