Learning the Hard Way: Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education

5. Rednecks and Rutters: Rural Masculinity and Class Anxiety

77 Chapter 5 Rednecks and Rutters Rural Masculinity and Class Anxiety When compared to girls, boys at both Woodrow Wilson and Clayton affected a more casual approach to schoolwork, resulting in less academic diligence and lower performance. This contrived carelessness was a way of doing masculinity, a response to perceptions that anti-school performances represented masculine power and independence. In this chapter I look deeper into why masculinity acquired such connotations and patterns of action, focusing on the rural context of Clayton. Theories of doing gender and hegemonic masculinity are contextually based; so to understand such processes in school, we must learn more about the settings in which masculinities and femininities evolve and how they intersect with other modes of difference and inequality. According to Connell and Messerschmidt (2005), hegemonic masculinity should be understood as locally situated and “embedded in specific social environments” (839). At Clayton, rurality, economic restructuring, and the exigent demands of achieving a respectable social-class position molded local definitions of masculinity and scripts for masculine performance. The local circumstances affecting masculinity and education became apparent to me on one rainy day during the second year of my fieldwork at Clayton. As the guidance counselor, Ms. Henderson, and I sat in her office talking, she had to interrupt our conversation to take a phone call. While she was on the phone, Tim, a dark-haired boy wearing a brown sweatshirt, came in and sat next to me. I had not had much contact with Tim during my 78 learning the hard way research, but he seemed to be nice and quiet. I asked why he was seeing the counselor, and he said that he needed to change his schedule to get out of Spanish class. “It’s too hard,” he complained. “I don’t know what’s going on.” I told him that I thought students needed at least two years of foreign language. He replied, “Yeah, my sister said that you need that to go to college, but not to graduate. I just can’t handle [Spanish] right now.” Ms. Henderson finished her phone conversation and asked Tim why he was there. He said he wanted to transfer out of Spanish. She asked him directly if he wanted to go to college. “Maybe one day,” he replied plaintively. Ms. Henderson informed him that he would need to complete Spanish if he wanted to go to college. Tim replied, looking down, “Yeah, I know, but maybe I can take it later.” Ms. Henderson accepted that decision and asked Tim what other class he would like to take. He lifted up his head and immediately replied, “Woodworking.” Ms. Henderson switched him into the woodworking course. At the risk of hyperbole, I venture to say that this one brief encounter may have altered Tim’s life. Perhaps he will eventually try his luck with Spanish and go to college, but at the time he appeared far more interested in taking woodworking, a class he would undoubtedly enjoy but that would not give him the credits he needed to pursue a degree after high school. After Tim left, I asked Ms. Henderson about his decision. She said that such decisions were typical among boys in the area: “Around here, a lot of boys see their fathers or uncles doing trades, and they want to do that. A lot of boys are more tied to the family and the area and don’t want to leave. The girls are more willing to get out.” What Tim’s experience and Ms. Henderson’s words showed, I eventually realized, was the definition and persistence of local hegemonic masculinity at Clayton. Boys were connected to manual labor and the families and community that historically revolved around such labor because it was defined as crucial to manhood and represented the strength of masculinity.1 In a largely working-class, coal-mining boomtown, being a man meant demonstrating a capacity for arduous and dangerous physical labor. And as in other coal-mining areas, class relations through the mining industry promoted gender relations that privileged male labor power and established the economic dominance of men (Yarrow 1985). Of course, Clayton had evolved considerably since the heyday of the coal industry and, as I have mentioned, saw this industry evaporate in the late 1980s. Rural Masculinity and Class Anxiety 79 This change created complex and shifting definitions of both masculinity...