ABSTRACT
Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study, this chapter examines the meanings that South African primary school teachers attach to young masculinities and how their perception of childhood gender and sexuality shapes the formation of masculinities in the early years. The findings of this study reveal how teachers’ perceptions of masculinity, informed by essentialist assumptions of gender, resulted in the normalisation of boys’ violent and disruptive behaviour in primary school. Moreover, teachers regulated boys’ performances of masculinity with the aim of moulding their identity to assimilate with gender normativity. In doing so, boys were afforded access to power in unfettered ways that reinforced violence, heterosexual entitlements, domination, and gender inequalities. Together, these regulatory mechanisms reflected and were refracted through the local context in South Africa, where hegemonic notions of masculinity are tied to historical processes and male power. The study findings point to the importance of working with teachers to effectively challenge dominant and limiting discourses of gender in childhood by developing sophisticated knowledge of masculinities as complex, localised, and shifting instead of unitary, natural, and homogenous.
