This research explores how critical media literacy transforms ways of engaging with media texts and expands the understanding and practice of literacy. In this qualitative teacher inquiry, even though the teacher researcher had envisioned for the students an identity as academic-language learners who engage with competing ideologies of masculinity through critical analysis of its construction in a media text, the students chose to enact the subjectivity of masculinity as a lived experience rather than merely an academic deconstruction, and the subjectivity of themselves as having a critical voice in relation to the social construction of discrimination. These findings prompted the teacher researcher to consider the reflective nature of teacher inquiry and its potential for building relations between identity and subjectivity.