School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemNegotiating masculinities: the experience of male teachers in Indonesian early childhood education( 2017)Since the fall of President Suharto, the New Order’s hegemonic masculinity has been increasingly contested and reconfigured. This thesis expands understandings of historical and contemporary formations of Indonesian masculinities. It focuses particularly on ‘nurturing masculinities’ by examining the gender narratives and practices of men who teach kindergarten age children. Specifically, this research demonstrates how male teachers navigate social expectations about their work and gender identity in a female-dominated and feminised profession. It adopts a focused ethnography research design that combines in-depth interviews with classroom observations. Interviews were undertaken with eight male teachers from five schools and their female colleagues, student’s parents, and the school’s principals and managers. Observations took place in classrooms and the broader school environment in order to record male teacher’s interactions with students and teachers and the alignment with their personal narratives. This thesis shows the dynamics through which hegemonic masculinity is constantly being both defended and challenged by male teachers. The discourse of nurture, which is pervasive in the early childhood profession, is the modality through which the negotiations of masculinity take place. The thesis shows how male teachers reorient both gendered discourses of nurture and understandings of hegemonic masculinity in their self-narratives about their work and in their workplace interactions.