In the last 18 months, together with my colleagues from Brazil and Japan, we have explored the possibility to carry out this project jointly. We have met at several occasions, at two conferences that I had organized in the last academic year, and in two panels that I coordinate last July, In addition, I gave several presentations at meetings and colloquia on pilot data that were collected within the last 12 months. While my original work (see reference section) was situated in the development of narrative and emotional/evaluative positions in children between the ages of 4- and 12-years, the turn to work on identity issues has been documented by a number of publications on teenagers’ narrative identity work as well as on pregnant women’s identity claims and, at a more general level, the development of positioning analysis for the purpose to analyze processes of identity formation. In the following I will briefly summarize five different domains that have impacted on the development of the proposed study. These include gender research, masculinity research, developmental approaches, discourse analytic methodologies (with sub-domains of position analysis and sociolinguistic identity research), and gender/masculinity research in different nation states.

Relevant sources with regard to gender socialization (in family and schools) and gender differences in childhood and adolescent form the backdrop against which the proposed study is positioned explicitly as discourse analytic (i.e., analyzing how topics and themes about self and other are organized in different discourse settings by male children and male adolescents) from an ethnographic perspective (i.e., with an emphasis on the exploration of how the participants make sense of themselves). Accordingly, the study will not adopt a gender comparative orientation, but rather it attempts to explore the process of masculinity formation from the perspective of young male participants.

In contrast to the advice-giving literature in three different nation states on how to bring up young males appropriately, and in contrast to the (growing) body of literature that views the young male as (intrinsically - or forced, due to the breakdown of dominant masculinity discourses) emotionally handicapped, potentially violent and socially cut-off from their own feelings and suffering, the proposed study attempts to explore the types of discourses produced by young males (at different ages, in different discourse sites, and in different cultural location/nation states), how these discourses are productively and coherently employed for their own practical purposes, with an openness toward the (often intrinsic) incoherencies and contradictions of these discourses. Thus, rather than aiming for general characterizations of these discourses, the study will place emphasis on how the actual discourses are pieced together and achieved (i.e., on the micro-management of the discourses) -- leading to insights into developmental aspects of identity formation processes.

In contrast to Ericksonian and psychoanalytic approaches to identity development, but also in contrast to evolutionary developmental models, the proposed project starts from the assumption that identities are first of all formed (i.e., they emerge) locally in interaction with others in and through discourse. The present study is closely related to the growing perspective that social interactions in general and communicative practices in particular are an important arena of development. And it is here (in interactions) where developmental processes can be studied (micro-)analytically.

The project is an elaboration of critical and feminist approaches to discourse, power, and gender – with an emphasis on the integration of ethnographic, ethnomethodological, sociolinguistic, and narrative approaches, resulting in the development of positioning analysis to reveal the processes involved in identity work in different discourse settings and different discourse topics. Methodologically, it makes use of participant observation, "naturally" occurring peer interactions, interviewing, narrative analysis, focus groups, and the comparison of spoken and written discourse data. I will summarize further below how positioning analysis as a methodological tool for the micro-analysis of identity processes out of a blend of ethno-methodological and sociolinguistic traditions.

All three countries are equally affected by the rapid globalization processes that are sweeping the globe, causing an increasing fragmentation of traditional identity images and the practices that enable their construal (Castells, 2000; Giddens, 2000). Japan, scoring highest on the Masculinity Scale, and as such the perfect site for masculinity research (with Brazil scoring relatively low on the same scale, and the US ranging exactly in the middle between Japan and Brazil), seems to be affected particularly hard by radical changes in the spaces that used to be occupied in a gender-segregated society (Ito, 1996; Kratani, 2000; Miyaday, 1997). A particular problem seems to be the erosion of explanatory models ("master discourses") that have been legitimate in the particular culture, such as for instance the image of the hegemonic male. And although the teenage suicide rate has been increasing steadily over the last forty years in all ‘developed’ nations, this increase in Japan (90% of them are male) is particularly alarming. Teachers, who have been trained to treat boys and girls "the same", are confronted with frustrations and violent acts of young boys who feel that their identity as males is at stake (Kimura, 1999; Lewis, 1995).

According to recent market studies (reported in the New York Times, August 13^th, 2000, page 4 of the International section) Brazilian men are by far more concerned with "the effort to cultivate an attractive exterior" when compared with their US-American country fellows, and we expect a similar difference when compared with Japanese men. The early sexualization of the female and male body within the Brazilian culture seems to encourage an earlier onset of male hegemonic self presentations in Brazilian male youths than in the US and particularly in Japan (see Nolasco, 1993).

Taking these differences in cultural ways of interpreting childhood, adolescence, maleness, and in particular the male body, as the starting point for our investigation, it seems to make sense to probe deeper into the processes of how young males draw up positions vis-à-vis the culturally available explanatory models of masculinity and how they micro-manage their positions in different discourse settings and in different discourse topics. These issues are of particular relevance for the assessment of how to introduce new models into the discourses of children of teenagers, as for instance in attempts to replace the hegemonic male with the image (and discourse) of ‘the new man’.