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Nuancing Young Masculinities tells a complex story about the plurality of young masculinities. It draws on the narratives of Finnish young people (mostly boys) of different social classes and ethnicities who attend schools in Helsinki, Finland. Their accounts of relations with peers, parents, and teachers give insights into boys' experiences and everyday practices at school, home, and in leisure time.
The theoretical insights in this volume are wide-ranging, illuminating the plurality of masculinities, their dynamism, and intersections with other social identities. The young people's enthusiastic and reflexive engagement with the research dispels stereotypes of boys and masculinities and offers a unique and holistic re-imagining of masculinities. Nuancing Young Masculinities provides a nuanced and compelling understanding of young masculinities.

Recent studies on boys and young men's heterosexual practices point in contradictory directions. On the one hand, boys and young men seem to be placing less value on "hard", overtly aggressive masculinity and compulsive heterosexuality, in keeping with their adoption of more egalitarian attitudes in their sexual relationships. On the other hand, the hegemonic masculine notions that associate "real" men with sexual prowess persist as well. In this article, we argue that this contradiction indicates careful (re)calibration in doing respectable heteromasculinities. We draw on a small-scale qualitative study located in Helsinki, Finland, in illuminating how cis-gendered boys and young men with less privileged backgrounds construct their heteromasculinities as respectable, which requires context-specific balancing between distancing themselves from and embracing hegemonic notions of manhood. Through this balancing, the boys and young men reconfigure not necessary the substance but the style of respectable heteromasculinity; thereby upholding masculine hegemony by attuning it to the claims of the "#MeToo era."

Availability and access have been central worries that are discussed related to children's and young people's sport and other structured leisure activities. In this article, we shift the focus towards children's and young people's experiences of violence perpetrated by coaches or leaders within such activities in Finland. We use a large-scale survey on children's and young people's experiences of violence in different spheres of life (Finnish Child Victim Survey 2013) as the data, and concentrate on the significance of gender and ethnicity for the experiences of violence within structured leisure. The results show that boys report significantly higher levels of emotional, physical and sexual violence perpetrated by a coach or a leader within leisure activities than girls; and immigrant background seems also to increase the risk of being victimized. With the help of logistic regression analysis, we assess the role of other background factors in experiencing violence within structured activities, but conclude that the significance of gender and ethnicity persists even when factors related to the family background are taken into consideration.

Parenthood is a normatively regulated category with distinctly loaded moral expectations about "good parenting". These normative expectations are lived through the body in gendered, classed, and ethnicized ways. We examine the ways in which parents representing majority and minority ethnic backgrounds construct an image of themselves as respectable parents, a construct that is intertwined with the idea of decent citizenship. The parents drew on middle-class, professional, and familist discourses on assertive parenthood, characterized by close scrutiny of their children's activities and friends, and the clear boundaries imposed on them together with democratic, dialogical relationships with them, as the preferred way of parenting. Describing one's own parenthood as respectable included an implicit or explicit definition of "Others", who were less respectable as parents in ways that carried gendered, ethnicized, and classed meanings. The qualities required of "a respectable parent", besides physical and material characteristics, were also connected with the idea of "inner fitness" in the form of the right kind of moral values. ; Peer reviewed