This Issue

In our first article, Hlbana and colleagues extend Connell's approach to understanding young masculinities in order to examine the lives of boys living on the streets of Bukavu, a city on the eastern fringes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hlabana et al. argue that street spaces offer specific temporal and socio-geographic contexts in which to explore how gender and masculinities are negotiated and contested. The article highlights the experience of everyday relationships over three years for one group of 19 street boys, aged 13–18, who live together by the shores of Lake Kivu, and the role of city spaces in their lives. Drawing on secondary data analysis of longitudinal ethnographic research with this group, this article suggests that the spatiality and temporality of street boys’ relationships shape their masculine practices and identities. These facets are played out in their everyday interactions with each other and with girls, women, and men as part of their daily survival. The authors conclude that this results in a mosaic of street masculinities that are both fluid and complex, shedding light on previously unexplored masculinities in an understudied group and part of the world.

In the second article, by Ferrari and Nascimento, the affective-sexual trajectories of young gay men in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil are analyzed. Based on semi-structured interviews with 15 young, urban, low-income gay men, aged between 19 and 24, this article shows how the learning of masculinity has consequences for the men's sex lives. As a result, Ferrari and Nascimento argue that these young men have been brought up for the exaltation of heterosexuality since boyhood, and that the pedagogies of masculinity produce hierarchies among gay masculinities. These hierarchies connect with other social markers, such as race, social class, religion, sexual preferences (such as being active or passive), and gender expressions, upholding the notion of hegemonic masculinity. For the young men in the study who escaped this pattern, several vulnerabilities and multiple violent acts that took place during their trajectories are reported.

Turning the focus away from boys and young men themselves to adult friendships with young boys, in the third article Vitus and Perregaard explore the experience and meaning of being in an arranged male adult friendship for 7–10-year-old boys from lone mother families in Demark. In analyzing empirical material from a two-year fieldwork study, the authors draw on methodology and concepts from phenomenology. They propose that boy–adult friendships provide boys with a realization of masculine embodiment and also reflect hierarchical masculinity, but that the presence of the male body is essential. The article discusses the way in which the analysis contributes to the literature on adult–child friendships, particularly between boys and male nonrelative adults, and that on masculinity and boyhood studies, exploring boys’ embodiment from a phenomenological perspective.

In the fourth article, by Kehler and Borduas, the authors question the (in)visibility of male bodies, body image issues, and a prevailing discourse of denial in Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculums across Canada. Drawing on a national study, the authors examine narratives of adolescent boys to demonstrate how the latter make sense of locker-room interactions and bodily negotiations among their male peers. The article connects the debates about curricular content across several provinces in Canada to identify emerging concerns of body dissatisfaction among boys. Kehler and Borduas argue that a limiting narrative of male sexualities, bodies and body image issues ignores the marginalization and oppression of boys who face shaming and homophobic slurs in schools. The article concludes by calling for a (re)consideration of male sexualities and bodily practices, while proposing changes that would more fully embrace and acknowledge adolescent male bodies in schools.

In our final article in this issue, Kingsman provides a scoping review of rites of passage (ROP) programs for adolescent boys in schools. This scoping review adopts a systematic methodology to refine an initial accumulation of 708 articles. Nine key articles investigating the impact of school-based ROP programs for adolescent boys are examined and analyzed according to rationale, design, and impact. Kingsman argues that each program focuses on three major domains of impact—community, responsibility, and identity. The review finds that adolescent boys’ participation in ROP programs may enhance community engagement, build responsible citizenship, and improve self-perception through the development of positive masculine identity.

This issue also contains reviews by Watson and Kehler of Laura Scholes's text Boys, Masculinities and Reading: Gender Identity and Literacy as Social Practice and by Nelson of Adriana Villavicencio's Am I My Brother's Keeper?

As always, I conclude my editorial by recording my thanks to all those who have reviewed submissions for BHS and to the editorial board members who give their support to the journal. Our next two issues (15.1 and 15.2) are linked special issues, organized by guest editors Cliff Leek and Jonathan Allan and titled Storytelling to and about Boys: Meanings and Representations in Children's Media.