The resources and strategies that 10-11 year old boys use to construct masculinities in the school setting

behaviour (Canaan, 1991). Although Skelton (2001) reminds us that it is important to
emphasise that violent forms of masculinity are not the ‘preserve’ of working class males,
some of these boys almost certainly imitated actions seen, and learnt, within their
families and from other members in the local community. It was a necessary requirement
of the informal culture for all the boys to appear tough, and one of the boys told me that
‘you can’t afford to be nice ‘cos people will think that you’re soft inside’. Acts of daring
and displays of courage could also bring admiration and status, and some of these
happened outside school. Inside school, reputations of being tough were continuously
being made and lost, and in the following conversation I am asking two of the leading
boys, Dan and Luke, about the standing of another boy in a parallel class:

This exchange points to the essential insecurity of the dominant masculinity in this school
because there is an almost daily need to sustain and defend it against challengers
(Pattman etal., 1998). If a boy bases his status on toughness and fighting, he needs to be
ever-attentive to potential rivals; he is only going to be as good as his last fight, and if
beaten his status will rapidly diminish. It also shows how Luke uses the tactic of fighting
to ingratiate himself with the peer group when he arrived from another school in the early

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