“Everyone is talking about male toxicity:” Everyday youth activism in rural America

• In Event: Youth as Agents of Change: Cases from Nepal, Rural USA, Saint Lucia, and Dominican Republic

Proposal

Introduction
This paper intends to add to the discussion on the forms of protest youth engage in against gendered norms in a small rural high school in an American Midwestern community. In previous scholarship and popular imaginary, rural and small-town life has been constituted as an unchanging opposite to the constantly moving city (Gray et al., 2016). As Woods (2003) also stressed, “dominant discourses within rural areas promoted the myth of the ‘apolitical countryside’” (p. 309). However, recent scholarly attention on the lived experiences and various forms of rural youth protests throughout the racial justice movement in 2020 has continued to disrupt the notion that rural spaces are homogenous, conservative, and unchanging. There is a long history of rural protest for racial and social justice (Joubert and Lensmire, 2021) and as examined by several scholars, rural social movements are actively engaged in the processes of re-making rural societies around the world (Baylina & Rodó-Zárate 2020; Walker, 2021). Yet, a gap in education research on the myriad forms of protests and rural youths’ response to other global issues persists.

Theoretical Framework
This paper complicates the common understanding of unchanging and unchallenged gendered norms in small rural towns by invoking the voices and experiences of rural youth. In past literature, rurality has been used as a catch-all term, conjuring images of conservative gendered norms and hegemonic masculinity (Gray et al., 2016). Traditional markers of male masculinity expressed by displays of physical toughness and the ability to fight remain commonplace (McMahan, 2011). Along with physical toughness, Pascoe, (2007) contends “ritualistic sex talk, patterns of touch, and games of “getting girls” (p. 87) among young men led to enforced heteronormative masculinity and gender inequality. Those who do not fit in the normative conceptions of gender, either by being physically weak or not engaging in heterosexual behavior, were marked as outsiders.
By applying a lens of “everyday activism” as used by Trott (2021) in studying youth environmental activism, this paper advances the understandings of how rural youth in the American Midwest protest gendered norms and “male toxicity” and how rural youth are re-making their society through seemingly mundane actions. Building off Trott (2021), youths’ everyday activism as understood in this study, is defined as individual and collective efforts to disrupt one’s own and others’ everyday actions and routines in response to conservative gendered norms and masculinity. Unlike more traditional types of activism like public protests, youths’ everyday activism is located “within young people’s personal spheres of influence … rather than in the public sphere” (Trott, 2021, p. 2).

Data Collection
This paper is based on data collected during a longitudinal study on youth citizenship and national belonging from 2018-2020 in a rapidly diversifying small rural town in the American Midwest.). In this study, I sought to shed light on the following broad, youth-focused inquiry: Who belongs in the ‘Midwestern-American, imaginary?’ To address this question, I observed everyday behaviors in this rural high school and community and conducted a series of narrative interviews with diverse youth, teachers, and community members.

Findings
Throughout fieldwork and thematic analysis, it became apparent that while strongly influenced by intersectional structures of power and the individuals’ position within these structures, youths’ feelings of belonging were not static and instead were negotiated through everyday actions of protest. Notably, youth sought to disrupt gendered norms through everyday expressions of peer solidarity and calls for peer accountability. These acts of everyday youth activism occurred throughout the school, but for the purpose of this paper, I focus on examples observed in a particularly gendered space – the “shop classroom.” In rural spaces, wood-shop classes are spaces where masculine identities developed (Morris, 2008) and in this study, it was where youths’ acts of everyday activism against gendered norms were observed most.
For example, the teacher in the shop classroom, valued and idealized outward displays of physical strength – a traditional masculine characteristic – and frequently mocked a student who was physically weaker than his classmates. Yet, time after time, none of his peers joined in or agreed with the taunting and instead, sarcastically pushed back against the ridicule from an authority figure. Unlike past studies (Pascoe, 2007) that stressed peer re-enforcement of masculine norms contributed to their entrenchment in the school spaces, these youth backed a peer – even if they did not consider him a friend – at personal risk that the mocking would be turned onto them next. This expression of solidarity, while not a “traditional protest,” nevertheless points towards youths’ defiance of these gendered norms in this rural space.
Another example of everyday youth activism were informal conversations about “male toxicity” as one student described it and calls for peer accountability. In another class, students were required to make documentaries about issues that were important to them – one focused on misogyny in the school dress code. Young men in the woodshop class engaged in continued conversation around this documentary and how they saw misogyny in their lives. Surprisingly, in these conversations within this very gendered space, several young men called for each other to be more attuned to their own behaviors with young women, particularly about their appearance. This form of everyday activism may have sparked awareness and accountability only within the school walls, but acknowledgment and continued engagement with peers potentially could facilitate sustained empathy and change in behavior in youth over time.

Contribution to Existing Knowledge
The focus on acts of everyday activism – shows of solidarity and calls for accountability by peers – in this rural space, demonstrate the myriad forms of protest rural youth engage in. By examining youths’ everyday activism against gendered norms, this study reflects on the relationship between power and protest in an often-overlooked context and contributes deeper understandings of the conceptualization of “protest” from a Midwestern-American, rural youths’ perspective. Protests in rural educational spaces take various forms and this paper sheds light on the nuanced contestation and defiance of youth in rural education spaces.




 

Author

• Heidi Ione Fahning, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities