One of the boys

Gender, class, and identity formation among boys in middle school

Abstract

Norway has an ongoing discourse about boys at school, often talked about as falling behind or being school losers in a feminized school. This discourse is built on boys getting lower grades
than girls in all subjects except PE, and due to boys dropping out of upper secondary education more frequently.
This Ph.D. thesis is an ethnographic study of 6th and 7th-grade boys’ identity formation in school and is based on a year of participant observation at a primary school in inland Norway. This research aims to challenge and nuance this simplified dichotomy of boys struggling and misbehaving on one side and well-behaved and high-achieving girls on the other. The thesis looks at the everyday practices of boys at school, and how they create themselves and are created by others, as individuals and groups. The analytical focus is on how gender, masculinities, and social class play a part in identity formation among boys, and how this further influences their ideas about themselves in the future. Furthermore, an emphasis is put on how pupils navigate the social space at school to remain within what is considered ‘ordinary’, balancing taking part in the sameness of a common ‘we’ within the class or peer group while cultivating their individuality.
This project investigates what school life is like for boys, and how differences in class position and expressions relating to masculinities and ways of doing boy shape their ideas
about their own lives in the present and future. To exemplify how both school life and ideas about the present and future are different for pupils in different subject positions, I will focus
on two analytical pupil categories. I refer to these categories as the football boys, as representatives for a compliant, composed, and hybrid masculine expression; and the defiant
boys, as representatives for the boys opposing and defying the school, teachers, and lessons. These two categories thus present very different approaches to school. The defiant boys more
often oppose the school and the teachers and see their futures outside formal education, while the football boys hold a social and cultural capital making them able to fit more easily into the
school’s project, making them popular as friends, and giving them a dominant position.
Conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork has given the thesis a broad scope and enabled me to view these boys’ everyday lives at school from several different angles, such as consumption, gender performance, discipline, and language use. This study has found that identity formation at school constitutes a process of placing oneself within this network of factors in an ongoing back-and-forth where ways of acting influence one’s position in class while one’s position influences expectations of behavior and presentation. Different roles have different expectations relating to gender performance, patterns of consumption, commitment to the common ‘we’, and how one relates to the school, the teachers, and the school's values. Especially striking is the effort put into not veering too far away from the ordinary. Pupils are acutely aware of how social norms regulate gender performance, consumption, and schoolwork, and that challenging or breaking norms might come with sanctions. This is especially visible within consumption, where many try to avoid being viewed as having too little or the wrong things while also not being viewed as spoiled. Furthermore, their age position between being children and teenagers (tweens) brings with it challenges of acting in age-appropriate ways while exploring topics and experiences related to teenagers and adults.
The ordinary and normative also permeate gender performance. Largely cis-heteronormative expectations dominate not only social norms between pupils, but the school’s practices relating to gender. Acceptance of gender equality and inclusion of different gender identities and sexualities exist in principle, but practices remain normative. An event such as the school dance is highly gendered according to normative principles and highlights the norms of everyday life in an exaggerated form. Gender performances are closely related to subject positions within the class, placement in pupil hierarchies, and nous of how to navigate social norms, leading many boys to take up masculinities that are hybridized in some way.
Anthony Giddens’ description of identity in late modernity as a reflexive project of the self is relevant to this thesis. Ways of being and behaving in school are frequently related to
potential consequences later in life and influence how pupils see themselves as individuals in the present and future. Pupils’ relations to the school’s project, and their experiences of
everyday life there, influence how they envision their future as teens and adults and what they can and cannot be and do. Bringing the future into the present ascribes risk to some pupils
who find expectations from the educational system hard to fulfill. This thesis shows how these boys negotiate their place within the school and as a future generation of adults.