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35 The Hidden Injuries Chapter 3 of Gender Students at Woodrow Wilson and Clayton faced many difficulties and disadvantages, and their gender ideals and pathways to becoming a man or a woman developed within these challenging contexts. Their gendered responses to life challenges produced different outcomes. Masculinity was consistent with school distancing while femininity was consistent with school attachment , and each enactment had different implications for education. In this chapter I focus on two students at Clayton High School, Kevin and Kaycee. Although I realize that such a concentration makes the book somewhat asymmetrical, my rationale is twofold. First, the approach contrasts the masculinity and femininity of two students with similar backgrounds in the same school context. Second, Kevin’s and Kaycee’s personal experiences greatly struck and affected me. As a sociologist, I am trained to divine group-level patterns, but unfortunately this often entails losing people’s personal stories. This chapter, then, is an attempt to communicate those narratives and showcase the fact that my research was about people, not simply abstract concepts and patterns. The narratives demonstrate what I call the hidden injuries of gender, a phrase modeled on Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s (1972) lyrically titled The Hidden Injuries of Class. In their classic text, they write, “[the] fear of being summoned before some hidden bar of judgment and being found inadequate infects the lives of [working-class] people; . . . it is a matter of a hidden weight, a hidden anxiety, . . . a matter of feeling inadequately in control ” (33). Sennett and Cobb refer to such hidden injuries throughout their book, showing how class status affects the dignity of poor and working-class people and how they carve out a sense of self-respect in reaction, constructing “badges of dignity” that deflect perceived degradation (84). 36 learning the hard way Gender can be a framework for interpreting and responding to social challenges that threaten to impugn dignity. Like Sennett and Cobb, I found that social class, family background, race, and place-based stigma threatened the dignity of students in my study, prompting them to carve out a sense of respect and efficacy. Kevin and Kaycee managed challenges from their family backgrounds by following distinctly masculine and feminine scripts. Other students at Woodrow Wilson and Clayton faced both similar and different challenges, but all interpreted such hidden injuries through the lens of gender and devised gendered responses to heal these injuries. Kevin I first met Kevin in a ninth-grade English class at Clayton. He had thick, sandy-blond hair and deep-set eyes. He rarely smiled, and his brow was often furrowed into what approached a scowl. Despite this sullen exterior he was highly personable. He was one of the first students I met and talked to during my fieldwork, and he later helped me recruit additional students to interview. Students and teachers seemed to like him but also viewed him as a little different. Students occasionally made fun of him, and teachers viewed him as potentially troublesome. When I got him out of class for his interview, I asked the teacher, Ms. Galloway, if I could get any makeup work for him. She replied, “Well, you can get it, but the question is, will he do it?” Kevin and I walked down the hall to a private room, his white high-top sneakers squeaking loudly on the concrete floors. When the interview began, he told me that he lived in a house with his parents, his younger brother, and occasionally his sister and seven-year-old nephew. His mother worked as a secretary for an electrician and, as he described it, got “paid pretty good.” Kevin’s father was fifty-four years old and disabled. He had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade and was collecting disability assistance at the time of the interview. Kevin seemed to vacillate between feelings of pride and shame regarding his father: kevin: He’s said to only have an eighth-grade education through IQ tests. . . . But he’s a smart guy. He can’t really do bookwork, but if you go out and you give him lumber, he can build a porch. Like he built most of our house with my Uncle Jon before he was disabled. . . . e. m.: Okay, so he can do things. As far as bookwork— kevin: As far as bookwork, he’s not great at it. He can read and write decent. About an eighth-grade level—read and write. He...

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