This lecture considers some important cultural and intellectual problems arising from the relations between feminism and boyhood.

Contemporary media discourse suggests that feminists exclusively understand boys and the experience of boyhood through such frameworks as “patriarchal privilege” and “toxic masculinity”. This lecture considers some important cultural and intellectual problems arising from these dominant ideas about the relations between feminism and boyhood. It also outlines a case for the necessity of feminist research that engages with ideas about boys, images of boys, and experiences of boyhood in self-consciously affirmative terms that avoid presuming any opposition between the interests of boys and feminism.

Catherine Driscoll is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her books include: Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2002), Modernist Cultural Studies (2009), Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (2011), The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience (2014) and (with Heatwole) The Hunger Games: Spectacle, Risk, and the Girl Action Hero (2018). She is lead CI for the ARC-funded project “Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem” (2021-2023).

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This lecture is co-hosted by the ANU School of Sociology and the ANU Gender Institute