This paper argues that in order to begin loosening the ties that bind care and gender in primary education, we need to re-examine the knowledge sought and found by educational research about teachers. The focus is primarily on how we understand men who teach. Through an examination of two scholarly texts -Ashley, M., and J. Lee [2003. Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the Primary School. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham] and King, J. [1998. Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who Teach Young Children. New York: TCP]-I argue that we must be mindful that our research can effectively produce and reiterate common-sense understandings of men that binds them to the hegemonic masculine ideal. It is argued that mixed-method qualitative research that untangles the layers of context influencing the lives of men who teach is important. The paper also suggests that the study of male teachers' emotions, as at once individual and social, and private and public, can disrupt the rational-emotional binary that cements care to gender and reveal new configurations of the gender order.

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This article uniquely employs Beverley Skeggs’ ‘hierarchies of personhood’ as a means to explore the iconographies of teacherhood in neoliberal times. Drawing on the narratives of three male primary school teachers in England, it examines and critiques the neoliberal ‘subject of value’ that is acquisitional, performative and self-propelling. ‘Self-projection’, ‘self-protection’ and ‘self-separation’ are identified as a trio of self-care practices that invite normative identity claims as they articulate with embodiments of value found in gendered, classed and raced discourses in contemporary cultural and political domains. The article is therefore about how, within school communities, conditions of personhood are established through regimes of value, and how these regimes are bound by the logic of commodity and exchange. In addressing the limited attention given to the localised formation of masculinities within neoliberalism, the article contributes to an emerging area of scholarship via its innovative engagement with sociological conceptions of personhood and value. The article thereby seeks to mark a shift in the academic and public discourses framing ‘male primary school teachers’, as it critically examines how such an identity category hinges on regimes of value conditioned by interlocking technologies of neoliberal educational governance, patriarchy and classism.