(IN) SECURE TIMES - CONSTRUCTING WHITE WORKING-CLASS MASCULINITIES INTHE LATE 20TH-CENTURY

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the ''Other'' as a means of framing identities. Dra wing on two independent qualitative studies the authors investigate di stinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, rel ate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create s elf. First the authors look at an ethnography of ''the Freeway boys,'' a community of urban white working-class high school boys who must de al with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecu re place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the au thors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a com bined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identit ies that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white wome n and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how hig h schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege.