Dude, You Are a Fag by Pascoe - Essay Example

Pascoe sufficiently highlights the rape culture while explaining how boys tend to escape the specter of being a fag.

Pasco then highlights and compares the aspect of masculinity between two groups of girls. The first group is that of gay-straight political young girls and the other group is that of jocks that may often be seen playing basketball that represent the hip-hop culture and are generally black. Many girls belonging to the second category are lesbians. Popular basketball girls tend to be more masculine in their actions and behavior as compared to the GSA girls that would rather investigate such norms. With this, Pascoe concludes that masculinity fits well with the girls who project patriarchal norms.

In the end, Pascoe suggests some policies that would increase the awareness and tolerance of the high school management towards gender diversity and expression of sexuality. Thus, they would be in a position to minimize harassment of gay students, girlish boys, and other female students in high schools. The book was fundamentally based on ethnography, so Pascoe finally comprehensively discussed her interaction with the subjects of her research in the appendix and talked about the way she dealt with them.

The main point of the book is that adolescents in America acquire masculinity by denying their association with the identity of a fag. Pascoe purposefully chose to use the word fag and not gay throughout the book because fag denies any association of an individual with masculinity. A faggot is by all means feminine despite being a biological boy. Children call one another fag in school to humiliate one another and impress upon others that they are not as powerful and perfect as a masculine should essentially be.

Not only does this render a person infertile, but also signifies his failure in all aspects of life, and most importantly, a fag is gay. The apparent femininity does not in any way deprive a fag of his quality of being gay. The fag insult is generally interpreted as gendered, raced, and sexualized. Pascoe also projects the idea that schools conventionally allow this kind of harassment in the school environment because it signifies the school’s association with heterosexuality which is thought of as a social norm. Long story short, Pascoe has made a successful attempt of tying the fag discourse with gender in addition to sexuality as it is done conventionally. Read More