Stylizing Language and Performing Masculinities: An Immigrant Adolescent Boy's Identity Negotiation and Language Learning

• In Event: 25.021 - Adolescent Male Students and Their Negotiation of Patriarchal Privilege Across Literacies and Literary Contexts

Abstract

Research Purpose
This paper reports a qualitative study examining the relationship between masculine identities and language learning of one immigrant adolescent boy, “Tiger,” a 16-year-old boy from Taiwan. Drawing on data sources that included field notes, audiotaped classroom interactions, and interview data, from one larger, year-long critical sociolinguistic ethnography of a group of immigrant young men’s learning experiences in one high school in a U.S. Midwestern state, I aim to address three related questions: 1) How do Tiger’s masculine identities intersect with other identity markers to shape his subject positions? 2) How does he use linguistic resources to perform his masculine identities in one English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom? 3) How is his language learning experience shaped by his negotiation of masculine identities?
Theoretical Frameworks
Instead of viewing gender as biological or sex differences, I view gender as “a complex system of social relations and discursive practices, differentially constructed in local contexts” (Norton & Pavlenko, 2004, p. 504) and as socially constructed and performed (Butler, 1990; Cameron, 2006). Drawing upon Connell’s (1995, 2005) concept hegemonic masculinity, I conceptualize masculinities as relational, multiple, and located within complex, unequal power relations.
Methodology and Data Sources
The larger ethnographic study was conducted in the 2014-2015 school year, and focused on Tiger and two other adolescent immigrant boys in Academic High School. I observed the three focal participants as a group in their ESL classroom every morning, and followed each of them, two times a week, into one of their mainstream classrooms they recommended for me to observe. I audiotaped and videotaped classroom interactions for micro-discourse analysis. In addition, I conducted three life-story interviews with students, and also collected the students’ class assignments and other school documents for analysis. In the present study I focus on Tiger, analyzing field notes, audiotaped classroom interactions, and interview data.
Findings
Data analysis was informed by interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman, 1981; Gumperz, 1982) and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (Baxter, 2003). Drawing on the sociolinguistic concept of stylization (Cameron, 2000; Coupland, 2001; Rampton, 2001, 2013), I illustrate through analysis that Tiger’s language learning and masculine identity negotiation were intertwined in the ESL classroom. His stylized L2 speech in the classroom was a social practice of performing a dominant hyper-masculine identity, and an ideological language practice to resist the hegemonic discourses that he was subjected to, such as Asian Model Minority discourse and “gay” discourses. However, his performances of hyper masculinities in the language activities were not aligned to the teacher’s instructional goal of socializing her students into “good learners,” which complicated his learner identity and led to him being identified as a “problem boy” who was “not serious.”
Scholarly Significance
This study underscores the importance of theorizing masculine identity as a second language acquisition construct for understanding multilingual young men’s investment in language learning. It also points to the need for teachers to be cognizant of multilingual young men’s masculine identity negotiation and its impact on their investment in language practices.

Author

• Kongji Qin, New York University