Dude, You're a Fag

Reading this ethnography I formed the hypothesis that misogyny is actually a secondary reaction formation to a fear of failure to fit or appease normative erotics of the body within homosocial spaces (i.e., what may actually constitute masculinity), rather than being a primary or foundational phenomena for masculinity. This would seem to be consistent with empirical evidence as well though I would have to look for the specific studies I'm thinking about again (namely ones that talk about the relationship between "emasculation" and misogyny).

Besides my having gained a firmer grasp of this insight through the book, the books merit is its use of intersectional and discourse analysis to demonstrate that the consolidation of masculine identity is not reducible to a reliance on homophobia in male-to-male relations, but is primarily about how bodies are highlighted and valued within a particular set of sexual norms. The homophobia is a downstream effect of this. It was fascinating to go through the case studies in the book as it showed, to me, the subtle ways in which the body "takes place" in these interactions, becomes present in discourse--in language--through its fragmentation, and that this fragmentation is what allows bodies to end up subsumed in a social world mired with contradictory or conflicting demands that it has to navigate. The strategic deployment of the different fragmenting abstractions regarding the body and their associated valuations or demands is the process by which senses of self are forged, and it is this process of strategic deployment that actually manages to produce individuals' social position even while no individual ever actually embodies any given abstraction (such as "machoness" or "manhood") fully. This process of identity consolidation is thus ongoing. It is for this reason that we can talk about "masculinities" rather than "masculinity." Yet, of course, it would be a mistake to just do away with the latter in social analyses, as it is precisely the latter that tracks the life of this "fragmenting abstraction" across discourses, and what thereby makes possible the many masculinities (the book covers black [cis]male masculinity v. white [cis]male masculinity as well as female masculinity). That the ethnography illustrates this so nicely made clear to me the relevance of Lacan's concept of the Symbolic register and made me consider with more clarity what the role of that register is in the process of "sexuation." I came to the realization that psychoanalysis--particularly, Lacanian psychoanalysis--can be very helpful in grounding and deepening our understanding of intersectionality, though it also renders problematic usual understandings of what "patriarchy" actually is or consists of (e.g., it would seem to make it more difficult to "point" to someone running the show here, although the hierarchies described by patriarchy are still quite clearly present--this is consistent with Foucault's view of power, although I am not totally committed to that view).

I did at certain points reading the book get a bit bored, but this is mostly due to a familiarity with some aspects of the experience of "boyhood" such that the plainer observations did not grab. I found myself identifying with the LGBTQIA+/queer students covered in the book, perhaps unsurprisingly--the feminine boys in particular, if only because that was the only experience of myself allowed to me growing up. Overall, I found the ethnography helped clarify, refine and solidify a few things for me. I find most of the policy prescriptions towards the end of the book to be well-advised, though I always like to see how things could be improved and I had to wonder if something was indeed missing. I think this feeling of something missing in the policy prescriptions came from my noting Pascoe's observation at an earlier point in the book of the stark contrast and division between the private, or one-to-one, social lives of boys and the public practices and social life of boys. It didn't seem to me any of the policies directly addressed this "splitting" of boyhood, though one can argue some of the suggested policies indirectly do so. My intuition is that this division is actually extremely crucial if one wants social change for men and boys.