Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (review)

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 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. Though this chapter...