The Persisting Fag Culture

Reading CJ Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag made me think a lot. In high school, I hung out with the theatre kids most of the time. They were just my crowd. And like the theatre kids in the book, I was pretty isolated from the "fag culture" that pervades a lot of high school. As I was reading the book, I was a little appalled at the behavior described and I was appalled by the behavior that teachers just allowed. But as I was reading it, I could imagine that if my high school experience wasn't so isolated from the normal high school crowd, if I didn't spend my time in the "smart" classes or if my extracurriculars consisted of more than theatre, math club, and scholar bowl, that I would have easily seen this kind of behavior. I would have been more exposed to the culture that Pascoe described.

But as I was reading, the one place that it really stood out to me is the residence hall I live in. Pascoe mentioned that females didn't carry out the fag discourse as often as males did, so it is a little surprising that where I see this behavior the most often is the all female dorm. And it is used very much in the same way. It isn't ever thrown at one resident to another, but most often it is used by the female residents when males come to visit. When a male jokingly imitates stereotypical behavior or hangs around like a love sick puppy dog, you can hear down the hallway "You're such a fag." Whenever, I am around, I attempt to stop this language (something that is very ingrained into us during our 1 week of intensive training), but it always strikes me as odd. I hear "fag" used offensively way more than I hear "gay" used offensively which really surprises me.

It goes back to what Pascoe said, it wasn't about being homosexual, it was about masculinity. Being called a "fag" reflects a loss of masculinity. As she says, you can still be gay and masculine (as one boy said, it doesn't stop you from being able to throw a football), but it is that loss of masculinity which really drives the fag discourse.

Again as much as I am surprised, at the very same time I am not. Most of these women were popular in high school. The students that they hung out with weren't the theatre kids, they were the jocks. They were the cheerleaders and they were the popular kids. In a way, they were the ones that most adhered to the stereotypical norms in regards to gender. It shouldn't surprise me that they enforce this idea of masculinity that arises from high school. I think what surprises me most is that I didn't see this around me until my senior year of college. Because there is no way that it hadn't been happening before.

Anyway, if you get a chance, I would recommend Dude You're a Fag, I might reference that book again sometime later (especially the chapter regarding female masculinity, which probably resonated with me the most), but for now this is all I have regarding it. Except, I will say, I wish that maybe she had talked a little bit more about how women partake in the fag discourse. I believe she mentioned that women were not nearly as involved in it, but at the same time, through my own observations, women are as embedded in the fag discourse as men. It would be interesting to observe how different women see and partake in the discourse.