Stories of Raising Boys
Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety
Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Temple University Press,U.S.
Published:26th Jun '26
£22.99
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
In her poignant, affecting autoethnography, Stories of Raising Boys, Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock investigates the meaning of disability, gender, race, and privilege in contemporary culture. Scott-Pollock is a white mother living with a physical disability raising four boys—Theo, a three-year-old risktaker; Tony, ten, who lives with seizures; Vinny, eight, who is gender expansive; and five-year-old Nico, who is also gender expansive and experiences anxiety. They live on the southeastern U.S. coast with their father, Evan, and their baby sister, Rosalie.
Through narrative analysis, Scott-Pollock compares and contrasts her circumstances to the ways in which adult interviewees manage the same lived experiences as her sons. She also includes their opinions about masculinity and identity, as well as parenting boys. In doing so, Stories of Raising Boys deepens the cultural complexity of parent–child relationships and expands our collective understanding of how they form and emerge. In addition, Scott-Pollock uses a metaphor of swimming through the ocean near her family's home to illustrate resisting marginalization while also promoting strong cultural identities, especially in turbulent waters.
Stories of Raising Boys offers an absorbing cultural reflection on the intersectionality of identity, power, and privilege.
"The metaphors of water and swimming that run throughout Stories of Raising Boys are apt for the shifting currents and confluences of intersecting identities in a cultural sea of difference. This project vulnerably and courageously confronts contested issues of race, gender, and the performativity of parenting. At the same time, Scott-Pollock illustrates the power and importance of qualitative inquiry through an exacting narrative autoethnographic framework. In doing so, she establishes a template for co-storying as critical methodological play that invites others to tell their stories."—Bryant Keith Alexander, Professor of Communication, Cultural, Gender, and Performance Studies and Dean in the College of Communication and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University and coauthor of Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory, and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood
"Stories of Raising Boys is a beautifully crafted critical autoethnography that shimmers with intimate, ethically reflexive storytelling, dialogue, and a symphony of voices. Scott-Pollock models the promise of a co-storying qualitative methodology while advancing scholarship on masculinity, disability, gender expansiveness, and parenting. You will lose yourself in Vinny's glitter-bright, gender-expansive boyhood and in Tony's navigation of seizures and hegemonic masculinity. This is an intriguing read, especially for those interested in family communication, performance of identity, queer studies, qualitative methods, disabilities, and youth development. Highly recommended."—Sarah J. Tracy, Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University and author of Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact
ISBN: 9781439926116
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm
Weight: 313g
216 pages