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To cite this article: Chris Haywood & Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (2012) ‘What's next for masculinity?’
Reflexive directions for theory and research on masculinity and education, Gender and Education,
24:6, 577-592, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2012.685701
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Gender and Education
Vol. 24, No. 6, October 2012, 577 –592
Research on masculinity has become an important area of gender and education that
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includes a wide range of empirical concerns and theoretical approaches. This article
identifies a number of studies that are asking questions about the conceptual
usefulness of masculinity within educational contexts. The first section explores
how educational researchers are beginning to suggest alternative ways that
hegemonic masculinity may be configured. The second section draws upon work
that interrogates the disconnection of gender from sex. Such work considers the
importance of understanding schooling worlds through an untethering of gender
categories from physical bodies. The third section suggests the possibility of a
post-masculinity position by exploring research that questions the viability of
masculinity as a conceptual frame to understand gender. In conclusion, the paper
argues that such developments can be used heuristically to inform the critical
reflexiveness of future research in the area.
Keywords: gender; masculinity studies; queer theory; post-masculinity
Introduction
Over the last decade, across western societies masculinity has emerged as a key
analytical and political concept in making sense of gender relations (Dudink, Hage-
mann, and Clark 2008; Hearn and Pringle 2009). Of particular significance has
been the projection of education institutions as both the cause and the solution to
the suggested ‘problem with boys’ (Epstein et al. 1999; Skelton 2001). In response,
educational researchers have been vigorously identifying, describing and explaining
how masculinity can help empirically and conceptually to understand what is going
on. In effect, the concept ‘masculinity’ has been used to explain male behaviours
across diverse areas of the educational sector that includes primary schools (Frosh
et al. 2002; Paechter 2007; Woods 2009), secondary schools (Mac an Ghaill
1994a; Jackson 2006), further education and training institutions (Archer and Leath-
wood 2003; Parker 2006) and higher education (Simpson and Cohen 2004; Dempster
2009). Furthermore, masculinity has been applied within educational contexts in a
range of international and non-formal educational contexts (see e.g. Light 2008;
Bhana 2009). Such work has been useful in identifying how boys’ attitudes and
∗
Corresponding author. Email: c.p.haywood@ncl.ac.uk
behaviours systematically harm girls’ schooling experiences (Reay 2001; Arnot 2002;
Kehily 2004; Ringrose 2008). At the same time, it has been vital to the development
of an expansive understanding of male power by arguing that boys also physically and
emotionally harm other boys (Epstein 2001; Stoudt 2006; Dalley-Trim 2007).
However, despite the immense analytical purchase of masculinity, educational
researchers are beginning to ask questions about the conceptual and empirical ade-
quacy of ‘masculinity’. More specifically, they are modifying and rethinking how
masculinity is conceptualised, in order to achieve greater empirical and analytical pur-
chase in their focus of study.
This article reports on recent educational research that is revising what masculinity
means and in so doing, it aims to document important conceptual shifts and modifi-
cations that may have a significant impact on the future use of masculinity in edu-
cational research. Rather than see a focus on the study of masculinity excluding
work on femininity, we recognise that ‘particular forms of femininity are produced
in relation to and through particular, and highly valued, forms of masculinity’
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(Blaise 2009, 453). Therefore, the current theoretical revisioning of masculinity, with
its inherent relationality, has implications for how power, difference and desire is
mapped out, not only in terms of gender, but other social and cultural identifications,
such as ethnicity, sexuality and class. Importantly, the following discussion is not
simply a focus on boys and young men, but on educational research that is developing
ideas about masculinity in educational contexts. Although in their own work the
authors use the tension between materialist and post-structuralist approaches to think
through masculinity (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003; Mac an Ghaill and
Haywood 2007), we aim to be inclusive and highlight approaches to the study of mas-
culinity in education from diverse theoretical backgrounds. The selection of studies is
not meant to be random or representative; there may be other studies in the field of
gender and education exploring similar themes. Therefore, the case studies selected
here are used to underpin the article’s aim of identifying how masculinity is being con-
ceptually reconfigured (Onwuegbuzie, Leech, and Collins 2011). Furthermore, the
cases may stimulate readers to consider the similarities and differences of studies
across each of the sections, as well as those within the broader field of gender and edu-
cation. Thus, evaluative judgements can be made on whether such work presents the
‘same old story’ or we are able to (or perhaps should be able to) represent the concep-
tual dynamics of gender and masculinity in alternative ways. In light of this, the first
section explores how educational researchers are identifying alternative configurations
of masculinity that are not dependent upon the cultural resources of homophobia or
misogyny. Furthermore, such work challenges theoretical assumptions that imbricate
masculinity with patriarchy and dovetails with Moller’s (2007, 269) suggestion that
gendered power ‘should not be equated with or reduced solely to a logic of domina-
tion’. As such, research is suggesting that there may be discourses outside of traditional
patriarchal masculinity, where boys and young men can make their identities ‘male’.
The second section explores how recent educational research is borrowing from
queer theory to explore the disconnection of sex from gender. In other words, by
cutting masculinity loose from its ontological premise within physiology, it is possible
to envisage a more fluid embodiment of masculinities and femininities. This section
suggests that a recent discussion on tomboys and female masculinities have much to
offer the study of masculinity in educational contexts. The third section outlines a
radical departure for the use of masculinity in educational research. It explores
Butler’s (2004, 43) suggestion that
Gender and Education 579
a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the
exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power
that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses that thinkability of its
disruption.
relationship between two primary school boys, Ben and Karl. Although the relationship
between the two boys is described as a close and intimate friendship, Redman et al.
resist understanding the relationship as structured by hegemonic masculinity. Further-
more, even though the boys use heterosexual discourses, it is not self-evident what
meanings are being ascribed to those discourses; the researchers resist transposing
adult definitions of such discourses onto the cultural worlds of children. At the same
time, rather than sexualise the relationship through a sexuality identity framework
(i.e. gay, bisexual and heterosexual) they attempt to capture the feelings shared
between the two boys without recourse to normative (adult) ascriptions. The impor-
tance of such analysis is that they suggest the possibility of ‘versions of masculinity
that might be capable of tolerating difference, ambivalence and complexity around
gender and sexuality’ (2002, 190). This is of major significance as it points to a
means of understanding masculinity that is not dependent on a patriarchal dividend.
Swain’s (2006) work also explores this gendered space outside of hegemonic mas-
culinity. In his research on three co-educational junior schools in the UK, he argues that
alongside hegemonic, complicit and subordinated masculinities, we should begin con-
sidering a mode of masculinity called ‘personalised masculinities’. For Swain, schools
operate as a location for action and agency and as an ‘institutional agent’ that generates
hegemonic regimes of masculinity. He develops the idea of a space outside of hegemo-
nic masculinities where alternative ways of ‘doing boy’ could be identified. Focusing
on 10 –11-year-old boys, he argues that there are boys who do not wish to subordinate
others. For example, recognising the hegemonic model of masculinity embodied in the
‘sporty boy’, Swain argues that many of the boys did not wish to align themselves with
this ‘idealised masculinity’. He asserts that these boys see themselves as different rather
than subordinated. Swain (2006, 343) suggests that ‘Although masculinity is con-
structed against femininity, a question that needs to be asked is whether the hegemonic
form always needs to produce subordinate forms of masculinity to maintain itself’. The
implication is that the conceptual framework of hegemonic masculinities may not be
comprehensive enough to incorporate the range of relationships that boys have with
hegemonic masculinity. In response, Swain argues that ‘personalised masculinities’
may be one way to address this.
It appears that studies of masculinity in education are reconsidering how masculi-
nity is being constituted. Anderson (2005) drawing upon interviews and participant
observation with 68 self-identified straight male collegiate American football
Gender and Education 581
male and masculinity have to go together, this may be in contradiction to social con-
structivist approaches in the field of inquiry. However, he also suggests that: ‘if we
sever the assumed link between masculinity and male, do we render meaningless the
concept of masculinity?’ (Flood 2002, 211).
The disconnection of masculinity from physiology has been undertaken by edu-
cational researchers who have drawn primarily upon Halberstam’s (1998) concept of
female masculinities. Research using the concept of female masculinity brings into
focus the relationship between gender and sexuality (the formation of masculinities
through heterosexuality), and how such gender formations are imbricated in inclusion-
ary and exclusionary structures of power (and the possibilities of empowerment). Such
themes are explored by Bhana (2008, 412) whose feminist research in South African
schools aims to challenge static representations of African schoolgirls. She suggests
that
The possibility of a conjunction between female and masculinity that challenges the path-
ology associated with transgressive women and applied to young girls in this study makes
it possible to argue that African women are not waiting to be victims – that female mas-
culinity can be empowering and suggests the multiple forms of power and domination –
not the exclusive preserve of boys and men.
This also dovetails with Renold’s (2009) ethnographic research with 10–11-year olds
in two UK primary schools. She explores how some girls take up masculinised prac-
tices, embody hegemonic masculinity and in effect, negotiate the ascription of ‘hetero-
sexualised femininities’. Of key importance for Renold is that girls ‘queer’ and contest
the implicit relationship between masculinity and heterosexuality through the adoption
of a tomboy positionality. One feature of the masculinity practiced by the girls was the
rejection of that deemed feminine, including associating with their peers. One of the
consequences of this subject position is that
‘being a tomboy’ is perhaps one of the few remaining legitimate subjects of girlhood that
can directly deflect the male heterosexual gaze and subvert or queer (heterosexualised)
girlie culture. Erica (year 6) and Sadie (year 5), for example, exclusively positioned them-
selves and were positioned by others as ‘tomboys’ (as ‘one of the boys’, as ‘honorary
boys’). Their longitudinal performative ‘masculinity’ and queering of gender and
sexual norms (e. g. tomboy as drag) seemed to shield them from a number of
Gender and Education 583
heterosexualizing processes within their local power culture, from sexual harassment and
innuendo to coercive romantic positioning within an increasingly compulsory boyfriend/
girlfriend culture. (Renold 2009, 236)
In this research, the space for the rejection of hegemonic masculine forms through the
adoption of masculinity by girls leads to the possibility of a transgressive space. This
offers an extremely useful understanding of how masculinity may emerge. At the
same time, it appears that the disconnection of sex and gender does not always lead
to transgressiveness. Tong (2008) draws out the complexity of taking up a female mas-
culinity. Her research on lesbian schoolgirls in Hong Kong highlights how their rejec-
tion of feminine cultural forms gave them a cultural space to take up a range of
masculine practices. This, however, was a more complex identification as the girls
took up a more ‘conventional’ approach to effeminate gay men, perceiving them as
‘disgusting’. The implication is that with these particular girls in this specific
context, they maintained masculine as dominant and to be celebrated and feminine
as subordinate and unvalued.
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By taking one’s identification as male or female, and one’s recognition as such by a com-
munity of masculinity or femininity practice, as the basic position from which a variety of
masculinities and femininities can be constructed, differing according to time, place, and
context, I am trying to at least reduce the power of the masculine/feminine dualism, while
recognising the ways in which it can be used to mobilise power.
This work offers a productive way forward to consider how we make sense of gender in
school-based contexts (see also Mendick 2006; Renold 2008; Francis 2010).
However, she has been criticised by Rasmussen (2009), whose particular reading of
Paechter suggests that there is a reification of individual agency, a positing of gender
584 C. Haywood and M. Mac an Ghaill
within a rigid gender dualism and that the reversal of female masculinity does not
necessarily lead to more flexibility in how to explain gender relations. Although the
specific applicability of these criticisms to Paechter’s position remains questionable
(2009), it provides a useful critical reminder of the difficulties faced by those attempting
to think through gender categories.
The work on female masculinities offers those exploring gender in schooling a
different emphasis than those who focus on a modification of hegemonic masculinities.
The tension between the ascribed meanings of masculinity at a structural level and local
identifications has produced other ways of engaging with the sex/gender relation. For
example, one way to do this is to draw upon Bakhtin’s work on dialogism and hetero-
glossia to explore the constitution of student experiences. Ryan and Johnson (2009)
suggest that
Bakhtin’s (1994) philosophies of dialogism and heteroglossia are useful to consider the
ways in which the individual and the social interact to constitute the diverse, multi-
faceted identities or subjectivities of individuals as they construct and express meaning.
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These intersubjective understandings about how self is both socially constructed and indi-
vidually experienced sees individuals drawing upon an intricate and continuous interplay
between self and the ideologies of society. (248)
It is argued that young people’s identities are implicated within a series of intersubjec-
tive moments, where dialogic relations are negotiated. Dialogic here refers to the mul-
titude of voices providing the resources through which identities may be spoken. This
provides more fluidity in terms of the range of ways gender identities are constituted.
Francis (2010) also uses Bakhtin’s notions of monoglossia and heteroglossia to explore
gender identities in educational contexts. For Francis, monoglossia appeals to the domi-
nant definitions of gender – stereotypical notions of masculinity, while heteroglossia
refers to micro-level interactions. She argues that binary notions of masculinity and
femininity and their interdependency with sexed bodies limit how we capture the fluid-
ity of the everyday experiences of gender. For example, Francis cites a number of inci-
dents where boys and girls take on masculine/feminine behaviours. In effect, their
behaviours and practices appear to be ‘transgressive’ of normative gender behaviours.
Importantly, the pupils do not take up counter-identities in terms of male femininities –
as studies on transgender self-identification indicate – rather there is a complex
arrangement of monoglossic and heteroglossic events. Importantly, Francis argues
that there needs to be a more subtle method of explaining the diversity of behaviour
without the reduction to identity categories. This conceptual division between mono-
glossia and heteroglossia enables her to locate gender practices that do not fit easily
with notions of masculinity and femininity. As a consequence, the broader social struc-
tures of gender remain enduring, while the local practice of gender identities allows for
a range of gendered configurations, such as male femininities and female masculinities.
Although the use of Bakhtin is popular across a range of disciplines, in educational
research on masculinity, it is in its infancy and is beginning to provide a productive
analytical framework. As a result, there is scope to develop the framework further.
For example, monoglossia and heteroglossia exist unequally where power remains
‘top down’; as Bakhtin suggests monoglossia is ‘clearly more powerful and ubiqui-
tous’, and in contrast heteroglossia is, ‘less powerful and have complex ontological
status’ (1984, xix). Further research might explore another space identified by
Bakhtin as polyglossia. Polyglossia is a space that ‘fully frees consciousness from
the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language’ (1984, 61). In many
Gender and Education 585
ways, Bakhtin’s concept of polyglossia suggests the potential for gender to be con-
sidered and understood outside of existing conceptual frames that are currently being
used. More work could be undertaken to explore the possibility of understanding mas-
culinity outside the language through which it is constituted. Although not in the scope
of this article, there is potential for a conceptually transgressive approach that would not
only question the viability of masculinity as a concept to understand notions of gender.
which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized, but gender
might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denatur-
alized’ (Butler 2004, 42). The strategy, therefore, is to theoretically distance gender
from masculinity (and femininity) to enable gender to be constituted through alternative
social and cultural forms. In other words, the use of masculinity as a conceptual tool to
explore educational space may be instantiating a regulatory system of gender that is
dependent upon sex/gender binaries. By undermining the regulatory system that config-
ures gender, we can, in turn, begin to ‘undo gender’. This refusal of the binary cat-
egories is illustrative in Frank, Davison, and Lovell’s (2003, 129) suggestion that
Quite simply, then what we are advocating is the need to think differently about how we
think (Flax 1987) about boys and men, about masculinity and sexuality, and more
broadly, how we have come to ‘know’ the world through the more general artificial
polarities which modern investigation and theorising has invented as ‘real’.
Therefore, one way to disengage the ‘artificial polarities’ that regulate gender is to
explore how particular attitudes, behaviours and practices are being rearticulated or
reassembled in ways that are not intelligible through the identity category of masculi-
nity. Working in the field of cultural studies, Noble (2004, xxxix) in her excellent
exploration of female masculinity differentiates her project from that of Judith Halber-
stam: ‘What I argue is that the subjects under discussion not only refuse categorization
as a teleology but that they also rearticulate, or reassemble, the intelligibility of categ-
orization itself’. So, whereas the first section of this article explored how the conceptual
integrity of masculinity is maintained through notions of hegemonic masculinities, or as
Butler (2004, 43) suggests the ‘multiplication of genders’, the second section loosens or
unfastens an interpretive schema that ‘naturalises’ of masculinity and femininity as gen-
dered norms. In this final section, a post-masculinity approach severs masculinity as the
primary interpretive frame through which to explain gendered subjectivities.
In the introduction, we identified how masculinity has been used unproblematically
as a concept to explain male behaviours in diverse educational contexts that range from
3-year-old boys (pre-school) through to 21-year-old boys (higher education). In these
instances, it appears that masculinity and being have theoretical proximity; to under-
stand ‘maleness’ we can use the concept of masculinity. One strategy to undo gender
might be to let go of gender and consider how ‘maleness’ is constituted through
586 C. Haywood and M. Mac an Ghaill
particular cultural discourses. This is something evident in the research of Hills and
Croston (2011). They argue that the category of masculinity and femininity are restric-
tive, in that, they limit the possibilities of capturing cross-gender attitudes and beha-
viours. The danger of this approach is that understanding gender outside of
masculinity may lead to reducing gender to ‘maleness’. The argument from a post-mas-
culinity position might suggest that we have a different social and cultural construction
of gender that is not premised upon masculinity and femininity. Thus, one area that
Butler (2004) identifies as creating theoretical distance between gender and masculinity
is by highlighting the ‘. . .possibilities for gender that are not predetermined by forms of
hegemonic heterosexuality’ (54). Such a position is developed by Miller (2006, 19)
who argues that ‘Gendered and sexualized bodies are only rendered visible if they
align within the bounds of the heterosexual matrix. . .’. Therefore, in order to explore
gendered identifications and experiences outside masculinity, we may need to
explore gendered forms that are not dependent upon heterosexuality. For example, in
the context of River High School, Cheri Jo Pascoe argues that ‘masculinity and femi-
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ninity are forged through a “heterosexual matrix” (Butler 1995) that involves the public
ordering of masculinity and femininity through the meanings and practices of sexuality’
(2007, 27).
However, if there is little recognition or identification with the heterosexual matrix,
the cultural forms of masculinity and femininity may be more ambiguous. In short, the
intelligibility of gender that is premised upon heterosexuality may be ruptured through
identifications that are unable to be cohered through masculinity. This was something
found in the early work by Thorne (1993). She identifies how younger children ‘cross
genders’ particularly in the absence of a developed heterosexual meaning system and
suggests the importance of recalibrating the relationship between gendered subjectiv-
ities and (hetero)sexual structures. For example, there is often a tendency to use
adult-led (heterosexual) masculinities to explain boys’ schooling experiences. Davies
(1989, 2006) also explores the dynamics of category maintenance by children who
transgress masculine- and feminine-orientated discourses and practices. She suggests
the possibility of opening up a third category of gender that results in ‘breaking up
the gender binary’ (2006, 88). Research by Haywood (2008) reports on how the gen-
dered meaning systems of boys aged 8–12 years in a UK state school were not located
within easily definable heterosexual and homosexual binaries. As a consequence, ero-
tically charged behaviours between boys and between boys and girls were not collapsed
within a logic of (homo/hetero)sexuality. With the structures of normative heterosexu-
ality that underpin the articulation of masculinity (and femininity) being less salient, a
masculinity identity that ‘Othered’ femininity, employed homophobia and celebrated
heterosexuality was not taken up by these boys (see also Leck 2000).
The theoretical distance between gender and masculinity is also methodologically
and analytically challenged by Talburt’s (2010) use of the ‘subjunctive’. Based on read-
ings of the film, the History Boys, Talburt highlights how the theoretical framing of sub-
jectivities through identity creates reified categories that demand a rigid indexicality of
being and doing. In the History Boys, Talburt outlines how knowledge, desire and iden-
tity are secured through the interpretive boundaries embedded in pedagogic and admin-
istrative structures of schooling. However, she identifies particular incidents in the film
where such boundaries are transgressed. For example, she suggests that the students
articulate a queering that is uncoupled from identity categories and circulates across
and beyond heteronormative circuits of desire. ‘The boys do not express the sexual
and gender phobias “expected” of males of their age: they comfortably “act” like
Gender and Education 587
women in class, openly enact queer desires, and take turns on Hector’s motorbike’
(Talburt 2010, 61). [Hector is a Humanities teacher, who routinely ‘gropes’ each of
the boys when he gives them a lift]. Thus, Talburt suggests that educational research
should endeavour to capture ‘subjunctive validity’ that among a range of aspects,
‘is concerned with undecidables, limits, paradoxes, discontinuities, complexities’
(Lather 2007, 128, cited in Talburt 2010, 62). From this perspective, queer experiences
are disconnected from identity categories and can be used to suggest alternative ways of
conceptualising gender.
One of the critiques of Talburt’s position, and that of a post-masculinity position, is
that there is a marginalisation of the institutional context and that discontinuities circu-
lating through sexual categories are facilitated by the unspoken continuities of institu-
tionally driven privilege and status. It could be argued that the film’s narrative and the
subjunctive potential appear to underpin a masculinity that is achieved through the
pursuit of an intellectual muscularity (Redman and Mac an Ghaill 1996).2 Furthermore,
work by Skelton et al. (2009) suggests that children use discourses of masculinity and
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femininity to structure relationships between themselves and their peers. There is also a
broader criticism of a ‘post-masculinity’ position in that it does not appear to suffi-
ciently address the issues concerning systems of social and cultural inequality. Further-
more, suggesting that masculinity can be understood beyond categorical identities may
result in a politics of cultural difference that
. . .works in the service of maintaining a compulsory ignorance, and where the break
between the past and the present keeps us from being able to see the trace of the past
as it re-emerges in the very contours of an imagined future. (Butler 1999, 18)
So for example, in working class schools where there was a majority Asian student popu-
lation with a mainly white minority, the dominant representations of Asian youth tended
588 C. Haywood and M. Mac an Ghaill
to be negative with caricatures of them as sly and ‘not real men’. However, in working
class schools which included significant numbers of African-Caribbeans, the students
felt that the Asians were caricatured in a more positive way in relation to the African-Car-
ibbeans, who were perceived as of ‘low ability’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘anti-authority’. (158)
deploy social and cultural categories as intersecting, the use of simultaneity facilitates
a conceptual liminality. This liminality is a position that is ‘necessarily ambiguous,
since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifi-
cations that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’ (Turner 1969, 95).
In the minutiae of the classroom space, Youdell identifies the fluidity in the ascription
of identities to boys, who have been educationally disenfranchised from a learner iden-
tity. She suggests that
There is no either/or here – the binary machines of subjectivation seem not to operate.
Boys are not either student and learner or SEDB [social, emotional and behavioural dif-
ficulties] boys or cool boys. Rather there is a simultaneity and fluidity to these positions.
(Youdell 2010, 320)
Consequently, alongside the lack of discourses that are taken up by the teacher to estab-
lish an adult identity, the boys who are at one moment in an educational system signi-
fied as abject, are simultaneously located as ‘becoming-student, becoming-learner,
becoming-boy’ (Youdell 2010, 322). One of the features of studies that use masculinity
is to cohere difference and similarity. This tends to reflect Benjamin’s (1988, 17) obser-
vation that ‘. . .difference is defensively incorporated into rigid representations rather
than recognised in tension with commonality’ and we should begin to make visible
the boundaries that ‘enclose the identical’. So rather than interpreting social and cultural
processes as ‘feminisation’ or ‘re-masculinisation’, a post-masculinity position might
draw upon other categories such as age or ‘race’/ethnicity to designate gender. The
overall direction of the post-masculinity position is to destabilise and disconnect mas-
culinity from gender; there is a conscious intention to avoid trying to make gendered
subjectivities fit theoretical and empirical representations of masculinity.
Conclusion
This article has offered a particular mapping of the field, to track the different ways that
masculinity has been conceptualised. It does not attempt to capture all of the literature
and cover the range of intricacies that theories have developed. Research on masculi-
nity in education continues to be a source of theoretical and conceptual excitement.
Although the authors are keen to explore further a post-masculinity approach to
Gender and Education 589
Notes
1. Connell has maintained a critical engagement with her original concept of hegemony and the
way it has been taken up by others (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005).
2. Special thanks to second reviewer for pointing this out.
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