Personhoods and meanings of adolescent masculinities in a North-West secondary school

Abstract

This thesis provides insight into what the data suggests can be understood as the stage of ‘becoming’ of five adolescent boys in their habitual spaces of learning and living as analysed through the theoretical lens of masculinity scholarship. The word personhood is used to encapsulate the process instead of the complete production known as identity. Accounts of this process were observed through the analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with the main participants, their respective guardians and educators, informal conversations with all participants and extended participant-observation over five months – July 2021 to November 2021. The thesis documents the ongoing, real-time observation of the fluidity and reconstructions of masculinity in formal and informal settings. It is an ethnographic analysis addressing part of the gap of what masculinities in a South African township environment are perceived to be in the media and existing scholarly anthropological research outputs.