Boyhood Studies

This article explores the emotional expression through a singing voice in the reinterpretation of the male ideal identity and traditional fairy tales with romantic plots in Disney's animated films. We analyze whether princes sing, and if so, when, what about and how often they sing compared to princesses, male villains, and comic reliefs. By doing so, we aim to shed light on how gender bias may lead to emotional injustice and shape the construction of boyhood. After the analysis of the statistical data, we conclude that princes sing less than princesses, male villains and comic reliefs, especially in films produced after a sociopolitical conservative period, and they mainly sing with their romantic interest, perpetuating so the male ideal of not showing emotions and vulnerability in public.

A nontrivial aspect of early twentieth-century Western masculinity is the popular reception and educational relaying of early endocrine concepts of sexual development after 1889. “Internal secretion” relocated long-standing monocausal attributions of sexual maturation and differentiation—the grand story of boy-to-man “development”—from “reabsorbed” semen to a conjectured “second” testicular secretion. US sex-hygienic works (1870s–1940s) readily reveal the long-term survival of the “old”, semen-based, physiology of sex/gender as well as its behavioral-hygienic implications concerning “semen loss,” a survival animated by various attempts at containing and interpreting transpiring scientific opinion. These discursive maneuvers provide a historical backdrop to present-day quasi-scientific valorizations of continence recirculated under the heading of “semen retention,” valorizations posing important but unanswered questions concerning boyhood health-scientific literacy and what may be shifting, post-gonadal psycho-physiologies of male identity.

This article counter-narrates the centrality of texts in reconstructing resistances to the haunting presence of hegemonic masculinity and sexuality in boyhood and adolescence. Through our textual interactions we, two gay-identified men, growing up in different countries and continents recount how our reading encounters provided an Other location in and among the quotidian narratives of normalcy in which a queer hermeneutic emerged. In this article, we suggest reading critically necessitates reading intertextually in order to interrogate the macro/micro connections and is a practice in which the wider social, political, cultural, and historic contexts frame the reading event. Reading critically, we suggest focuses on issues of power, transformation and signifies how textual interpretations allow for alternative visions of self to co-exist.

As an exercise in the self-analysis of one boyhood, the author analyzes a science fiction film, Invaders from Mars, which had a profound and lasting effect on his emotions when he viewed the film in 1953 at age eight. Cultural meanings and unique individual meanings interact during the act of viewing the film, and the author uses this personal case study to make larger points about collective cultural fantasies in popular culture and individual fantasies in the boy's mind. Psychoanalytic theory about the latency period (ages five to twelve) of psychosexual development helps explain what is so unsettling about the film for the author when he was an eight-year-old boy.

While not limited to Baltimore, the “squeegee boy” is a common sight at major entryways into the city. Commonly, but not exclusively, very young men armed with window cleaning supplies, these individuals are dedicated to earning funds from visitors to the city, particularly on busy days. While prohibited, they persist, as this provides one of the few semi-legitimate ways for these young men to earn a living. I engage in a critical discourse analysis of social media videos of various squeegee kids. I analyze the boys’ language for discursive elements of internalized adultification and survivornomics. Overall, these discourses highlight the powerlessness of these boys, they are engaging in actions that could negatively impact their well-being because of their limited options.

This article draws on rape culture discourse and theories of masculinity in crisis to examine two Young Adult (YA) novels: Aaron Hartzler's What We Saw (2015) and Cassie Gustafson's After the Ink Dries (2021). Using Michael Kimmel's framework of cultures of entitlement, silence, and protection, I conduct close readings to examine how young male athlete characters participate in these cultures, concealing a sexual assault through their adherence to a “don't betray the brotherhood” mentality. The article also examines how the characters minimize their own involvement to preserve a “good guy” persona, prompting readers to evaluate what that label means within rape culture. Ultimately, this analysis considers why these boys fail to step in, speak out, or take responsibility—behaviors that must be critically contextualized if we are to foster more accountability and challenge the social norms that enable sexual violence.