Potato Chipping

Powerful

I know. Ethnographies are hard. And I don’t mean to diminish any of the dozens of provocative behaviors and insights C.J. Pascoe presents in Dude, You’re A Fag, indisputably the best book I’ve read so far this summer. But I have to admit, because of some of her methodological choices, I felt it was somewhat lacking because it could’ve been much more complete.

She chose to employ a research design (participant observation) best suited for a micro-level interactionist perspective, while primarily employing a macro-level conflict perspective. This tension forces her into the untenable position of repeatedly asserting that River High is representative of the American high school, because of its demographic similarity to the country as a whole (an ecologically flawed premise) and presence of supposedly archetypal characteristics (e.g., school pride).

I thought she did a great job when she combined interactionism with feminism, as she did with Ricky (the most openly homosexual boy in the school) and the girls who challenge traditional gender roles. I don’t understand why she didn’t apply the same method with her other subjects. In these case studies, she uncovers important contexts like family origins, relational dynamics, and individual normative outlooks and ties them to the larger environment of the school, whereas the teachers, the traditionally feminine girls, and the hegemonic boys aren’t treated with the same depth.

She describes how the teachers and administrators ignore or tacitly encourage sexist behaviors, but doesn’t dig into why Ms. Mac acts the way she does. She describes how Cathy allows her body to be tossed around, but when she asks her why, Cathy gives a vague, dismissive answer (“That’s just what we do”) that should’ve been probed but instead is left at face value. She describes how many of the boys fall into the misogynistic, fag-epithet dynamic in public, but talk touchingly about their girlfriends in private. Yet she doesn’t attempt to uncover how they’re able to reconcile this apparent contradiction.

I also thought her treatment of power was incomplete. There’s a whole body of literature that investigates how men or boys assert power as a consequence of feeling powerless: e.g., Fine et al.’s “(In)secure Times” [pdf]. Though Pascoe does a great job describing how the boys assert power, she doesn’t look at all into whether or not they actually feel powerful. This one-sided approach, I thought, led her into some deficient conclusions.

For example, she discusses a subpopulation of boys who reject the hegemonic mistreatment of women because of their strong religious beliefs, and suggests that they are “drawing on masculinizing discourses of self-control and maturity [which] like practices of compulsive heterosexuality [indicate] control and mastery, not over others (girls), but over themselves” (112). Both the fact that these boys have been socialized into treating women poorly and have no choice to subdue their habitual sexism but by exerting control over themselves, and the fact that they simultaneously feel so powerless in the face of their temptation to sexualize women that they must rely on a higher power, are ignored.

I also question how, although she observed many different environments within the school, it seems that a disproportionate number of her examples come from the weight room and shop class, two settings composed of male actors that I doubt anyone would consider representative. We’re on a first-name basis with Josh, Pedro, and many others who adhere to the most conspicuously oppressive model of masculinity, yet the rare boy who challenges it publicly (“I got a girlfriend, man. I wouldn’t do that to her,” 110) is left nameless. Why doesn’t he merit the scrutiny that the basketball and GSA girls receive? What do the large number of unremarkable River boys who quietly go about their day think about masculinity? We don’t know.

I enjoyed the read, and I thought she did an excellent job with what she did choose to cover. But I was disappointed that she didn’t follow up on some interesting developments that probably would have led to some compelling findings.

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