The findings and analysis of this chapter are drawn from a comparative ethnography of aspiration and imagined futures in schools in London and New York (funded by the US-UK Fulbright Commission and the Peabody Trust). For the purposes of this chapter, I concentrate on the New York City phase of the research, at Bronx High School, to provide a critical assessment of how masculinity is enveloped into neoliberal framings of “aspiration” (Allen 2014). At Bronx High neoliberal masculinity is articulated in relation to individualized educational success and failure, adaptability to uncertain future economic conditions, “hard work,” and achievement against the odds to achieve particular (and in this case particularly elusive) imaginings of the American dream. I also consider how lived experiences in the present lead young men to imagine future aspirations and future masculinities beyond a hegemonic neoliberal ideal. Bronx High shows itself to be a profoundly future-oriented institution in which students must reconcile the privileging of imagined neoliberal futures with the often starkly different realities of their own experiences in the post-financial-crisis present. This precarious balancing act speaks to the notion that the recent financial crisis represents a potential ideological as well as structural crisis for neoliberalism (Duménil and Lévy 2011)—in this case, by subtly challenging the extent to which neoliberal framings of aspiration can or should be accepted by young men as the “natural” foundations for particular imaginings of the future framed in relation to masculinity (Hall, Massey, and Rustin 2013).
Alexander, Patrick G.
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\School of Education
Year of publication: 2017Date of RADAR deposit: 2017-10-13