Boys from the Bronx, Men from Manhattan: Gender, Aspiration and Imagining a (Neoliberal) Future After High School in New York City

Abstract

This chapter explores neoliberal discourses of the self as they emerge in the transition from youth into early adulthood. My aim here is to explore the spatial and temporal parameters of neoliberal subjectivities as they are constructed at the end of secondary schooling. Specifically, I draw on ethnographic research in order to consider how seniors at a large public high school in The Bronx, New York City, negotiate ideas about aspiration in relation to constructions of masculinity and imaginings of the future. In rendering visions of their lives after school, students imagine themselves in multiple future times and spaces, often through narratives of partial or total escape from their community in The Bronx and towards visions of ‘the City’. In this case, ‘the City’ is occasionally the literal space of Manhattan, and sometimes a more abstract metropolitan destination representative of future success in keeping with an ideal neoliberal reckoning of the self. These removes correlate with imaginings of future masculinity as boys from the Bronx imagine themselves as men ‘from Manhattan’. However, the partial and multiple narratives of future selves that young men recount also reveal enduring tensions that at times challenge the notion of a singular, hegemonic, neoliberal logic of self. I make sense of the resulting tensions, contestations and multiple imaginings of the future through the novel conceptual frame of quantum personhood (Alexander, Masculinity and Aspiration: International Perspectives in the Era of Neoliberal Education. New York, Routledge, 2017). This concept draws on metaphors derived from quantum physics as a way to capture the concurrent, entangled future persons that are imagined as young people flit, electron-like—some self-assured, some uncertain, many a mix of both—towards the event horizon of early adulthood.