Discharging Affect: Creating Feminist Spaces of Potential for Masculinities and Boyhood

Recent Government legislation on Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in England and Wales tasks Primary Schools with the challenge of tackling sexism, misogyny, homophobia and gender stereotypes to create an inclusive culture. Reworking gender power relations presents significant challenges to schools and young people in the former shipbuilding area in northeast England where our study is based, a region formerly renowned for heavy industry and embodied forms of ‘hard’ masculinity. In response, we draw upon ethnography, creative methods, artwork and digital media with 120 young people to ask, ‘What does it mean to be a man’, in the contemporary post-industrial period? Inspired by growing research on masculinity and affect, we explore how young people initiate a potential for feminist imaginaries of boyhood. We draw on theories of affect to explore the attachments that boys have to different versions of boyhood and masculinity as a way of opening up spaces for potential transformations. Doing so, we argue that young people can be active in the creation of feminist boyhoods and that a focus on affect can make policy and pedagogic contributions to challenging more oppressive masculinities.