The research we present assumes that we are living at a global level an agonistic moment (Mouffle, 2013) for the dispute to establish the meanings that will be considered hegemonic (Gramsci, 1995), where gender and feminist discourses are being central. 

While the feminist project (Walby, 2011) and its desire to change everything (Gago, 2019), during the last decade, have been central in the restructuring of social relations that advocate for a democratic transformation in a way that produces effects on state public policies, the reactionary ghosts of the past have once again taken on materiality through increasingly sophisticated devices that produce and reproduce neopatriarchal and neocapitalist subjectivities and discourses (Brown, 2019). 

According to Mark Fisher (2014) the overlapping of past eras is now so pervasive that we do not even notice it. The politics of nostalgia (Tanner, 2021) seek to renew the old through the disguise of the ecstasy of novelty. In this context, the slow cancellation of the future (Fisher, 2014) solidifies the distribution of social inequalities. 

Education and educational organisations interest us as contexts of transmission of the social world we live in (Arendt, 1996), allowing us to understand how the macro level intervenes in the micro, and vice versa. Among the different educational organisations, the context of Vocational Training and, specifically, the professional family of Vehicle Transport and Maintenance in Valencia (Spain) is chosen in order to understand the ways in which society distributes, classifies and orders that knowledge, physical and symbolic, which it considers valuable, in a way that generates different social groups (Bernstein, 1990).

The vocational family of Vehicle Transport and Maintenance, historically and culturally associated with working-class masculinities, has been used to analyse the characteristics of gender and social class relations The main research question is: what and how are the ideals and representations of gender held by young people studying Vocational Training in Transport and Vehicle Maintenance in Valencia (Spain)?  

Out theory is based on gender as a regulatory apparatus of society that operates within social practices by defining the parameters by which some subjects are considered intelligible and others unintelligible in a given context (Butler, 1990).  Masculinities are one of the possibilities of performativising gender, being linked to the history of institutions and economic structures. Following Raewyn Connell (1993), they are a social position, a place in gender relations, which has effects on social practices, culture, bodies and subjectivities. 

We understand that those who access Vocational Training in Vehicle Transport and Maintenance are learning to be - or to performativise - a certain social position that involves not only learning manual and technological skills, but also a pedagogical form of cultural assimilation and a form of self-representation (Rajan-Rankin, 2017) that materialises in the social life and bodies of young people at the liminal moment of transition to the world of work in the automotive industry in a historical context of deindustrialisation (Nayak, 2003) and crisis in the sector. 

Under the neoformulations of patriarchal capitalism and in the face of the loss of control over the production of existence, many young people are left with only the neoliberal fantasy of a future projection where they have access to material and symbolic goods, while at the same time they are wary of being lucky enough to find a paid job. In the words of Michael Kimmel (2019, p. 111):

"(...) in a way, their bloated expectations may be a response to the very different economic climate in which they're coming of age (...) they know that corporations are no longer loyal to their employees (...) So why should they be loyal to the company?"

Our research was designed on a qualitative basis thus we can analyse particularities and shared characteristics. To answer the main research question, what and how are the gender ideals and representations held by young people studying vocational training in transport and vehicle maintenance in Valencia? A triangulation of data has been carried out which, methodologically, accounts for the different levels of transmission of the pedagogical device (Bernstein, 1990): - Analysis of public policies on gender in Vocational Training in Valencia. - Analysis of the social corporeality of the profile of young people studying Vocational Training in Transport and Vehicle Maintenance in Valencia. - Ethnographic analysis of multiple single case and biographical interviews during two school years (2020-2021; 2021-2022) in a TMV VET in València. o Direct observation (open) o Semi-structured interviews with teachers and school management (10) o Interviews with students of Vocational Training in Transport (18). In addition, the necessary socio-statistical analysis of the profile of young people studying VET in Valencia has been carried out (project funded by the Generalitat Valenciana "Itinerarios de éxito y abandono en Formación Profesional de nivel 1 y 2 del sistema educativo de la provincia de Valencia" (GV/2018/038). Analysis of the qualitative data was undertaken through the use of MAXQDA software using following an abductive approach where we applied theoretical codes, with ad hoc codes emerging from the empirical material (Verd y Lozares, 2016). We have adapted, through the abductive method, the theoretical frame of reference according to the empirical findings, finally focusing on the question of subjectivities. We then have use the method of discourse analysis and interpretation.

The results of the research indicate that young people, who study this professional branch, have found in it a job training that becomes an allegory of their adult life; an adult life in which they wish to feel included and citizens in their own right with access to a social position that allows them to demonstrate that they are worthy of being, worthy of being considered, in short, adults. In this sense, it should be borne in mind that the current crisis situation in the automotive sector, together with the climate crisis we are experiencing on a planetary scale, confronts them with a training for work that they easily come to consider as training for unemployment, or for intermittently precarious employment. In conclusion, we believe that what is really at stake in vocational training in this productive branch is the very meaning of work for young people. These young people do not consider mechanics to be a relevant vortex from which to construct their identity, but rather a necessary issue in today's society that allows them to access a form of subsistence. Few subjects today can expect a life with a stable job, or an amiable entry into mercantile productive relations and, for this reason, work as the axis of masculinities has ceased to have the relevance it had in the moments of industrial expansion; satisfaction does not now reside in work and work is a way of obtaining money, but not the only one (hooks, 2004).

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