"Gay" and "fag" were the two words that C.J. Pascoe, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, heard the most while shadowing students for 18 months at a high school in California.
This was just one of the things that Pascoe noted during her 2014 William R. Johnson Intercultural lecture—Bullied: youth, gender and homophobia—at Elmhurst College Oct. 22.
A researcher focusing on gender, youth, homophobia, sexuality and new media, Pascoe has had work featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and in a Frontline documentary. Pascoe's book, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School—about sexuality and gender in high school—won the American Educational Research Association's 2007 Book of the Year Award. In 2010, she received an honorable mention from the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award for the section on sex and gender.
Prior to coming to the University of Oregon, Pascoe spent five years teaching at Colorado College and two years working with the Digital Youth Project—a MacArthur Foundation initiative on learning and new media. Pascoe is also the chairperson of the American Sociological Association's Section on Sex and Gender.
Pascoe told the approximately 200 people gathered, "I was raised in the Christian faith tradition and this is the first time a college from the Protestant tradition has asked me to come speak."
"Anti-bullying language is all around us and bullying stories make the news almost every day," said Pascoe. Of her book "Dude," Pascoe said she thought she was writing a book about teenage boys and homophobia. However, in the years since, she has been getting queries from a variety of sources to speak about bullying in general—but she didn't feel like she knew enough about the subject to speak on it.
Pascoe noted that she only used the word "bullyin"g twice throughout the entire book. "How is it that I wrote an entire book about homophobia without using the word bullying?," she asked. "What's that about? I wasn't using bullying as a frame because of the way our national discourse talked about homophobia and bullying. What I was talking about in 'Dude' was the way in which homophobia and homophobic language are central to shaping contemporary masculine identity."
Pascoe explained that while researching the book, she spent a year and a half hanging out with students at a working-class north-central California high school that had about 2,000 students. What Pascoe found was "that gay kids weren't just bullied for being gay, rather homophobic bullying was a part of boys socialization into more normatively masculine behaviors."
"Understanding boys homophobic behavior as a part of their gender socialization process suggests that the current ways we are talking about homophobic bullying might need some reworking," she added. "Framing their behavior solely as homophobic bullying can obscure the complicated way in which their aggressive interactions are a central part of the socialization process that supports and reproduces gender and sexual inequality."
Pascoe noted that there is a relationship between masculinity, homophobia and aggressive interactions between young people—otherwise known as bullying. To illustrate this point Pascoe shared the story of Ricky—one of the students she met at "River" High School—who frequently wore multicolor hair extensions, mascara and skirts, and was a talented dancer who choreographed the school's assemblies and dance shows as the head of the almost all-female ( except for Ricky ) jazz-dance team. Ricky shared with Pascoe that he experienced anti-gay bullying beginning in elementary school and the word the verbal abusers used most often was "fag," with the worst of it occurring during his high school years. Pascoe noted that Ricky ended up dropping out of high school; however, for other young people the effects of bullying are far worse.
"Sadly it's taken tragedies like what happened to Tyler Clementi and others to get us to pay attention to the role of homophobia in young people's lives. ... I noticed that the part of the discussion that was missing was gender," said Pascoe. Pascoe explained that the perpetrators and victims of homophobic bullying and harassment are primarily boys, and that the root of this is the way masculinity is perceived in society as well as the fear of gay men.
While talking to the boys at "River," Pascoe found that, for those boys, being masculine meant being powerful, competent, unemotional, heterosexual and dominant, and they spent every waking moment displaying these behaviors.
"To do this, they engaged in what I came to call a 'fag discourse.' ... I'm using the word 'fag' purposely. It feels awful to say it and it should feel awful to hear it. That's how kids in this high school felt every day," said Pascoe. "I'm avoiding the word 'homophobia' because I think it flattens and psychologizes the problem. ... When we do that with homophobia we risk psychologizing the kind of practice these boys are engaging in. I also use the phrase 'fag discourse' because I heard that word, 'fag,' all the time at 'River' High. The other word I heard a lot was 'gay' or 'that's so gay.'"
Pascoe noted that three components to this discourse became apparent to her after observing and talking to the boys at the school: It's not just about gay people, it's a serious insult/lowest thing you can call a person and it's gendered, meaning it strikes at the heart of what it means to be masculine. Pascoe said the question is, "How do we see the fag discourse manifest itself?" "We can see it in aggressive, humorous, fluid and collective interactions," said Pascoe.
"The things we invest in to deal with bullying are often short-sighted programs or curricula that put a Band-Aid on the problem, encourage kids to talk about it and move on," said Pascoe. "I would suggest that it's more important to talk about emotional literacy, social injustice and inequality to address the root causes of bullying rather than encouraging kids to not tease each other for some undesirable difference.
"When you call interactions between young people—in this case, boys—bullying and ignore the messages about gender inequality embedded in them we risk divorcing what they are doing from larger issues of sexual inequality and sexualized power ... It allows the rest of society to evade blame for perpetuating the structural and cultural inequality that young people are playing out interactionally every day."
A Q&A session followed Pascoe's lecture.
See www.cjpascoe.org for more information .
