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Dude you're a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school

DOI:10.1080/09589236.2013.794070
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Lydia Namatende-Sakwa
Lydia Namatende-Sakwa
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Dude you're a fag: masculinity and
sexuality in high school
Lydia Namatende-Sakwa a
a Columbia University , New York , NY , USA
Published online: 07 May 2013.
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BOOK REVIEW
Dude you’re a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school
CHERI JO PASCOE, 2011 (second revised edition)
Berkeley: University of California Press
227 pp., ISBN 978-0520271487, £18.00 (paperback)
Through a picturesque ethnographic description, Pascoe’s Dude, you’re a fag: masculinity
and sexuality in high school gives a fly-on-the-wall experience of sexuality in high school.
Informed by an interactionist approach to gender, the book unveils taken-for-granted ways
in which masculinity is constructed through interactions, discourses and traditions like
prom, sports and drama. The study was conducted at River High, a high school in
California. I found the descriptions of setting, characters, discourses and events so
archetypical that I was reminded of my own high school experiences in an African context.
The setting is indeed a helpful case to think through contemporary constructions of
masculinity, sexuality and inequality.
The book explores five central themes regarding constructions of masculinity:
repudiation, confirmation, race, homophobia and girls’ gender strategies. Through
repudiation, Pascoe shows how boys reject femininity; confirmation rituals posit
masculinity as eroticised male dominance; masculinity is shown to vary with race;
homophobia is enacted through hetero-normative practices; girls’ gender strategies show
how girls deal with repudiation and confirmation rituals.
Pascoe’s greatest contribution is in contesting the idea invested by masculinity
theorists that masculinity is akin to male bodies. Her empirical work dislodges masculinity
from the male body, building on the ‘multiple masculinities’ model that views masculinity
as a socially constructed constellation of practices enacted by male and female. The book
is highly successful in the nuanced ways it engages with and merges theory and practice to
explore a broad spectrum of issues traversing masculinities.
Pascoe is critical of the role of schools in constructing hetero-normative masculinity
by rewarding hetero-normative practices enacted through school traditions, while policing
and punishing non-normative practices. Teachers are shown actively participating in
hetero-normative ways in which boys lay claim to masculinity. Except for the Black boy
suspended for calling another a ‘fag’, student sexist behaviour was ignored, in essence
normalising it as expected discourse.
However, using a pragmatic stance, I depart from Pascoe and contemporary queer
theorists’ emphasis on parody and play as central to social change in school (Butler
1990, Lugones 1990 as cited in Pascoe 2011). Pascoe foregrounds parody and play as
ways of constructing the social world to allow students to express gender fluidity,
challenge gendered power, highlight the importance of institutional spaces for gender
play and call into question the opposition of categories of gender. She cautions though
that playing with gender is not progressive in and of itself and could reinforce differences
in the sense that ‘boys who dress up as girls on Halloween ...don’t challenge the gender
order. Rather, they highlight exactly how much they are not girls’ (Pascoe 2011, p. 164).
Pascoe reaffirms that ‘playing with gender is an answer. But is not the answer’ (Pascoe
Journal of Gender Studies, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.794070
Downloaded by [Columbia University] at 10:35 07 May 2013
2011, pp. 164– 165). This resonates with Butler’s (1990, p. 139) contention that ‘parody
by itself is not subversive’. Yet, Pascoe posits parody and play as central to social change
with regard to sexuality in school, which I find troubling. While I do not dispute its
potential role, I challenge its centrality given the potentially ambivalent effect on
audiences.
I would propose a more pragmatic approach underscored by broader issues of
changing how people think about power and inequity. Therefore, rather than foreground
gender play, the agency of ‘deviant’ groups such as those who attempted to subvert hetero-
normativity should have been of primary focus. The basketball girls and gay –straight
alliance (GSA) girls are examples from Pascoe’s work: they identified and were named by
others as ‘girls who act like guys’ (p. 115). Although the former were loud and popular, the
latter, who formed a support group for gay students, were socially marginalised and less
well known. Similarly, the agency of Black boys whose masculinity was precariously
defined by race and social structure would need reclaiming and redefining. Pascoe’s
recommendations should have grappled with how to buttress the strengths of groups
which had resisted hetero-normativity, as well as, with how to empower marginalised
groups to reclaim their subjectivity. As the women’s and civil rights’ movements have
shown, victims of hetero-normativity can do it for themselves through consciousness
raising.
Furthermore, while I concur that ‘schools ...can be places of intense homophobia
and sexism, they can also be places for anti-discriminatory responses to marginalization’
(Pascoe 2011, p. 167), I continue to question the locating of gender play as central to
averting hetero-normativity in schools: I draw on scholarship highlighting the key role of
teachers in gender socialisation in schools (Paechter 2007, Sanders 2000) to make a case
for teacher training to take centre stage in advancing social change sustainably in
schools.
Pascoe concludes the book advocating activism through practical steps to promote
equitable conditions in schools; examples include curriculum redesign, posters,
support for GSAs, counselling and reform of school traditions. However, given that
her findings highlight teachers as key players in perpetrating hetero-normativity, these
recommendations should have considered how teacher attitudes and behaviours can be
addressed. Tsvi-Mayer (1993 as cited in Tatar and Emmanuel 2001, p. 22) asserts that
‘teacher awareness is thought to be the most important anti-sexist intervention in
schools ... Change will not occur unless teachers take a strong interest in those
issues.’
Apart from this point of dissent, I found the book captivating and humorous. It gives
invaluable insights into methodological, thematic and theoretical concerns around
sexuality in schooling. I highly recommend it for researchers, teachers, practitioners and
students interested in tackling the issues of sexuality.
References
Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Paechter, C.F., 2007. Being boys, being girls: learning masculinities and femininities. Maidenhead:
Open University Press.
Pascoe, C.J., 2011. Dude, you’re a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Sanders, J., 2000. Fairness at the source: assessing gender equity in teacher education for colleges
and universities. Seattle, WA: Washington Research Institute.
2Book Review
Downloaded by [Columbia University] at 10:35 07 May 2013
Tatar, M. and Emmanuel, G., 2001. Teachers’ perceptions of their students’ gender roles. Journal of
educational research, 94 (4), 215– 224.
Lydia Namatende-Sakwa
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
E-mail: lydiasakwa@yahoo.com
q2013, Lydia Namatende-Sakwa
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.794070
Book Review 3
Downloaded by [Columbia University] at 10:35 07 May 2013
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