The Second Sex of Tomorrow? Constructions of Masculinity in the Moral Panic About Boy's Education. A Content Analysis of Canadian News Media

Based on qualitative content analysis of articles in ten major Canadian newspapers between 1990 and 2011, this thesis asks how masculinity is represented in discourses about gender and education. My analysis suggests that the public discourse about boys' education is out of touch with scholarly research, and instead relies on a number of problematic tropes: (1) Schools are imagined as being run for girls and by female educators devoted to an anti-male agenda; (2) education is seen as a zero-sum game, in which what benefits girls must be necessarily bad for boys; (3) boys are being constructed as one homogenous group that is inherently different from girls, while any diversity among boys, especially in terms of race and class, is erased. I argue that the panic about boys' education must be understood as a backlash against feminism, based on a misreading of economic transformations through a gender lens.