Training "Blue-Blooded" Canadian Boys: Athleticism, Muscular Christianity, and Sports in Ontario's "Little Big Four" Schools, 1829-1930, Journal of Sports History, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Fall, 2016), pp. 253-271. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Physical education, sport and hyper-masculinity in schools
Sport Education and Society, 2008
Among widening social anxieties about practices and performances of contemporary masculinity are questions about the place of hyper-masculine (contact) sports, such as games of football. Foremost are concerns about some of the values and attitudes that appear to circulate within such contexts. With their historical leaning towards character attributes aligned to hardness, solidarity and stoicism, there is growing pressure on coaches and teachers to manage and mediate the participation of young males in this arena. Against this backdrop, this paper explores some of the tensions that emerge in schools when the codes and mores frequently associated with a hyper-masculine sporting identity are seen to flourish. Foremost here is the emergence of cultures of entitlement, abuse and exclusion. Following the illumination of such cultures across three research narratives, this paper discusses the sorts of reforms that are needed to promote more educative and responsible engagement with hyper-masculine sports in, and beyond, schools.
This paper re-evaluates the role of sport in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Many scholars (e.g. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin) have commented extensively on the novel as a founding text of ‘muscular Christianity’ that was promoted in the public schools in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Although it is widely acknowledged that Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, had scant interest in games, there is little doubt that Tom Brown’s Schooldays was influential in regards to the cult of athleticism that swept across the public schools later in the century. Sports scholars such as Garry Whannel have contended that the novel promotes athleticism and valorises team sports. In this paper I suggest that such readings are in contradiction to the intention of Thomas Hughes, who was later to complain in The Manliness of Christ (1879) that, 'athleticism is a good thing if kept in its place, but it has come to be very much over-praised and over-valued amongst us' (pp. 21 – 22). I argue that an early misreading of this well-known text as a tribute to athleticism in general and team sports in particular has served to over-emphasise the place of sport in the novel and that a re-evaluation is overdue.
In Loco Parentis: Public-School Authority, Cricket and Manly Character, 1855-62
This article considers the responsibility for schoolboys' behaviour and character when in liminal spaces between home and school, in an historical account of the annual cricket matches in London between Eton, Harrow and Winchester in the late 1850s. The episode is situated in the context of the Clarendon Commission's discussions on school sports, parental and school authority, and 'muscular Christianity' in the early 1860s. Set in the conceptual framework of late-nineteenth-century manliness and masculinity, the article suggests an enduring attachment to pursuits of the mind rather than the body amongst masters, and points to a greater role for parents (particularly fathers) and boys themselves in the rise of athleticism in schools than is usually granted by historians. The article outlines the limits of school authority in loco parentis, and calls for a reinterpretation of the history of muscular Christianity and its relationship with the public schools.
Boys at Gender-Play inside the Muscular Christian Ideal
Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 2007
In elite boys’ schools there is a level of anxiety about the perceived place of the curricular subject drama and how it might interact or interfere with the ironclad essentialist and homogenous masculinity promoted by elite all-boys’ schools. The feminization of the drama and the suspicion of males who “do drama” create a duplicitous tension for boys who take the subject as they walk the gendered tightrope between the expected public display of the “muscular Christian” and the tantalizing “drama faggot.” This paper offers some reflections about observations on and interviews with boys who “do drama” inside the male-only worlds of the Great Public School (GPS) of Brisbane, Australia. In these schools I observed masculinities were constantly disrupted (perhaps uniquely) in the drama classroom and explored by male drama teachers who provided a space in which to playfully interrogate the “muscular Christian ideal” of a boys’ school.
Having the balls, having it all? Sport and constructions of undergraduate laddishness
Gender and Education, 2009
This article investigates the role of sport in framing and communicating hegemonic masculinity among male undergraduates within one British university. The data were collected through questionnaires and one-to-one interviews with 24 male students who were asked to consider their relationship with laddish masculinities. The evidence indicates that sport was important in framing hegemonic masculinities within this milieu. While participants recognised the importance of sport in constructing masculinity, they were also critical of sportsmen’s ‘laddish’ practices and attempted to distance themselves from these behaviours. Nevertheless, they remained complicit to the more general attributes of hegemonic masculinity – particularly notions of strength and independence. The article discusses the implications of this finding for how researchers mightconceptualise hegemonic masculinity, and offers a suggestion on how they might harness these attributes to challenge the more negative practices associated with manhood.
3. Sport and the Masculine Ethos: Some Implications for Family Interaction
Comparative Sociology, 1984
Women who have undergone mastectomies are acutely sensitive to this dynamic as are the developmentally-disabled and their families (e.g. parents have been heard to comment, wryly, "you'd think mental retardation (or cerebral palsy) is catching, the way they avoid our kids. ") Cf. Friedson, E., "Disability as Deviance" in Sussman, M. (ed.) Sociology and Rehabilitation (Washington, American Sociological Association). 5 Steinman-Traunstein, op. cit. 6 Ibid. 7 Examples which suggest redefinition and rising political consciousness from the recent American social revolutionary period (1950s thru the early 1970s) are: "Black is beautiful!", Gay is good!" and "Sisterhood is powerful!" 8 See Roland Warner's discussion of gemernschaft and gesselischaft in The Community in America (Chicago, Rand McNally & Co., 197) 2ne ed. and H. C. Wilensky and C. N. Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare (N.Y. Free Press, 1965). 9 These were necessitated primarily by cultural and political differences; political subdivisions and the nature of centralized government are distinctly different in Britain from those in the United States. 10 Department of Commerce, Capitol District Profile of People, Jobs and Housing (undated; based on 1970 census). 11 I Space does not permit their missions and titles to be detailed here. 12 2 The fact that the data, taken as an aggregate, were collected over a span of three years (in Greater Albany as early as 1972, in Edinburgh as late as 1975) may constitute a slight limitation of the study. 13 de Tocqueville, A., Democracy in America, Edited by J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1969). 14 The reader will note that these data are from 1972-75. In the interim the mass media of communication have continued to transmit American culture to Europe and visa versa. Cross-cultural influences are ever on the increase. For example, current anti-nuclear protests in Europe, including Britain, and those in the United States, bear a striking resemblence to each other. 15 5 Earlier we wrote of the underground. Based on our experience with eleven organizations that declined participation in this study, they are more likely than other groups to refuse to be interviewed because: (1) they are masquerading as SHOs, and fear exposure, (2) they are firmly committed to remaining "underground," and therefore reject cooperation with "establishmentarians," (3) militant separatism is basic to their founding principles, or (4) they are tired of being exploited by researchers whom they see as milking respondents for information that does not benefit members of the SHO. Traunstein-Steinman, 1973, op. cit.