The 'making of men' in educational contexts outside mainstream schooling

• Main Author: Farrier, Alan
• Published: University of Manchester 2005
• Subjects: 370.15
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.491144

Research on men and masculinity has boomed in the past two decades, due largely to the insights and progress made by feminist theorists. Mainstream education has emerged as one of the most widely studies areas of society for examining issues of gender and masculinity, but relatively little has been discussed concerning men in other educational contexts. My research focuses on semi-structured interviews with young men from a variety of educational contexts outside mainstream schooling: Sociology Undergraduates, B.Ed Students and 'Powerhouse' Complementary Educational Project users. This thesis charts my movement of thinking about the 'making of men' in each of these contexts, and the increasing influence of poststructuralist theory as a means of understanding the formation of masculinities, and of considering my own influence and role in the research. By means of introduction, I give a brief 'intellectual biography', to illustrate how I arrived at my initial thinking about masculinities, before demonstrating the increasing influence of poststructuralist theory through the course of the thesis. I proceed to illustrate how various academic discourses on gender impinge on the masculinities in the interviews and contribute to a complex set of factors affecting my developing understanding of gender. I interviewed 30 men in total, and I my discontents with various methods of analysing the 'data' led to the development of a different method of analysis than I had originally intended, presenting 'stories' which focus on one man in particular from each cohort. As I interviewed participants in both group and one-to-one contexts, there are also contributions in these 'stories' from several of the other young men. These 'stories' where were then developed further by the addition of a second 'story' column, written a year after the first, which both interrogates and elucidates on the first in an attempt to deliver a 'polyphony' of voices concerning the masculinities in the interviews. I conclude by suggesting that researching masculinities is problematic due to the assumptions and definitions that the researcher brings into the fieldwork, but by analysing the transcripts with multiple readings, we can allow for a greater understanding of the men and masculinities involved. I then proceed to debate the how emancipatory aspirations of traditional feminist research can be applied to my study, and how poststructuralism troubles the notion of 'validity' involved with such research. I point towards the possibilities of future research on masculinities that incorporates feminism and poststructuralism, allowing for a 'movement' between the 'paralysis' and 'Iiberatory' aspects involved, explicitly discussing the role of the self in the research and the dynamic nature of the production of masculinities, in order to produce gender research that is pertinent for the 21 st century.