From Fags to Dudes: Rethinking the Construction of Adolescent Masculinities through Sexualizing Discourses

Spend any time at a U.S. high school and you will soon hear students (and some teachers) bandy about the pejorative fag. There are two schools of thought on the ubiquity of this slur’s use: either it is an empty and, therefore, multipurpose epithet no more attached to specific subjects than bitch, lame, or ghetto adhere to women, the differently bodied, or black urban working poor, respectively. Or it is an unequivocal marker of the overtly permissible homophobia that marginalizes gay-identified young men in classrooms everywhere. C. J. Pascoe’s engaging and timely ethnography moves the meaning of fag beyond the empty or narrowly defined epithet. Her vivid account of prosaic high school life offers compelling materials (and good reason) to rethink the textured, complex, and pivotal role fag plays in the gendering of young people.

Not since Penelope Eckert’s classic analysis of high school social hierarchies has an ethnography so richly detailed how youth and schools reinscribe social identities.¹ Pascoe observed and interviewed more than fifty students and countless teachers and administrators for a year and a half at “River High” — the pseudonym for the multiracial, middle-class Northern California high school Pas-coe studied. After deftly plumbing how “idioms of sexuality” shape adolescent masculinity through the everyday interactions of individuals and institutions, Pascoe concludes that for young men (and I would argue for the young women depicted too), no job seemed more pressing than repudiating “the specter of failed masculinity” (5). While the production of masculinity is often uncritically linked to male-identified bodies, Pascoe’s corrective and contribution to feminist studies of masculinities is to note how all facets of the high school environment work to shore up masculinity. In doing so, Pascoe offers a more productive locus for studying masculinities. What is most striking and original about Pascoe’s study, however, is the sustained attention she pays to the different ways school environments circulate sexualized discourses — privileging their expression among white young men and punishing its manifestations among a diverse group of gay- and lesbian-identifying youth with the most regulation focused on young men of color. Whether expressed through the explicit use of fag or heterosexist chatter about girls’ bodies (that, on occasion, was not just verbally but physically violent), sexualizing discourses work differently for white boys, masculine girls, and young men of color.

The first three chapters provide ample materials to illustrate the book’s central claim that “heteronormative and homophobic discourses, practices, and interactions in an American high school produce masculine identities” (4). What Pascoe calls “fag discourses” — the refrain of “FAG!” hurled through the halls and imitations meant to mock the feminized man — shoulder the Herculean task of keeping normative masculinity aloft (60). Fag discourses permeated campus rituals, scenes of daily banter, and the interactions of social cliques. Whether it be at the Mr. Cougar contest, auto shop, weightlifting room, backstage at the school musical, among the Gay Straight Alliance kids, or female basketball stars, Pascoe documents how necessary (and time consuming) it is to buoy up masculinity. Pas-coe’s fourth chapter productively riffs on Adrienne Rich to reframe young men’s gendered sex talk, commonly written off as a consequence of adolescent boys’ hormones, as “compulsive heterosexuality” — the continual, ritualized display of control over girls’ bodies meant to demonstrate social power more than sexual desire (84). Chapter 5 looks at the celebration of certain young women’s female masculinity over male femininity to further the case that fag discourses detach from specifically male bodies and, therefore, generate important sites to consider for research.

As Pascoe notes, the repudiation of the fag specter “didn’t occur in a vacuum” at River High (157). Her conclusion effectively recounts how schools and their power brokers “encouraged, engaged in, and reproduced the centrality of repudiation processes to adolescent masculinity” and how that frames the actions of the young people we meet through her work (157). Less...