“Be a man”: boys’ talk about gender in families

ABSTRACT This paper draws from an ethnographic study of 8–9-year-old primary school boys’ construction of masculinities. We focus on a group of Indian and black school boys situated in a working class setting in South Africa. In their narratives, the family emerged as one of the central organising sites for the social production and reproduction of masculinity. While masculinities are produced within a broader social and cultural context, this paper gives significance to family dynamics in shaping and reinforcing young masculinities. We show that while boys address family in relation to the reification of gender binaries and hegemonic patterns related to gender roles, sexuality and violence, their performances of masculinities were not entirely reiterative of these norms. Instead, boys actively challenged, negotiated and resisted dominant norms hence destabilising homogenous conceptualisations of children as passive recipients of received knowledge and oppressed power. We foreground young boys’ agency in their negotiation of masculinities and further demonstrate how the broader historical and social forces of race, class and culture intersect with dominant gender discourses within the context of families to enable plural versions of masculinities.