Rob Pattman

But it's racism I really hate: Young masculinities, racism and psychoanalysis

This article addresses the issue of how discursive analyses revealing the way personal accounts of masculinities are constructed can be supplemented by theories providing plausible explanations of how individuals take up particular subject positions. It is suggested that psychoanalytic concepts are helpful in this regard. An analysis is presented of material from a participant in a study of emergent masculinities among boys in London schools. This material concerns the cross cutting of gendered and racialized identity positions. The use of psychoanalytic constructs enables the production of an account of this boys narrative in which reasons for his adoption and defense of particular positions, despite their contradictory and conflictual character, can be proposed

Lads, machos and others: developing ‘boy-centred’ research

This chapter provides some background to our project by investigating recent research which has explored the construction of masculine ‘identities’ through ethnographic, observational and interview methods. We are particularly interested in research that addresses the topic of boys’ experiences by allowing them to speak about it openly and in detail, rather than research which, for example, measures achievements, attitudes or behaviours. We are also concerned to maintain a view of masculinity in its relational aspects — that is, to understand how it comes to be constructed in relation to femininity- and how, in the context of ‘masculinity’ itself, there might be many varied ‘masculinities’, alternative ways of ‘doing boy’. Other key topics explored in research on masculinities and gendered identities include the ways in which what counts as being female or male is contested and resisted and how gendered identities are differentiated by, for example, social class and ‘race’.

Middle‐class struggle? Identity‐work and leisure among sixth formers in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the ways in which sixth‐form students in Milton Keynes negotiate their identities and the symbolic significance they attach to leisure activities in the process of doing this. The paper draws upon qualitative, young‐person‐centred interviews with sixth formers in state and private schools. We address the investments of sixth formers in constructing themselves as autonomous individuals and argue that they do so from a position of middle‐class subjects‐in‐the‐making. Through an inversion of Willis’ (1977) (focus, our concern is to make explicit the implicitly middle‐class identities sixth formers were forging. We argue that the identity‐work of sixth formers plays a part in the reproduction of school‐based class inequalities by pathologising working‐class students while constructing themselves as bourgeois liberal individuals.

White South African school girls and their accounts of black girls at school and cross-racial heterosexual relations outside school

The post-apartheid era has generated opportunities for cross-racial mixing and socializing among young people inconceivable under apartheid, and this perhaps is no more apparent than in the formation of racially mixed public schools. In this article we draw on an interview study that seeks to investigate Grade 11 (16—17-year-old) young people and their lives and identities in different schools near Durban. We concentrate on interviews conducted with a group of middle-class white girls in a formerly white school and we examine whether and if so how they draw on whiteness when asked to reflect on themselves and their relations with others in and outside the school. While we begin with how these girls spoke about themselves and their relations with others in the school, we focus mainly in this article on these girls’ accounts of cross-racial heterosexual relations outside the school. In their accounts of schooling whiteness was constructed in opposition to versions of blackness associated with racial essentialism and intransigence. What was very striking was how positively they presented (heterosexual) desire when directed to boys of other races, associating this with free will and agency as against ‘constraints’ imposed by their parents, peers and culture. In these accounts their sense of whiteness seemed much less assured and taken for granted than in their accounts of their relations with black girls in school. Whereas, we argue, white girls drew on versions of whiteness (and blackness) in school that reinforced racial divisions and hierarchies, despite presenting themselves as non-racial, their interest in cross-racial heterosexual relations and expressions of cross-racial desire subverted racial essentialisms even if, in some cases, this was extremely limited.

Student identities, and researching these, in a newly ‘racially’ merged university in South Africa

The paper reports on research conducted by third‐year sociology students into student identities at the University of KwaZulu‐Natal in Durban, South Africa. This university was formed as a result of a merger between two formerly ‘racially’ defined universities. The research, comprising interviews and observation and taking place at the University’s Howard College (the formerly white University of Natal), was envisaged as a way of enabling the students to apply practically theories of identity, and as a means of generating local resources. In spite of the recent merger, ‘race’ emerged as a major influence on student identifications, affecting associations on campus, what people did, where they went to in their break times and their attitudes to others. The paper investigates racialised groupings and identities on campus, how they are forged in relation to each other and students’ emotional investments in them. It draws, also, on the researchers’ own experiences, as black, white and Indian male and female students, of engaging in this research, and the issues and problems they encountered, and reflects on some of the methodological implications of students researching students and ‘race.’

Constructing and Experiencing Boyhoods in Research in London.

When Rob was about 14‐years‐old, at an all male boarding school, he was so glad that he did not have a tiny penis like another boy who was called girl. He was popular because he was good at sport, missed his mum and dog terribly but never showed it (except a little to his mum and dog) and talked a lot about girls he fancied. These memories were triggered by an interview based study on the identities of 11‐ to 14‐year‐old boys in London which we conducted from 1997–2000. Rob was the interviewer, and he interviewed boys in groups (45: 36 single sex and nine mixed) and individually (79) in 12 London schools.

Gender and Education in Developing Contexts: Postcolonial Reflections on Africa

Two of the most pressing educational concerns in sub-Saharan Africa – violence and HIV/AIDS – are directly related to the ways in which gender is socially constructed. In developing contexts gender has stubbornly remained a one-sided topic with the focus fi rmly (and justifi ably) on the plight of girls in schools. In the African context where girls have often been marginalized, the benefi ts of education including increased economic opportunities, smaller families and its role as a “social vaccine” against HIV are well documented. Yet, in many African countries, access to education is curtailed by lack of resources and the question of quality of education has been raised as an important reason why girls continually lack the skills and confi dence to make appropriate choices in environments that are plagued by unemployment, poverty, violence, confl ict and HIV/AIDS. Schools are not safe places for girls and most of the gender analyses focus on the ways in which sexual violence manifests in school sites hindering and harming the education of girls. The focus on boys on the other hand and the construction of masculinities as a gendered construct has been largely absent from the literature on gender and education in development discourse. Where the focus has been present the construction of violent masculinities has received attention (Morrell, 2001). In industrialized and developed economies, research on gender and education has focused on boys, with a great deal of attention being given to the crisis of masculinity and feminist gains at the expense of boys. In this writing, boys have been presented as gendered victims who need support. This is in contrast to writings about boys and men in Africa who have often been demonized and seen as potentially dangerous. Recently though, an approach in gender and education in sub-Saharan Africa trying to shed light on the construction of masculinities and their complex relationship to socially and materially impoverished contexts ravaged by HIV/AIDS is emerging. These analyses generally conclude that violent and hegemonic forms of masculinities within resource-poor contexts nurture unequal gender relations and it is usually boys and male teachers that use violence. Girls mainly suffer the consequences of violence in school. Similarly, most reports on HIV/AIDS focus on how girls are made vulnerable to the disease by a rampant heterosexual masculinity. Girls account for nearly 60% of HIV infections in sub-Saharan

Learning from the Learners: How Research with Young People Can Provide Models of Good Pedagogic Practice in Sexuality Education in South Africa

In this chapter, we reflect on what we learn from South African learners about sexuality as it emerges in their accounts about their lives in and out of school. We focus on how sexuality is spoken about and given meaning by learners. The chapter also considers how intersectionality is forged through the connections that learners make between sexuality, gender, race, class, and age. We reflect, too, on how we learn this and the relations we establish with the young people in the research which enable them to engage with sexuality in ways which are pertinent to them. This carries implications, which we explore, for developing learner-centred forms of sexuality education, as advocated in the Life Orientation curriculum, which encompasses sexuality education in South Africa.

Loving and Hating Jacob Zuma: Some Implications for Education.

In the first of our ‘Current concerns’ series, Rob Pattman provides a fascinating account of responses to the Jacob Zuma trial from students in South Africa. Reflecting upon the repercussions of Zuma’s acquittal for rape, Pattman suggests, offers a highly charged moment for the articulation of difference and, crucially for teachers, the discussion of difference. In a recent packed meeting I attended in a large university hall in Durban to reflect upon the impact of the Jacob Zuma rape trial, a young Black man got up, announced he was a Jacob Zuma supporter and was very pleased with Zuma’s acquittal. Reading from a script, he then asserted that Zuma was his ‘role model’ and that, like Zuma, he would not wear a condom when having sex and have a shower afterwards. Jacob Zuma is the former Deputy President of South Africa who was suspended from office pending a court case on corruption charges but whose name has dominated the South Africa media over the last few months in relation to his prosecution for rape of a much younger woman who was HIV positive. This woman was an old family friend of Zuma’s, the daughter of an ex-comrade of his in the anti-apartheid struggle in which he—Zuma—played an important role. She was staying as a guest at Zuma’s house where she alleged the rape occurred. Zuma admitted having sex with her but claimed it was consensual and when called to the witness stand and questioned why he had unprotected sex with the complainant knowing she was HIV positive, he indicated that he felt the risks of contracting HIV from her were low, and that he showered to ‘minimize’ the risks. When the young man at the meeting said he would follow Zuma in this way there was laughter and clapping from some Black young men sitting around him while many other members of the audience looked shocked. His failure to use condoms, and especially his reasons for having a shower, has made Zuma the object of much contempt and ridicule, and cartoon images of a fat naked Zuma having a shower have proliferated in the newspapers. The image of a

Christian Women and Men from Durban: Peer Sex Educators in the Making.

In HIV and AIDS and life skills education in southern Africa peer education has been advocated as a way of democratizing relations between educators and students and encouraging participatory pedagogies. But what makes a peer educator, or rather how do people make themselves peer educators? Similarities in terms of age, social status and background do not automatically result in teachers and students identifying as peers and engaging in participatory teaching and learning. This paper focuses on an interview with men and women in their 20s who were identified as peer educators and taught life skills education to children in a ‘black’ high school. How did they, as full‐time paid employees several years older than their students working for a Christian organization, construct themselves as peers in relation to the male and female students they taught? It is argued that this involved contradictory ways of relating to students, moralistic and student‐centred, and that they subverted and reproduced conventional gendered identities.