ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how aspirations are socioculturally informed and the role gender plays in complex, negotiated process. It focuses on the experiences and perspectives of young men in the transition from school to higher education, gender is a salient dimension of identity, and one which interested in exploring in interrelation to aspirational and educational dimensions. The chapter discusses how researchers have considered aspiration as a gendered project. It also discusses the context of higher education in the participant’s home state of South Australia. In discussing the young men’s accounts of their school experiences and identities, the chapter highlights three significant themes: the notion of effort held back; the importance of maintaining an “easygoing” social persona; and the need for strategies to negotiate academic and gender performativity. These themes interrelate through an overarching discourse of masculine egalitarianism, which necessitates neither rising above, nor falling below, one’s male peers.
