Boys and Feminism

Contemporary media discourse suggests that feminists exclusively understand boys and the experience of boyhood through such frameworks as “patriarchal privilege” and “toxic masculinity”. This lecture considers some important cultural and intellectual problems arising from these dominant ideas about the relations between feminism and boyhood. It also outlines a case for the necessity of feminist research that engages with ideas about boys, images of boys, and experiences of boyhood in self-consciously affirmative terms that avoid presuming any opposition between the interests of boys and feminism.