Gender Lesson 1B: CJ Pascoe's research

Today we are reading a seminal sociological work on gender by sociologist C J Pascoe.

Dude, You’re a Fag, by C.J. Pascoe. 2007.  Pascoe is currently working on three projects: conducting fieldwork for her new book on inequality in high school, examining homophobia in online spaces and interviewing GLBTQ young people about their life experiences. She continues to write about bullying, homophobia, LGBTQ young people and contemporary shifts in definitions masculinity.

Pascoe spent a year and a half doing ethnography at a high school in California in order to “write a book about guys” (That’s how she described it to the students).

Pascoe gained access to the high school by writing the school district office about her research topics and requesting access to the students. She was granted permission to come to the school and conduct interviews with students. So Pascoe made her intentions and motives clear before she began her ethnographic research. (Some ethnographers conceal their purposes as researchers and deceive the people they’re studying--generally because they don’t want people in a setting to alter their usual behavior by virtue of being watched).

Pascoe recognized that high school is the perfect setting to study gender and sexuality. Specifically, she wanted to study the role of masculinity in the lives of both male and female students. She formally interviewed fifty students and informally interviewed “countless” students, faculty, and administrators.

A major component of her study consisted of observations. She spent time observing students in classrooms that included “gender-neutral” sites like Senior Government class and traditionally masculine sites such as auto shop class. She also made observations at drama classes and at Gay/Straight Alliance meetings. She took field notes (in order words, she filled notebooks) of her observations about how students, faculty, and administrators constructed meanings of gender and sexuality. She also spent time with students at lunch and popular school events like the Winter Ball, rallies, plays, and dances.

As you read, think about how school and peers combine to create socialization messages about masculinity. Are these messages latent or manifest? How do they affect males? What are the possible effects on females? Is this true at our school? Be sociologically mindful for a few days and see if you can hear similar messages.

Read this excerpt from Dude You're a Fag by CJ Pascoe.

As you read the excerpt answer the questions below in this Google Form.

1.  Describe Pascoe's research.   What is she focused on - both generally and specifically?

2.  What are the gendered meanings of the word "fag"?

3.  What does Pascoe mean by the idea of "fag fluidity"?

4.  What does Pascoe's research show about race and the use of the word "fag"?

5.  Have you heard this type of discourse (not necessarily the same word) at Stevenson?

6.  Have you heard this type of discourse (not necessarily the same word) in middle school?

7.  Pascoe's research is almost 15 years old now, but do you think it is still interesting/enlightening?  Why or why not?

If there is still time left in class, watch Pascoe talk about her research here:

Special Guest Dr. Everitt

 Welcome Dr. Judson Everitt!

Loyola Sociology undergrad director.

Ph.D., Sociology
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 2009

M.A., Sociology
Indiana Univeristy, Bloomington, IN 2004

B.A., Sociology
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 2000

Courses Taught

• Society in a Global Age (Intro to Sociology)
• Social Problems
• Principles of Social Research (Methods)
• Gender and Work
• Inequality in Society
• Sociology of Education
• The Logic of Sociological Inquiry (Graduate Research Methods)
• Qualitative Inquiry (Graduate Ethnographic Methods)
• Teaching Undergraduate Sociology (Graduate Course)

Author of the book Lesson Plans

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Urban Violence; A complex problem created by decades of institutional racism

Why is there so much urban violence?

It is a complex issue requiring a more complex answer.  

There's myriad research about it so I will share a few resources that explain the complexity.

Urban Ghettoes and Crime; A long history

First, urban crime has a long history as does urban racism.  Sociologist Mitchell Dunier details this history in his sweeping 2016 work Ghetto, reviewed in American Journal of Sociology here.    And another resource documenting crime in early Chicago is Northwestern University's index of homicide in Chicago from 1870-1930.  These resources shed light on a widely studied phenomenon sometimes called scaling of crime; Crime multiplies exponentially in urban settings.   This 2017 PLOS One Journal article explains it.  And, Science Daily (2019) explains it here.

Chicago's History of Crime and Ghettoization

In the US, urban gangs were often dominated by low-income and low-status immigrant groups such as Irish gangs followed by Italian and Jewish gangs among others.   But the highly segregated, urban crime of today came after the first great migration and was layered with the second great migration.  As Black Americans sought jobs and to escape Jim Crow in the northern cities, they were redlined into very limited neighborhoods (in Chicago sometimes called "the black belt").   

Allan Spear details the rise of Chicago's black enclave as a neighborhood of fluid race relations and opportunity and how that beacon gave way to a segregated ghetto.   Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis is a really important sociological study of Chicago's black neighborhood before the second great migration detailing the amazing accomplishments of Chicago's early Black residents.  When whites returned from WWI there was competition for those jobs - this resulted in the 1919 race in Chicago which Dominic Pacyga explains was a riot over class and jobs misnomered as a race riot.

After the second great migration during World War II, Chicago's black population expanded even more in the same, small, redlined area.  Historian Arnold Hirsch details that ghettoization in his book Making the Second Ghetto.  Despite amazing accomplishments within the black community, eventually, overcrowding and lack of city services led to neighborhood disintegration.  Roger Biles details the increasing ghettoization in his historical account here.  This left an overcrowded neighborhood full of poorer, less educated Americans identified as Black

At the same time, because the neighborhood was poor and Black, the city neglected the services and development of the neighborhood.

In fact, some infrastructure like the Dan Ryan (94) expressway was purposefully added to physically sequester the poor Americans who were identified as black into a limited area.  

As the Black population continued to compound, cities, especially Chicago, used dense housing to contain the poor minorities.  For example, in Chicago the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) built high-rise housing projects - these were high-density, low-income apartments.  Along State Street they were called Stateway gardens, and the largest was called Cabrini Green (good summary at that link).  These high-rise buildings concentrated people who were Black and poor into a highly dense area.  The city continued to neglect both the buildings themselves and the residents.  This resulted in a permanent underclass that relied on an underground economy.  

This combined with de-industrialization and a loss of working-class jobs as detailed by U of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson in Truly Disadvantaged (1987).  

That led to many middle-class black and white families moving away and creating highly segregated, low-income neighborhoods such as detailed by sociologists Massey and Denten in American Apartheid (1995).  With the loss of blue-collar jobs and middle-class residents, these urban neighborhoods were truly segregated and low-income, and void of jobs and opportunities.  

As residents turned to crime and gangs for protection and financial opportunity they faced violence from within the neighborhood (Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, 2000), while police and laws targeted these disenfranchised communities from outside.  Read about it in the Atlantic.

Similarly, Sudhir Venkatesh details the way that public housing created a complex relationship between poor urban residents, police, city officials and street gangs in his book, American Project (2002).  

The Criminalization of Poor Urban Minorities

Sociologists like Forest Stuart and Alice Goffman make the case that police target poor communities.  And other social scientists (Sentencing Project, Marshall Project, Equal Justice Initiative, Michelle Alexander) explain that the disparity in the criminal justice system which has incarcerated nearly 1/3 of all black males has torn apart families and disenfranchised entire zipcodes (Paul Street's Vicious Circle).   

And, more recently, SHS grad Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve explains in her 2016 book, Crook County that the criminal justice system is embedded with racism that disproportionately punishes poor minorities.   All of this leads to an incredibly segregated and poor community with little economic opportunity and with families torn apart.  Street gangs fill the institutional voids of policing, economic opportunity, and family stability.  And as street gangs gain control over neighborhoods they take membership/control of the residents living there - not the other way around.  In other words, because the gang controls your neighborhood, residents are forced to align with gangs - as opposed to residents joining gangs that leads to the neighborhood being controlled by the gang.

Did contemporaries know that bad policy was creating such a poor quality of life?

One telling case of someone understanding the decline was Dorothy Gautreaux.  She was assigned a CHA apartment but after the civil rights laws of the 1960s, she sued the CHA claiming that their assignment of housing was 99% black and therefore segregationist and illegal. She won the right to move to an area outside of this segregated ghetto of highly concentrated poverty.  Her move became a test case eventually called moving to opportunity which showed that black residents who were allowed to move to middle-class areas benefitted greatly from the move.  They were surrounded by people who went to college and had connections and good jobs.  This showed the enormous impact of housing segregation.  In fact, a former student of mine, Rahul Gorawara from SHS wrote a paper about Gautreaux and his paper was second in the national history fair.  Gautreaux won her case after a record decades-long lawsuit and it became an important model for housing reform.  

What is being done?

To answer your question about what is being done, Chicago has torn down all of its high rise low-income segregated housing,  but the legacy remains in the lives of those who were affected for generations by the racist segregation.  The physical buildings are gone but the legacy of poverty, lack of education, disinvestment and disenfranchisement all persist.  And these are the neighborhoods that experience high crime today.  

Another resource that traces the rise of Black metropolis followed by ghettoization and the rise and fall of high-density public housing see David Greetham's study, Chicago's Wall: Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority (2013).

Racial Diversity and Racial Strife; A Cross-cultural Examination

 I had a question about the racial strife within the US as a product of a more diverse country:

Is the racial strife in the US a natural product of the US being a more diverse society?

I am not sure I have a specific answer but I do have a number of ideas to consider:

• To understand "race," it is necessary to understand the social and political history of a country.
• "Diversity" is relative; just like race is a social construction, diversity can be defined in different ways making it difficult to quantify.
• Myriad ways of measuring "diversity" show the USA is less diverse than many other countries.

Racial Formation; The Importance of Social and Political History

First, I think the most important piece to consider is the Omi and Winant conclusion that I mentioned in class regarding the social construction of race.  Essentially, their claim is that race is shaped by each country/society's social and political history.  And because race is NOT biological, think of it in terms of social group.  So in other words, each country creates social groups based on the dynamics within that country's history.  This makes "diversity" and "race" (i.e. social groups) relative to each country.  So, while the U.S. looks diverse to Americans by seeing people who look: African, Desi, East Asian, Indo-European, etc...  We only notice these differences because our society points them out.  Other societies notice differences that Americans do not - for example within Africa there are numerous different ethnicities and cultural groups, and biologically, Africa has the greatest genetic variation of any continent.  However, all of that diversity in the United States would simply be considered black.  This is the most important baseline to your question.  We must start out with this understanding.  And, by many measures, there is myriad evidence that the US is NOT the most diverse country around the world.

Second, not only do we notice the tensions and diversity more in the USA because we live here but also those tensions are exacerbated by a social and political history that:

• sought to justify domination by race for nearly 250 years of brutal slavery beginning in 1619
• Fought an extremely destructive war over the racial slavery practices but never came to terms with slavery despite the end of the war (1865)
• Created a political and criminal justice system after slavery ended that lasted for another 100 years (Civil Rights legislation 1964)
• And then for decades created a system of ignoring "race" while still creating race-based policies of incarceration and political dog whistles until the Black Lives Matter Movement ushered in a second civil rights movement (2014).

In other words, our country has not come to terms with its long history of racism so even though the USA might not be the most diverse country in the world, it has a particularly painful history of dealing with diversity that we, as a country,  have not come to terms with yet.

"Diversity" is Relative

This PEW research explains the relative views about diversity within various countries around the world.  Views on diversity vary from country to country but also within countries based on demographics.  Intranationally, more diversity is seen as positive by younger and more-educated people worldwide and seen as negative by people supporting populist and conservative parties.  Internationally, diversity is more favored by Western nations.  Below are some graphs explaining the findings:

"Diversity" is Difficult to Measure

Stanford U. professor James Fearon explains the difficulty of defining "ethnic diversity" in this 2003 paper, Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country:  

Despite the difficulty, Fearon attempts to create a proxy (including language) for defining "diversity" around the world.  His conclusion rates the USA at less "diverse" than many of the other countries examined - 6th out of Western nations and much lower worldwide.  Here are some graphs from Fearon:

And this PEW research from 2013 explains which countries are more "diverse" based on a German study.  The graph below highlights that there are many countries considered more "diverse" than the USA:

World Population Review explains the most diverse countries based on the same German study mentioned above by the PEW.

This Washington Post article explains research from Harvard Institute for Economic Policy that shows "diversity" is a social construct and is relative to each country or population.  The article explains how the research attempts to measure diversity and the effects of diversity.  The first map below shows that the USA is only moderately ethnically diverse, while the second map shows that US respondents are very open to having neighbors of a different race.

Share of people who said that did not want a neighbor who was from a different race:

 World Atlas created its own measure of ethnic diversity here.  It does not list the USA among the most diverse countries worldwide.  Africa dominates the list.

Religion can also serve as a proxy for diversity.  The Pew examines religious diversity in countries around the world here.  Using religion as a measure, the USA is also less "diverse" than many countries worldwide.

Diversity within the USA:

Here is an article from The Census Bureau explaining the diversity in the US.

Here is a diversity map from the Census Bureau of diversity within the US: