Policing Boys’ Bodies: School Regimes of Gender and Sexuality

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: For the Health of It: Interrogating Boys, Bodies, and Unspoken School Spaces

Abstract

Schools are primary sites for the production of sexuality, sexual identities and sexual practices. Schools convey and regulate sexual meanings, organized in ways that are heteronormative and homophobic (Walford, 2000; Walters & Hayes, 1998; Wood, 1984). Beginning in elementary school, students participate in a “heterosexualizing process” (Renold, 2000) in which children present themselves as “normal” girls or boys through discourses of heterosexuality, what Judith Butler (1995) refers to as a “heterosexual matrix” (see also Kehily, 2000; Robinson, 2005). Thus the construction of gendered selves from elementary school through high school is inseparable from the institutional ordering of sexuality. The heterosexualizing process organized by educational institutions cannot be divorced from, and in fact is central to, the development of contemporary masculine identities and bodies in adolescence.

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a working class high school I call River High, this paper illustrates how a high school’s formal and informal “sexuality curriculum” (Trudell 1993), or way in which sexuality is constructed at the level of the institution through disciplinary practices, student-teacher relationships and school events, undergirds a normative adolescent masculinity. Both the formal and informal sexuality curricula at River High encourage students to craft particular sexual and gendered identities, in which masculinity and femininity are defined by heterosexuality and gender inequality (Neilsen, Walden, & Kunkel, 2000). Through institutional practices of heterosexuality River High provides the scaffolding for an adolescent masculinity constituted by interactional rituals of heterosexism and homophobia. Through school rituals, pedagogical practices and disciplinary procedures, River High sets up formal and informal sexual practices which reflect definitions of masculinity and femininity as opposite, complimentary, unequal and heterosexual. The way the school’s disciplinary system is brought to bear on boys’ bodies reveals that racialized notions of masculinity are imbued with different sexualized meanings. This means that African American boys are subject to institutional scrutiny and punishment for heterosexual practices which are expected of white boys, while both Asian and Latino boys are rendered invisible. Finally, this paper addresses spaces of resistance in the school (drama performances and Gay/Straight Alliance meetings) where boys invest in alternative meanings of masculinity and bodily practices. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which schools and young people themselves might begin to construct gendered and sexualized selves that are less tied to bodily practices of dominance and inequality. To frame these findings I integrate queer theory, feminist theory and sociological research on masculinity.

This research is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban high school in north-central. I spent a year and a half as a participant observer; in addition I formally interviewed 50 students. In the course of fieldwork I also conducted countless informal interviews with students, faculty and administrators.

Author

• C. J. Pascoe, Colorado College