Contested masculinity : teenage boys in the central Philippines
Date
2009-11-17T19:32:54Z
Authors
Lauer, Stephen Thomas
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Abstract
This study looks at the masculinity of teenage boys living in an impoverished community in Bacolod City, Republic of the Philippines. Through the use of ethnographic methods of participant observation, interviewing, and photographic techniques, this study assesses what it means for a group of teenage boys to become men. This study finds that the boys negotiate a complex set of demands and constraints on their becoming men resulting from influences of poverty and unemployment, dynamics of hegemony and subordination, and intergenerational relations of power. This study concludes that the inability of the boys to fulfill hegemonic notions of masculinity based on economic attainment may contribute to the boys' feelings of emasculation and problems of substance abuse, may widen the gap between hegemonic masculinity practised in the Philippines and forms of manhood available in this community, and may be instrumental in more firmly entrenching these males as an underclass in Philippine society.
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Keywords
Teenage boys, masculinity, Philippines