Becoming boy: a/effecting identity in a Catholic boys' school

Abstract

This thesis examines how identities are effected specific to time and space. In particular, I consider different masculine student identities enacted by boys in a Catholic boys’ school. Motivated by my own experiences as a teacher in such a school, I address the dominant masculinity of the school, and how student masculinities are formed not only within this masculinity, but also how other student masculinities come into (and out of) existence. In considering how different masculine identities continually come together, and move apart, within and between school spaces, I draw on Deleuze’s concept of the assemblage, as understood through feminist new materialist notions of the posthuman. Thr..