Boys talking about girls

Abstract

Taking identities as ‘relational’ and as ‘marked by difference’ (Woodward, 1997), research on the identities of boys has focused on how these are produced in relation to particular versions of the feminine ‘other’. In this research, as described in Chapter 2, boys’ accounts of girls and women are treated as integral to the process through which boys construct their masculine identities. Such research has challenged common-sense assumptions that gender identities are relatively fixed, self-contained traits which individuals possess and which cause them to behave in similar and pre-ordained ways.