Straight/Strait Jackets for Masculinity: Educating for "Real" Men

Abstract

Although much research in gender and education has been done over the past twenty years in Canada, very little attention has been paid to the way in which schooling produces and reproduces heterosexual masculinity and legitimates the existing relations among men in the society. The sources that we have had for understanding young men's lives have largely been the writings of "experts"; the accounts of the lives of young men have continually patterned themselves after a theorizing which stresses that history is made "behind their backs." In this article, we hear the voices of fourteen male high school students, interviewed twice during 1988-89 when they were between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Through their voices, these students become the experts in describing their practice, their history in the making — indeed, what it means to be a young man.