Dude, You're a Fag

Our required reading of "Dude You're a Fag" struck a chord with me at several different points. Though the high school was extremely different from mine, which was a small private high school with only two black students and one Latino, the fag discourse among the males was very much the same.

The fact that "the fag because a hot potato that no boy wanted to be left holding" (Pascoe 61) was very relatable to my high school experience. I remember often feeling that the more the guys in my high school classes lobbed the words "fag" and "faggot" at each other, the more self conscious they seemed and the more they seemed to need to pass on the fag epithet to others to avoid it themselves.

However, in some discussion of the fag discourse and other gendered topics in the book, I feel Pascoe went a little too far in interpreting immature teen behavior as inherently homophobic or gender stereotyped. For example, when the boys are playing the "cock game" in class- which boys in my classes frequently did- I saw it as more of a immature prank of seeing how far they could push the boundaries rather than an attack on another boy.

This was even more applicable with the discussion of the Basketball Girls and Rebecca. Pascoe outlined the way that the Basketball Girls were loud, popular and well liked, especially Rebecca. She describes her as "a darling girl with a vivacious smile and tangible energy, and she made friends easily.... both straight boys and straight girls at River High commented on her attractiveness" (Pascoe 125). She contrasts this with the story of Ricky, who was often mercilessly teased for his gender-bending clothing, called a fag daily, and was the subject of heavy discrimination. She ascribes this difference to the fact that boys who act like girls and adopt typically feminine sex roles are treated a lot differently than girls who adopt typically masculine sex roles. While this is true, and while a man in a dress and heels walking down the street would almost certainly be scrutinized more than a woman wearing baggy pants and a t-shirt, I think Pascoe fails to examine all the other factors and characteristics that go into the different treatments of Ricky and Rebecca.

From my prior experience, both in high school and everyday life, lesbians and women who choose to exhibit some male-type roles do not escape scrutiny and judgement. The fact that Rebecca was "attractive" and had a "vivacious smile," along with being a basketball star and having many friends, certainly influenced her position in the eyes of her classmates. As Pascoe goes on to explain, the GSA girls feel this discrimination much more than Rebecca seems to.