The literature on masculinity lacks thorough and sustained in situ examinations of how diverse boys employ their bodies to construct masculine identities during pubescence. To address this gap, the present article examines how a group of 10 sixth-grade Latino boys, who publicly acknowledged that they were experiencing puberty, employed their bodies at school to construct their masculine identities. The data suggest that among the boys, puberty was a social accomplishment connected to masculine enactments informed by the dominant gendered expectations of (...) peers at school and in their neighborhoods, the hegemonic masculine practices espoused by commercial hip hop rappers, and the dominant gender orders in the U.S and both Dominican and Puerto Rican societies. With physical displays of corporeal strength and tolerance for pain, the boys sought to signal that they were entering adulthood and preparing their bodies for a social world wherein physical confrontations between males were commonplace. The findings contribute to our understanding of how second-generation children who reside in low-income, working-class neighborhoods and have social ties to their nations of origin and their respective cultures construct masculinities in the United States. The article concludes with a call for longitudinal ethnographic studies examining how boys from various social backgrounds construct masculine identities during their pubescent development. (shrink)

Over the past decade, sexual rumor spreading, slut-shaming, and homophobic labeling have become central examples of bullying among young women. This article examines the role these practices— what adults increasingly call “bullying” and what girls often call “drama”— play in girls’ gendering processes. Through interviews with 54 class and racially diverse late adolescent girls, I explore the content and functions of “sexual drama.” All participants had experiences with this kind of conflict, and nearly a third had been the subject of (...) other girls’ rumors about their own sexual actions and/or orientations. Their accounts indicate that sexual drama offers girls a socially acceptable site for making claims to, and sense of, gendered sexuality in adolescence. While they reproduce inequality through these practices, sexual drama is also a resource for girls—one that is made useful through the institutional constraints of their high schools, which reinforce traditional gender norms and limit sexuality information. (shrink)

Few studies have examined how groups of individuals enact different patterns of gender relations within and across contexts. In this article, I draw upon nine months of fieldwork and 15 semistructured interviews conducted with eight- to 10-year-old swimmers on a co-ed youth swim team. During focused aspects of swim practice, gender was less salient and structural mechanisms encouraged athletes to interact in ways that illuminated girls’ and boys’ similar athletic abilities, undermining categorical, essentialist, and hierarchical gender beliefs pertaining to athleticism. (...) However, in the swimmers’ unfocused free time, the salience of gender was high and structural mechanisms encouraged swimmers to engage in “borderwork.” In this context, similarities between the genders were obscured and girls and boys instead interacted in ways that affirmed essentialist and categorical—but nonhierarchical—meanings of gender. By paying attention to structural mechanisms and the variable salience of gender, we can thus see the various conditions under which children deploy different patterns of gender relations, and how less oppressive gender relations can potentially “spill over” from one context to the next. (shrink)