This study explores the peer group understandings of five male friends between the ages of six and eight years and seeks to examine the ways in which the groups social dynamics interact to define, regulate and maintain dominant and collective understandings of masculinities. Within a self-selected affinity context, and drawing on their lived and imagined experiences, the boys enact and interpret their social worlds.
Adopting the principles of ethnography within a framework of feminist poststructuralism and drawing on theories of groupness and gender(ed) embodiment, the boys understandings of masculinities are captured and interpreted. The key analytic foci are directed towards examining the role of power in the social production of collective schoolboy knowledges, and understanding the processes through which boys subjectify and are subjectified, through social but also bodily discourses. The boys constructions of peer group masculinities are (re)presented through a narrative methodology which foregrounds my interpretation of the groups personal and social relevances and seeks to be inductive in ways that bring to life the boys stories.
The study illuminates the potency of peer culture in shaping and regulating the boys dominant understandings of masculinity. Within this culture strong essentialist and hierarchical values are imported to support a range of gender(ed) and sexual dualisms. Here patriarchal adult culture is regularly mimicked and distorted. Underpinned by constructions of femininity as the negative other, dominant masculinities are embodied, cultivated and championed through physical dominance, physical risk, aggression and violence.
Through feminist poststructural analysis which enables a theorising of the boys subjectivities as fluid, tenuous and often characterised by contradiction and resistance, there exists a potential for interrupting and re-working particular masculinities. Within this framework, more affirmative but equally legitimate understandings and embodiments can be explored. The study presents a warrant for working with early childhood affinity groups to disrupt and contest the dominance and hierarchy of peer culture in an effort to counter-act broader gendered and heterosexist global, state and institutional structures. Framing these assertions is an understanding of the peer context as not only self-limiting and productive of hierarchies, but enabling and generative of affirmative subjectivities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216951 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Keddie, Amanda, kimg@deakin.edu.au,jillj@deakin.edu.au,mikewood@deakin.edu.au,wildol@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. School of Education / School of Social & Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Amanda Keddie |
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