Multiple Masculinities?

Through interviews with 20 teenage boys at two high schools, the author examines the ways in which boys from different school subcultures engage with the most dominantly masculine of the school's peer groups—the Jocks. The author investigates how boys from less “masculine” groups maintain a sense of self as masculine. The boys do this by reworking meanings of group membership and gendered identity to include masculinized attributes associated with Jocks, such as competence, heterosexual success, and dominance. These findings indicate that a simplistic deployment of the “multiple masculinities” model may miss some of the ways gender works in a given setting. The author argues that typologies overlook the complex ways in which masculinity is discursively manipulated so that even boys who are understood as less masculine within a school's social hierarchy maintain or create a sense of self as recognizably masculine.