Editors' introduction

Summary

Part III of our volume consists of three contributions to the field of identity studies concerned with the more specific business of gender identity. Even more concretely, within the field of gender studies, all three chapters speak to what it means to be or become a young man. While other contributions in this volume similarly show how participants orient toward issues of gender (cf. Georgakopoulou's analysis of 17-year-old girls' identity formation in projective narratives, or Bell's study of a woman who is trying to make sense of herself as mother and as DES daughter), we decided to give these chapters their own categorical umbrella. They all show how male identities are formed discursively vis-à-vis particular hegemonic discourses of masculinity, but also vis-à-vis discourses of heterosexuality and whiteness – in positions of complicity but also in positions of resistance towards these discourses.

All chapters use narratives-in-interaction as their database to explore these identities as constructed and emergent, but the data collection techniques are different in each case. While Kiesling made use of the ethnographic interview as a story-elicitation technique with fraternity students, Moita-Lopes relied on a focus-group interview between three researchers and seven young adolescents. Wortham and Gadsden had young African-American researchers interview lower-class, urban African-American men who had become fathers as teenagers. Their semi-structured interviews resemble more the traditional biographic interview style used typically by sociologists.