Publications

As one of its key contributions to feminist thought, post-structuralist feminism has invited healthy suspicion of the search for absolute origins of the study of power and inequality. We now know very well that gender relations inhere in complex and mutable social configurations: there is no original sin, no primordial logos, no underlying dialectic ‘in the final analysis’.¹ Contemporary feminist theories have attended to the ways that gendered forms of power can disassemble, regroup, and resurface: gender relations are nothing if not inventive. Yet public discourses surrounding boys – and to some extent, scholarship in boys studies – tends to consider the boy and boyhood as a ‘ground zero’ for an understanding of patriarchy. The notion that gender identities are complex relational phenomena finds little traction in public debates about raising and schooling boys. Thus the search for origins returns in a new guise under the auspices of a (most often) unstated question: when and how does everything go wrong for boys?

This Special Issue contributes a more complex and nuanced understanding of the gendered lives of boys, an interest that was present in foundational feminist and queer literatures in the 1980s (see Laird 2004). Feminist research and scholarship on boys, especially that aligned with queer or trans studies (see, for example, Hammer 2019; Martino et al. 2024; Tang 2021), with Indigenous and critical race studies (see, for example, Faulkner 2020; Lindsay 2018), with critical disability studies (see, for example, Gibson et al. 2013; Wilson et al. 2012), and indeed with child studies (see, for example, Thorne et al. 2024; Wells 2018), has made important contributions to understanding how boyhood is lived in diverse sociocultural contexts marked by the weight of patriarchal traditions and the privileging of (some forms of) masculinity. While we will not attempt to summarise that vast field here, we do want to open this collection by drawing out some key ways that these essays both build on and extend dominant paradigms in the study of boys. In particular, we want to consider pathways and opportunities for boys studies that begin with critical feminist insights into the social organisation of gender, but that can move beyond what is commonly understood as the ‘boy problem’. […]

Boys are figured as both too fast and too slow for what’s expected of them. Too action-oriented for the classroom or for happy domestic containment. Too slow to grow up or too stalled by obstacles to their natural energies to embrace manhood. This article considers the widespread perception of boys and boyhood as characterised by a desirable energy and liveliness but, at the same time, by a problematic excess of energy and a reluctance or incapacity to channel this efficiently into mature competencies. To do so, we consider some long discursive precedents for understanding boyishness as simultaneously energetic promise and management problem: from enlightenment discourses on education through to ‘boys work’ organisations like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA; to resonant imaginations of innate boyhood energy at odds with society in popular texts; and to recent scholarship on the current cultural impasse of boys perceived as unable or unwilling to become men. In coming to grips with the resilience of this discourse on the energies of boyhood, we consider its implications for contemporary feminist analyses of boyhood and make an argument for thinking about boyhood as a more mobile designation for orientations, experiences, and bodies.

This article explores the epistemic underpinnings of parenting advice books about raising boys, with a focus on the work of two best-selling Australian authors: Maggie Dent and Steve Biddulph. Alongside a range of normative claims about boys, biology, and the role of parents in the acquisition of gender, these books advance a claim to boyhood as a phenomenon best known through ‘common sense’. Avowedly anti-expert, these texts present gender as something ‘obvious’ – readily understood through simple everyday observation. Not only are their accounts of gender at odds with contemporary feminist research, but they work to push feminist research out of the conversation altogether. Following Geertz [Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “Common Sense as a Cultural System.” The Antioch Review 33 (1): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/4637616], this article argues that ‘common sense’ can be understood as a semantic field which makes an asset of theoretical inconsistency and ‘thinness’, and positions scholarly rigour as unreliable or suspect. A feminist response to the ‘common sense’ claims of texts like these must therefore grapple not only with matters of fact and accuracy, but also with the implicit claim that parental expertise and everyday observation contain epistemic value above (and in opposition to) scholarly research on gender and childhood.

This paper analyses the (re)mediation of teenage boyhood in Netflix’s British teen comedy-drama, Sex Education (Netflix 2019–2023), focusing on the series’ central protagonist Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) and his characteristic awkwardness. Popular discourse constructs his awkwardness as central to the series’ effective departure from the traditional gender norms that organise the teen drama series. However, while the promise of an alternative televisual boyhood is both refreshing and appealing, the search for a better category of ‘being boy’ continues to assign a set of gendered traits or behaviours to a distinctively sexed body. Drawing on the concept of awkward affective labour, the paper rearticulates Otis’s awkwardness as a desirable trait subsumed in narratives of neoliberalism, where overcoming awkwardness and embracing the discomforts of adolescent boyhood are framed as valuable. The logic of Otis’ enterprising coming-of-age narrative replicates the industrial logics of Netflix, where screening comfort and feminist narratives build audience preferences and are conducive to binge-watching.

This paper examines the TikToks of mixed race Japanese Australian content producer Jiyayjt. Jiyayjt provides insights into growing up as a mixed race boy in Australian and Japanese society, and in an interracial family. His interest in Japanese and broadly Asian popular culture appears a significant part of his diasporic subjectivity, and he offers interesting racial commentary on the figure of the ‘weeb’ as a counterpoint to mixed race Asian identity. This essay argues that Jiyayjt’s masculine performance is shaped by increasingly influential Asian popular cultural representations of soft masculinities, sometimes called softboys, flowerboys, bishonen (beautiful boys), with links to the manga genre of Boys Love. TikTok, like other new media platforms, has been described as a heterotopic space where the values and norms of multiple global contexts flow into individuals’ screens. Transnational conceptions of boyhood or boyishness within contemporary masculinities are evident in TikTok fandoms engaged in Asian popular culture, such as Jiyayjt’s. This article argues that the increasingly powerful influence of Asian popular culture and values offers new possibilities in the construction of mixed race Asian Australian masculinities. These possibilities include the reimagining of masculinities through feminist questioning of hegemonic gendered norms.

This article considers Katherine Angel and Amia Srinivasan’s feminist critiques of consent culture in relation to one of Australia’s most successful instances of consent advocacy – Chanel Contos’s ‘Teach Us Consent’ campaign. I begin by detailing and endorsing how Angel and Srinivasan criticise consent culture for obscuring the fact that women are exposed to (and shaped by) patriarchal norms. I then argue that they fail to wholly extend this nuance to men. By implying that men’s actions in sexual encounters are somewhat expressive of ‘authentic’ desires, Angel and Srinivasan risk imputing to men the very conception of agency they criticise consent culture for imputing to women. This makes it harder to see boys as anything other than potentially violent future-men. In the final section, I argue that though Contos offers a more holistic response to sexual violence than consent culture, she views boys as not-yet-men with a default loyalty to patriarchy. The resonance between these feminists is understandable given the severe and gendered problem of sexual violence. Yet it also indicates, I conclude, that there is a pattern in contemporary Western feminist discourses of sexual consent to enclose boys (and men) as potential perpetrators, furthering the association between masculinity and violence.

This article examines the role of boy witnesses in screen representations of domestic and family violence. Australian cinema has frequently placed a speechless boy at a scene of men’s violence: he might bea figure of innocence against masculinities gone bad, or a proxy for the audience, simulating a point-of-view untroubled by contemporary debates around gender-based violence. This article argues that the figure of the boy who looks is invested with multiple competing meanings attached to masculinity, including idealisations of boyhood curiosity, celebrations of boys as figures of progress, and the racialisation of Australian boyhoods within the context of colonial violence and dispossession. Furthermore, by interrogating the trope of the boy who looks, this article considers the affordances and limitations of contemporary feminist approaches to violence in cinema, and argues for an understanding of domestic and family violence in cinema as inextricably linked to the ways that we think about masculinity, cultural identity, and youth.

This paper explores feminism as a site of explicit struggle and implicit sense-making for young men. Through an analysis of interviews with twenty young people at two Australian universities, it considers how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape discussions of men, boys and masculinity. Actively grappling with the place of boys and men in certain high-profile feminist debates, participants’ responses revealed core sites of tension around their collective and individual responsibility for gendered harms, tensions reflective of those present within feminist debates themselves. The impact of feminism could also be seen in the gendered analysis so many participants produced to make sense of limiting emotional norms, even though they did not recognise this analysis as a feminist inheritance. Moving beyond an approach seeking to categorise young men’s responses as either pro- or anti-feminist, this paper highlights the entanglement of feminism in young men’s sensemaking around gendered issues.

Cranbrook in Sydney’s east is one of the most elite boys schools in Australia. On Monday night, the ABC’s Four Corners program aired claims some female teachers had been bullied by male staff and sexually harassed by students. Amid the school’s decision to go fully co-ed by 2028, there are concerns about whether Cranbrook will be a safe space for girls. In a statement to the ABC, Cranbrook said its “current staff, including female staff, overwhelmingly support the School, its values and its culture”. It also said it has appointed teacher Daisy Turnbull to prepare for coeducation and “support the furtherance of gender equality” at the school. What do schools need to do in order to be genuinely gender inclusive?

When students walked through the sandstone gates of Sydney’s Newington College for the first day of school last week, they were met by protesters. A group of parents and former students had gathered outside this prestigious school in the city’s inner west, holding placards decrying the school’s decision to become fully co-educational by 2033. Protesters have even threatened legal action to defend the 160-year-old tradition of boys’ education at the school. One told Channel 9 they fear the change is driven by “woke […] palaver” that will disadvantage boys at Newington. Newington is not the only prestigious boys school to open enrolments to girls. Cranbrook in Sydney’s east will also go fully co-ed, with the decision sparking a heated community debate…

While consent forms part of the Health, Wellbeing and Relationships strand of the New South Wales (NSW) Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) curriculum in Australia, it is not consistently or effectively delivered within schools. The recent e-campaign, Teach Us Consent in NSW, drew attention to the alarmingly high rates of sexual assault experienced by young women during their school years or shortly after. The campaign called for mandatory, inclusive and comprehensive consent education in schools. This paper presents research from a case study of an elite, same-sex, Catholic boys’ school in NSW, Australia, examining the types of knowledge and attitudes young men and their PDHPE teachers had about sexual consent and the types of consent pedagogies mobilised. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with the five male PDHPE teachers, and a focus group was conducted with five Year 11 male students (aged 16–17). The findings highlight that while participants recognised the importance of sexual consent in intimate relationships, consent pedagogies were grounded in individualising discourses of risk, responsibility and care, which rearticulated hegemonic gender norms. Findings from this study contribute to discussions of how schools approach consent education, and the limitations presented by outsourcing relationships and sex education.

This special issue has been compiled to suggest that there is much to gain from affirmative feminist approaches to boys: from problematizing the categories of boy and boyhood; examining the multiplicity of boyhoods through historical, comparative, and intersectional lenses; and examining boys’ social and emotional lives as boys, rather than for the adults they will become.

This paper considers some cultural and intellectual problems arising from these dominant ideas about the relations between feminism and boyhood.

This paper explores the discursive construction of boys in two Australia domestic violence primary prevention advertisement campaigns.

This article argues for a revised understanding of ‘complicity’ as a undertheorised position and relationship within the social organisation of gender.

The group known as ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates, usually men) has become a spectacle for feminism as well as for mass media.

Transkids is a documentary on gender transitioning children in Israel. My interest is in the quotidian lives of the three transmasculine youths portrayed in the film

This critical commentary considers the significance of Connell’s The Men and the Boys in the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies.