Resumen de Boys – the Disadvantaged Gender?
The paper is focused on a powerful discursive configuration: the diagnosis that boys are nowadays tremendously suffering from being de-privileged in relation to girls. The hermeneutic analysis of the dominant patterns of interpretation that are characteristic for this dramatized discourse-configuration shows how the gender order of the modern society is constructed as instable and seriously endangered. The narrative pattern of the boy being fundamentally disadvantaged – not least by lacking male interfaces – is in this paper discussed as a ‘supportive narrative’ for (re)stabilizing difference and distinction within a clearly structured gender order. However, the open question will remain as to whether the overdetermination that structures the discourse as a whole points in the direction of a persisting or a changing social and symbolic order.
