In this article I explore the nuanced performances of masculinity enacted by a 14-year-old boy named “Tom.” Tom, a boy of Filipino descent, complicated much of what was the case with other (non-Filipino) young male participants in my study when it came to masculinity. Rather than simply (re)producing hegemonic masculinity, I show in this article how Tom played with his masculinity and countered potential accusations of homosexuality through acts of self-exoticization and self-feminization (removing others’ power to do so). I explore the role that Tom's Filipino heritage and London background plays in his performance of masculinity, arguing that in the overwhelmingly white context of Norfolk (UK), it serves to anchor his hegemonic masculinity through connotations of “toughness” and “urbanness.” It is therefore in Tom's emphasis of his diasporic “Otherness” that his gender transgressions can be consolidated.
Victoria Cann is a Lecturer in the Humanities in the Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, where she is Course Director of the MA Gender Studies program. Victoria is author of the book Girls Like This, Boys Like That: The Reproduction of Gender in Youth Taste Cultures (2018). v.cann@uea.ac.uk