Primary School “Studs”

Abstract

Research has yet to fully explore younger boys’ heterosexual cultures beyond an awareness that heterosexual performances are integral to the production of a “real boy.” Drawing upon an ethnographic study of boys’ (and girls’) gender and sexual relations in two contrasting primary schools, this article argues that while most ten- and eleven-year-old boys experience the boyfriend/girlfriend culture as an emotional cocktail of fear and frustration, a minority of boys invest in a privileged hyperheterosexual masculinity as the “studs” of their classes and schools. Detailed case studies illustrate the different ways in which discourses of “heterosexuality” can be drawn upon at this age and offer some insight into the ways in which masculinity, (hetero)sexuality, childhood, and schooling intersect and are negotiated and experienced by preadolescent boys as they make sense of their emerging gender and sexual identities.