It is interesting to see the backtracking and negotiations going on in the peer group
dynamics as they try and work out the contradictions of showing your bottom at the
window when changing for games and kissing a girl, and in the end Paddy is reduced to
justifying the assertion of Travis’s gayness by the fact that Travis makes a series of funny
noises.

Conclusions

This paper has concentrated on subordinated groups of boys in three schools and has
proposed that the strategies of subordination used by the dominant boys can be
summarised under the generic heading of ‘difference’. Many of these were linked to the
body (particularly in embodied forms of physicality/athleticism) which was the primary
resource used to establish peer group status, and those boys who either would not, or
could not, use this resource were generally positioned at the bottom of the pupil
hierarchy. We can see that these boys endured a considerable amount of suffering, and
their lives at school were often both an undesirable and unhappy experience. Clearly, this
situation is not limited to these schools, or to the UK. A greater awareness and
understanding of some of the motivations behind the methods of subordination employed
will give inclusive educators a better chance of formulating programs to counter some of
the worst excesses of dominant masculinity. The paper has argued that the peer group

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