This book is about how boys and girls learn to be men and women. Drawing on a wide range of studies, the author examines how masculinities and femininities are developed and understood by children and young people, in families, in schools, and with their peers.

The question of how boys become men or how girls become women may seem simple, but the answers can be complex. This new edition draws upon rich examples from research, popular media, and global accounts, to explore how gender is produced, consumed, regulated and performed in young lives today.

This collection brings together analyses from a range of educational contexts around the world of the ways in which notions of identity and difference, belonging and exclusion are constructed within and beyond the context of education. Three key themes link the chapters within the book: · current policy and practice in education and educational research; · educational imperialism and its legacy; · cultures and sub-cultures within and beyond educational contexts. Part One, Educational Policy and Practice: Internal Colonisations, explores what might be described as the "internal" colonization of education by a certain set of hegemonic ideas and practices--practices which the authors in this book set out collectively to resist. In Part Two, Educational Imperialism and its Legacy, the focus turns to "external" imperialism within education. In Part Three, Culture and Subculture Within and Beyond Education, notions of space, place and identity are interwoven with linguistic, symbolic and material cultural markers. The contributors are Elizabeth Atkinson, Stephen Ball, Renée DePalma, Stephen Dobson, David Gough, Ruby Greene, Jennifer Lavia, Ahmad Nazari, Carrie Paechter, Michael Reiss, John Storey, Takako Takano, Maddalena Taras, Carol Vincent and Deborah Youdell. The book is intended for academics, for students working at Masters level and above and for education professionals and policy makers and will also appeal to scholars working in education and those involved in interdisciplinary work or working in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and sociolinguistics.

What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? The feminist movement has a long and rich history, but has its time now passed? This edited collection is driven by the question, why is feminism viewed by some as outdated, no longer necessary and having achieved its goals, and, we ask, what role have the media played in this? Debates in media and cultural studies often focus on the politics of everyday life, tending to marginalise formal (or 'big P') Politics (government and Parliament); whereas debates in political science tend to marginalise the everydayness of politics ('small p' politics). Aiming to bring these two strands together, this volume argues that 'politics' needs to be reinserted into debates around the nature of contemporary feminism, as well as restating that feminism is central to contemporary P/politics.

The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women's and men's involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and criminal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughout The Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics - such as domestic abuse and sexual violence - and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars - such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide.

This book is an ethnography of teachers and children in grades 1 and 2, and presents arguments about why we should take gender and childhood sexuality seriously in the early years of South African primary schooling. Taking issue with dominant discourses which assumes children’s lack of agency, the book questions the epistemological foundations of childhood discourses that produce innocence. It examines the paradox between teachers’ dominant narratives of childhood innocence and children’s own conceptualisation of gender and sexuality inside the classroom, with peers, in heterosexual games, in the playground and through boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. It examines the nuances and finely situated experiences which draw attention to hegemonic masculinity and femininity where boys and girls challenge and contest relations of power. The book focuses on the early makings of gender and sexual harassment and shows how violent gender relations are manifest even amongst very young boys and girls. Attention is given to the interconnections with race, class, structural inequalities, as well as the actions of boys and girls as navigate gender and sexuality at school. The book argues that the early years of primary schooling are a key site for the production and reproduction of gender and sexuality. Gender reform strategies are vital in this sector of schooling.

In 1973, homosexuality was officially depathologized with a revision in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry. In 1980, a new diagnosis appeared: Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood (GID). The shift separated gender from sexuality, while it simultaneously reinforced traditional concepts of "male" and "female" and made it possible for cross-gendered behavior and/or identification to be deemed psychiatric illness. What is the difference then between a child being called a sissy on the playground and being labeled with a disorder in a psychiatric hospital? Combining theory and personal narrative, this volume interrogates the meaning of "the normal" that pervades the literature on GID and investigates the theoretical underpinnings of the diagnosis. Sissies and Tomboys considers how the stigma of illness influences a child's development and what homosexual childhood, freed from the constraints of conventionally acceptable gender expression, might look like.