Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities

by Ken Corbett

Familiar and expected gender patterns help us to understand boys but often constrict our understanding of any given boy. Writing in a wonderfully robust and engaging voice, Ken Corbett argues for a new psychology of masculinity, one that is not strictly dependent on normative expectation. As he writes in his introduction, “no two boys, no two boyhoods are the same.” In Boy Hoods Corbett seeks to release boys from the grip of expectation as Mary Pipher did for girls in Reviving Ophelia.

Corbett grounds his understanding of masculinity in his clinical practice and in a dynamic reading of feminist and queer theories. New social ideals are being articulated. New possibilities for recognition are in play. How is a boy made between the body, the family, and the culture? Does a boy grow by identifying with his father, or by separating from his mother? Can we continue to presume that masculinity is made at home? Corbett uses case studies to defy stereotypes, depicting masculinity as various and complex. He examines the roles that parental and cultural anxiety play in development, and he argues for a more nuanced approach to cross-gendered fantasy and experience, one that does not mistake social consensus for well-being. Corbett challenges us at last to a fresh consideration of gender, with profound implications for understanding all boys.

Genres: Gender, Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Parenting

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Ken Corbett is Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He maintains a private practice in New York City and consults internationally. His writings and interviews about gender, sexuality, art, and psychotherapy appear in academic journals as well as in magazines, newspapers, websites, and on television. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities and the forthcoming A Murder Over a Girl.

Praise for A Murder Over a Girl

“Profound and disturbing, this heartbreaking testimony of our culture’s worst fissures suggests that understanding is the only way to heal.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Harrowing, humane, and utterly engaging, A Murder Over a Girl is a triumph of storytelling, delivering deep insight into gender and adolescence while drawing us into a fascinating narrative. It is a book very much of the moment, but at its heart it is a classic tale of human emotion.”
—Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief

“Ken Corbett was put on earth to write this stunning book, now, at a moment in our history when we need him to be our secret agent, our witness, our guide inside the maelstrom of this mad hatter court.”
—Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang

“With great compassion, insight, and care, Corbett takes us to the scene in which one transgendered child’s daring and vibrant bid to become a girl met with the murderous rage of a boy well-taught in holding and using a gun. A murdered girl is gone, a nearly undocumented life, yet her spectre lives on in this remarkable book, a narration that enters us into the minds of those who make hatred into a form of pernicious reasoning. A Murder Over a Girl is about youth culture, gender, school, and the failures of the legal system, about cunning reversals in argument whereby murderers are cast as victims, and the traces of the dead are nearly effaced. Corbett does justice to this death and to this life precisely on the occasion, the trial, when legal justice failed her, with a book both intelligent and loving, exposing a world tragically lacking in those very qualities, calling upon us all to intervene to halt gender violence before it begins.”
—Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble

“Ken Corbett corrals the chaos and trauma of the King murder trial into a riveting story of the “cratered minds” that result from, and perpetrate, violence. With an analyst’s attunement, he also takes us beyond the courtroom, imagining his way into the lives and minds of Brandon McInerney and Leticia King with nuance and tremendous compassion. He gives a devastating account of the emotional landscapes of the school, the families, and the communities in which both murderer and victim were and were not held. Corbett’s determination that this crime be named and these lives be told results in a powerful and heartbreaking book.”
—Gayle Salamon, author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality

“There are events that break out of a culture as illness breaks out of a body. Ken Corbett has written an account of a crime yes, a trial yes, a tragedy, but he has also perceived a way for us to comprehend the gender dis-ease just below our cultural skin. This is a brilliant and necessary book.”
—Marie Howe, author of What the Living Do and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

Reviews

[Manuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was particularly captivated by Corbett's deep and yet easy-to-follow analyses of particular patients. The book does an excellent job at providing with a language with which to start thinking again about masculinities and boyhoods, even our own. Perhaps it lacks in systematically laying out the core concepts/ideas/critiques being put forth. Overall, definitely worth it for people interested in masculinity, queer theory, psychoanalysis.

[Ender · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess this book was fine, but it read like a research paper, and didn't have a lot of practical application. It was a lot of Freudian musings and comparisons, which aren't without value, but were definitely without attraction.

I think this guy is probably a much better psychologist than he is a persuasive speaker. His thoughts were intelligent, but too generic and contrived, without much meat and too much stew.

I would only recommend this book to the most serious child psychologists.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for the topic and content, 3 stars for the presentation, simply because it was a little too clinical for my tastes. But hey, if that's your scene...!