Masculinity in Secondary Public Schools at San Luis de Potosí, México

Abstract

The article provides an answer to the question: How do students from public high schools located in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, perceive and build their masculinity? The public schools, according to the political profile of the Mexican State, implements mechanisms through which it promotes gender relations and the construction of a hegemonic type of masculinity, that is, patriarchal, linked with the values of neoliberalism. Accordingly, we analyze the school and curricular institutional space, and the practices of the students, which allude to the conformation and perception of masculinity in three processes: a) generational relations; b) bodily practices; c) perceptions of homosexuality. Because it is relevant in the speeches of the students, the relationship that the school maintains with the family space is also examined. Part of the analysis is based on the speeches of the students recovered through group interviews. One answer, as a conclusion, to the question asked, is that the students, from their sphere of reflexivity, resignify and create new practices that question and sometimes subvert, the hegemonic masculinity promoted by the schools.