Dude, You’re a Fag review

 Dude, You’re a Fag review

Abstract

High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You’re a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe’s unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the “specter of the fag” becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the “fag discourse” is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.

Introduction

The book through a thorough ethnographic research, the author examines machismo in high school. The author work proposes that masculinity to be defined through control and dominance. It is established by high school students through their routine of the fag epithet. It explores masculinity enacted by female and male bodied students. The consequences of a strict gender system, racialized masculine ideas, heteronormativity within the system of the school, and deeds of conflict to the gendered communal order. The author steered a fieldwork through the River High School for one year and a half. He generally led formal interviews with fifty school students and informal interviews with the faculty, administration and students. The whole school fraternity participated in the formal interviews.

The novel has been criticized for her interpretation of the male-female interactions that she observed. The book reviewed Christine Shearer asserts that Pascoe should have represented student’s motivations and perceptions for their seemingly inappropriate deeds. Despite this critique, shearer contends, Pascoe’s analysis is understandable, however, given the many descriptions of incidents that bordered on or were clear cases of sexual harassment” (p.127)

Synopsis

Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, is a readable, easy-to-teach and provocative exploration of the role that high schools play in producing hegemonic masculinity. Based on 18 months of participant observation research inside “River High,” a middle-class high school in northern California, the book takes readers behind the scenes of youth sexual and gender culture, and painstakingly reveals the banality of homophobia, competition and humiliation, harassment and violence, and other gendered forms of suffering in American high schools. Lest readers get too depressed, Pascoe also uncovers the humor, playfulness, tenderness and performativity that survive in high schools, which remain places of possibility and yet-to-be-fully-formed subjectivities.

One of the book’s most significant contributions is that it offers a clear empirical illustration of Judith Butler’s arguably abstract argument that gender is the product of reiterated acts of repudiation and confirmation. Pascoe shows how schools provide the tools for boys to confirm hetero-masculine selfhood and repudiate everything that falls outside of it, namely femininity and homosexuality. Her analysis centers on “fag discourse” and the efforts boys invest in deflecting the stigma associated with being a fag by attaching this stigma to other boys. Drawing on rich and numerous ethnographic examples, Pascoe reveals that any boy can be a fag, and that being a fag covers far more territory than homosexual desire. A boy risks being a fag when he is emotive, warm or expressive; incompetent or noncompetitive; physically weak; and unable or unwilling to dominate girls. All boys [End Page 484] are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence is established through endless acts of repudiation or the never-finished work of locating the fag outside of oneself.

One of the more compelling moments in the book is Pascoe’s illustration of the concept compulsive heterosexuality, which refers to the ways that heterosexuality is asserted through acts of aggression and dominance. I found this a very useful articulation of what gender scholars already know but often overlook, which is that violence is a constitutive element of male heterosexual authenticity. At River High, boys’ stories about sex were very frequently detached from any positive erotic meanings, including their own personal pleasure or orgasm (let alone love or romance). Instead, it was about mastering and conquering girls’ abject bodies that took center stage in their tales. Boys’ stories emphasized what they found disgusting about girls bodies and frequently included violent imagery of “ripping vaginal walls” and making girls bleed.

In addition to examining gendered discourses, Pascoe places analytic focus on the institutional underpinnings of gender-making. Pascoe shows how River High, as an institution, produced teenage forms of hetero-masculine dominance through rituals, games, policies and discourses that centered heterosexual masculinity and that required all students to adapt. Gendered competitions and performances, dances, homecoming rituals, popularity contests and other heterosexualizing and sexist activities were already in place at River High when students arrived as freshmen. These events functioned not only to normalize ideas about gender that students already possessed, but also to serve as their own gender training ground. Furthermore, Pascoe illustrates while teachers at River High reported that they did not discuss sexuality with students, they repeatedly honored heterosexuality by asking straight students about dating, engaging in heterosexual repartee, invoking heterosexual metaphors in their teaching, and making sexist and heterosexist jokes.

Dude You’re a Fag also documents the ways that gay students resisted River High’s hetero-normative culture. Despite risk of harassment and violence, some gay students were defiantly “out” on campus, regularly wore gender-queer clothing, organized a gay-straight alliance, and attended dances with their partners. In an unexpected move given the book’s focus on fag discourse, Pascoe dedicates a chapter to exploring the complexities female masculinity at River High, as exemplified by butch female athletes (some of whom were lesbians) and gender-queer girls in the gay-straight alliance

Analysis

Labeling others as a fag is a part of what Pascoe describes as “fag discourse”, which is central to boys’ joking relationships. Joking about the fag both cements relationships among boys and soothes social anxiety. The high school boys in Pascoe’s study bond by throwing the fag epithet at one another. Boys call their peers a fag for a number of things, such as being incompetent, showing emotion, caring about appearances, dancing, or expressing (sexual or platonic) interest in other guys. Another aspect of fag discourse is the enactment of the fag, in which high school boys would act out exaggerated femininity or pretend to be sexually attracted to men. Through this behavior, “… boys reminded themselves and each other that at any moment they could become fags if they were not sufficiently masculine” (p.60).

Pascoe’s research suggests that hegemonic masculinity has a racial component in the context of the American high school. Not only was masculinity defined differently for whites and people of color, but homophobia manifested itself quite differently among the school’s nonwhite population. For black students, achieving masculinity required activities such as caring about clothing and dancing, which would be labeled as fag activities if enacted by white students. Pascoe asserts that, in order to combat stereotypes about black people as being poor and “ghetto”, black students paid close attention to clothing, accessories, and cleanliness. Dancing was also understood to be an important aspect of achieving black masculinity, as it was associated with hip-hop culture.

The black students in Pascoe’s research were less likely to engage in fag discourse than the other students. These students often teased one another for being or acting white. If black students did use the fag epithet, they were often talking about homosexuals, rather than effeminate men. When confronted with an effeminate, gay dancer, for instance, black students reacted with humor and admiration for his skills, rather than the hostile or violent reactions typical of white students.

Though the black boys in Pascoe’s study were disproportionately popular among their peers, they also faced excessive discipline from school administration. Pascoe posits that this is because of a tendency to assume intentionality with black students in instances of misbehavior. For example, black performers were threatened with expulsion by administrators if they danced too provocatively at school assemblies, while white boys dancing in an equally provocative manner were not warned or disciplined for their behaviors. In this instance, administrators seemed to be influenced by stereotypes of black men as being hypersexual when considering what displays were appropriate at school, while they did not attribute sexuality to the white boys.

Conclusion

Reference