Abstract/Summary

This study focuses on pupils in an all-boys’ full-time senior U.K. boarding school as a unique location to unfold the construction of masculinity in the education of elite males. The extant literature extensively examines masculinities in education in state schools. However, there is a paucity of literature interrogating the contemporary experiences of boys in U.K. all-male senior boarding education. This insider-research employs semi-structured interviews to collect rich data from a small group of fifteen boys in their final year of full time senior all-boys boarding education. It is a case-study employing a post-modern constructivist orientation to ontology. It approaches epistemological questions with an interpretivist lens, and applies a qualitative methodological approach underpinned by a reflexive feminist perspective. Connell’s multiple and hegemonic masculinities are its theoretical lens; it analyses the meaning, rationality and dynamic of the cultural processes recorded, the ways in which they maintain and reproduce the gendered social order, and influence participants’ sense of their masculine identities. The original contribution of this study is to identify an ecotypified masculinity construction, herein designated, ‘epic masculinity’ and to reveal how it is experienced by participants as a warrant of leadership futures. This research into boys’ perceptions of masculinity within a specific educational milieux is potentially interesting and applicable to a range of wider stakeholders, including those concerned with national education policy, mental-health, safeguarding, and in addressing the rise of aspirational misogyny.