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Full-Text Articles in Inequality and Stratification
'Dicks Are For Chicks': Latino Boys, Masculinity, And The Abjection Of Hiomosexuality, Richard Mora, Mary Christianakis
'Dicks Are For Chicks': Latino Boys, Masculinity, And The Abjection Of Hiomosexuality, Richard Mora, Mary Christianakis
Richard Mora
Employing social constructivist theories and the concept of abjection from gender studies, this article examines how and why a group of low-income, USA-born Dominican and Puerto Rican middle-school boys constructed masculine identities by invoking and repudiating homosexuality. Ethnographic data from a 2.5-year study indicate that the abjection of homosexuality was a place of performativity wherein the boys utilised their bodies, cultural referents, and bilingualism to delineate masculinity, reiterate heteronormativity, and distance themselves from homosexuals, who they perceived as a threat to their sexuality, personal safety, and physical dominance. At school, the boys enacted a hypermasculine, heteronormative variant of their ethno-racial …
“Do It For All Your Pubic Hairs!”: Latino Boys, Masculinity, And Puberty, Richard Mora
“Do It For All Your Pubic Hairs!”: Latino Boys, Masculinity, And Puberty, Richard Mora
Richard Mora
The literature on masculinity lacks thorough and sustained in situ examinations of how diverse boys employ their bodies to construct masculine identities during pubescence. To address this gap, the present article examines how a group of 10 sixth-grade Latino boys, who publicly acknowledged that they were experiencing puberty, employed their bodies at school to construct their masculine identities. The data suggest that among the boys, puberty was a social accomplishment connected to masculine enactments informed by the dominant gendered expectations of peers at school and in their neighborhoods, the hegemonic masculine practices espoused by commercial hip hop rappers, and the …