This article addresses the issue of how discursive analyses revealing the way personal accounts of masculinities are constructed can be supplemented by theories providing plausible explanations of how individuals take up particular subject positions. It is suggested that psychoanalytic concepts are helpful in this regard. An analysis is presented of material from a participant in a study of emergent masculinities among boys in London schools. This material concerns the cross cutting of gendered and racialized identity positions. The use of psychoanalytic constructs enables the production of an account of this boy's narrative in which reasons for his adoption and defense of particular, positions, despite their contradictory and conflictual character, can be proposed.