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Making sense of debates in the education and masculinities field

Much has been made of a supposed crisis in masculinity that, it has been said, contributes towards boys’ failures at school, both academically and socially. Those suggesting that this crisis has had an impact upon how boys come to see themselves have usually drawn upon an anti-feminist rhetoric to fuel their arguments that men are the victims in a new (and perhaps not so new) gender war (see, for example, Hoff Sommers 2000). Underpinning such views was the suggestion that schools had become feminized institutions. Many of these claims began in the late 1980s, reaching a crescendo in the 1990s (for a critique and discussion, see Mills 2003; Weaver-Hightower 2003). These claims infiltrated the policy arena, with many governments seeking to take up the cause of boys (for a discussion of the Australian and UK contexts, see Mills, Francis, and Skelton 2009; see also Jha and Kelleher 2006; Keddie 2009). The policy purchase of much of the anti-feminist populist texts appears to have lessened somewhat in recent times – although it makes its appearance from time to time in the media (see, for example, Donnelly 2012). The effect of much of this debate was to put boys’ education and masculinities on the gender agenda both theoretically and empirically. Thus, whilst boys’ education had clearly been of interest to feminist researchers in the 1980s (Arnot 1984; Mahony 1985; Askew and Ross 1988), a new sociology of masculinities was starting to take shape in the 1990s. Haywood and Mac an Ghaill were early and important contributors to this field of research (see, for example, Mac an Ghaill 1994; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003). Their work was also being produced at a time when post-structural theories were beginning to have a significant influence on education and gender theory, and which provided a powerful case for exploring the way in which identities were not fixed, shifted across place