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| 73 Part II Boys Boys and men are gendered beings, functioning within culture, structures, and institutions that are infused with masculinities norms. As feminists have long argued and explored, as a group men have disproportionate power and privilege over women. Masculinities analysis, as suggested in part 1, adds to that analysis by further unraveling how male power and dominance, as a group, is sustained. Masculinities analysis also suggests how boys and men can nevertheless be unequal and/or subordinated as part of dominance, how they can be rendered invisible and hidden even as they define dominant norms. In parts 2 and 3, focusing first on boys and then on men, I take the insights of feminist analysis infused with masculinities scholarship and apply that enriched feminist approach to areas where boys and men are negatively affected by gender. In this part, I examine boys in the contexts of education and juvenile justice. Education is an area where there has been considerable attention to the “crisis” of boys, who are doing poorly compared to girls on many measures. At the same time, much of this debate is essentialist and hierarchical. Although focused on boys, it has not focused on gender as a factor in boys’ performance or the structure and culture of education. Examining the position of boys in education also exposes the danger of treating gender analysis as a zero-sum game, where attention to boys means relegating girls to a secondary position. The “either/or” tendency in this area must be combated with “both/and” strategies. Juvenile justice presents a different context. Here boys are not coequal in the system; rather, boys are the primary focus of the system. Boys predominate at every stage, and the system was created with them in mind. Although explicit in its inception, in its contemporary form the gender of the system has been largely unexamined. Oddly enough, although the system is presumed by all to be about boys, gender is rarely discussed. There are parallels to this strange absence of gender talk in systems disproportionately filled by women—most notably, in discourse about the welfare system. This results in a kind of “doublespeak” where welfare “recipients” are always coded female (and usually, as black females). Similarly, juvenile “offenders” or simply 74 | “juveniles” are coded male (and usually, as black males). Unexamined gender policies, strongly raced, are characteristic of both. Policy reinforces, in the case of juvenile justice, a hypermasculine norm, to the detriment of boys who intersect with the juvenile justice system. This male-specific norm also harms, in a different way, the increasing number of girls who come into the juvenile justice system. These two examples suggest how feminist analysis, infused with masculinities analysis, might expose the more complex workings of gender in structures and cultures and suggest solutions that support gender equality for both boys and girls. The analysis here is suggestive and preliminary rather than comprehensive. At the same time, it clearly shows how masculinities analysis can serve the goal of exposing gender subordination while still clarifying the gender-specific ways that subordination plays out. Finally, it ensures that boys can be the focus, and should be the focus, of gender equality efforts in addition to girls, rather than as rivals for an equality constructed as being a choice between one or the other. ...

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