YOUTH /&NEOLIBERALISM

10.1177/0044118X04268377
Phoenix SOCIETY / DECEMBER
AND MASCULINITY
2004

NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY

Racialization and the Contradictions of
Schooling for 11- to 14-Year-Olds

ANN PHOENIX
Open University

The last decade has seen the growth of knowledge societies within neoliberal econo-
mies. As a result, learners are increasingly individualized and expected to be respon-
sible for their learning. The main part of the article uses findings from a study of
young masculinities to argue that boys are not free to choose to work toward qualifi-
cations but are concerned to manage their everyday school interactions in the context
of their complicated, multiple positioning.

Keywords: masculinities; neoliberalism; racialization

Over the last decade, there has been a marked change in thinking
about education and learning in Europe (Dybbroe & Ollagnier, 2003).
This transformation is often referred to as the growth of knowledge
societies—a growth that has taken place within, and been fuelled by,
neoliberalism and that has served to individualize learners by render-
ing them responsible for their learning. Walkerdine, Lucey, and Mel-
ody (2001) suggested that neoliberalism has positioned people as re-
sponsible for their own “self-invention and transformation” to be
“capable of surviving within the new social, economic and political
system” (p. 3). They demonstrated that for young women, the social
and psychological mechanisms by which individuals deal with the
complex demands of neoliberalism are often difficult and sometimes
contradictory. This article aims to complement such findings by ana-
lyzing what it means for boys to negotiate masculine identity in a
neoliberal knowledge society.

YOUTH & SOCIETY, Vol. 36 No. 2, December 2003 227-246

DOI: 10.1177/0044118X04268377
© 2003 Sage Publications
227
228 YOUTH & SOCIETY / MONTH 2004

The article starts by discussing neoliberalism and its relevance to

subjectivity. It then uses the accounts of schooling and masculinity
produced by 11- to 14-year-old London boys to consider how the edu-
cational transformations produced in neoliberalism fail to engage
with their subjectivities and everyday practices. Debates about differ-
ences in boys and girls’ educational performance often imply that im-
proving educational performance simply requires boys’ act of will to
keep up with girls. However, a consideration of boys’ own accounts
indicates that boys were well aware that to gain future success they
needed to get qualifications if they were to optimize their future
chances. Schools are not, however, simply about the gaining of educa-
tional qualifications but are equally about negotiating the complex so-
cial processes that produce boys’masculine subjectivities. Boys were,
therefore, invested in positioning that ran counter to being seen to
work hard at school. They were, therefore, poorly positioned to
comply with the demands of neoliberalism.

THE RELEVANCE OF NEOLIBERALISM TO

SUBJECTIVITY AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES

Neoliberalism is an economic system and philosophy based on

laissez-faire free market values and freedom of globalized corpora-
tions. It enshrines values of competition, entrepreneurialism, market
participation, privatization, lack of state intervention, individual re-
sponsibility (e.g., employability), surveillance, assessment, and
managerialism. Over the last 30 years, it has acquired the status of a
grand narrative or a régime of truth by having been vigorously fol-
lowed by the Conservative and Republican leaders of Britain and the
United States (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) in the 1970s
and 1980s and has been continued in the British New Labour philoso-
phy of the 1990s and 2000s and the republicanism of George W. Bush.
As a form of liberal government focused on economic rationalism,
globalism and allowing the market to make major social and political
decisions offers contrary possibilities for the production of subjectiv-
ity. For, on one hand, the idea that the state should reduce its role in the
economy and that the market should be allowed to organize much that
happens to people as workers and as consumers provides little social
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 229

protection for some citizens while greatly benefiting others. At the

same time, many people apparently benefit from being freed from the
constraints of traditional employment. They have the possibility of
choice about what to consume and can engage in identity projects that
allow them to choose their own individuated biographies. The prob-
lem with this, however, is that this apparent freedom carries responsi-
bilities to make oneself continually employable through lifelong
learning, endless flexibility, and viewing what happens to oneself as
the product of individual, autonomous choices.
Neoliberalism is thus about continually changing the self, making
informed choices, engaging in competition, and taking the chances of-
fered by the market and the government to consume and take advan-
tage of the provisions of lifelong learning and so forth. However, these
four Cs—change, choice, chances, and competition—are posited on
the notion that everybody is, or should be, identical in important ways.
In particular, it requires people to take for granted that neoliberalism is
a natural form of social organization and view themselves as free and
rational agents, able to grasp the opportunities and choices apparently
open to them. Education and learning are central to this philosophy,
because they constitute an important site for all four of these features
of neoliberalism.
These requirements have been subject to much critique. For exam-
ple, Susan George (1999), has long been a harsh critic of the ways in
which neoliberalism has normalized itself, glorified inequality, and
blamed the weak and poorly educated for failing in social
competition:

Starting from a tiny embryo at the University of Chicago with the phi-
losopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students like Milton
Friedman at its nucleus, the neo-liberals and their funders have created
a huge international network. . . .
They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they
understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talk-
ing about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony. If you
can occupy peoples’heads, their hearts and their hands will follow. . . .
The central value of . . . neo-liberalism itself is the notion of compe-
tition—competition between nations, regions, firms and of course be-
tween individuals. Competition . . . is supposed to allocate all re-
230 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

sources, whether physical, natural, human or financial with the great-

est possible efficiency. . . .
People are unequal by nature, but this is good because the contribu-
tions of the well-born, the best-educated, the toughest, will eventually
benefit everyone. Nothing in particular is owed to the weak, the poorly
educated, what happens to them is their own fault, never the fault of so-
ciety. If the competitive system is “given vent” as Margaret [Thatcher]
says, society will be the better for it. Unfortunately, the history of the
past twenty years teaches us that exactly the opposite is the case (para-
graphs 7, 8, 11, 13).

Pierre Bourdieu (1998) and Edward Said (2000) are both also
highly critical of the hegemony of neoliberalism and the costs it im-
poses on individual citizens:

In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many.

Rather, it is a “strong discourse”—the way psychiatric discourse is in
an asylum, in Erving Goffman’s analysis. . . . And it is achieved
through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all
of the political measures . . . that aim to call into question any and all
collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the
pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually de-
creases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of sal-
aries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with the
consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of the
rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the family,
which loses part of its control over consumption through the constitu-
tion of markets by age groups. (Bourdieu, 1998, paragraph 4)
The price of this neoliberal system has been paid by the individual
citizen who feels left out, powerless, alienated from a market place
ruled by greed, immense transnational corporations, and a government
at the mercy of the highest bidder. . . . What is most discouraging is the
sense most people have that not only is there no other alternative, but
that this is the best system ever imagined, the triumph of the middle-
class ideal, a liberal and humane democracy—or, as Francis Fukuyama
called it, the end of history. Inequities are simply swept out of sight.
(Said, 2000, paragraphs 5-6)

In summary, critics of neoliberalism (such as those above) accuse it

of naturalizing oppression by creating desocialized knowledge and
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 231

institutions and creating individualistic and victim-blaming practices

that regulate and control the individuals it produces by persuasion
rather than threat (Lemke, 2001; Rose, 1999). As a powerful dis-
course, it has normalizing and homogenizing tendencies that have
complex, but often uncharted, effects on subjectivities, particularly
because it assumes that everybody is autonomous and so individually
responsible for their own outcomes through using the opportunities
available. Beck (1996) potentially offered a more hopeful vision in ar-
guing that contemporary society is characterized by reflexive, indi-
vidual decision making in a context of increasing risk and uncertainty.
For example, whereas reflexive decision making means that individu-
als increasingly recognize themselves as responsible for shaping their
own lives and so understand what happens to them as resulting from
their own failures, they also have opportunities to shape their trajecto-
ries and so have choices. However, as Elliott (2002) argued, this
privatization of risk results in fantasies of omnipotent control in a
context where we have less control than previously.
On the whole, neoliberals do not address the issues of how people
are produced as individuals who see themselves as free agents
(Walkerdine et al., 2001). Yet, understanding how people do or do not
engage with change, chances, choice, and competition within their ev-
eryday lives is central to understanding whether (and, if so, how)
neoliberalism is relevant to everyday lives. In the study that informs
this article, boys’ struggles to present themselves as properly mascu-
line conflicted with what would be expected of them within the social
changes characteristic of a neoliberal discourse of individualism—
even though boys were reflexive about how they should behave to do
well in society.

CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES
IN COMMUNITIES OF LEARNING

The social institution in which children and young people have to

spend the most time is school, and young people have to negotiate the
social relations that are produced by the educational context. Jean
Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), Lave (1993), and Wenger (1999)
have demonstrated that learning is not something that individuals do,
232 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

that is, separate from the rest of our activities and the direct result of
teaching. Instead, learning is social and comes from our experience of
participating in daily life. Lave and Wenger developed a model of situ-
ated learning in which learning involves a process of engagement in a
community of practice. In this model, identity is central because
learning involves changing identities, but, as Linehan and McCarthy
(2001a, 2001b) made clear, the community-of-practice metaphor
does not explain how the processes of developing identities in com-
munities of practice occur. Walkerdine (1997) pointed out that such
models assume that participants in the learning process behave in
what are constructed as reasonable and rational ways, and as a result,
they produce covert regulation where learners are expected to learn to
police themselves in the ways desired by the educators. However,
learners may be regulating themselves in relation to social relations
that do not involve the teacher and so may be disengaged from the edu-
cator’s agenda. Linehan and McCarthy (2001b) argued that “as people
engage in joint activity they not only appropriate but also create or re-
construct the context in which they participate” (p. 146) so that emo-
tion, values, and cognition all come together from personal histories
and the sociocultural context to produce relations of conflict and con-
trol. Hodges (1998) used the example of herself as a trainee teacher to
demonstrate that participation in communities of practice requires the
loss of some identities and the enabling of others. The expectation that
she should do what her teacher-trainer required rather than siding with
the children in the classroom sometimes positioned her in ways she
found uncomfortable. The counterposing of teachers’communities of
practice with those of children meant that she had to attempt
cognitively to suppress identities that she saw as sympathetic to the
children at great emotional cost—so much so that the resulting
conflicts led her to abandon teacher training.
This way of thinking about learning—as involving relations of
control and conflict—is helpful to the understanding of why boys
have come to public attention, because they are gradually slipping be-
hind girls in terms of the educational qualifications they achieve. The
many publications that have addressed themselves to the question of
the gender gap in attainment between girls and boys point to various
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 233

explanations. Several researchers have argued that boys have more

difficulty than do girls in adapting to major changes in contemporary
society, especially the shift in traditional patterns of male employment
and the skills required to meet new occupational demands (e.g.,
Arnot, David, & Weiner, 1999). The complexity of these factors
makes it extremely difficult to disentangle the relationship between
masculinities and schooling (Bleach, 1999). It is clear, however, that
the attainments of both boys and girls are affected by social changes as
well as by school policies and what teachers and students do. Further-
more, there is a strong anti-swot culture in many schools that particu-
larly affects boys and is evident from early in children’s school careers
(Epstein, Elwood, Hey, & Maw, 1998; Jordan, 1995; Noble &
Bradford, 2000; Reed, 1999; Skelton, 2001; Swain, 2000).
This anti-swot culture is part of boys’ constructions of masculinity
and, hence, their everyday practices in their communities of practice
in relation to it. It has repeatedly been found in research that masculin-
ity is defined as being about hardness, aggressiveness, confrontation,
and hierarchical power relationships and that it is racialized (Connell,
2000). One consequence of this is that boys who quietly get on with
their schoolwork and make it clear that academic achievement is a
high priority for them are considered effeminate by boys and teachers
(Mac an Ghaill, 1994). The pervasiveness of a fear of failure in not be-
ing considered masculine enough and, hence, of being considered
feminine leads to rejection of schoolwork and what girls do—some-
thing that Jackson (2002) called a “self-worth protection strategy.” It
also privileges competition between boys in sport (Martino, 1999).
The research currently available thus indicates that communities of
practice are important to the underachievement debate. The rest of this
article discusses how masculinities produce communities of practice
that cannot easily fit with neoliberal discourses of pupils choosing to
compete by working to get qualifications. However, gender does not
operate in isolation. Boys simultaneously occupied racialized and so-
cial class positions (as well as others). It is therefore important to ad-
dress the intersection of racialization and gender in attempting to un-
derstand why many boys cannot fill the prescriptions of neoliberalist
discourses.
234 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

THE STUDY OF YOUNG

MASCULINITIES IN 11- TO 14-YEAR-OLD BOYS

In the study reported here, seventy-eight 11- to 14-year-old boys

from 12 London schools were interviewed during 1998 and 1999.
Four schools were in the private sector and eight in the public sector
thus ensuring a range of social class groups and ethnicities.
Forty-five interviews were conducted with groups of usually four
to six young people. Thirty of these group interviews were with boys
in single-sex groups, and nine interviews were with mixed groups of
boys and girls. This involved a sample of 245 boys and 27 girls. Two
individual interviews were conducted with 78 boys. All interviews
were tape-recorded and transcribed (see Frosh, Phoenix, & Pattman,
2002, for more details of the study and an overview).

SCHOOLS ARE NOT ONLY FOR EDUCATIONAL

QUALIFICATIONS: THE IMPACT OF CANONICAL NARRATIVES

A pervasive finding in the masculinities study was that boys con-

structed masculinity as being about toughness, style, sporting prow-
ess (particularly at football), and not being seen to get on with school-
work in the way that many girls did. This constituted what Bruner
(1990) called a canonical narrative—the accepted view (among boys
in schools) about how lives ought to be lived in the culture of school.
Boys, therefore, had to negotiate positions for themselves in relation
to the imperatives of the canonical narrative. This meant that the boys
spent a great deal of time negotiating a middle position for themselves
in which they could manage what they saw as the demands of mascu-
linities while still getting some schoolwork done without being
cussed too much by other boys.

Q: What makes boys popular?

A: Being good at sport . . . being good at cussing people. . . . If
someone cusses you and you just take it, they think you’re weak, but if
you cuss them back er make a better cuss than them . . . then that’s . . .
the first round to him then second round to you. . . . The more girls like
you the more popular you become . . . and you have to be popular for
the girls to like you. . . . You have to be good at cussing and sport. . . .
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 235

The popular boys, because they’re popular, have to get into trouble.
They always like backchat the teacher, get loads of detentions. . . .
They’ll think you’re cool. (13-year-old)

The polarization of popularity and schoolwork had consequences

for how boys reported that they could behave at school. For example, a
major obstacle to boys treating school as a place in which to do serious
schoolwork is that this could lead to their being bullied:

Thomas: It’s your attitude, but some people are bullied for no rea-
son whatsoever just because other people are jealous of them, and I
find that quite annoying.
Q: How do they get bullied?
Thomas: There’s a boy in our year called James, and he’s really
clever and he’s basically got no friends, and that’s really sad because
he’s such a clever boy and he gets top marks in every test and everyone
hates him. I mean, I like him, when I see someone bullying him I just
tell them to go and get lost, I just find that really annoying.
Q: Is it clever boys that get bullied?
Thomas: No, not always, it’s also because he’s really shy. Some
people are really clever and they get bullied. It’s just he’s just bullied. I
think he’s bullied too much and he never answers back, so they find it
easy to bully him. (14-year-old)

In the extract above, Thomas dealt with the dilemma that arose
from attempting to present himself as both a boy and sympathetic to
school achievement. He disclaimed the notion that everyone hates the
really clever boy in his class by professing that he (Thomas) likes him
and defends him from bullying. He thus distanced himself from what
Wetherell (1998) called the potentially “troubled position” of being
one of those who bullies a boy just because they are jealous of his aca-
demic attainments. Instead, Thomas constructed for himself the posi-
tion of being kind and morally responsible.
In the British school system, children who attend private schools
know that their parents pay a great deal to improve their chances of do-
ing well educationally, and all those we interviewed wanted to get
qualifications and felt that it would be shameful if they did not get
236 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

qualifications. However, they also decried the notion of boys working

too hard, as is demonstrated in the following two extracts:

A: We have like a weak school and not a hard school.

Q: Meaning?
A: Um, well, we got a reputation of being a very good academic
school and not having any good/good-hard people, so, um, it’s quite
annoying cos it’s quite rough actually. We do rough sports, and we’re
quite hard.
Q: Why do you think you got that reputation?
A: Cos loads of our pupils are really weak, like really academicos.
This counts as a really academic school. (13-year-old private school
boy)

The pervasiveness of name-calling for boys who are seen to work hard
in school and the disdain in which such boys are held produced contra-
dictory positions for many boys who wanted to do as well as possible
academically but did not want to be rejected in the classroom. The
communities of practice in which they spent their time therefore con-
strained how they could engage with formal education:

I hope we boys beat girls in exam results and stop playing football as
much as we do, because girls don’t like football and football is one of
the things that puts you off work. (14-year-old)

Although the boy quoted above expressed a hope that boys will do
well, several boys put a great deal of effort into negotiating the de-
mands of schoolwork and the demands of masculinity at school. For
them, informal pedagogy, produced because conforming to the ver-
sions of masculinity currently circulating in British schools, was at
least as powerful as the formal pedagogy that many people assume is
the point of school. This is evident in the accounts of boys who are suf-
ficiently self-reflexive to recognize that they are using strategies to
help them both to fit the expectations of masculinity and the demands
of schoolwork.
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 237

Q: Yeah, yeah. . . . So what—what about you? What, what would

you say . . . that you’re . . . you’re . . . popular or . . . or what?
Mustafa: I’m about in the middle.
Q: Oh, right. How d’you get to be in the middle?
Mustafa: I wouldn’t know.
Q: Yeah.
Mustafa: There’s some people you don’t even know them.
They’re always quiet in the class.
Q: Yeah.
Mustafa: And they’re some people they talk an but they don’
like get into trouble.
Q: Mm.
Mustafa: And then some people get into trouble but not that
much like me.
Q: Ok.
Mustafa: Sometimes you get into trouble and then the popular
boys because they’re popular, they have to like get into trouble. They
always like backchat backchat the teacher.
Q: Mm.
Mustafa: Get loads of detentions.

Mustafa’s middle position here involves getting into trouble in class

but not as much as do popular boys who he suggested “have to like get
into trouble . . . because they’re popular.” His account reminds us that
popularity carries costs. Far from being entirely free to choose how to
behave, there are weighty expectations on popular boys that they will
be hard enough to satisfy other boys’ desire for the spectacle of con-
frontations with teachers. Why does Mustafa position himself in the
middle? It seems that, like many of the boys we studied, he wants to
negotiate a position where he does not get into too much trouble but
does so enough to be poplar enough for school to be bearable. He does
not condemn the behavior of popular boys who he defines as being
popular simply because they are resistant to authority, but he does say
later in the interview that “they’re just wasting their time.”
In the example discussed above, boys adopted strategies that en-
tailed hard work and constant self-monitoring. Many other boys also
238 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

ensured that they got some work done while talking about boys’ pur-
suits and messing about:

Q: What do boys do in class?

Jim: Talk about football and computer games. . . . I talk and work at
the same time. . . . They [teachers] just tell us to shut up. . . . We just
keep on talking. . . . She just keeps on shouting. Says if you keep on do-
ing it, you going to get a detention. (12-year-old)

Q: Did you ever get teased for being a boffin?

Julius: No, it wasn’t like that. . . . I used to mess about and then at
home just study, and now I do both. I can mess about and study at the
same time, so, no, I don’t get teased. (13-year-old)

Q: You said you were clever in the group interview, do you get
cussed for that?
Bob: No, not really. In class I don’t do all my work, sometimes I do
nothing. The only people who are cussed are two Turkish boys. They
always sit in the front and do all their work and when someone cusses
them they don’t do anything about it. . . . Some people cussed me cos I
keep getting high results and call me nerd. Some parts were jokey and
we laughed afterwards. . . . Sometimes if people are jealous if they call
me nerd, I call them dumb. They’re probably not going to do well
when they leave the school. (14-year-old)

Boys often demonstrated that they were sophisticated in their nego-

tiation of the constraints imposed on them by masculinities and
schoolwork. They were also observant of other boys’strategies for ne-
gotiating these contradictions. This sometimes included being ex-
plicit that this requires inauthenticity:

Matthew: And you just ignore them, you sort of, you know, laugh
with them, “Yeah, I done well in this exam,” but that, you sort of
change your attitude and pretend you’re like them. You know you pre-
tend you’re dangerous as well, but really you don’t care much, so sud-
denly, you’re playing, “Yeah, yeah I’m just like you,” and things, and
soon they get bored. . . . They sort of think that they’re exactly the same
as you, so they shouldn’t sort of cuss you because really they’re cuss-
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 239

ing themselves. . . . You pretend you’re cool and you know you hang
out with the group and things, but the instant they stop, . . . you just ig-
nore them again. (14-year-old)

Overall, boys dealt with the dilemma that can be characterized as

masculinity versus schoolwork in four ways. Many of them negoti-
ated a middle position for themselves, working sometimes and being
off task at other times. For some others, doing boy entailed being pop-
ular by not working. A very few boys managed to negotiate the de-
mands of masculinity and schoolwork so that they managed to be both
popular and do well at schoolwork, and a few others focused on their
schoolwork in ways that made them unpopular with other boys.
So although boys recognized that they were in changing social cir-
cumstances, actively negotiated those circumstances, and were self-
regulating within the social constraints they experienced, they could
not see themselves as free and autonomous or as entirely responsible
for optimizing their choices and educational chances. That boys are
not simply free to make rational choices becomes even clearer if we
consider how masculinities and racialization intersect in their
everyday practices.

DIVIDED THROUGH RACIALIZATION

The discussion so far has recognized that boys deal with the pres-
sures of masculinity and schooling in different ways, but a major way
in which boys are differentiated concerns racialization. There is ample
evidence that Black young men of African Caribbean descent are
viewed in some ways as super-masculine (Sewell, 1997). They are
constructed as possessing the attributes that are constructed by young
men as indicative of the most popular forms of masculinity—tough-
ness and authentically male style in talk and dress. As trendsetters,
they may be seen as archetypally active consumers, choosing and pro-
ducing new styles. This positions them in particularly contradictory
ways. At one and the same time, they are feared, discriminated
against, and face high rates of school exclusions because of those fea-
tures. However, they are also respected, admired, and gain power
240 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

through taking on characteristics that militate against good classroom

performance.
In this study, boys’ accounts indicated that masculinities were
racialized in two ways: through differential treatment from, for exam-
ple, teachers, and because Black, White, and Asian boys were consid-
ered to be differentially positioned in terms of hegemonic masculinity.
The characteristics of hegemonic masculinity (hardness, sporting
prowess [particularly at football], and resistance to teachers) were
qualities that were particularly attributed to Black boys.
From their research in the U.S. context, Majors and Billson (1992)
identified an aggressive assertion of masculinity that allows control,
inner strength, stability, and confidence in the face of the adverse so-
cial, political, and economic conditions that many African American
men face. This cool pose fits many of the characteristics associated
with popular masculinity. However, it also imposes costs on those
Black boys and men who cannot deal with it simply as performance
but want others to believe that they really possess it. What this means
is that rather than playing with a set of identities that might be adapt-
able to different contexts, many Black young men find themselves
constrained within a construction of masculinity that gives them
power in their local situations. However, it contributes to their relative
lack of power in society as a whole. Moreover, those boys who attempt
to inhabit this prescriptive cultural construction of masculine posi-
tions but are unsuccessful in doing so have to deal with failing to
achieve racialized, gendered, cultural practices that many have
essentialized as natural to Black boys.
Boys’ narratives frequently constructed Black boys as
hegemonically masculine, Asian boys as both not properly masculine
and unpopular, and White boys as in between but closer to Black boys
than Asian boys. In the extract below, only three of the four boys speak
in this part of the discussion and one dominates the discussion. Note
that although he makes general claims about Black boys’popularity, it
does not appear to be comfortable for Des to apply the notion of Black
boys as popular to his own school year:

Des: Don’t know, it’s just . . . Black boys seem to get friends eas-
ier . . . and they’re more popular, I suppose.
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 241

Interviewer: What about in your class, are Asian boys as popular as

Black boys?
Des: No, I shouldn’t think so.
Jason: No.
Interviewer: They’re not, no.
Des: No.
Interviewer: Why’s that?
Des: Don’t really know [sigh]. Black boys, um, Asian boys just go
round with . . . like who they want . . . but they don’t they don’t go out
picking, they wait for them come to them. They’ve only got a few
friends. (group interview with 12-year-old White boys)

Interviewer: So . . . you’re more likely to go around with Black boys

than Asian boys, are you?
Graham: Yeah.
Interviewer: Why is that, do you think?
Graham: Probably cos like . . . sometimes you think not . . . you
ain’t, you’re not really popular an’ . . . you know someone who is pop-
ular and you go and like try and hang around with them? (group inter-
view with four White boys from year 8; 12- to 13-year-olds)

In the extract above, Des presents one version of why Asian boys
are unpopular—that they go around with other Asian boys rather than
having friends from other groups. This version was widely shared
among other boys, even as accounts of informal, racialized segrega-
tion as part of everyday school cultures formed part of many boys’nar-
ratives so that, for example, White boys often mixed only with White
boys. The point here is that boys constructed racialized hierarchies of
masculinities that served to exclude Asian boys while idealizing
Black boys.
For Black boys, being idealized for behavior that is antithetical to
getting on with schoolwork could mean that they recognized that their
behavior was likely to have an adverse impact on their chances of
gaining educational qualifications without being able to easily do any-
thing about it (a dilemma also faced by White boys as they tried to ne-
gotiate masculinity). From the account below, it seems that only boys
who could still achieve examination success while actively demon-
242 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

strating that they choose not to engage with schoolwork or comply

with expected behavior stand a chance of doing well educationally:

Interviewer: You mentioned also that that when you first came that
quite a lot of, of, Black boys, um, thought this was a racist school.
Greg: Yeah.
Interviewer: And, and, um, that they were quite lippy.
Greg: Yeah. Um, Black boys are probably one of da worst behavin’
in this school. . . . Yeah. They like pickin’ on White boys that look
like . . . . They call them geeks and fings like that.
Interviewer: Right. Why do they do that?
Greg: Because, like, if you’re in a class, um, with a lot of Black boys
an’ you’re White an like, an like you answer all the questions . . .
they’ll start calling you teacher’s pet, geek, and things like that.
Interviewer: Why is it that it’s mainly White boys that are teachers’
pets?
Greg: Um. Cos, cos most Black boys in this school. Yeah. Most of
them are really bad, and they don’ really like their subject. They
bunk . . . classes and fings like dat.
Interviewer: Why do you think that is?
Greg: I don’t know. Um . . . probably they wanna show their friends
that they’re big or something. Because there’s like this boy in year 11.
He’s, um, he like, he like finks he’s big. He’s really brainy. When it co-
mes to exams, he’ll pass all his exams, but, but he don’t like going to
lessons and things like that, because he wants to show his friends that
he’s really big. (11-year-old Black boy)

CONCLUSIONS: CONSEQUENCES IN
RELATION TO NEOLIBERAL DISCOURSES

The demands of masculinity meant that in boys’ communities of

practice, school was not simply about learning. Instead, it was equally
about managing social relations. Boys had to spend a great deal of
time and effort practicing strategies that allowed them to be accepted
by their peers and permitted them to do some schoolwork (and so,
hopefully, to get some qualifications). This had important conse-
quences for boys. Many were anxious about their positioning and
 Phoenix / NEOLIBERALISM AND MASCULINITY 243

were able to think critically about masculinity and their place within
it. To avoid been viewed as not masculine enough, most had to pro-
duce careful performances at school that involved monitoring and po-
licing what is allowable as masculinity for themselves and other boys.
This entailed spending time and avoiding being seen as serious about
schoolwork. Yet boys were not cultural dopes who were simply incor-
porated into already existing gender relations. They recognized that
gender positioning had changed and knew from the media and their
teachers that girls are doing better educationally than boys. Many
complained that their teachers preferred girls and resented this (as
well as girls). They were also well aware that to gain future success,
they needed to get qualifications and were analytical about how other
boys negotiated the dilemmas posed by masculinity versus school-
work. Nonetheless, they were invested in doing boy in ways that re-
duced the amount of schoolwork they could do, because failing to be
accepted as sufficiently masculine imposed costs in terms of being the
butt of name calling and ostracism that most boys did not want to face.
Performances of masculinity were therefore constrained by canonical
narratives of masculinity. For this reason, many negotiated a middle
position for themselves between being too academic or failing.
The pervasiveness of racialized constructions of difference indi-
cated its centrality to the production of identity positions for boys. The
racialization of those cultural practices that define popular masculini-
ties apparently places them out of the reach of White boys and particu-
larly Asian boys who are constructed by White and Black boys as not
properly masculine. Some White boys produced narratives that indi-
cated that other White boys wanted to be Black, but this was not some-
thing they generally claimed that they themselves wanted to be—at
least, not all the time. However, cool pose has consequences for Black
boys who have to expend a great deal of energy living up to it rather
than, for example, engaged in school work (Majors & Billson, 1992).
A consideration of the intersection of masculinity and racialization
demonstrates that masculinity is a practical accomplishment
(Connell, 1995) that is racialized and where power relations are evi-
dent and contradictory. Racialization is both a resource in the con-
struction of masculinities and is produced in boys’ everyday practices
of contestation or conformity. To some extent, this racialization de-
fines Black boys outside normality, because such an envied position-
244 YOUTH & SOCIETY / DECEMBER 2004

ing leads some young White men and teachers to treat young Black
men as if they are other and too hard. This is a further way in which the
intersection of masculinities and racialization has an impact on boys’
communities of practice—by limiting access to getting educational
qualifications, because it could lead to in-school exclusions (and, no
doubt, exclusions from school). Racialization makes contestation
about masculinities and differential positioning an important aspect
of boys’ subjectivities. As such, it undoubtedly contributes to
anxieties and contradictions for boys.
Understanding the challenges inherent in achieving racialized and
gendered equality in schools thus requires that we consider the rea-
sons that boys are not entirely free to choose to behave in ways likely
to improve their future educational attainment. These reasons center
on boys’ concern to manage the present rather than the future in the
context of complicated, multiple positioning that means that boys are
competing with each other just to be accepted as sufficiently mascu-
line. Masculinity therefore militates against boys’ ability to comply
with the tenets of neoliberalism. The boys’ accounts indicate how un-
satisfactory is the assumption that everybody is, or should be, identi-
cally able to benefit from the opportunities assumed in neoliberalism.

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Ann Phoenix is a professor of social and developmental psychology at the Open Univer-
sity. Her research interests include the social identities of young people, particularly
those associated with gender, race, social class, and consumption. Her publications in-
clude Young Mothers? (Polity Press, 1991); Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Rac-
ism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage (with B. Tizard; Routledge, 1993;
2nd ed., 2002); Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms (Ed., with Kum-Kum Bhavnani;
Sage, 1994); Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe (Ed., with H. Lutz &
N. Yural-Davis; Pluto, 1995); Standpoints and Differences (Ed., with K. Henwood & C.
Griffin; Sage, 1998); and Young Masculinities (with S. Frosh & R. Pattman; Palgrave,
2001).