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Boys, Boyhood and the Construction of Masculinity

Article · January 2008

DOI: 10.3149/thy.0202.119

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 Boys, Boyhood and the
Construction of Masculinity
Guest Editor’s Introduction

HEATHER ELLIS
Balliol College, Oxford

This introductory article explains the aims of the interdisciplinary conference

“Masculinity and the Other” held at Balliol College, Oxford, August 29-30,
2007, at which all of the papers comprising this special issue of Thymos: Jour-
nal of Boyhood Studies were first presented. It points out the prominence
which the notions of the “boy” and boyhood and the life-cycle enjoyed at the
conference and seeks more generally to suggest the benefits a more fully in-
tegrated discussion of these topics might bring to the fields of masculinity and
gender studies.

Keywords: boys, boyhood, masculinity

In the scholarship of the last twenty years, there has been a major move away from
treating gender as an essentialist identity. In particular, men’s studies, which developed
in the 1980s in response to a predominantly feminist critique of male power structures,
have undergone a veritable sea-change. Instead of stressing the idea of innate and fun-
damental differences between men and women (sometimes termed the “separate-and-
different cultures” model1), masculine identity has been increasingly treated as a highly
contingent social construct. No longer is the study of masculinity restricted to a rela-
tively small number of academic fields (primarily sociology, psychology and cultural
studies), but has become instead one of the most vibrant areas of interdisciplinary in-
vestigation. R.W. Connell (1998) has referred to this change as the “ethnographic mo-
ment” of the 1990s, when history, cultural anthropology and other disciplines grounded
in empirical research and focused on the importance of cultural context became in-
creasingly interested in the formation of male identity. The emergence of a range of

1
For a useful explanation of this model, see Thorne (1993, pp. 89-110). See, for example,
Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2003).

Heather Ellis, Balliol College, Oxford.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Heather Ellis, Balliol College, Oxford
OX1 3BJ, United Kingdom. Electronic mail: [email protected]

THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 2008, 119-124.

© 2008 by the Men’s Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved. http://www.mensstudies.com
thy.0202.119/$12.00 DOI: 10.3149/thy.0202.119 Θ
119
ELLIS

new sub-disciplines focused on the study of masculinity has been the result. Prominent
among these has been the history of masculinity which developed under the auspices
of scholars such as John Tosh and Michael Roper in the early 1990s (Tosh & Roper,
1991; Tosh, 1994), and has since become one of the most popular and innovative fields
of historical inquiry.
The move towards interdisciplinarity in masculinity studies has been accompa-
nied by growing scepticism about the predominantly structuralist analyses which in-
formed men’s studies in the late 1970s and 1980s. Increasingly, scholars have
questioned the claim of writers such as Andrew Tolson (1977) and Jeff Hearn (1987)
that socio-economic structures and power relations have been chiefly responsible for
determining forms of masculinity. In the 1990s, R.W. Connell (1995), among others,
argued for a multiplicity of masculinities which did much to undermine existing ideas
of male identity as essential and universal, possessed by all men, regardless of age,
class, ethnicity or any other cultural marker. In recent years, however, Connell’s own
work has been criticized for being too closely wedded to a neo-Marxist methodology
which unduly privileges the role played by power relations in the formation of identity.
With the increasing popularity of social constructionist theories in masculinity stud-
ies, scholars such as Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1997) have ques-
tioned Connell’s emphasis on hegemony and hierarchy, arguing that it underestimates
the extent to which the formation of masculine identity is characterized by fluidity,
fragmentation and contradiction. Clearly, the impact of power relations cannot be ig-
nored in any study of masculinity; their role, however, must be problematized as part
of a critical analysis which does not treat them as constant and immovable.
In addition, some have argued that Connell’s pro-feminist stance and preoccupa-
tion with the concept of gender oppression has led her to overestimate the importance
of the male-female binary in the construction of masculine identity. More recently,
scholars have stressed the need to examine how a variety of cultural markers such as
age, class and ethnicity, as well as gender, interact and combine in the complex process
of identity formation. It was with this aim in mind that we organized the conference at
Balliol College, Oxford, August 29-30, 2007, where all of the essays in this special
issue were first presented. By calling the conference “Masculinity and the Other” we
sought to focus attention on the process of construction itself. In particular, following
calls from scholars such as Stefan Collini (1991) and John Tosh (1994), we wanted to
investigate the role and importance of non-female “others.”2 The majority of papers,
therefore, explored a range of male “others” including immature males, working-class
males, and exotic males. A number of papers chose to interrogate the familiar terms
“man” and “manliness.” While some considered “man” in its most familiar gendered
sense, others focused on its alternative, yet related meanings of “adult” and “human.”
In some contexts, then, such as in all-male educational institutions, “manliness” was
found frequently to have connoted the possession of age and maturity in preference to

2
For more information on the aims of the conference and a further selection of conference
papers, see Ellis & Meyer (forthcoming, 2009). For examples of this approach, see Cameron
and Bernardes (1998) and Rogers (2008).

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 GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

the gendered characteristics of masculinity; in others, it seems to have been primarily

intended to distinguish “humane” virtues from the inhuman and the bestial.
As well as exploring the diversity of “others” employed in the construction of mas-
culine identities, we were keen to encourage papers which focused on male groups tra-
ditionally neglected in scholarship. It was felt that the strong emphasis placed on
concepts of hierarchy and hegemony in much recent work on masculinity had led to an
over-privileging of male subjects in positions of power and authority. For many groups,
such as boys and adolescents, working-class men and homosexual men, a recognition
of agency in the process of identity formation has often been lacking. In recent years,
increasing importance has been laid on recovering and reconstructing so-called “sub-
altern” and “marginalized” masculinities; however, here too, we can see the continued
preoccupation with the impact of power relations to the exclusion of other factors af-
fecting identity formation. Among the papers we selected were a number interested in
exploring marginalized groups as active subjects, capable of fashioning their own mas-
culine identities and not necessarily concerned primarily with their own inferior posi-
tion. Particularly prominent here were papers included in the panels dealing with
themes of “youth and age” and “fatherhood.” Indeed, the role of boys and adolescent
males in fashioning their own identities was considered in several papers including
some of those making up this special issue of Thymos.
The decision to include papers which took seriously boys’ agency in the process
of identity formation was based on the belief that boys should not be considered solely
as objects in the construction of adult masculine identity. In the first issue of Thymos,
the editors expressed a similar conviction (Groth & Janssen, 2007). In stating their
commitment to “saving the phenomenon” of the boy, they made clear that an integral
part of this project was a belief in the individual and collective agency of boys in de-
veloping identities of their own (p. 3). Equally important, they stressed, was the need
to open up gender studies (the field in which boys and boyhood have traditionally been
examined) to insights gained from other disciplines. The study of boys and boyhood has
much to recommend it to scholars of masculinity. Most obviously, it provides an ex-
cellent opportunity to explore the ways in which distinctions of gender interact and
combine with those of age, a cultural marker whose importance has been the subject of
increasing scholarly attention in recent years.
Perhaps more than any other aspect of identity, age allows us to access the frag-
mented, shifting, ever-changing nature of masculine identity which scholars have been
emphasizing in recent work. For age is by its very nature liminal and transitional and
boyhood has a good claim to be considered the liminal experience par excellence. In
the words of John Burnside (1996), it is the period when human beings are most “sus-
ceptible to change: where being is raw, as it were, where identity is less fixed, more
open to possibility” (p. 203). Some eight years ago, Anne Scott Sørensen (2000) com-
mented on the particular ability of “boy-centered research” to “open the field of gen-
der studies to multiplicity and diversity […] and thus keep [it] at the center of academic
severity” (p. 240).
However, we have to be aware of the possibility that in shifting the focus of re-
search in masculinity studies to the interaction of gender with other cultural markers,
we may actually undermine the integrity of the discipline itself, for an examination of
the roles played by other factors such as age, class and race in the construction of iden-
tity can only lead to the qualification of the importance of gender itself. Yet if we are

121
ELLIS

committed, first and foremost, to a study of identity, then we must be open to the idea
that a better understanding of it may only be achieved when gender is seen as but one
among several competing sets of distinctions which inform and shape people’s sense
of self. There is no need, though, to see this as resulting necessarily in the reduction of
the many different facets of human identity to one level. The challenge is to discover
the peculiar conditions (the when, where, and why) under which gender does take cen-
tre stage in the process of identity formation. Postmodern theorists of subjectivity such
as Stuart Hall have been stressing the need for some time now to move away from a
narrow focus on particular facets of identity and to consider the entirety of individual
subjectivity as the object of enquiry. Unless masculinity studies (and, more broadly,
gender studies) take this conclusion onboard, the future viability of the disciplines may
be in doubt, for as Hall (2000) has warned, “identities […] are never unified and, in late
modern times, [are] increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply
constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices
and positions” (p. 17).
Collaborative interdisciplinary projects like Thymos and the conference on “Mas-
culinity and the Other” may well be one way forward. Although the primary focus of
the papers selected for this issue is masculine identity formation during boyhood, they
are also concerned with exploring the ways in which distinctions of gender shape and
are shaped by other aspects of subjectivity—primarily age—but also, class, “race”, cit-
izenship and nationality. Complementing Thymos’ emphasis on interdisciplinarity, the
contributors hail from a variety of scholarly disciplines (cultural history, psychology,
classical studies, and comparative literature) and employ a distinctly interdisciplinary
approach, frequently ranging outside the confines of their own discipline. Likewise,
the essays are broad in terms both of their chronological and geographical range. While
Henrik Berg focuses his attention on the construction of masculinities in Hellenistic
Greece (3rd Century BC), Anne Markey examines the importance of “boyish spiritual-
ity” in the works of Patrick Pearse in early twentieth-century Ireland. Pauline Farley,
by contrast, investigates constructions of ideal masculinity for boys in English chil-
dren’s annuals throughout the twentieth century, while Alexander Clarkson examines
the presentation of heroic masculinities in boys’ war comics in Cold-War America,
Britain and Germany. Finally, with Damien Riggs’ paper we are brought up to the pres-
ent day with an exploration of the treatment of fatherhood in early twenty-first century
books on raising boys.
Common to all the papers is a focus on literature as a source for the study of mas-
culinity and boyhood. While some essays (Markey, Clarkson and Farley) are concerned
with literature designed primarily for boys by adult male writers, others (Berg and
Riggs) focus on texts which represent and describe boys and their behavior. Taken to-
gether, the essays testify to the great variety of ways in which literature, viewed as a
form of intergenerational communication, can shape the relationships between boys
and adult men. While Markey, Farley and Clarkson focus on literature written prima-
rily for an adolescent male readership, they highlight the very different ways in which
that literature was used. On the one hand, Farley shows how boys’ annuals in twenti-
eth-century England recreated to a surprising degree codes of moral and physical mas-
culinity inherited from the Victorian era; Markey and Clarkson, on the other hand, stress
the creative ways in which particular ideals of boyhood were employed to strategically
critique dominant ideals of adult masculinity. Thus, Markey shows how Patrick Pearse

122
 GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

employed shifting constructs of Irish boyhood to oppose the form of imperial mas-
culinity he saw as embodying Britain’s political and cultural oppression of his country.
Clarkson, meanwhile, reveals how images of “good” and “bad” boys were used strate-
gically in war comics to criticize the civilian population of America for not sufficiently
supporting the Vietnam War. Nor are boys themselves presented as being without
agency in these constructions. In all three papers, emphasis is placed on real boys’ in-
teractions with literature as well as the writers’ own familiarity with the world of boys.
The active construction of boyhood and male adolescence is an equally prominent
feature of the literature focused on by Riggs and Berg. Although not directed at boys
themselves, both the books examined by Riggs and the Menandrian comedies explored
by Berg directly engage with the everyday lives and self-perceptions of the boys they
describe. We know that boys, when approaching manhood, would accompany their fa-
thers to see comedies performed in Hellenistic Greece; similarly, Riggs’ parenting
books were designed to shape the interactions of real fathers with their sons. Just as with
the literature aimed directly at boys, we can see concepts of “boys” and “boyhood”
being used creatively by the respective writers. Riggs demonstrates the ways in which
contemporary parenting books, although not overtly homophobic, nonetheless succeed
in creating an artifical, yet powerfully persuasive construct of the “average boy.” Berg,
by contrast, shows how Menander used his adolescent male characters as part of a
broader strategy to represent ideal forms of masculinity in his plays.
A final feature of the selected papers (and one particularly significant for the mis-
sion of Thymos) is their willingness to call into question the very meaning of the terms
“boy” and “boyhood.” Thus Clarkson’s essay examines the effect of depicting adult
men as overgrown boys in comics, which although designed for an adolescent reader-
ship were, in fact, also read by many middle-aged men nostalgic for the stories of their
boyhood. Berg, meanwhile, considers the phenomenon of an “extended” boyhood in
Hellenistic Greece and asks whether physical or mental age (maturity) was more im-
portant in defining the limits of boyhood in this society. In different ways, both Markey
and Farley discuss the profound symbolic power of “the boy” in situations frequently
disconnected from the lives of real boys, while Riggs demonstrates how in contempo-
rary parenting books the cultural status of “boy” has been consistently denied to boys
who identify as gay or otherwise demonstrate “abnormal” sexual proclivities.
Altogether, we think that this special issue brings together a range of papers which
offer fresh perspectives on the interrelation of gender and age in the process of iden-
tity formation. This has recently become a question of central importance, not only to
the study of masculinity but also to the emerging field of life-course studies. The con-
tributors have chosen to focus attention on the enigmatic figure of the boy. Their in-
vestigations reveal his considerable significance as a site for exploring the complex
connections between distinctions of age and distinctions of gender, both in the past and
in contemporary society. While some contributors consider the boy primarily as the
object upon which other males inscribe their notions of masculinity, others highlight his
importance as an active subject, engaged in the construction of his own masculine iden-
tity. All, however, demonstrate the value of focusing attention on this liminal and tran-
sitional figure when investigating how different facets of identity interact and combine.
In so doing, they fulfil one of the most important aims of the conference where their
ideas were first presented.

123
ELLIS

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