Boyhood Studies

With far too many scholarly journals out there now, why launch yet another? Hurried readers may never recognize what THYMOS is about unless they get past the first word to what follows: Journal of Boyhood Studies. That may happen in quite a few cases at first, but we are convinced that once underway, THYMOS will take its place among the best interdisciplinary journals in English. Boys, we believe, have something to teach us about the body, sexuality, spirituality and the imagination and, for that reason, without wishing to be excessive, we want to emphasize our conviction that the subject matter of THYMOS—boys and boyhood—is central to everyone’s self-understanding as a human being in what will very soon be a thoroughgoing global culture.

The topic of this article is the psychological meaning and consequences of the repression of a male’s experience of being a boy in the course of his socialization to manhood. Although the eradication of the sense of being a boy is a requirement for attaining manhood in nearly all cultures, the boy remains psychologically alive, although hidden, in the older male. The features of boyhood, why boys often frighten us, and why boys nonetheless enchant both males and females are discussed. An explanation of our ambivalence about boys is found in their anatomy, kinetic physicality, distinctive early experiences with their father, and residual characteristics of the boy’s early relationship with his mother and the feminine. The article concludes with some observations about what a genuine harmonization in a male of the boy with the man might mean for a man’s relations with his father, his sons, other males, and females.

This article proposes a linguistic anthropological approach to the notion BOY, drawing attention to diverse research methods including etymology, onomasiology, corpus analysis, semantics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and comparative ethnolinguistics. As a popular and flexible lexical device, BOY may function as an operator on the received nature of manhood (by rendering it contingent on the discourse and narrative of development), but also as a possible aid in its ever-imminent bankruptcy by disengaging its stylistics from essentialist understandings of both gender and life phase. BOY, thus, lies at the heart of discussions about masculinity as it relates to performativity, language, and discourse, but, in important ways, it also exceeds and contests the confinements of gender/masculinity research.

Systematic scrutiny of everyday photographs of American boys together suggests that, as never before, homophobia became a barrier for boys in 1950s America. In a time of high anxiety regarding the possible implications of male togetherness in the United States, boys’ relationships in the 1950s, with fresh physical inhibitions, came to resemble relationships typical of older American males. Although cultural concern over homosexuality was decades-old in the 1950s and had long inhibited the various associations of older males, that anxiety may not have exacted its toll on boys together until the postwar period, establishing restrictions that continue to severely limit closeness among boys.

In elite boys’ schools there is a level of anxiety about the perceived place of the curricular subject drama and how it might interact or interfere with the ironclad essentialist and homogenous masculinity promoted by elite all-boys’ schools. The feminization of the drama and the suspicion of males who “do drama” create a duplicitous tension for boys who take the subject as they walk the gendered tightrope between the expected public display of the “muscular Christian” and the tantalizing “drama faggot.” This paper offers some reflections about observations on and interviews with boys who “do drama” inside the male-only worlds of the Great Public School (GPS) of Brisbane, Australia. In these schools I observed masculinities were constantly disrupted (perhaps uniquely) in the drama classroom and explored by male drama teachers who provided a space in which to playfully interrogate the “muscular Christian ideal” of a boys’ school.

This article is based on in-depth interviews with 14 young gay men aged between 18 and 25 years. Using narratives in a life-historical perspective the young men reflect upon their boyhood and adolescent years to highlight the many and varied issues confronting young gay males during this formative period. While a range of themes will be identified through use of inductive thematic analysis, it is the school environment and the process of schooling that highlights the issues associated with difference that young gay males confront while growing up. Life histories provide a unique method of understanding difference in the lives of individuals. Capturing the essence of meaning of a young gay male’s life (under the age of 18) through consensual research data is difficult due to the ethical dilemmas presented in requiring a parent or guardian to provide the right for participation. Therefore, life histories become even more important where young gay males are concerned in an attempt to understand the issues they confront while growing up gay in a heterosexualized culture.

Naughty Boys. Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture by Sami Timimi. London: Palgrave, 2005, xv + 245 pp., paper.