This book review is published in a journal column that reports on ethnographies suitable for undergraduate university teaching. The citation is:

deRoche, John E.

2007Review of Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. General Anthropology 14(2): (forthcoming).

Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. C.J. Pascoe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, xii + 227 pp. ISBN976-0-520-25230-1. <www.ucpress.edu>

John E. deRoche

Cape Breton University

This study of masculine gender construction in a working-class suburban California high school is an excellent ethnography for undergraduates in anthropology and related fields. Students will find it current, topically salient, personally informative, lively in style, and under 200 pages long. Pascoe did this research as a Berkeley doctoral candidate in her late 20s. The exemplary fieldwork vignettes and case studies are abundant, rich, vivid, and experientially resonant. At the same time, she has thoroughly theorized her narrative, providing a fine conceptual vocabulary, a probing critical framework, and a set of intelligent practical recommendations.

One mark of a successful ethnographer is the capacity to transport readers plausibly and engagingly into other worlds of experience. I read this book as a 60-year-old, left-leaning, middle-class, small-town, non-religious, Atlantic-Canadian, heterosexual, male parent, of Northern European heritage, esthetically and bodily averse to hip-hop and team sports. Yet, it is not only because I am a social scientist, nor because I survived high school (as something akin to a nerd), that Pascoe’s account made it seem that I was living “real time” in the thick of things at River High. Rather, it is because she is very good at her work. I can only speculate that Dude would resonate equally with most undergraduates. But I would bet on it.

The book’s title announces its key theme: the nature of boys’ “fag discourse” as key to their masculine identity-work. Here we see “an adolescent masculinity constituted by interactional rituals of heterosexism and homophobia”(p. 27). With few exceptions, the boys obsessively and teasingly call each other “fag,” make homophobic jokes, and parody effeminate behavior. The discourse entails “homophobia,” but does not simply equate to it. First, although the school culture is strongly homophobic, the terrifyingly powerful “faggot” image, for boys of River High, spills out well beyond sexual issues and indeed does not actually denote “homosexuality” as such. Rather, “fag” marks failed masculinity. If masculine in demeanor, a homosexual man is not a fag; and a fag is not necessarily homosexual. Second, both the homophobia and the fag discourse are “gendered,” practiced only by boys. (Note that the boys typically think lesbians are cool). Third, both discourses are also racialized. Pascoe recurrently demonstrates how masculinity models and discursive practices differ across racialized groups.

If a fag is unmasculine, what is “masculine”? “In the world of River High, masculinity was defined as sexualized and publicly enacted dominance” (p. 166). This, in turn, is the frame in which the boys strive for an image of efficacy and personhood, in both their self-concept and social identity. The frantic disavowal of a fag identity (Chapter 3), and the corresponding practices that Pascoe conceptualizes as “compulsive heterosexuality” (Chapter 4), are all about achieving that precious and fragile niche in the world.

Pascoe scrupulously delineates the boundaries of these behavioral modes among boys. She presents the exceptions to the prevalent model (e.g., religious boys, and some engaged in loving relationships). Also, she makes clear that both the dramaturgy of the fag discourse and the heterosexual claims-staking are pack behavior. Boys’ more private backstage presentation of self typically lacks the verbal swagger, coming across as more vulnerable, disclosing, and empathetic.

Pascoe’s socially centered analytical approach warrants special comment. She insists on a counter-reductionist methodology in her fundamental conceptualization of sexuality and masculinity. Two examples will suffice. First, ethnographically and theoretically, she integrates multiple levels of analysis. While firmly grounded in microsocial and quotidian data, she also investigates the school as an institution (especially in Chapter 2), and understands her site in reference to larger North American sociocultural formations. Correspondingly, in her perspicacious strategic policy recommendations (Chapter 6), she takes into account structural as well as personal imperatives, discursive alongside legislative resources, and interpersonal politics besides macropolitical directions.

Second, Pascoe deviates from much sociology of masculinity literature by unswervingly arguing, from an empirical base, that “masculinity” supercedes male bodies, occupying instead a social-relational realm of talk and activity that individuals and groups can incarnate in multiple forms and degrees, and varyingly in time, as aspects of their self-image and social identity. She most creatively exemplifies this claim in the intriguing chapter on “masculine girls” (Chapter 5).

“Crafting a researcher identity” is the topic of the excellent Appendix. Informatively detailing her wise and successful presentation of self to her various circles of participants, Pascoe covers numerous issues that every field researcher has to work through, such as the merger between the activity observed and the activity of observing (which, in her case, entailed the sexuality discourse itself). If supplemented with a brief summary of the project, this little chapter would serve nicely as a stand-alone reading assignment in qualitative methods courses.

I offer one mild caution. The descriptive accounts of persons and events are easy reading. Students will need support, however, in gaining a foothold on Pascoe’s interpretive language. Professors or tutors would be wise to ensure students are not strangers to how gender theorists (indeed, “social constructionists”) talk and think, before loosing upon them such formulations as “gender is accomplished through day-to-day interactions” (p. 13). One could also downplay the theoretical framing of Chapter 1 until after students see the issues concretely posed in the substantive chapters, where Pascoe grounds her interpretive claims in continuous offerings of fieldwork evidence and illustrations, weaving them together unobtrusively.