Young masculinities: masculinities in youth studies

This chapter provides an overview of how men and masculinities have featured in the field of youth studies historically and more recently. First we briefly sketch out what characterised research on young people’s lives during the emergence of the field. We next consider how young men are represented in contemporary media and how youth scholars have reacted to these representations and highlight the field’s more recent research agendas. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing whether young people can be seen as being at the forefront in terms of changes in gender relations and gendered identities and whether youth studies, by implication, is a frontier for identifying social change.