The declining significance of homohysteria for male students in three sixth forms in the south of England

By M. McCormack. 2011

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

English schools have traditionally been institutions with high levels of homophobia. This is attributed to the need that heterosexual boys have to maintain a heteromasculine identity. However, by drawing on 44 in-depth interviews and 12 months of participant observation across three sixth forms, I detail the ways in which homophobia holds little cultural sway with the heterosexual male students in these settings. Here, the majority of students intellectualise pro-gay attitudes, maintain friendships with openly gay students and are physically tactile with each other. Homophobic discourse is rarely heard and it is even stigmatised in two of the settings. Homosexually-themed language that I call ‘gay discourse’ replaces it. This discourse maintains socio-negative effect, but it is also used by openly gay students to bond with their heterosexual peers. Accordingly, this research shows that cultural homophobia maintains less significance than has been documented in previous studies.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80cccd031181dac004ec37106c31c6254e1e45d5

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Citations in the corpus

Inaccurate Estimation of Disparities Due to Mischievous Responders (2014, result): “Interestingly, the resulting smaller disparity estimates are more compatible with some in-depth, qualitative accounts that suggest that sexual-minority identification is becoming less of a stigmatizing factor among adolescents than it was in past years (McCormack, 2011; Savin-Williams, 2005).”
Inclusive masculinity theory and the gendered politics of men's rugby (2010, background): “This is something found in a number of university and school settings in the previous few years (Anderson 2005b , 2008 , 2009 , McCormack 2010 , McCormack and Anderson 2010 ).”