BOSTON UNIVERSITY Department of Sociology

“Smart Guy” Masculinity, Identity, and High School Achievement

A Senior Thesis

PRESENTED BY

Sean Ashburn

April 2014

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ABSTRACT

This project responds to widespread concerns about the academic underachievement of boys and young men relative to their female classmates, engaging with the premise

that the accomplishment of hegemonic masculinity in high schools is incongruent with the attitudes and behaviors that contribute to high academic performance among

adolescents. In light of this tension, this study relies on data from retrospective in-depth interviews with twelve high-achieving men to consider how these adolescent men negotiate their academic achievement and masculine identity. Findings reveal

that some high-achieving men adopted distinct strategies, which included participating in athletics and representing themselves as “cool” and relaxed, to sustain

their performance of a masculine identity. Alternatively, the sexual minority men rejected masculine ideals and invested their identities primarily in academic

achievement and other “unmasculine” endeavors, which provided them with feelings of empowerment despite their subordinated masculine status. These narratives greatly enrich sociological interpretations of the popularized gender achievement gap among adolescents and provide support for integrating gender studies curricula at the high

school level.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever grateful to my advisor, Professor Cati Connell, for her guidance and encouragement. Her mentorship has vastly shaped my identity as a scholar, educator, and

human being.

Thank you to the other members of my thesis committee, Professor Japonica Brown-Saracino and Professor Maureen Sullivan. Your addition to this process is much

appreciated.

Thank you to Samantha Levy, Sam Meisel, Rachael Smith, and Jeremy Weprich for engaging with my ideas and offering your insight since this project began. Also, thanks to

Abigail Clauhs for being an empathetic “thesis buddy.” And the biggest thanks to Kyle Plantz for tolerating far too many “I’m stressed” moments and for being an important

distraction.

This project would not have been possible without the twelve young men who generously shared their high school memories with me and offered me a window into their lives. I

truly appreciate their sensitivity and thoughtfulness. My motivation was their belief that this story was an important one to tell.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction – “The War on Boys” 1 Chapter 2: Boys, Homophobia, and Education 9 Chapter 3: Methodology, Methods, and Data 22 Chapter 4: Complicit Masculinities, Legitimacy, and Discreet Achievement 28 Chapter 5: Subordinated Masculinities, Identity, and Exceptional Achievement 62 Chapter 6: Discussion and Conclusion 87 Appendix: Interview Guide 96 References 98

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The widening gender gap in academic achievement is real. It threatens the future of millions of American boys. Boys do not need to be rescued from their masculinity. But they are not getting the help they need. - Christina Hoff Sommers, The Atlantic, 2000

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – “THE WAR ON BOYS”

In recent years, backlash to the advances of American feminism has created

public concern about the possible adverse effects of women’s advances on men. Authors

and cultural critics have garnered significant media attention for their analyses of the so-

called “end of men,” a catchphrase propagated in journalist Hanna Rosin’s 2010 Atlantic

article. Rosin’s article suggests women now have the occupational and educational

advantage over men because of the late 20th century’s decline in manufacturing careers

and the increasing popularity of a “more feminine management style” (65). “The

economic and cultural power shift from men to women,” Rosin writes, is visible in

contemporary women’s presence in middle management and professional careers, their

gains in traditionally male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering, and

math, and their comparative success in acquiring educational credentials (64). Rosin

attempts to illustrate the mainstream rise of society’s “alpha female,” in which 40 percent

of mothers are the primary earners in their families and 60 percent of all bachelor’s

degrees are earned by women. On college campuses, Rosin claims, female students and

university faculty and staff have consistently observed a gender pattern in which:

Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away (66).

Notably, Rosin’s text points to an earlier Atlantic article from “equality feminist”

Christina Hoff Sommers, who drew media attention with her own analysis of the “war on

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boys” in America’s schools. Boys, according to Sommers (2000), are increasingly

disadvantaged by an education system that better serves the capacities of female students.

She maintains that feminist efforts to develop the confidence, ambition, and diverse

talents of girls alongside “complaints” of male privilege and school bias have incited a

movement of “laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to

redress the harm done to girls” (60). Consequently, Sommers’ contention is that girls,

whose crisis of underperformance has been a myth for decades, have flourished in

schools to such a degree that they exceedingly “outshine” their male classmates in grades,

advanced coursework, school engagement, and educational aspirations.

While also expressing contempt for teachers and administrators who passively

deny the gender disparity that favors girls, Sommers’ article decisively dismisses the

arguments of education researchers and gender scholars who share her interest in the

academic achievement of boys but attribute their diminished performance to socialization

into normative gender stereotypes. Referring to the work of Harvard psychologist Carol

Gilligan on boys’ development of masculinity under patriarchy, Sommers critiques, “The

pressure to conform to these stereotypes, she believes, has impaired, distressed, and

deformed the members of both sexes by the time they are adolescents” (74). While

“Gilligan's views are attractive to many of those who believe that boys could profit by

being more sensitive and empathetic” (74), Sommers affirms that gender neutral policy

shifts, such as an elimination of supposed practices that enable girls’ achievement and of

messages that suggest that boys are unfairly privileged, will appropriately address the

crusade to sabotage boys, but without threatening “common sense” notions of gender. Of

those misguided attempts to reconstitute the categories of gender, Sommers proclaims,

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On a less academic plane Gilligan's proposed reformation seems to challenge common sense. It is obvious that a boy wants his father to help him become a young man, and belonging to the culture of manhood is important to almost every boy. To impugn his desire to become "one of the boys" is to deny that a boy's biology determines much of what he prefers and is attracted to. Unfortunately, by denying the nature of boys, education theorists can cause them much misery (74).

However popular, these messages are hugely misguided in their gender

essentialism and in their simplification of women’s advancements to a narrative of

progress uncomplicated by continued institutional disadvantages. Furthermore, the notion

of a “war” on boys conceptualizes achievement, opportunity, and success as zero-sum,

whereby improvements for girls have promptly threatened boys’ intellectual capacities.

Although highly objectionable in their analysis, these articles by Sommers and Rosin do

represent a broader, legitimate concern about the academic and career success of

American boys and young men. While their claims compulsively contest feminist

understandings of the ongoing oppressive sex-gender system, the accuracy of the

educational statistics spouted by these and other proponents of the so-called “war against

boys” appear to indicate manifest challenges in the scholastic experiences of men.

Conclusively, Hanna Rosin (2010, 68) writes, “What’s clear is that schools, like the

economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more

easily to young girls.” Here, Rosin unknowingly highlights the roles schools as

institutions play in informing the stratification of students based on characteristics that

have been found to be closely linked to normative expectations of gender expression.

Approaching the matter of boys in school with the lens of gender theory,

foundational masculinities scholar R. W. Connell (1989) demonstrates that distinct

expressions of masculinity developed in schools are incongruent with attitudes and

behaviors that contribute to high academic performance among adolescents. While girls

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potentially earn social status among their peers by representing precocity, maturity, and

academic success, boys are widely esteemed based on their athleticism, aggression,

insensitivity, and defiance of authority (Adler & Adler, 2010; Connell, 1989; Eder et al.,

2010; Epstein, 1997; Morris, 2012; Willis, 1977). As a result of this incompatibility

between what Rosin and Sommers rightly recognize as necessary for school success –

literacy skills, class preparedness, attentiveness to authority – and the qualities that

masculinities scholars acknowledge to be requisite for the “construction of a combative,

dominance-focused masculinity” (Connell, 1989, 300), peer hierarchies effectively

discourage boys from pursuing an identity tied to expressions of intelligence, obedience,

or educational goals.

One of the major consequences of this symbolic opposition of traditional

masculinity and academic effort – the genuine “war on boys” – is that academically

oriented behavior invites the homophobic labels of “fag” and “queer” commonly directed

at high school boys who represent a feminized, failed masculinity. As Morris (2012)

found in his ethnographic research in two public Ohio high schools, “boys who remained

attentive in class, assiduously followed school rules, admittedly studied, and prepared

academically were most likely to be called ‘gay’” (71). Unfortunately, the association of

academic achievement and effeminacy prevalent in the dominant adolescent peer culture

disciplines men who achieve beyond the accepted boundaries of adolescent masculinity

and rewards men who do not invest in academics and/or challenge the institutional values

of their schools.

However, while most educators with whom I have spoken concur that academic

under-achievement is widespread among their male students, our daily observations,

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especially in higher education contexts, indicate that of course there are some young men

who are achieving in academics at impressive levels. In fact, they tend to stand out as

exceptional among their classmates because, according to Morris (2012), prevailing

gender discourses cause “smart” men to be perceived as “gifted with innate intelligence”

(60), while their high achieving female counterparts are assumed to succeed because of

their (less impressive) hard work. Recognizing that these high-achieving men are

responding to institutional environments in which academic behavior is recognized as a

feminine characteristic by their peers (Morris, 2012; Francis et al., 2012), I was eager to

explore the conditions that allow certain men to navigate these stereotypes and to better

understand how they reconcile their academic achievement with an intact sense of

masculine identity. To develop a more vivid understanding of how high-achieving young

American men respond to the discourses in their peer culture that mark academic

achievement as un-masculine, I investigated the academic and peer-social experiences of

adolescent boys through in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of twelve high-

achieving young adult men.

Despite a wealth of research into social and institutional processes by which male

students develop identities antithetical to school engagement (Adler & Adler, 2010;

Connell, 1989; Eder et al., 2010; Epstein, 1997, 1998; Ferguson, 2000; Lesane et al.,

1999; Marusza, 1997; Morris, 2012; Willis, 1977) and some investigation of the high-

achieving, popular students in the United Kingdom (Francis et al., 2012), comparatively

little research has explored the experiences of adolescent boys in the United States who

succeed at negotiating their high academic achievement while maintaining a performance

of normative masculinity. Furthermore, research on the gender-based homophobia

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experienced by American gay and gender non-conforming adolescent boys is lacking in

its qualitative examination of the academic performance of these students, relative to

their conventionally masculine peers. Statistical data from national surveys has led

researchers to conclude that sexual minority youth face significant scholastic challenges

that impede their opportunities for postsecondary success and that GBT boys are

specifically likely to externalize their distress through disengaging from school and

seeking drugs, alcohol and other risky behaviors (Pearson et al., 2007; Sadowski, 2010).

However, few studies have collected these students’ stories to understand how they

conceptualize the relationship between their non-normative or transgressive

representations of masculinity and the development of a high- or low-achieving identity

at school.

Accordingly, my conversations with the twelve young men in my research sample

probed the in-school dynamics that they witnessed and experienced during high school to

advance the state of sociological research on masculinities and education. I examined

patterns in the life and school histories of the six conventionally masculine, heterosexual

young men I interviewed to discover the performative strategies they employed as

adolescent boys in order to reconcile a masculine and high-achieving identity among their

peers. These practices included participating in mid-status high school sports,

establishing positive relationships with multiple high-status social groups, performing an

easygoing, agreeable attitude, and downplaying their achievement as just one element of

their overall identity. Additionally, these men, like the high achieving men considered in

the research of Morris (2012) and Francis and her colleagues (2012), were careful not to

emphasize their commitment to academics among their peers in order to contain their

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achievement within a larger public performance of masculinity. Alternatively, through

my interviews with six gender non-conforming, sexual minority men, I considered how

these men might engage differently with academics because of their subordinated status

due to their embodiment of conventionally feminine characteristics. I found that, indeed,

these sexual minority men engaged in a process of opting out of identifying with their

failed performance of masculinity and were instead able to stake their identities fully in

their academic achievement and exceptional talents in music, theater, leadership, and

activism.

During the remaining chapters, I articulate how I reached these findings,

incorporating the voices of the participants who shared their accounts of their

adolescence with me. Chapter two presents existing research on the intersections of

masculinities and schools, focusing on the ways in which schools as total institutions

enable status preoccupations among students that are accomplished through normative

performances of gender. I show how behaviors that conform to the institutional

expectations of school, including authentic academic engagement, are socially attributed

to femininity and thus, when performed by men, threaten their claim to a masculine

identity. I also briefly discuss the research on the school experiences and outcomes of

LGBT students. In subsequent chapters, I present the methodology of my study,

including descriptions of the sample, data, and analysis. I present the results of my

research in two chapters, with the first focusing on the experiences of the normatively

masculine, heterosexual men and their efforts to locate their high academic achievement

within their masculine identity. The subsequent chapter presents my analysis of the

gender non-conforming, sexual minority men and their accomplishment of an empowered

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high-achieving identity following their disidentification with the ideals of masculinity

that they struggled to perform. The final chapter summarizes these findings in relation to

implications for educational practice and offers measures to counter the social pressures

that inhibit many adolescent men from achieving in school.

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CHAPTER 2: BOYS, HOMOPHOBIA, & EDUCATION

The concept of hegemonic masculinity refers to a socially dominant notion of

manhood whose support is rooted in political, economic, religious, and media

institutions. While few men actually enact the cultural ideal of hegemonic masculinity, its

construction is sustained by the consent of other men who access power and privilege

through their relative proximity to the hegemonic ideal. Patriarchy, according to theorist

R. W. Connell (1987), mandates a stratification of masculinities in which “hegemonic

masculinity is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as

well as in relation to women” (183). Among the remaining subordinated masculinities are

homosexual masculinities and particular behaviors closely tied to femininity, Connell

(1995) explains,

Gayness, in patriarchal ideology, is the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure. Hence, from the point of view of hegemonic masculinity, gayness is easily assimilated to femininity (78).

Nonetheless, heterosexual men and boys can also be located in this subordinated

realm through material practices and discourses that link them with femininity. Because

of the universal supremacy of hegemonic masculinity, Connell (1987) clarifies,

These other masculinities need not be as clearly defined – indeed, achieving hegemony may consist precisely in preventing alternatives from gaining cultural definition and recognition as alternatives, confining them to ghettos, to privacy, to unconsciousness (186).

Despite the repression of subordinated masculinities, Connell emphasizes that

their accomplishment involves “strategies of resistance or forms of non-compliance”

(183). Thus, for individuals who fail to approximate a hegemonic masculinity, their

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identity and behaviors may represent an unintentional strategy of transgression whose

resistance invites alternative opportunities for comportment.

Schools as “Making Masculinity”

Since the development of gender and masculinities studies from the discipline of

women’s studies, K-12 schools have served as a prominent site of significant research

into the ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity as essentialized and

complementary expressions of sex and sexuality. Additionally, because it is

conceptualized as a meaningful period for individuals’ development through the testing

of identities (Erikson, 1968), adolescence can be seen as illustrative of the performative

aspect of gender as well as the cultural policing of non-conformity.

The concept of total institutions advanced by Erving Goffman (1961)

characterizes this stratifying influence that develops for children in schools. Under total

institutions, sites where all aspects of life transpire in the same space governed by the

same authority, the bureaucratic ideology obliges officials to exhibit uniform treatment of

all entities, such that, for example, all prisoners must be disciplined identically for their

transgressions to reinforce the homogeneity of the prison mass. In response, Goffman

finds, group members originate internal hierarchies and discrete sub-communities to

undermine the power of the administrators and the institution itself over their conduct.

Faced with this controlled, depersonalized environment, inhabitants strive to uphold their

individual identities and acquire personal power through the subjugation of others in the

cohort.

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The organization of schools produces a similar outcome for students as they

attempt to derive status and power under homogenizing conditions. Milner (2010)

discusses the inexpansibility of status, suggesting that social status exists only in limited

supply to maintain its value and thereby creates a relative positioning of group members

(201). This low supply reifies the stability of school status systems while inviting

individuals to denigrate their peers to advance their own relative status, of which Miler

articulates, “you can move up by putting others down” (202). Hence, students

demonstrate what Marcel Danesi (1994) deems “small cruelties” by insulting, making fun

of, and putting down other children by targeting intelligence, appearance, socioeconomic

background, gender presentation, and various other differentiating characteristics.

Connell (1989) finds that unemployed working-class men engage in defiant,

trouble-making behaviors during their youth, with the school providing an antagonistic

institutional authority against which these boys substantiated their rebellious masculinity.

The alienation of the working-class from education is seen in trouble-making boys’

assignment to the lowest academic tracks and early involvement in the school

disciplinary system, although getting in trouble reinforces privileged maleness and

patriarchal order. Alternatively, Connell discusses boys who were considered swots

(perceived as academically engaged) and wimps (perceived as physically and emotionally

weak), both of which are designated as effeminate in contrast to the “cool guys” (295).

Strikingly, Connell observes that the differentiation of masculinities enforced by schools

is in possible contrast to the social power structure of the macro society; although access

to authentic social power is awarded to boys who succeed academically, working class

boys who “fail” are likely to “claim other sources of power, even other definitions of

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masculinity” (295) though athleticism, aggression, and heterosexual appeal. Professional

class boys, in contrast, possessed presumed access to the credentialing supplied by

schools. Although they sometimes conformed to the belligerence of their cool peers,

these boys assume a “calculative attitude” towards their personal and professional futures

and thus develop a “responsible” masculinity tied to organized collective power valued

by the larger society.

Similarly, Marusza (1997) posits that the limited occupational opportunities for

self-employed physical labor and manufacturing invite poor and working-class boys to

adhere to a compulsory heterosexual hypermasculinity related to the American Dream

that gives the impression of approaching the hegemonic masculinity. Male vocational

students adamantly repudiate professional class occupations as “sissy” and “soft” (180).

Instead, their descriptions of their vocational aspirations glamorize tradework like

automechanics as “work that you control,” work that “can keep the world running,” and

work in which the public is “completely dependent on you” (180). These forms of

commodified labor that produce dirty hands are assigned “external significance” (181)

and become symbols of masculinity to obscure their alienating effects within a capitalist

economic system.

Adler and Adler (2010) also assert that the characteristics that earn and diminish

popularity vary based on gender-specific peer cultures for preadolescents. Varied gender

role expectations make for the exhibition of divergent methods, attitudes, and behaviors

to acquire “social honor” and prestige in a school hierarchy. For boys, the authors

identify athletic ability, coolness (defined by aspects of self-presentation), toughness

(defined by defiance of authority), advanced interpersonal skills, and successful

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heterosexual relationships as qualities that garner popularity among peers. High academic

performance, while initially valued by some boys in early elementary school, becomes an

increasingly stigmatizing trait, leading many boys to reject scholastic engagement for

macho attitudes of defiance, or for exceedingly intelligent boys, reluctance to achieve full

potential or efforts to conceal their successes. In middle elementary school, the “teacher’s

pet” or “goody-goody” labels were found to be exceptionally negative and peer solidarity

was valued more by the collective youth culture than validation from adults, with school

coming to serve a social rather than academic function, thereby diminishing boys’

aspiration for academic success. Along with family wealth, parent permissiveness,

physical attractiveness, and advanced communication, the authors found girls’ popularity

was easily compatible with academic achievement. Girls could potentially gain social

status from good grades and teacher approval.

Eder, Evans, and Parker (2010) posit that the interactional development of sexual

aggression and teasing originate in expectations of masculinity as “tough and

domineering” along with in youth’s prevalent fear of losing peer status. The authors

illustrate instances of sexual teasing that reveal that male peer groups evoke objectifying

and vulgar language both publically in the presence of women and privately in

predominantly male spaces. These performances generally increased boys’ social status,

whereby sexual conquest serves as a primary marker of “success” for adolescent boys,

which consequently devalues academic pursuits that generally do not accumulate

heterosexual appeal.

In Dude, You’re A Fag, sociologist C.J. Pascoe (2007) illustrates such interactions

between students that incorporate verbal and physical representations of dominant social

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and moral ideologies to both access personal power and temporarily destabilize a peer’s

status. Pascoe’s fieldwork illustrates the interactional policing of the boundaries of

masculinity through the discourse of the fag insult, such that gendered homophobia was

directed at adolescent boys who did not present as normatively masculine, even

momentarily, rather than exclusively at non-heterosexual peers. In Pascoe’s observations

of a California high school, boys consistently derided each other with insults related to an

inadequate masculinity. Pascoe discuses the fluidity of the fag insult, which she found to

be “an identity that no boy wanted but that most boys could escape, usually by engaging

in some sort of discursive contest to turn another boy into a fag” (61). “In this way,” she

writes, “the fag became a hot potato that no boy wanted to be left holding” (61). Thus, the

fag discourse functions as a mechanism with which boys engage in an exchange of power

and stigma and interactionally produce a stratification of boyhood and adolescent

masculinity that is reflective of the broader social order’s valuation of masculinities, as

shown by the tolerance of the authorities in Pascoe’s research site toward explicit

mockery of male femininity. It is apparent that expressions of masculinity that, because

of their proximity to the cultural framework of hegemonic masculinity, most successfully

generate popularity and social status among American adolescents substantially preclude

the simultaneously pursuit of high academic achievement. Schools as institutions

contribute to the status differentiation of their students, with gender performance

functioning as a powerful mechanism by which this gradation is formed.

E.W. Morris’s (2012) ethnography Learning the Hard Way employs one and a

half years of field observations and interviews with students at two American high

schools, one urban, low-income and predominantly African American and the other

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predominantly white, low-income and rural, to respond to popular claims of boys’

academic underachievement, often deemed “the boy crisis.” Morris asserts that in

economically disadvantaged communities, “prevailing discourses […] framed true

manliness as something that could not be achieved by paying attention in class or burying

one’s nose in a book” (5). Morris found that “few local scripts for educationally

successful manhood existed at [the schools he studied], where hegemonic masculinity

was defined primarily through physical attributes such as pragmatic manual skills or

explosive athletic abilities” (170). Rather, in both sites boys performed a “contrived

carelessness” in their approach to school in order to demonstrate manhood, and also held

male peers accountable to this standard of academic disengagement with homophobic

policing. As Morris explains below, behaviors that facilitated school success, not

necessarily including intelligence, marked adolescent boys as effeminate and elicited “the

specter of the feminized male” (Pascoe, 2007):

As I have discussed, boys who succeeded because of so-called natural intelligence were seen as acceptably masculine. However, if they succeeded because they were careful, organized, and committed to schoolwork, their masculinity was called into question. Boys perceived as nerdy – often those who put effort into schoolwork and were involved in school activities – were likely to be called “gay” or “pussies” (70).

He elaborates on a particular student named Tom, who ranked first in his high

school class and played the flute:

Peers scrutinized the masculinity and sexuality of boys who, like Tom, performed well academically, hung out with girls, and were involved in non-sports-related school activities such as band. This pressure compelled many to avoid exhibiting academically oriented behavior or, if they did, to shore up and display their masculinity in other ways, such as through sports and fighting (70-71).

Furthermore, replicating the findings of Marusza (1997), male students in Morris’

rural school prioritized manual labor, physical strength, and insubordination as indicative

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of hegemonic masculinity and perceived school effort and “office jobs” as feminine.

Meanwhile female students interviewed by Morris emphasized achievement as “an

opportunity to escape” (45) their low-income community. Consequently, Morris positions

achievement as a form of resistance for women against gender subordination (deemed

“conscientious resistance”), in order to “gain recognition and empowerment” (131) and

establish a “successful self-reliant future” (145), which, as I will suggest later, may have

parallels for sexual minority men who also face discrimination. Morris’ chief conclusion

is that biological sex differences do not explain the lower academic outcomes of many

adolescent boys, but rather the interactional “active production of gender” sustains boys’

underachievement as they work to perform hegemonic masculinity.

Consistent with the findings that have been presented so far, Epstein (1998)

synthesizes a collection of British and Australian research on resistance to schooling as a

constitutive element of adolescent masculinity and its relationship to compulsory

heterosexuality, of which she writes, “the rejection of the perceived ‘feminine’ of

academic work is simultaneously a defense against the ‘charge’ of being gay” (97). She

suggests that in her research with gay and lesbian young people, it was striking “how

often being a boy who was scholastic was given as the identifying marker for being the

subject of bullying and of homophobic abuse” (98). Like other authors, Epstein

emphasizes that achievement itself does not necessarily contradict the performance of

masculinity, but working hard and exerting effort in school is problematic for boys.

Epstein concludes that, “the main demand on boys from within their peer culture (but

also, sometimes, from teachers), up to the sixth form at least, is to appear to do little or no

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work, to be heavily competitive (but at sport and heterosex, not at school work), [and] to

be rough, tough and dangerous to know” (106).

As this body of research indicates, the negative relationship between academic

achievement and masculine peer status contributes heavily to the diminished school

performance of adolescent boys that has alarmed authors like Hanna Rosin and Christina

Hoff Sommers. My study builds on this premise in an attempt to illustrate the strategies

by which particular boys are able to successfully procure modest popularity through a

normatively masculine self-presentation without sacrificing good grades, school

engagement, or postsecondary aspirations. Moreover, while traditionally, men and boys

who fail to embody hegemonic masculinity because of feminine or homosexual

characteristics have been conceived of as representing a subordinated masculinity, I

explain how these transgressive students, like their female peers, may be uniquely

positioned to succeed academically because of their exclusion from the dominant

masculine peer culture and because of their added incentive to “escape” (via higher

education and/or economic prosperity) from an adolescent community that does not

embrace their differences.

Sexual Minority Student Experiences

The distinct challenges of LGBT students relative to heterosexual peers have been

the focus of considerable research and some media attention. Building on earlier research

suggesting that discrepancy with school norms and expectations and resulting feelings of

stigmatization contribute to diminished academic success, Pearson and colleagues (2007)

found that same-sex attracted youth, particularly boys, had significantly lower GPAs,

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fewer advanced courses in math and science, significantly more course failures, higher

engagement in substance use, and reported much lower integration and support from

peers and adults in the school community as well as lower educational expectations

related to college matriculation – all compared to other-sex-only attracted adolescents.

Based on the calculated statistics, the authors conclude that sexual minority youth face

significant scholastic challenges that impede their opportunities for postsecondary

success and that boys are specifically likely to externalize their distress through

disengaging from school and seeking drugs, alcohol and other risky behaviors. The

authors also speculate that because teachers and school staff reward behaviors that

conform to the school’s ideals and punish deviance, sexual minority students are

especially vulnerable to alienation, “teacher bias and social isolation at school” (532).

Sadowski (2010) asserts that despite ongoing discussions of political and social

progress for sexual minorities in the United States, survey research indicates a continued

serious risk of depression and other negative responses to distress, such that in 2005, 25

percent of Massachusetts LGBT high school students reported attempting suicide within

the last year (a decline from 40 percent in 2003). The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight

Education Network (GLSEN) 2011 survey found that 71.3 percent of LGBT middle and

high school students reported hearing homophobia slurs frequently in their schools.

GLSEN’s annual findings continue to highlight the unsafe environments created by

homophobic harassment and threats, leading victimized youth to stay home from school

four times as often as other students and earn average GPAs 0.3-0.5 points lower than

other students.

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In contrast, grounded in evidence that “sexual minorities are more likely to be

college educated than heterosexual individuals” (693), Carpenter’s (2009) significant

statistical results indicate that in college gay male students earn higher GPAs than their

heterosexual male peers, perceive their academic responsibilities to be more important

than do heterosexual males, spend more hours per day in paid labor, value attending

parties less than heterosexual males, and participate in more student organizations and

volunteering than do heterosexual males. Based on these findings, Carpenter concludes

that gay men have positive outcomes in college relative to their straight peers, from

which he speculates that “gay males may have higher ability and unobserved motivation

for a given level of education than their heterosexual counterparts” (702).

How can we make sense of these seemingly contradictory indications of gay

students’ academic experiences? Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler (2013) offer support for a

theory known as the “best little boy in the world” hypothesis, whereby sexual minority

boys compensate for the stigma of their sexual identity by achieving at high levels in

academics and other domains. This theory, as I will detail later in this paper, serves as a

point of departure for my analysis of the experiences of the six well-adjusted, sexual

minority men I interviewed.

Trangressing Masculinity?

Understanding and interpreting the power dynamics and gendered, sexual, aged,

classed and ethnic elements of bullying will reveal the larger society’s own power

structures (Horton 2011). Consequently, the dominant social and moral orders authorize

certain occurrences of bullying when the system or hierarchy find their policing efforts in

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agreement, given that schools generally function as institutions of group conformity.

Notably, Horton alludes several times to male femininity and academic behaviors as

common causes of bullying, both of which are important to my research as I examine

how these activities interact and co-exist in high achieving feminine presenting male

students. Citing Connell (2001) and Epstein (1998), he writes, “A number of school

masculinities researchers have highlighted how school work may often be linked to

femininity and thus considered a ‘gay’ activity by many boys” (272). However, among

boys for whom the approximate embodiment of hegemonic masculinity appears

unattainable because of their homosexual or feminine properties, the social status

conferred by educational achievement may represent an alternative course by which they

can access social and economic power, including educational and professional access,

that are “delivered by the school system to boys who are academic ‘successes’” (Connell,

1989, 295).

As these studies show, schools act as a site of stratification for adolescent boys

based on the compliance of their identity, attitudes, and behaviors with a cultural ideal of

hegemonic masculinity. While this system of values considerably stifles academic

achievement and has perhaps created a “war against boys,” our observations in daily life

tell us that there are still many male adolescents recognized for their intelligence,

leadership, charisma, and school performance. Our daily observations also tell us that,

despite homophobia, many of the educated professional men with whom we are familiar

are members of the LGBT community. The conceptualizations and experiences of

masculinity unique to these high achieving men, both those who closely resemble

hegemonic masculinity and those who are assigned a subordinated masculinity, are

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currently neglected perspectives to which this project gives prominence in order to better

understand and address the academic disengagement indicative of the larger population

of boys.

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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY, METHODS & DATA

To accomplish this project, I collected and interpreted the narrative reflections of

individual men with intentionality in adherence to participants’ intended meaning.

Neuman (2012) states that, “qualitative explanations tend to be rich in detail, sensitive to

context, and capable of showing the complex processes or sequences of social life” (353).

Thus, qualitative methods were appropriate for this study’s objective of illustrating how

adolescent boys actively interpret and internalize messages about the relationship of

academics to socially valued expressions of masculinity. Furthermore, feminist

methodology actively “minimizes exploitation of research subjects” (Naples, 13) by

privileging the self-described experiences of informants. To this end, this study relied on

semi-structured in-depth interviewing in order to capture young men’s own recollections

of their school histories and their nuanced negotiations of gender.

This project takes a constructivist grounded theory approach, which works to

understand the ways in which meaning is constructed by case subjects in discrete

contexts (Charmaz, 2006). As in a counseling relationship, constructivist researchers

collaborate with research participants to both derive an understanding of the participant’s

thoughts and actions while also recognizing the interpretive nature of the theorizing

process. Constructivists emphasize context, including the conditions of “power,

communication, and opportunity” (Charmaz, 2006, 130) that influence and establish

participants’ experiences. Consequently, constructivists actively reflect on and

acknowledge their own ideological relationship to the theories they develop, including

the assumptions with which they engage in the research process and interpret findings.

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Methods

I conducted in-depth interviews with a total of twelve (12) American men

currently living in the greater Boston area, all of whom I classify as academically high-

achieving based on their self-reported high school academic performance and their

matriculation to nationally-known four-year colleges and universities. All of these men

self-identified themselves as “top” students in their high school graduating class and

completed courses at the highest academic track offered by their school, which included

Advanced Placement (AP) and Honors courses. Three of the interviewees were current

undergraduates and nine had previously completed an undergraduate degree.

Additionally, of the nine college graduates, two had earned advanced degrees and three

more were currently enrolled in graduate school. The men ranged in age from 19 to 29

years with an average age of 23.5 years. Table 1 (page 28) shows that six men identified

as heterosexual, four as homosexual, and one as bisexual. Additionally, one man

identified as transgender. Three identified as men of color.

As illustrated by Image 1 (page 28), seven attended high school in the Northeast,

two in the Southeast, one in the Midwest, one in the Rocky Mountain region, and one in

the Pacific region. Four of these high schools are located in cities classified by the U.S.

Census Bureau as “urban” or “urban clusters,” while the remaining eight are located in

suburban or rural communities. Seven men attended public high schools and five

attended private, religiously-affiliated schools. Of the men who attended public schools,

median household incomes in their school communities ranged from $42,085 to

$113,416, as presented in Table 2 (page 28). For private school graduates, annual tuition

rates, included in Table 3 (page 28), ranged from $7,600 to $15,900.

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The ethical and practical considerations of involving minors as research subjects

complicated the possibility of interviewing current high school students. However, as I

anticipated, invoking the experiences of young adult recent high school graduates

provided the opportunity for greater reflexivity as temporal distance allowed participants

to contemplate their time in high school with greater complexity and nuance than current

high school students who are likely highly invested in and less critical of the processes by

which peer hierarchies and gender expectations develop. The exposure of young men

over age eighteen to alternative educational, workplace, and social environments also

provided them with a richer, more complex understanding of how their conceptions of

peer gender norms varied by context. Many respondents engaged in lengthy discussions

of how the local values prevalent in the context in which they attended high school differ

from the norms of their undergraduate institution or from Boston or New England more

generally. These perspectives would have been absent had the sampling frame been

confined to current high school students or even 18 to 21 year olds.

Six of the twelve participants were recruited from personal connections or

referrals through snowball sampling and six contacted me through email in response to

my postings submitted to various listservs associated with young Boston-area

professionals and opportunities related to gender and sexuality. The in-person interviews

occurred between August 2013 and January 2014 and lasted between one hour and

twenty minutes and three and a half hours, with an average of slightly under two hours.

The interviews took place in a variety of locations in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville,

Massachusetts, including private residences, cafés and restaurants, and university

buildings.

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Esterberg (2002) conceives of qualitative interviews as a unique relationship

centered on “the production of talk” (emphasis in original; 85) in which “two individuals

come together to try to create meaning about a particular topic” (85). Specifically, semi-

structured interviews invite the researcher to assume the perspective of the respondent

because “the interviewee’s responses shape the order and structure of the interview” (87).

Notable in their validation of marginalized voices, in-depth semi-structured interviews

encourage a rigorous exploration of a theme and the formation of theory. Thus, while I

employed a standardized interview guide for each interview (Appendix 1), I was

responsive to respondents’ “movements” and “turns” (87) during the interview to best

support an authentic discussion of their experiences and to explore thoroughly the

individual gender-related successes and challenges that informed their level of scholastic

performance. Most of these interviews unfolded as casual conversations in which the

participants shared an abundance of descriptions and reflections on their high school

motivations and identities, and participants also eagerly offered their own observations

and hypotheses about gender and achievement. In this way, the respondents served as

active participants in shaping subsequent interview questions and inspiring eventual

theoretical conclusions.

Data & Analysis

Each interview was digitally recorded and transcribed with participants’

permission. After transcribing, I coded the 650 pages of interview material by hand,

thoroughly reviewing the twelve interview texts for patterns and commonalities among

the respondents’ stories, recording anecdotes and musings that suggested the possibility

Ashburn 26  

of theoretical or practical significance in a separate document. I did not seek to identify

conclusions that could be generalized beyond the sample, but rather identified common

experiences among participants with shared characteristics and variations across

dissimilar cases. Specifically, because my two primary sub-questions addressed the

contrasting experiences of gender normative, presumed heterosexual men and gender

non-conforming, presumed sexual minority men, I analyzed the interview data primarily

along the axes of sexual orientation, gender expression, and gender identity. Thus, I

generated a separate list of concepts for each of these two cases and coded the data

accordingly, closely examining the patterns in the responses of the six heterosexual men

in the sample and of the six men who identified as other than heterosexual to consider

how sexuality and masculinity intersect in relation to young men’s academic

achievement.

Furthermore, my knowledge of the existing literature in masculinities and

education suggested that social class on the school-level and peer group-level would be a

meaningful sources of comparison, so I employed a combination of median household

income (for public school graduates), annual tuition (for private school graduates), and

participants’ descriptions of socioeconomic demographics to consider how the class

composition of a student’s school shaped their academic achievement (Morris, 2012;

Willis, 1977; Epstein, 1998). However, because some participants’ high schools served

predominantly high-income families and relatively high-achieving students while others

were socioeconomically diverse with achievement closely correlated with family (and

peer) income, I sought to understand the ways that social class interacted with

achievement from the perspective of the participants, rather than attempt to artificially

Ashburn 27  

classify each participant’s school as “low-SES” or “high-SES.” Additionally, because

close to half of the sample attended high school at small, private Catholic or Evangelical

Christian institutions, this attribute arose as a salient aspect of comparison between

participants’ experiences. Table 4 (page 28) illustrates the distribution of school type for

the men in the sample.

To summarize, I divided the sample into cases along three key dimensions, sexual

identity, socioeconomic composition at the school-level, and type of high school attended

(public versus private, religious), and coded for recurring themes accordingly. Sexual

identity proved most productive and remains the primary dimension of analysis

throughout the study. Diversity in participants’ ethnic and geographic backgrounds

resulted in considerable variation within the experiences of interviewees and allowed for

interpretive themes both anticipated and neglected by current literature, including

analyses of the implications of race, class, and community ideology, alongside gender

and sexuality, for academic achievement.

Image 1. Locations of High Schools Attended by Sample

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Table 1. Sexual Identities of the Interview Sample Sexual Identity Frequency (n) Percent Relative Frequency (%) Heterosexual 7* 58.33% Homosexual 4 33.33% Bisexual 1 8.33% *Includes one trans man whose experiences I discuss along with the other sexual minority and gender non-conforming men. Table 2. Median Household Income for Public School Interview Sample Only Median Household Income Frequency (n) Percent Relative Frequency (%)

(out of 7 total public school students) $40000 - $60000 3** 42.86% $60000 - $80000 2 28.57% $80000 - $100000 1 14.29% > $100000 1 14.29% **One participant attended high school in a city with a median income significantly less than that of his actual town of residence, where the median income is $128,656. Table 3. Annual School Tuition Cost for Private School Interview Sample Only Private School Tuition Frequency (n) Percent Relative Frequency (%)

(out of 5 total private school students) < $10000 / year 2 40% > $10000 / year 3 60% Table 4. High School Characteristics of the Interview Sample Type of High School Attended Frequency (n) Percent Relative Frequency (%) Small public ( < 1000) 1 8.33% Mid-sized public (1000 – 1500) 2 16.67% Large public ( > 1500) 4 33.33% Private, religious (Evangelical Christian)

2 16.67%

Private, religious (Catholic) 3 25%

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CHAPTER 4: COMPLICIT MASCULINITIES, LEGITIMACY, AND DISCREET ACHIEVEMENT

“…so I had to figure out a way to be smart and not be vulnerable.” – Joey, 27,

heterosexual man The preceding chapters have highlighted the discourse by which adolescent men

are policed when their behaviors transgress the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. Many

scholars have suggested that high academic achievement is situated among those

behaviors, because idealized performances of adolescent masculinity are set against

deference to school authority and investment in school practices (Connell, 1989; Morris,

2012; Willis, 1977) so that “the characteristics associated with learning are those

associated with femininity: hence those boys who are ‘academically able’ and are seen to

work hard are frequently positioned as effeminate by other pupils and teachers” (Francis

et al., 2012, 66). However, in his celebrated examination of the experiences of “laddish”

male students attending British secondary schools, Willis (1977) reveals that the

“counter-school culture” (11) is most prevalent among working class boys whose

ideologies of masculinity ultimately lead them into working class occupations and

thereby reproduce social and economic inequality generationally. Willis illustrates “the

lads” in his research sites as expressing their “style” (12) through skipping class to

wander and congregate in school hallways, smoking outside of the school, drinking

underage in local pubs, using coarse humor to disrupt teachers’ classroom authority

(“having a laff”), and executing other public pranks. The lads establish their identities in

contrast to the school conformists or “ear’oles,” who Willis explains as “having invested

something of their own identities in the formal aims of education and support of the

school institution – in a certain sense having foregone their own right to have a ‘laff’ ”

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(13). This binary represents a capitalist ideology that Willis describes as the notion that

“the human word is divided into those who are ‘good with their hands’ or ‘good with

their heads’ ” (146). According to Willis, this labor distinction intersects with the logic of

patriarchy, so that manual labor is associated with masculinity and mental labor with

femininity, and as a result:

Mental activity for ‘the-lads’ is not only barred because of their particular experience of the institution of the school, but also because it is regarded as effeminate. […] In the crucial, critical, and classic shift, what they take as mental work becomes for ‘the lads’ mere ‘pen-pushing,’ ‘not really doing things’ and, most importantly, ‘cissy’: it is not basically man’s work or within the manly scope of action. We see at least why the ‘ear’oles’ are likely to be regarded as effeminate and passive ‘cissies’ by ‘the lads’, and why other names for conformists include ‘pouf’ or ‘poufter’, or ‘wanker’. Despite their greater achievement and conventional hopes for the future, ‘ear’oles’ and their strategies can be ignored because the mode of their success can be discredited as passive, mental and lacking a robust masculinity (149-150).

Thus, the lads are inspired to assert their masculine identities through manual

labor and the capitalist aim of sustaining a class of wage-workers is achieved. Willis’

analysis of working class boys’ contact with the manual/mental labor distinction and

constrained economic opportunities is consistent with Messner’s (1990) analysis of how

class differences shape young men’s commitment to athletics. According to Messner,

many low-income boys perceive athletic performance, a physical or bodily form of

expression, as one of a limited number of sources promising status and rewards, due to

the structural conditions that limit their access to other economic and professional

opportunities. Alternatively, Messner found that middle-class male athletes “made

conscious decisions to shift their attentions away from athletic careers to educational and

(nonathletic) career goals” (96), and therefore de-emphasized the importance of athletics

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for constructing a masculine identity because other resources and opportunities were

available to them.

Furthermore, Morris’s (2012) research draws the conclusion that, as suggested by

Carter (2005), the broader gender gaps in achievement among disadvantaged students

may be attributed to low-income boys’ performance of masculine dominance in

opposition to school when confronted with economic inequalities they interpret as

emasculating (12). Carter explains that among her research subjects “hardness provided

marginalized men protection against severe social and economic oppressions, from racial

insubordination to the fines of deindustrialization and the loss of jobs in the central cities”

(86), and such hardness was often embodied through noncompliance with the

expectations of educational institutions. Morris reinforces that the working class boys he

studied “converted this sense of powerless into a (presumed) powerful masculinity, which

based its accomplishment on behaviors such as defiance and carelessness that detracted

from educational success” (14). This emphasis on the contrasting educational and social

environments of students in predominantly low-income and middle-income schools will

be important to consider as I describe the experiences of the high-achieving men I

interviewed, who represent a range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Notably, in their examination of the social experiences of high-achieving British

students, Francis, Skelton, and Read (2012) suggest that research on “working-class

oppositions to conformity to the school” (94), such as that of Willis (1977), illustrates the

importance of context for shaping the relative behaviors that qualify a student to be

labeled a “boffin,” a British youth insult comparable to “nerd” or “geek.” They observed

disparaging labels for highly studious pupils at all of the schools in their study, including

Ashburn 32  

schools serving predominantly affluent and predominantly low-income students, and

conclude that “the construction of The Boffin is a relational one, with boundaries of

acceptable behaviour in relation to academic application drawn differently at different

schools” (94). My findings support this conclusion, as each of the men with whom I

spoke suggested that being “too bookish” or “too uptight” about academics had

consequences for boys’ masculine identity, but their descriptions suggest that the

standards of moderation in their peer culture often reflected the socioeconomic

backgrounds of the school’s high-status students.

Francis, Skelton, and Read’s (2012) study, entitled The Identities and Practices of

High Achieving Pupils: Negotiating Achievement and Peer Cultures, also provides an

important theoretical foundation for my analysis of the strategies employed by high

achieving male students who succeeded at maintaining a masculine identity in a high

school peer culture that brands achievement as effeminate. They begin with the premise I

have previously established:

Within this marginalization of ‘boffins’ it is argued that the construction of academic diligence as feminine leads boy ‘boffins’ to be positioned as effete, and consequently at risk of homophobic bullying. We argue that, in the hyper-heterosexual world of the school, ‘boffins’ are constructed as sexually deviant: boy boffins constructed as ‘gay’, and girl boffins constructed as asexual” (9).

Relying on their observations of nine co-educational secondary schools and

interviews with 71 teacher-identified high-achieving students, the authors attempt to

identify the qualities and “identity work” (103) that facilitated popularity among some

high-achieving students and earned other high achievers the labels of “boffin,” “swot,”

and others. Unsurprisingly, they conclude that, “a key factor in achieving and

maintaining popularity is through the ongoing performance of gender in what is seen to

Ashburn 33  

be ‘appropriate’ heterosexual ways” (107). For high-achieving boys, interest, ability, and

participation in some kind of sport, along with coolness (not “trying too hard”), humor or

“clowning”, and sociability, were significant for high-achieving popular boys to maintain

“balance” between their high achievement and high peer status. “Effortless achievement”

was also an influential strategy on which high-achieving popular students relied, because

“attainment without seemingly putting in the time and commitment is more acceptably

appropriately ‘masculine’ ” (160). Morris (2012) offers a related finding from the male

students whom he observed, who “consistently affected an unruffled carefree attitude,”

(53) that Morris describes as “contrived carelessness.” He adds, “their contrived

carelessness took the form of a publicly displayed absence of academic diligence and

planning” (53), and was a critical element of performing a masculine identity for both

low-achieving and high-achieving boys.

Furthermore, Francis, Skelton, and Read (2012) found that many high-achieving

students were consistently modest about their “cleverness” and may have been “covert”

or “private” achievers, but they maintained cheeky, “gregarious performances” (162) at

school that earned attention and status for their outgoing personalities. The authors

elaborate on the importance of the body “for pupils’ performance of gendered

subjectivity, and in facilitating ‘balance’ between popularity and academic achievement’

(167), considering the influence of athleticism and the appearance of athletic skill for

boys’ popularity and physical “attractiveness” for girls’. Their implication, which I will

embrace throughout the remainder of my analysis, is that exhibiting gender normative

behaviors is central to the accomplishment of peer status. Finally, the authors emphasize

Ashburn 34  

the internal labor necessary for the accomplishment of this balance of achievement and

popularity. They contend:

We want to reiterate that performances involved in the production of such ‘effortless’ achievement are themselves far from effortless: rather, onerous and consistent identity work underpins these productions. What we have shown is how highly gendered this identity work is and how the pupils who were high achieving and popular, especially the ‘alpha’ students, produced gender in ways which reflected normative, monological productions of ‘girling’ and ‘boying’ (168).

The results of my research, which I will present below, are consistent with the

findings of Francis, Skelton, and Read (2012) and Morris (2012). Each of the high-

achieving, conventionally masculine men I interviewed performed an adolescent identity

that was complicit with the ideals of hegemonic masculinity in that they successfully

mitigated the potentially feminizing effects of their academic engagement with distinct

behaviors that either conformed to or did not affront the dominant gender scripts of their

high school context. Specifically, they participated in athletic activities that allowed them

to demonstrate their physical aptitude and develop male friend groups; they actively

established friendships with multiple high-status social groups; and they attempted to

represent themselves as carefree, easygoing, and affable, rather than uptight, which

sometimes required understating their level of dedication to academic achievement. In

addition, all twelve men shared numerous stories of high-achieving male peers engaging

in similar practices who succeeded at subsuming their high-achieving identity within an

athletic, relaxed identity that would be read as masculine by their peers.

Connell (1995) describes complicit masculinities as those “that realize the

patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of

patriarchy” (79). As men, those who are complicit benefit from the oppression of women,

Ashburn 35  

but their embodiments of masculinity “involve extensive compromises” that keep them

from achieving the normative standards of the hegemonic ideal (79). Connell offers the

domestication of husbands and fathers as an example of such a compromise, suggesting

that by doing housework and demonstrating emotional sensitivity, family men undermine

their adherence to hegemonic masculinity, but still assume a position of authority and

male privilege that makes them complicit. I argue that the six heterosexual high-

achieving men I interviewed and many of the high-achieving peers they describe

represent such complicity to the extent that while their academically-oriented behaviors

compromised their performance of the hegemonic ideal, their enactments of other

elements of normative masculinity allow them to maintain an overall, legitimate

masculine status. All of these men worked hard during high school, cared deeply about

learning, and mostly respected the authority of their teachers. However, unlike the six

gender non-conforming men I will discuss in the next chapter, the high-achieving

masculine men worked consciously and subconsciously to prevent their achievement

from determining their full identity.

The Significance of Athletics

All of the men I interviewed described their high schools as environments in

which involvement in sports was indispensable for boys to achieve popularity, which was

most often established through adherence to a normative gender performance, just as

Francis, Skelton, and Read (2012) suggest. At many of these schools, sports were the

primary school-based activity, if not the only one, in which popular boys participated.

More than any other extracurricular activity, athletic achievement reinforced boys’

performance of a masculine identity. Like many participants, Patrick, a likeable 21-year-

Ashburn 36  

old white straight man who graduated from a private, Catholic high school in Connecticut

and participated in cross-country, track, and baseball, viewed athletic success as a central

quality for male popularity:

P: Um, the most popular guys? You’d have to stand out athletically. You’d have to…I think the sports that they would look for the popular guys most…baseball, basketball, football. When asked to describe the most popular male student from their high school, all

twelve interviewees identified an accomplished athlete, almost exclusively on the football

or basketball teams. The athletic involvement of these popular students seemed to

consume their identities; they were defined as “the quarterback” or the “phenom

basketball player.” There was some variation in the level of academic achievement of

these popular athletes, but this almost perfectly fell along the lines of social class and

school type. The most popular male student-athletes described by the sample from public

schools in communities with higher median incomes or private, religious schools

generally earned high grades in college-preparatory classes, matriculating to four-year

universities. Meanwhile, many of their popular, athletic counterparts attending public

schools that served predominantly working-class families were typically low-achieving

and ultimately enrolled in local state colleges or two-year institutions. As stated

previously, this is consistent with the findings of Messner (1990), who describes the

greater investment in athletics (rather than academics) among economically marginalized

boys, and Morris (2012), who emphasizes that the gender achievement gap is most

pronounced with economically disadvantaged communities.

Furthermore, while all twelve interview participants concurred that masculinity,

popularity, and athletics were closely intertwined, an important point of distinction is that

Ashburn 37  

participation in other non-athletic activities had different meanings in different school

contexts. Travis is a 20-year-old white straight man who attended a large public high

school in suburban Pennsylvania and was active on the cross-country, track, and soccer

teams. Travis describes sports as the only legitimate school activities in which popular

boys were sanctioned to participate at his school. Involvement in artistic or musical

activities, for example, marginalized boys by compromising their masculine identity and

access to peer status:

T: I think that for the most part, guys got involved with sports and if you weren’t involved with sports, you were not, um, involved in many other things. And for the guys that were involved with other clubs, like art or band, they really weren’t the popular students in high school. I had several good friends that were actually [in] the band but they weren’t really treated as being on the same level as other students because they were viewed as “the geeks” or the people that are just weird.

Caleb and Alex, gay men who attended public high schools in South Carolina and

western New York, respectively, expressed similar sentiments about the lower position of

the school orchestra, in which they both participated, relative to athletics. As I will

describe in Chapter 5, involvement in classical music, theater, and other non-athletic

student organizations was dangerous for boys who sought to perform a normative

masculine identity in some schools. However, it appears that at other high schools,

primarily those that are private or serve a more affluent population of families, non-

athletic student activities did not have such an adverse effect on boys’ popularity. I

attribute this difference to the emphasis that middle-class and upper-income families

place on fostering their children’s talents and qualifications through organized activities,

thereby preparing their children for college and other professional opportunities during

adulthood (Lareau, 2003). Patrick and Joey, both of whom attended private Catholic high

Ashburn 38  

schools in the Northeast, participated in mock trial, while Patrick was also active with

campus ministry and Joey with the math team. Jason, who also attended a private

Catholic high school in Michigan, was involved in high school’s Spanish club and

community service projects. Nate, who attended an expensive private Evangelical

Christian school in Massachusetts, played guitar with friends in an alternative rock band.

However, the responses of other participants suggest that in working-class public school

settings, involvement in such non-athletic activities had greater potential to negatively

influence boys’ popularity because they defied a class-specific construction of

masculinity.

Nevertheless, while the non-athletic extracurricular activities of these four men

did not damage their peers’ perception of them as masculine, they all remained active on

multiple sports teams in addition to their other commitments. My findings indicate that

by participating on high school sports teams, these high-achieving men were able to

bolster their successful performances of an adolescent masculine identity through their

physical fitness, competitiveness, and resulting relationships with other athletic male

peers. These outcomes had a protective effect that kept them from inhabiting a fully

subordinated position in the hierarchies of masculinity and adolescent peer status.

Reflecting on his involvement in high school sports, Travis acknowledged, “I think for

me particularly it was the difference between falling into the un-…the non-popular

group.” While none of the six high-achieving gender non-conforming men I interviewed

participated in sports during high school, five of the six high-achieving conventionally

masculine men were involved in one, two, or three school-based athletic teams. In some

cases, being on a sports team provided these men with access to a significantly different

Ashburn 39  

group of male friends than those they found in their Honors and Advanced Placement

classes. For others, their teammates were the same boys they took classes with, but the

athletic environment provided a climate that was not patrolled by teachers in which they

could collectively construct adolescent masculinity. For all of these men, the sports field,

locker room, and team bus served as arenas that called for performances of masculinity

that worked to offset the threat of assuming a nerdy or effeminate high-achieving

identity. Building relationships with high status athletes and accomplishing physical,

aggressive activities effectively “balanced” the intellectual, school-compliant activities

associated with their high achievement. This finding is closely consistent with that of

Francis, Skelton, and Read (2012), who conclude,

...a raft of international research has established the importance of ability at sport as an aspect of establishing masculinity for schoolboys. Our findings confirm its centrality in establishing and maintaining ‘popular masculinity’ (including among high achieving boys). However, beyond this, our findings suggest that ‘being good at sport’ can provide an important cornerstone of authentic masculinity that allows [high achieving popular] boys to incorporate other, potentially ‘feminine’ constructions into their subjectivities (e.g. orientation to school work; reflexivity; articulate communication, and so on), without the overall masculine construction being disturbed (156-157).

Joey, a 27-year-old Hispanic straight man and school administrator who attended

an elite single-sex Catholic high school in Rhode Island, was keenly aware of how his

place on the baseball team earned him masculine legitimacy despite his high academic

achievement. Like most of the men I interviewed, he felt that participation in “other

things,” meaning school activities beyond academics, usually sports, guarded against

potential insults related to his academic achievement. For Joey, involvement in school

activities earned him acceptance among his lower-achieving male teammates:

J: […] some of my friends who were on the baseball team with me, right, who weren’t on the Honors track, like their sort of individual perception of the higher

Ashburn 40  

classes was just like, “Alright like you’re kind of a nerd but we’re kind of okay with that, you know, because you do other things.” SA: Was nerd an insult? J: No. No, not really. I mean it was in some sense. Like, you were like…[the] only people who were called a nerd were kids who didn’t do anything else. Later, when I asked Joey to clarify whether it was general participation in any

school activities or particularly in sports that allowed him to successfully navigate high

school as a high-achieving, popular, masculine student, he emphasized that athletics

provided access to friendships with a particularly distinct population of male peers that

weren’t represented in his Advanced Placement classes, allowing him to broaden his

network and gain social capital to enhance his status:

SA: How important were sports? So like if you had just done well in school and did mock trial and math team, would you have been perceived different[ly], then, you know, adding baseball into the mix? J: Well I think baseball most broadened my social group for the most part. My cousin was on the football team and he was in the AP track and I was on the baseball team and I was on the AP track, so our ability to be friends with a larger group in the building was really dependent on the fact that we were on a sports team. A further important distinction Joey added that was recurrent in the responses of

these high-achieving, normatively masculine men was that it was only membership on

the sports team, not particularly skillful athletic ability, which upheld their claim to an

accepted masculine identity. Although their dedication and responsibility sometimes

earned them the role of team captain, none of these men described themselves as

especially talented athletes:

SA: I’m just wondering if athletic participation would be a necessity to gain popularity.

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J: Yeah, but athletic, athletic participation was an avenue to gain popularity. Athletic, like, being good at athletics, that’s a separate part of it. SA: Okay. Yeah. J: I wasn’t like…I would characterize myself as relatively popular in high school, relatively speaking, but like I was friends with kids on the baseball team, but I maybe played in like three games. Like I was on the team, but like me being on the team was not anywhere like…like it was a gateway to friendships there, but no one came to the baseball games to see me, right? So it was not like, “Oh okay, he’s really good,”…. Joey’s point of clarification further underscores how athletic participation serves

to foster relationships in a highly masculine context that supports high-achieving men’s

successful performance of a masculine identity. In addition, while almost all of the men I

interviewed described football and basketball as the most high status sports associated

with their school’s most popular boys, the sports represented among these high-achieving

men were track and field, cross-country, baseball, soccer and, in one case, lacrosse. Three

of the men I interviewed also mentioned competitive swimming as a sport participated in

by their high-achieving male classmates. Their descriptions of the social and athletic

landscapes of their schools suggest that the aggression and physical contact associated

with football and basketball better upheld the hegemonic masculine ideal and therefore

made these teams less welcoming to boys whose identities were not wholly compatible

with such expectations. Alternatively, certain mid- and low-status sports attracted boys

whose performances of masculinity did not fulfill the hegemonic ideal, including high-

achievers, seemingly because these sports were lacking the high-status boys at the top of

the masculine hierarchy who most enforced gender performance. For example, Travis

discussed his close friend group of five high-achieving, masculine boys as achieving

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popularity through their association with popular male athletes, even though, as track

athletes, they did not participate in their high-status sports themselves:

T: I mean they weren’t even on the best sports, but just being involved with sports meant that they were on the same schedule as athletes, which meant that they would hang out with them outside of school. Likewise, Jason identified his classmate Dexter, who eventually attended graduate

school for aeronautics at an extremely selective research university, as the highest

achieving boy from his high school graduating class. When I asked how this student was

perceived by his peers, Jason responded by emphasizing Dexter’s participation in two

low-status sports as important to his genre of popularity:

J: Yeah! Dexter was popular! Like people knew…popular in like his sense. Like he had a good group of friends. He also like was really good at track and cross- country. Not like the most glamorous sport but like, he was really good at that too. Ultimately Jason, who ran track and played baseball, described most of his high-

achieving male classmates as having been active in track and cross-country, so I asked

him about this connection:

SA: And was that something you would say, like the smart guys mostly did those sports? J: […] Um, we had football players in Honors and stuff but like, yeah, definitely like if, probably more like…if you went by GPA to sport, [higher GPA] would probably correlated with cross-country and track, probably. Yeah. Patrick, who ran track and cross-country and played baseball, made a similar

observation during his interview, identifying a correlation among the particular sports in

which high-achieving, athletic boys participated.

P: Um, so like a lot of times the really smart guys may not have been the ones that were like, uh, you know the big macho like football player. You know, I think, actually when I think of, as far as guys go, the ones taking the higher level classes were, you know, cross-country runners and, um, actually oddly enough mostly cross-country runners. So, you know, which is a sport that like, you know, most

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people don’t associate with like, you know, the high school jock. You know, it’s mostly football, baseball, basketball, those kids of sports, so… Joey felt similarly about the masculine hierarchy of sports teams: SA: Were certain sports more masculine than others? J: (laughs) Yeah I mean nobody thought kids on the cross-country team were masculine. Actually, the irony, thinking about [an extremely high-achieving, popular male swimmer in Joey’s class] is that nobody thought swimming was all that masculine. You had to play basketball or football, maybe lacrosse. Moreover, Caleb, a high-achieving gay man who did not participate in any high

school sports, hypothesized a similar theory about his South Carolina high school, where

football and basketball were the most celebrated and “mainstream” sports:

C: So I actually think that there is, I actually think there is some correlation between these more, uh, participation in these more marginalized athletics, some of the slightly less mainstream athletics and the, uh, attracting those who would also be higher academic achievers. I think the dominant paradigm for guys who were, um, who were in the more mainstream athletics was just that, uh, academics was just not very…was not especially important. I mean you might be, you know, do okay but nothing to fret over. The implication presented here is that high-status sports that more closely

symbolize hegemonic masculinity were incompatible with the identities of high-

achieving boys. Alternatively, sports that are more individual, like cross-country, track

and field, and swimming, and sports that involve less physical collision, like soccer and

baseball, appealed more to high-achieving, conventionally masculine men and provided

them with a forum to sufficiently reconcile their competing masculine and high-achieving

identities and maintain popularity. In this way, their performance failed to fully

approximate the adolescent hegemonic ideal based on aggression, toughness, thrill-

seeking, and violence, but their participation in high school athletics made them complicit

in the institution of athletics which contributed to gender stratification.

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Worth noting is that the one high-achieving, masculine performing man in the

sample who did not participate on a high school sports team was Russell, a muscular,

bearded 26-year-old straight man who attended high school in Montana. When I asked

Russell about his feelings towards masculinity during high school, he explained that his

physical strength and involvement in an out-of-school sport, competitive paintball,

fulfilled a similar function, perhaps even to a greater extent, as school-based athletic

participation did for the five other men:

R: […] I felt having some of the characteristics of the athletes made it easier to not feel unmasculine. Even if I wasn’t involved in their activities, I felt like I could have been if I wanted to. But I, I don’t feel like I was particularly passive, you know. I…oh, I probably should have mentioned, you asked what other activities I was involved in in high school. Um, every weekend I was playing paintball competitively with like sixty other people and so that was a pretty hyper- masculine activity. There were a lot of military guys that were playing and I was interacting with people that were older than me, so some of the people that were involved in this are in their mid-twenties and, like I said, were hyper-masculine types and I don’t know that I was particularly bullied by them, but it became clear from an early point that I needed to act pretty masculine with them in order to not be bullied. As his response suggests, Russell presents his participation in an aggressive

recreational activity as evidence that he was not “passive” during high school, a trait

which, in the context of our interview, is a potential weakness of being high-achieving

and, as a result, un-masculine. The masculinity he was expected to display during

weekend paintball games counteracted the academic behaviors he exhibited during

school, allowing him to maintain a high-achieving, masculine identity. Furthermore,

Russell recognized that his participation in the paintball community necessitated a

conscious performance of masculinity in order to be accepted by his peers. As I will

discuss in the next section of this chapter, most high-achieving conventionally masculine

men expressed that they experienced a similar pressure to perform particular identities in

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masculine settings, especially in athletic contexts. This sometimes made sports a source

of internal conflict, as was the case for Travis, who attended a public school in which, he

believes, many boys were underachieving and most student-athletes did not prioritize

academics. While Travis believed that his participation on several sports teams had

enabled his popularity, he struggled to integrate his high-achievement with the carefree

attitudes of his track and soccer teammates. This led him to end his involvement during

his last year of high school:

T: […] for the students that I was involved with on the sports teams, I actually wasn’t as close to. Uh, I was only close to two of them, which were, they actually ran track with me but they also were those two kids who were also very high- achieving and I was in the classroom with them. Beyond that I wasn’t…I never actually…especially with soccer, I never, uh, would spend the time with the students outside of actually playing soccer or actually running track. Uh, most of my friends were in academics. SA: And […] how did your teammates relate to you then, given that you didn’t spend much time with them outside of practice and games? T: I actua-…I wasn’t really, um, it made things really tough actually because I wouldn’t spend much time with them afterwards and I, as soon as kind of practice ended I would kind of jet out and go do my homework or go find my other friends and that kind of made it very discomforting really the last year. And my senior year, I actually chose to stop running cross-country because I felt out of place, um, and actually kind of quit sports altogether midway through my senior year. Um, and that was simply because I just felt distant to a lot of the students on the team because many of them didn’t really have the same workload as I did and I felt that we were dissimilar in that way. SA: And so you felt like those students didn’t prioritize academics? Do you feel like that was something that made you different from them and made you sort of isolated? T: Exactly. So I felt that they didn’t take academics as seriously as I did, and therefore I wanted to, uh, kind of get away from them because I felt like we were different. Travis’ experience was unique among my sample, but given that he is one of just

two high-achieving, heterosexual, conventionally masculine men I interviewed who

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attended a public high school, he calls attention to the notably different circumstances

present in private, religious schools in which the majority of students’ parents

presumably have the resources, both economic and cultural, to invest in their children’s

secondary education. Thus, it is important to note that while high-achieving, popular

young men may appear to have adeptly overcome the specter of effeminacy by

participating on athletics, the cultural contexts of individual schools and individual sports

significantly affects the comfort and ease with which high achieving boys can integrate

their achievement with athleticism. Nevertheless, this strategy of athletic participation

proved effective for all six high-achieving men who succeeded at performing a masculine

identity in the eyes of their high school peers.

Navigating Multiple Identities

As suggested by the preceding section, fluid movement between academic spaces,

such as advanced courses and curriculum-related extracurricular groups (math team,

mock trial, Spanish club), and male-dominated athletic contexts was a central practice for

high-achieving, masculine performing men. Like Joey’s experience on the baseball team

illustrates, developing relationships with multiple social groups prevented these high-

achieving men from having their social identities at school be solely defined by their

academic accomplishments. Had they not actively socialized with average- and low-

achieving students, their exclusive commitment to academics would have made them

vulnerable to the statuses of “nerd” or “fag,” as the current literature indicates. Thus, this

strategy of successfully integrating themselves into numerous peer groups by actively

affecting their particular norms and practices mitigated against the potential for their

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high-achieving identity to label them as “weird,” withdrawn, or studious to the point of

aloofness.

Sociability and connections with various social groups during high school were

important to many of the high-achieving, conventionally masculine men I interviewed,

and also important to many of their similar male friends. Travis described his class

president and high school valedictorian as a boy who used style, humor, and charisma to

relate to low-achieving students (“the other peer group”), leading boisterous cheers in the

stands at school football games.

T: I think for the most part students that were, um, high-achieving, specifically guys that were high-achieving, were not, um, as highly regarded or viewed as popular in high school and I think my valedictorian is an exception because he found a way to connect to the, kind of, the other peer group. Russell described a popular, high-achieving boy from his high school class in a

similar way, as someone who had established relationships with multiple social groups,

thereby preventing him from embodying the “classic nerd stereotype,” despite his

academic achievement.

SA: So […] would you have described him as popular at the time? R: Not near[ly] as popular as say the athletes were, but popular in a more generalized way. He was popular among a few different cliques in school. […] R: […] Um, there was people like I’m talking about with this student who, while I say that he’s introverted, he’s connected to people. He knows lots of people, while that’s very different from your classic nerd stereotype who doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t know anybody… The high-achieving, normatively masculine men I interviewed consistently

described themselves and male classmates like them as comfortable interacting with all

types of students, including male athletes who most closely performed hegemonic

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masculinity. In this way, I describe these men as representing complicit masculinities in

that they endorsed the dominant masculine ideals and acquired social capital by

conforming to the norms of their high-status male peers. When I asked Jason to describe

the major social groups of his high school, he identified jocks, “theater kids,” and

“stoners.” I later asked him to identify his own location in this social landscape, to which

he explained that his identity allowed him to interact with all students, including popular

athletes, even though he wasn’t one of “the loudest” high-status athletes himself:

J: Then there was like the middle group that like…I was in the middle group, where you played sports but you weren’t like the loudest. Like my best friend Bobby was the same thing. He had some Honors classes, I had a little more. Just like the, like, I don’t know how to describe them. They were just like, you can talk to anyone. I could go up to talk to [a star basketball player] if I wanted and I would. I would sit next to him in class. I could talk to [two other popular basketball players], like they knew me and my family, ‘cause they were teammates with my brother. Um, you know, you just, I mean this sounds stereotypical, but like you know, the middle, like you talk sports, you know, you know, the game that you watched or you know, stuff like that, just like you know, the average American boys I guess. Russell also found it important to navigate between multiple social groups to

sustain popularity, noting that, despite his investment in academics, some male friends

would not be interested in or impressed by his achievements:

R: Yeah, I think that that was the…that’s always been a thing for me, was switching up between different groups and “This is what’s important to this group so these are the things to talk about and maybe not mention this.” Yeah, I mean with the example of [my] low-achieving friend, that certainly comes up, that I rarely ever talked about what I was doing academically. When I met Nate for his interview, he was a 23-year-old recent college graduate

with an engineering degree from a selective university in the Northeast, excited to start

his first professional job. Charming and sincere, he had been raised in large religious

family, was homeschooled for most of his education, and had spent his final three years

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of high school at a private, Christian high school near Boston. During high school he had

observed his close friend from childhood, whom he described as bright and high-

achieving, adopt the performance and style of a preppy, lacrosse “bro,” allowing him to

be assimilated into the popular male group at their school:

N: […] yeah, they were kind of into the lax bro kind of thing. And I played lacrosse and like I started and stuff so it wasn’t like I was out of that circle either, it’s just like they kind of really embodied that. I’m thinking my best friend that I grew up with who also went to the school at the same time I did and was homeschooled until then…so I mean like we did the exact same thing. But I kinda saw his progression going from like homeschooler into like frat bro and then even to college he became like a real frat bro (laughs) so but I saw that progression, so to me it was like he kind of really embodied that group which was preppy and… Later, Nate elaborated on how his formerly homeschooled high-achieving friend

had established athletics as his “main thing” in order to embody the “full package.” In

this school context, Nate felt that an identity defined exclusively by high achievement

and academic effort would not gain popularity for boys. However, he suggested that

academic achievement could be merged with multiple other characteristics, like being

“cool” and not appearing to try “too hard” at schoolwork, in order to gain status. In this

way, it was important for high-achieving, popular male students to navigate and

acceptably perform multiple identities, such as athlete, cool, and relaxed, so that the

negative social effects of their high achievement could be neutralized:

SA: So was this guy, your friend, involved in other things at school? Like clubs or…? N: His big things were sports. And I played…he did all three seasons, so there’s like fall, winter, spring. I did the fall and spring. And we both started soccer and lacrosse, so…and I was pretty good too, so I mean, again we were kinda on the same level in that sense but he really took that on, like that was his thing and that was never my main thing. So, and he got recognized for it. He won a lot of awards at the school ‘cause he was a very hard-working athlete. Um, so… SA: So he fit in with this popular in-crowd that you were talking about before?

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N: Yeah, yeah, he definitely did. I feel like he, he probably like made himself fit in. Not like he would have trouble, but like he wanted to be in that crowd so like he really like adopted that kind of…’cause I saw the change from who he was to this kind of like edgy kind of… SA: Do you think sports were an important part of him being able to do that? N: To fit in? SA: To gain popularity there, with those people? N: I think it was helpful. Everybody in that circle was a good athlete. Um, so, I think, yeah, that’s like a good common ground. Again, it’s kind of that image thing. Like just having like the full package, like being cool and like down to earth and not looking like you try hard but still being one of the top in your class and being phenomenal…I think that’s kind of what everybody thinks they want to be. This “full package” identity maneuvering was the focus of most of my interview

with Joey, who, as a middle school administrator and former high school teacher, was

very aware of social dynamics among adolescents. As he explains below, Joey felt that

the ability to successfully pass as belonging in Honors courses and with the football team

was essential to maintaining a popular, masculine (“dude”) identity. When boys struggled

with navigating these multiple performances, they were often left to be defined by their

academic achievement alone, which severely compromised their masculine identity and

popularity.

J: It’s an all-boys school, there’s no place for introverts in the popular world. And I mean that not as an opinion. That’s what the reality was. The more introverted you were, the less likely you were to be…[…]…your ability to sort of gain popularity came primarily from your ability […] to be able to sit at the lunch table freshman year with your freshmen football team and also be in Honors math was an ability to be like, “Yeah, you’re the dude man. You can do both.” The ability to do both…so that’s an interpersonal thing in some ways ‘cause you had to convince the kids who weren’t on the Honors track but were in the sports that like you were still one of them, right? So that’s kind of like level of interpersonal relationships…navigating that was really important for changing your popularity track, but for the most part the more introverted you were.... SA: Can you think of guys who really failed at that?

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J: Yeah (laughs) SA: Can you tell me about some of them? J: Yeah. I mean, so I can think of…there was this kid, his name was Mike, and Mike was a…he was a…he tried out for basketball, didn’t make the team, three years. Every year he tried out, didn’t make the team. So he knew all the basketball guys and he decided that the best way for him to maintain his relationships with the basketball players while still being in calculus would be to be the manager of the team. And he did not like…he assumed wrongfully I guess that being like the manager was equivalent status to being on the team and what he ended up finding was that no one on the team gave a shit about him and no one in class gave a shit about he was the manager of the team. And so all of a sudden, he sort of like devoted all this time to being the manager and like the basketball team didn’t look at him. And he’d go and be like, “Hey guys,” but he couldn’t sit with the basketball players at lunch, right? But he really cared about that so he was not in with the other people…so I mean, like that’s a silly small example. People who tried to do like…if you tried to navigate friend groups and failed, you were like…that was it for you. You were done. SA: But Mike did really well in school? J: Yeah, but like he very quickly became the type of kid, like he stopped being the manager of the team because they wouldn’t like him and very quickly became what we talked about, like the nerd being the insult. Like you’re a nerd, that’s it. And he invested himself fully into his studies, went to [selective private university], graduated top of the class, but that was it. Subsequently, Joey identified his close friend, Jung-Hwa, as exceptionally

popular in their all-male high school because he “spanned every social group.” Jung-

Hwa’s ability to seamlessly negotiate disparate social spaces, between athletes, stoners,

and high achievers, bolstered his coolness and prevented his academic achievement from

marking him as unmasculine or nerdy.

J: Um, his name was Jung-Hwa. Jung-Hwa was, he was an Asian kid from a family of doctors. His expectation was, like, get a full-ride to wherever you go. That’s how he came from though. He was captain of the swim team. He was on math team with me (laughs). He was probably the biggest stoner at school, which is a whole access to a different group of people. And he was like one of like the Peer Mediators, which was, Peer Mediation was like an elite status at the school. If you were picked by your peers to be a mediator it was because people trusted you and

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like that was better than being captain of the football team, being Peer Mediator. And so like, Jung-Hwa was the coolest kid in the school ‘cause he literally spanned every social group and finished fifth in the class, full ride to [highly selective private university], um, and he had all that going for him. And he was the most popular because it didn’t matter. He’d be like, “Oh I wanna sit with the stoners today. I wanna go on a math team meet downtown…but I can’t ‘cause I got swim team practice,” you know? He was able to navigate all of that. […] Even faculty, to be honest with you, in terms of like, if you were asked a poll of the teachers in my building that day, who is the best student at this school…he would have been an example of one of the kids. They didn’t know that he was like dealing drugs on the side but like… Joey’s own experience as a high-achieving, masculine performing adolescent was

characterized by an intense awareness of, what he described as, “the social pressure to

learn how to code-switch because of the desire to keep in multiple groups.” For Joey,

adapting his behavior to conform to the preferences, attitudes, and styles of multiple

social groups offset his “smart kid” identity and made him well-liked by his male peers.

Like most of the high-achieving, masculine performing men I interviewed, Joey’s

performance of multiple identities during middle and high school was critical to earning

peer status and being perceived as masculine.

SA: You felt good being studious? J: Yeah, I felt…but I was also involved in other things. Like when I reflect on who I was as a middle school student, I was the smart kid, everyone knew me as the smart kid, everyone treated me as the smart kid. SA: And that wasn’t something that made you feel… J: No. And that’s weird, it’s very strange and I look back and I have very good friends who were not the smart kids and were the kids who would make fun of the smart kids and didn’t make fun of me for that. So I was like very much….I was very much like, “Yeah you know, you’re a smart kid. Joey’s the smart kid that we wanna do homework with.” SA: And why do you think that…why were you different? J: Because I was really good in middle school at code-switching (laughs). I was really good at it. It’s probably the one thing I was better at than academics. I was

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better at…I was known as a smart guy and raised my hand all the time in middle school, nothing would stop me from that, but when I’d sit at the lunch table, I’d talk about whatever everyone else wanted to talk about and recognize that in this conversation you guys wanna talk about X, Y, and Z, so I’m good at that. […] J: [...] so I had to figure out a way to be smart and not be vulnerable. To try out different things. So that’s probably why I got involved in, um, probably why I got involved in a multitude of different things. That’s probably why I stopped just playing one sport and played three sports. Probably why I didn’t dispute being all these different things because it gave me access to a lot of different people and I felt comfortable. If I could be with people who I wasn’t better than at things that they were really good at, it’d be a whole lot easier for them to accept me when I was really good at what they weren’t really good at. Notably, while Joey’s responses often suggested that he was proud of his ability

to successfully maneuver between diverse social spaces, he also expressed concern that

the “pressure to be everyone’s friend everywhere you go” could be debilitating for

adolescents. He had observed many peers at his elite, high-performing, all-male school

struggle with maintaining a sense of “internal identity” because peer and community

expectations demanded that they perform multiple counterfeit identities.

J: […] ‘Cause now you’ve got the pressure to be everyone’s friend everywhere you go and to have that connection with people regardless and so like it can lead…and what I can see when I was teaching and what I saw with my friends, multiple identities can lead to like no internal identity. Like an honest to God, I don’t know who I am because I have to be this person. While relationships with numerous groups of high-status students proved difficult

to maintain for some of the high-achieving, masculine performing men I interviewed, the

ability to do so allowed all six of the men I discuss in this chapter to not be

“pigeonholed” by their high level of school achievement. By proving their ability to

assimilate to multiple predominantly male peer groups, they accrued social capital at the

expense of complicity with hegemonic masculinity.

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Go with the Flow

Another strategy by which high-achieving men avoided being perceived as nerdy

or feminine by their peers was through publicly distancing themselves from their school

successes and their investment in achievement. As I have stated previously, a significant

body of literature on masculinity and schools reveals that appearing to care about

academics severely undermines adolescent boys’ ability to perform a masculine identity

among their peers (Willis, 1977; Epstein, 1998; Francis et al., 2012; Morris, 2012;

Jackson & Dempster, 2009). As British researchers Jackson and Dempster (2009)

explain, “research has demonstrated that the ‘uncool to work’ pupil discourse is a

powerful one in many secondary schools and is at the core of cool, popular, ‘laddish’

masculinity” (344). The authors’ research reveals that in both high schools and colleges,

“effortful achievement” was conflated with femininity, while men described themselves

as “laid-back” and “dismissive” (345) toward their academic assignments. One of the

authors’ college participants described himself as writing major assignments in a few

hours the night before a deadline while drinking whisky and preparing for a night with

friends at a bar:

Dave presents himself as very cool and relaxed despite the imminent deadline (‘I sat back on my computer’), as able to handle his drink (‘emptied the bottle of whisky’) and as someone who can work quickly and efficiently and still manage a social life (‘and I’m in the pub for last orders’). In many ways this description epitomises cool, laddish, effortless achievement, and is contrasted with the prolonged, ‘faffing’ process that he perceives women adopt (347).

In this British context, faffing refers to conducting extensive research and

completing multiple revisions for class writing assignments. For the men Jackson and

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Dempster interviewed, this level of effort was described as an inferior, feminine style of

working. Furthermore, the authors explore the hypothesis that, in addition to helping

young men perform a cool masculine identity, minimal effort and care “can also act to

protect these same boys and men from the detrimental implications of failure” (348). By

investing minimally in academic achievement, an incorrect answer in class or a low grade

on an assignment did not compromise boys’ feelings of self-worth or sense of

intelligence. The authors write, “There are numerous examples from the interviews of

boys and men discussing how they presented an image of indifference to their peers so

that if they ‘failed’ they could blame a lack of effort rather than a lack of ability” (349). A

nearly identical argument is made in the work of Morris (2012), who describes the

attitude of “contrived carelessness” as both allowing adolescent men to perform a

relaxed, cool, indifferent masculinity which was valued by their peer culture while

simultaneously protecting against feelings of shame and low self-esteem if they visibly

tried at academics and did not succeed. Additionally, Jackson and Dempster (2009) note

that in order for academically high-achieving men to perform “laddish” masculinity, they

had to represent their achievement as the result of little effort and much natural ability.

Presenting oneself as an effortless achiever has many benefits. Male students who pretend to do no work when actually they have worked hard – ‘closet learners’ as Covington (1998) calls them – may be seen to be in an ‘all-win’ situation in relation to their peers. First, they may be regarded by their friends as ‘cool’ for not working. Second, they reinforce their masculinity through the implicit contrast with effortful (therefore inauthentic) feminine achievement. Third, if they fail academically they can attribute their failure publically to a lack of effort rather than to a lack of ability (although privately this may not be so straightforward). Fourth, if they do succeed they may present it to their friends as effortless achievement which is associated with ‘genius’ (349-350).

Notably, all of the men I interviewed did devote significant effort to their high

school academic achievement and my findings do not suggest that the high-achieving,

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masculine performing men actively concealed their grades, academic recognitions, or

college acceptances. Instead, they worked to minimize assumptions based on these

accomplishments that they were uptight or strait-laced by representing themselves as

relaxed, agreeable, and carefree. This allowed them to position themselves in contrast to

two other categories of high-achieving male students: those who were perceived as aloof,

friend-less bookworms with underdeveloped social skills (not represented in my sample)

and those seen as self-righteous, hyperinvolved teacher’s pets (discussed in the next

chapter). In the high school context that valued carelessness and effortlessness as

masculine qualities, these “types” of boys seemed unwilling to “go with the flow,” which

effectively relegated them to a subordinate status and encouraged other high-achieving

boys to conform to a casual, easygoing masculine identity.

23-year-old Nate compared himself to several boys from his private Christian

high school whose attitudes towards their high academic achievement prohibited them

from being accepted by their popular male peers. Unlike himself and his best friend Peter,

another high-achieving boy in their class was unusually public about the effort he put into

his school assignments. This surprised Nate because he sensed a social pressure among

his male friends to present achievement as the result of natural intelligence.

SA: …so like what made [high-achieving male student] significantly different from someone like you who kind of made it all work? N: He was less social. Less outgoing, for sure. Um, I feel like we had to kind of get him out of his shell a little bit. Um, it just seemed a lot more obvious that he was like really working hard, to like get through stuff…[…] It was like we knew he was gonna succeed but he had to put in effort. I think he was…he’s just more verbal about that. So again, like my friend Peter wouldn’t like…gave you this impression of just like, he’s that smart that he doesn’t have to work that hard, like he just gets the answers really quickly…so, and he would never let on that the case was anything else than that. Whereas, I think I was surprised at times by this other guy, by the things he would say, because it was like, “Oh, you’re kind of

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like letting on that it was difficult for you to do this.” Even, I didn’t like to ever phrase something that made it sound like I struggled with any assignment or anything. By revealing his academic effort, this student violated the approach of effortless

achievement, which undermined his masculinity. Secondly, Nate described another high-

achieving boy as unusually refined, which classified him as a nerd, while Nate was open

to “joking around” and socializing with his male peers, allowing him to “balance” his

social (masculine) and academic identities.

N: It’s kind of the social thing, I guess. Like, I did sports, I was involved with some groups. I felt like I was able to fit in socially with people, as far as just having conversations and joking around and stuff. Whereas like this other kid I was talking to you about that was like really strait-laced, like, just the way he dressed and presented himself and his mannerisms and the way he talked, it was all kinda proper and like it didn’t make him seem like a high school kid, in some situations. Which […] that was more like the nerd thing. This high-achieving boy’s formal self-presentation violated the relaxed

carelessness that was important for maintaining a popular, masculine identity. In contrast,

Nate recalled the importance of “not car[ing]” during his senior year of high school when

he best fit in with the most masculine performing, popular athletes at his high school:

N: Um, again like these guys are like genuine friends of mine so it wasn’t like I was just doing it to fit in, but at the same time like, I remember like senior year, lacrosse…like that was the…like I felt like that was when I best fit in with that kind of group. And it was just kind of like because I felt like, “Yeah, I’m just gonna go along with this and just hang out and not care ‘cause it’s senior year.” I don’t know. So… Nate elaborated that opting not to challenge the attitudes and behaviors of the

popular guys was essential for remaining in their social group. He cited one example

during a school-sponsored trip to Europe when several popular guys were photographed

smoking a cigar and were subsequently punished when school staff saw the photo. Nate

admitted that he agreed with the school’s decision to punish his friends, but he

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recognized that it was important for him to be “cool” with their behavior in order to fit in

with their social group. Students who were uncomfortable with rebellious behavior were

excluded from popularity:

N: When I think about cool, and especially the way I defined it in high school, it’s like effortless or like just kind of being okay with stuff, which that’s like the vaguest thing you could ever say, (laughs) but like for me, for me, if I was like intent on trying to fit in with this group, like the way I would like best like kinda represent myself to them would like, “Yeah, I’m like cool with what you guys are doing. I’m just here to hang out and like talk about whatever you’re talking about,” or whatever. So I feel like kids that were more conservative or like would have a problem with anything they were doing would kind of exclude them. And like we did have a lot of like conservative Christian kids, a lot of the girls were more conservative, and that was like a distinct group as well and like there was like no, no cross-over between those groups because they were like, “No, we don’t like you guys and what you’re doing.” This ability to “go with the flow” was integral to high-achieving Nate’s

performance of a masculine identity during high school. He explained that while some

high-achieving students, especially girls, openly challenged the humor of the school’s

“class clowns,” he accepted their pranks with amusement:

N: Okay, for instance, these kids are in class and they decide to prank one of the teachers. Like I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t be part of that, I wouldn’t prank the teacher, but I could appreciate the humor in the situation (laughs). As Nate highlights, a willingness to “joke around” with little concern for teachers’

reactions was an effective element of performing masculinity. When I asked Jason to

describe the most popular boys from his high school, he replied:

J: Probably like pretty charismatic or when…they were funny and kinda easygoing. Um, able to just like joke around… Similarly, Patrick noted that when popular guys were in a high-achieving space,

like an Advanced Placement classroom, they would employ humor to demonstrate their

masculinity and status:

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P: I think, and I’m thinking of like a few different examples of like, the popular guys and, you know, so if you were, you know, top ten percent guys, you’d probably take, you know, five, six AP classes over your high school experience. If you were, you know, maybe not the top ten percent but you were still like, you know, you were still a bright student but you were more of a popular guy, you might take one, maybe two AP classes because there was still a high, um, high achievement within the high school. Um, but when those, when those students taking maybe one AP class were in that class, it was really apparent because you didn’t see them in all your other classes. Um, and so in that sense they may, you know, they may crack more jokes or like be more goofy in class… Meanwhile, according to Nate and many of the men I interviewed, boys who were

considered too obedient or too invested in the institutional rules and expectations of the

school, and thus were unwilling to participate in masculine classroom humor, were

targets of the “fag discourse,” thereby highlighting how contrived carelessness and a

willingness to go along with the practices of the school’s high-status guys were

compulsory for high-achieving young men who sought to maintain an acceptable

performance of masculinity among their peers.

SA: What are some of the common insults you would have heard guys direct at other guys? N: Um, I feel like the word gay might have been tossed around a bit. SA: That’s pretty normal. But like what would that be used for? Like what behavior would earn that an insult? N: Caring too much, almost. SA: About what? N: I feel like it could be a lot of things. Just being more uptight. Even from Nate’s brief response, it is not difficult to see how, if care and

conscientiousness are perceived as gay, academic achievement, which is associated with

effort and dedication, is not a desirable enterprise for adolescent boys. Thus, high-

achieving, masculine performing men were careful not to overemphasize their investment

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in school rules, activities, or assignments. A notable distinction is that while almost all

six of the high-achieving sexual minority men I interviewed held a top leadership

position in a non-athletic school-based organization, only one of the six high-achieving

heterosexual men I have discussed in this chapter pursued a similar public leadership

opportunity. I argue that this is because leadership in such extracurricular activities

symbolizes both sincerely and voluntarily caring about a non-athletic interest and an

investment in the school institution. For the high-achieving, masculine performing men,

leading the student government or theater group would have compromised their efforts to

appear easygoing and indifferent.

Conclusion

The high-achieving heterosexual men I discuss in the chapter engaged in

significant identity work in order to adequately perform a masculine identity in their high

school social environment. Active involvement in sports, assimilating to multiple male-

dominated social groups, and performing a chill, easygoing persona mitigated against

stereotypes of high-achievers as pedantic, uptight, and unadventurous, qualities that were

also symbolically linked to effeminacy in adolescent boys. These strategies of

performance successfully allowed these high-achieving men to subsume their high level

of achievement within an overall masculine identity that was accepted as legitimate by

the peer culture of their specific socioeconomic and school context. However, in contrast

to the high-achieving sexual minority students I will discuss in the coming chapter, these

smart guys did little surprisingly little to challenge or transgress the authority of

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hegemonic masculinity, making them complicit in the patriarchal structure that governed

their high school social landscape.

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CHAPTER 5: SUBORDINATED MASCULINITIES, IDENTITY, AND EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

“That identity was never an option for me.” – Will, 24, gay man

The previous chapter illustrates the strategies of balance practiced by high-

achieving young men who were still judged as masculine by their peers even though their

authentic commitments to school and to learning had the potential to injure their

masculine identity. While these tactics were available to half of the men I interviewed, all

six of whom identified as heterosexual, the other half of high-achieving men in the

sample did not report any meaningful attempts to be read as masculine by their high

school peers. Instead, each of these men’s experiences suggested that they recognized

early in their education that their personal qualities would not allow them to accomplish a

successfully masculine identity in the eyes of their peers. Contrary to the adolescent

masculine ideal they were surrounded by, these men did not perform well at athletics,

they developed a sincere passion for a form of expression seen as un-cool or un-

masculine, they experienced close relationships with teachers and other adults, and they

ultimately self-identified as gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (GBTQ) during

adolescence or early adulthood. By behaving in ways that did not conform to the

expectations of their gender and were perceived by their peers as effeminate or gay, these

men were stigmatized and condemned to a subordinated masculinity, since, according to

Connell (1995), “oppression positions homosexual masculinities at the bottom of a

gender hierarchy among men” (78). In her own empirical work, Connell found extreme

instances of adult gay men’s resistance to hegemonic masculinity through “seizing on a

hyper-masculine persona” or “doing something outrageously unmasculine” (147). She

argues that through numerous personal and political projects, adult gay men come to

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embody a contextually-bound homosexual masculinity that is not necessarily effeminate,

although their object-choice certainly has the effect of “shattering [the] hegemony” (162).

This suggests the possibility that the GBTQ men in my study who represented a

subordinated masculinity could have engaged in acts of resistance and non-compliance

that effectively allowed them to maintain a masculine sense of self despite their failure to

perform an adolescent masculine ideal.

However, with Connell’s theoretical contributions in mind, I alternatively found

that the high-achieving, gender non-conforming men I interviewed essentially forfeited

their claim to a masculine identity, which allowed for the possibility of them to engage

with alternative (un-masculine) interests and behaviors and consequently propelled their

academic achievement and sense of high-achieving identity. Their complex reflections on

their high school experiences suggest that a pre-adolescent sense of masculine

inadequacy encouraged them to thoroughly opt out of seeing themselves as masculine or

investing in the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. In contrast to the outwardly masculine

high-achieving young men from the previous chapter, these men did not view themselves

as capable of accomplishing masculinity and therefore did not have to grapple with

integrating high achievement into their adolescent identities. Instead, they successfully

developed alternative talents and achieved highly in arenas that their peers associated

with femininity, including academics, but rather than experience conflict or shame in

response, they drew validation, self-esteem, and empowerment from their exceptionality.

Additionally, for most of the men, especially those raised in poor or working-class

families, even if success in education did not accrue peer status during high school, it

carried the long-term promise of mobility and liberation, which was consequential for

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these men who, despite their high self-worth, had endured a lack of belonging among

their peers for most of their lives. The conclusion I reached upon hearing these high-

achieving, gender non-conforming men’s stories is that their awareness of their

subordinated masculine status compelled them to surrender any attempt at proving their

masculine legitimacy and, upon this recognition, they felt free to pursue a broader range

of expression and activities and succeeded at replacing their forfeited masculine identity

with a secure identity based on high-achievement.

In his essay “Choices, Not Closets: Heterosexism and Homophobia in Schools,”

Richard A. Friend (1993) makes the claim that, while the marginalization that gay and

lesbian students frequently experience in school can undoubtedly lead to harmful

behaviors and negative outcomes, “it is as likely that within this context of oppressive

silencing, lesbian and gay students develop strong sources of inner strength and a healthy

sense of self and excel academically and socially” (220). Among the approaches Friend

offers by which sexual minority youth respond to their subjugation is the “best little boy

in the world” hypothesis, originally presented in a 1976 autobiography by Andrew

Tobias, which Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler (2013) define as a process “whereby young

sexual minority men learn to deflect attention away from their concealed stigma through

overcompensation in achievement-related domains” (177). Pachankis and

Hatzenbuehler’s psychological examination of this hypothesis relies on previous research

on stigma and contingent self-worth, which claims that in order to maintain self-worth in

oppressive contexts,

stigmatized individuals might adaptively shift away from investing their self-worth in domains in which external validation is traditionally precarious for members of their group, or compensate for social devaluation by staking their self-worth in those domains that afford more assured success (177).

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The authors’ quantitative study of 195 heterosexual and sexual minority male

college students found that “sexual minority men, compared to heterosexual men,

reported self-worth that was significantly more contingent on academic competence,

appearance, and competition – the three achievement-related domains” (183). In their

conclusion, Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler also turn to socialization and interactions with

the peer culture as processes that further support their claims, noting,

Compared to others’ acceptance of a presumably devalued stigmatized self, academics, appearance, and competition may be safer domains in which young sexual minority men can invest their self-worth and represent means for young sexual minority men to gain esteem even within the threatening environment surrounding many sexual minority youth. Successful performance in these domains can garner social and economic capital, which one can subsequently spend to change or escape a given geographic locale (186).

I began this project aware of these findings, which mirror my own life experience,

and I was not surprised to find the “best little boy in the world” narrative reflected in the

responses of the high-achieving sexual minority men whom I interviewed. However, the

stories they shared did not suggest a passive, subconscious adaptation to the potential

stigma of being exposed as a sexual minority. In fact, the dynamic could not be quite so

simple, since high academic achievement itself was among the un-masculine behaviors

that was judged as effeminate and earned the insults of “fag” and “queer,” meaning that,

while educational achievement could lead to eventual rewards in adulthood, it had

additional costs for gender non-conforming boys during high school. Thus, given the

added potential for high achievement to garner suspicion of homosexuality among boys,

the “best little boy in the world” hypothesis as stated seems to be an ineffective

psychological response.

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My findings, as I will present below, are consistent with the essence of this

theory: indeed, many sexual minority men do not feel validated by their majority peer

culture and do invest heavily in academic success. However, the stories I heard indicate

that this is not because they must find a compensatory source of self-worth when faced

with the threat of social stigma based on their sexual identity. Rather, these men assessed

themselves against the hegemonic ideal and asserted an active rejection of what they saw

as restrictive and vapid standards of masculinity. From their perspectives, trying to earn

status as a male in a peer culture that valued such an ideal was hopeless (because they

couldn’t do it) and unimaginative (because they wanted to do something more).

McCready (2010) describes a similar process of “disidentification” (50) among gay and

gender non-conforming African American boys who recognized their difference and

detached themselves from the symbols of masculinity valued by their male peers. “By

disidentifying with LL Cool J and instead identifying with ‘Diana [Ross] and Janet

[Jackson],’ Jamal separated himself from the majority of black male peers,” (51) writes

McCready, illustrating that identification with icons of black femininity empowered

Jamal once he forfeited his identification with masculinity.

Of course, this renouncement of masculinity was not simple or absolute, but it

made it possible for these men to engage heavily in activities that their adolescent peer

culture alleged that they shouldn’t care about as men, like literature, classical music,

theater, singing, social activism, doing homework, asking thoughtful questions in class,

and building personal connections with teachers. Thus, although most were educated in

contexts that effeminized high academic achievement and investment in the institutional

elements of school, their dissociation from masculinity invited the possibility for their

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impressive academic success, which subsequently led to enhanced self-esteem and

empowerment. While all six of these gender non-conforming men certainly embodied the

character of the “best little boy in the world” to varying degrees, most of them would not

consider their achievement to be an act of compensation for insecurity about their sexual

identity. As their stories will show, they were agents in establishing an unconventional

adolescent identity that was highly compatible with their academic achievement, a

compatibility that was absent (or required careful cultivation) for most of their gender

normative male peers.

Disidentification: Athletics and Masculinity

While athletic participation proved to be a critical strategy by which many high-

achieving boys maintained a masculine identity among their peers, sports were a site of

discomfort and withdrawal for high-achieving boys who felt they did not have what it

took to succeed athletically. All six of the men who identified as sexual minorities

expressed a dislike or disinterest in sports as a teenager, which most men perceived to

result from a combination of poor athletic skill and anxiety about the homophobic

attitudes they associated with male athletes. These men often developed their aversion to

athletics before high school, with middle school serving as the period when most schools

first enforce sex-segregation on sports teams and in physical education classes. When

asked why he avoided taking P.E. during high school, Eduardo, a gentle 23-year-old

queer-identified Hispanic man who attended high school in a suburb of Los Angeles,

highlighted how he did not feel at ease in athletic spaces:

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E: Well it was just a matter of like I, I wasn’t into sports, so didn’t like playing them, didn’t like, uh, didn’t understand most of them, wasn’t good at them, and I think was a very, at least in middle school, it was a very homophobic space and I think as a freshman [in high school] I was still coming to terms with my sexuality so I wasn’t…I didn’t want to be in that space that I, in middle school, was suffering in. Similarly, Dylan, a white 23-year-old bisexual man from a major city in

Tennessee, shared his frustration with sports as an adolescent. An exuberant and

noticeably effeminate recent college graduate working in the performing arts, Dylan cited

athleticism as a key quality that kept him from fitting in with other boys.

SA: So what would it have meant to be one of the boys? […] What were the rules? D: I mean the sports were the biggest thing. I know we keep going back to that but it’s so true of young boys in this society. Um, you know, I knew that like middle school was when they made you do more P.E. and stuff like that and I was just like, “Damn it. I’m just not good at this.” For young men for whom it was difficult to embody the athleticism of their high-

status male peers, school became an arena in which they were symbolically linked to

femininity through charges of “wimp” or “sissy,” and were consequently assigned a

subordinated masculinity (Connell, 1995). Messner (1992) found that among the male

student-athletes he studied, “a particular kind of masculinity was being forged among

these boys and young men, a masculinity based upon status-seeking through successful

athletic competition and through aggressive verbal sparring which is both homophobic

and sexist” (37). Because of the significance of athleticism for performing an acceptable

masculine identity that repudiates homosexuality and femininity, sports serve as a major

site in which “boys learn early that to be gay, to be suspected of being gay, or even to be

unable to prove one’s heterosexual status is not acceptable” (Messner, 1992, 34). While

most of the gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men in my study did not publically

disclose their sexual orientation until after high school, their poor athletic performance or

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lack of engagement with sports during high school marginalized them as a result of their

failure to perform an idealized adolescent masculinity. Dylan’s especially difficult

experience attending a very small, private Christian school where students’ actions were

particularly visible informed his critique of what he saw as restrictive expectations of

masculinity and his own inability to fulfill such an ideal:

D: I grew up like really…I didn’t know it at the time but what I was feeling was an anger towards, um, the masculine ideal that has been built up in this country and only since I came to college and like started studying gender roles and stuff did it actually start making sense to me, um, so I was really mad about the way masculinity was represented as this thing where you go and play around and then you’re like really mean to each other and like that’s cool. Um, and that does seem to be kind of what the culture is set up with right now for youth. Um, it’s like, “Here go dick around and then like you’ll be awesome,” and like that has never translated to me at all. Um, so for me in relation to sports, I mean it was just kind of like A) I couldn’t do it, right, like one, I couldn’t do them. Two) they were forced on me in some ways by like P.E. classes and stuff like that where I had to try at something that I couldn’t actually do and then of course everyone else got to see that and then make fun of me for it. Um, and just sort of like these sort of masculine stereotypes that are all over the place, um, that are almost always wrapped up in sports or demeaning another person. These men expressed their lack of engagement with athletics with varying levels

of fervor. Some, like Caleb, a white 29-year-old gay Ph.D. candidate who attended high

school in South Carolina, stated that he paid such little attention to the male athletes in

high school that he could not remember any individually:

C: Um, well, my memory of my most popular male classmate, there was probably, so there was probably…so there’s two things to mention. There was probably somebody from either the football or the basketball team or maybe both that did attract a large following, who was a very popular kid, but, um, I just paid so little attention to that and I was in the marching band too, so I hated the football team because they were awful and would make us stay out in the cold for no, for no entertaining reasons. I didn’t pay too much attention to folks who were in athletics by and large so that’s very…that’s very hazy for me.

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Other men avidly rejected athletics as foolish and excessive. Matthew is a 25-

year-old trans-identified mixed-race man who grew up in a suburb of Boston and

attended an Ivy League university, where he retained his distaste for sports culture.

M: I didn’t get…like we had the stupid Harvard/Yale football game. I went once and it’s like all this cheerleading and band, I’m like, “Who gives a shit?” Like, this is so stupid. However, regardless of the intensity of their aversion to sports, in response to a

culture of athleticism that marginalized them, all six sexual minority men described a

decisive acknowledgement that they would never flourish in, or even enjoy, traditional

athletics. Dylan offered a description of how his resistance to sports caused him to lose a

close male friend at the beginning of high school and has contributed to his continued

difficulty finding common ground with other men. Poignantly, he suggested that, after

many disappointing attempts, he had accepted that he may never succeed at building a

sincere friendship with another man.

D: It was middle school when I had that phase of like trying to be friends with the popular guy, the basketball player, and like you know, by the time I was in high school, I was like, “This dude is an idiot and I am done.” Um, ‘cause we couldn’t front anymore, but like…it’s the sports and it’s also just like, I mean still to this day I don’t really relate to most men very well, like we start talking and they want to talk about like, I mean, sports like, I mean, right? Like they want to talk about sports and women and objectify women and I’m like, “Yeah, those really aren’t on my list right now of things that I’m doing.” Um (laughs) so, um, and I mean in some ways it’s my whole life I’ve spent trying to find, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to be like, “Okay, like is this a male friendship that is actually going to be a meaningful male friendship?” Because I’ve spent so much of my life being close friends with girls and I just accepted it at a certain point. It’s okay. Like whatever. This attitude of resignation towards athleticism and masculinity was extremely

common among the gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men that I interviewed. Will is

a handsome, mature, and confident white 24-year-old gay higher education professional

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who grew up in suburban New Hampshire and is likely perceived by some as

heterosexual. When asked how his peers perceived his involvement in theater during high

school, Will framed theater as an alternative he pursued only after accepting that he could

not cultivate an athletic identity.

W: It’s interesting because my perspective is unique in the sense that I, um, was never good at athletics so that was never an option. That identity was never an option for me. Uh, so I embraced theater, I ended up applying, auditioning my freshman year for a pretty small straight show, Neil Simon play, and somehow got a lead role and it was really just that…if I hadn’t gotten that role, I don’t know what I would have done in high school. By consciously de-identifying with athletics, Will developed an identity open to

alternative behaviors and priorities which perpetuated his success in the performing arts

and also, as we will discuss later, his high academic achievement. Like Will, Eduardo,

Dylan, and Matthew, Caleb recognized as an adolescent that athletics were not

compatible with his identity and this served as a key quality that distinguished him from

his male peers:

C: I’ve for a long time, even before that, felt differentiated from my male classmates because I was just not, I didn’t really like sports. I didn’t like to play sports and, uh, I wasn’t very good at them and I, I didn’t…they weren’t fun for me and so that always made me, that always made me feel different. As Caleb’s statement illustrates, most men felt that involvement with sports was

essential to maintaining a conventional masculine identity at school. For Alex, a

nineteen-year-old gay man who grew up in western New York, an obsession with sports

and disregard for all other domains was “the standard” for successfully performing

adolescent masculinity:

A: I just think definitely the more, like masculine you were as a boy, the more popular you were. I think anyone who wasn’t was kind of alienated, uh, and so yeah, definitely those like athletic, super-males were more popular.

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SA: So what did they, or how did you feel like the super-male […] masculinity was defined in this high school? Like what are the characteristics? A: Like what made them? Well they would just always walk around with like athletic-wear on, just only be talking about sports and um, just the standard, like they wouldn’t degrade themselves to talk about like academics or music or anything like nerdy like that. They would just be like in the game, talking about athletics, which is what defined them that way. Thus, the discomfort with sports that these men experienced caused them to feel

and be seen as significantly different from their male peers. They did not engage in the

“collective practice” of athletics (Connell, 1995) and, without that essential ingredient,

were therefore excluded from normative adolescent masculinity. Will’s analysis

illustrates this fact, which was repeated in each interview, succinctly:

W: Um, you know sports from day one in [my hometown] reigned supreme and, uh, nothing…it didn’t matter…if you were a man, you needed to be good at sports and there was no value in being a man and being sensitive or being able to, um, do art or photography or cry. There’s not…definitely no value at all placed on that. Dylan maintained that even among teachers, who symbolically transmitted ideas

about education to students, masculinity was necessarily linked to athletics.

SA: And you think that male teachers reinforced a certain version of masculinity in their classrooms? D: Absolutely, um, and also gave sort of like, um, a team-feel like to their boys there, right? So like, they had their boys, we all knew who they were, like, um, and it wouldn’t be uncommon that you’d spend the first five minutes talking about practice last night. And like, are we in class or what are we doing? Um, and meanwhile I would just sit in the corner and talk with like, you know, the girls about who’s dating who…I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. Um, but, um, yeah. That weird sort of moment where, where the role…there’s not even a role model of masculinity that’s not attached to athleticism, right, within this universe? And like that’s kind of shitty too. The attitude of dismissal evident in the men’s statements about their experiences

with athletics was echoed when they discussed how they related to the expectations of

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masculinity more generally. Often this was expressed through a distancing from other

male peers, as Dylan’s story highlights above. Eduardo openly noted, “Yeah, I definitely

had no guy friends...or, still don’t.” Alex, who was his class valedictorian, drew a

connection between his diminishing relationships with male classmates and his increasing

academic achievement, suggesting that by disinvesting in a masculine identity, his

investment in school was strengthened.

A: As I said I was initially friends with a lot of guys, um, and my progression as I went through high school, every single year I did better and better so, and every single year I was friends with less guys and more girls, so it’s…for me, that’s exactly what happened. Later, Alex also discussed how he did not subscribe to the style or activities of the

popular, hypermasculine boys at his school.

A: Oddly, I mean I was weird. I didn’t care very…at all what they said so it didn’t matter but a lot of people would dress or do things to appeal to that group of people. While the experiences of all six gender non-conforming men insinuated that they

did not see themselves as staking a claim to a masculine identity, the following reflection

by Dylan, who I found to consistently display both an impressively insightful and

alarming self-awareness, captures the essence of how these high achieving men saw their

identities in relation to masculinity. He candidly reveals that high school served as the

period during which he psychically and socially disaffiliated from masculinity, and again

explains that this was due to his inability to attain the adolescent masculine idea and his

related disapproval of it:

D: But I mean, I just knew I so didn’t identify with, um, masculinity at all. Like it’s funny to me now but like, there was a time when people would say “young man” or use the word “man” applied to me in any way, I would like shirk a little bit inside. I would like cringe, ugh. Not because I thought I should be a woman or some transgender crisis, but, um, but because of what “man” represented. I did

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not roll with that. Um, now I laugh about it and now I can take a better, a better perspective on that, but like, yeah, I would never say the word “man.” Um, and so I knew that I was in a weird, like…I just didn’t identify as a man at all really at that point. I mean, like I was just kind of like whatever. Um, and so I was just kinda like screw it and, um, when you have that attitude you lose some things, but you also can’t be bothered by like, “Is it cool that I’m smart?” Like, I’m not cool at all actually and I don’t even know if it’s like a gender…I wasn’t even trying to gender assimilate anymore. I think that’s what middle school was for me, I was like, I wanted so bad to be one of the boys and then by the time I got to high school I was just like, “This is never gonna happen.” As this passage exposes, taking a “screw it” attitude toward the strict expectations

of masculinity allowed Dylan and men like him to not “be bothered” by concerns about

whether their academic achievement would be read as “cool” or masculine by their peers.

Likewise, while discussing whether high achieving gender non-conforming men

experienced homophobia in his high school, Will acknowledged that there was gender-

related social risk involved for such high achieving men, but that most were deemed

“asexual” and “outside the realm of the sexual” because their priorities meant that they

had replaced a sexual identity with a high achieving identity. Thus, forfeiting in the

struggle to “gender assimilate” had its costs, as Dylan implies (we should note that none

of the gender non-conforming men I interviewed dated during high school), but it also

made it imaginable for these young men to develop their passions in un-masculine fields

and achieve at exceptionally high levels compared to their peers.

Alternative Possibilities C: Yeah, I think I felt exceptional for uh, when I started to be, high, high, a high academic achiever, and this started around third grade where I think I started to differentiate myself, then yes, I felt differentiated from lots of folks and probably male more so than female, so at, I’ve for a long time, even before that, felt differentiated from my male classmates because I was just not, I didn’t really like sports. I didn’t like to play sports and, uh, I wasn’t very good at them and I, I didn’t…they weren’t fun for me and so that always made me, that always made me feel different. And then of course being a dedicated musician and on clarinet and the classical, classically trained, this made me feel different as well from all

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people but I suppose particularly male classmates because, not as much as say the harp or the flute, but clarinet was stigmatized as a girl’s instrument. But there…no one really made fun of me. It was just…it was something that I did tacitly acknowledge and always had a sense was gender non-normative. Caleb’s statement, part of which was included earlier, provides incredibly

important insight into the school and peer experiences of high achieving, gender non-

conforming young men. First, Caleb recognized very early in elementary school that he

did not identify with athletics the way his male peers did. Then, around third grade, he

began performing at an exceptionally high level in school and later, in sixth grade his

mother encouraged him to get involved with the school band as a replacement for sports.

After placing first in the annual All-State band competition for clarinet, he began

performing with the Carolina Youth Symphony. Caleb ultimately graduated third in his

high school class and enrolled in a highly selective private university in the Midwest to

study music performance. At the time of our interview, he was earning a doctorate in

English literature from another major private university in the Northeast, with a passion

for British and Irish modernism and lyric poetry.

While Caleb describes much of his identity development as occurring during early

and middle childhood, what is important to draw from his experience is that his alienation

from athletics and resulting feeling of difference relative to his male peers was later

spurred by his success in academics and clarinet. I found comparable experiences among

other high achieving, gender non-conforming men, each of whom were unrestrained in

their academic performance and leadership in the performing arts and other student

organizations. By “tacitly acknowledg[ing]” their incompatibility with the hegemonic

masculine ideal and opting out, Caleb and other men could invest in feminine activities,

like clarinet, without the persistent threat of their masculinity being publically

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compromised. These alternative passions, coupled with their overall academic

achievement, are where they found self-worth and empowerment that promoted greater

opportunities in young adulthood.

Will’s earlier description of his initial audition for a high school theater

production follows a similar narrative as Caleb’s. Upon accepting that he could not

access a masculine identity founded in athletics, theater, at his mother’s suggestion,

provided Will with a supportive community and an arena to flourish. The relationships

and identity he found in his theater organization, which he only discovered after

abandoning his fragile claim to a masculine identity, provided a defense against feelings

of inadequacy:

W: Um, so for me the pressure, the risk of appearing weak as a man in theater was sort of trumped…it didn’t, it wasn’t as important as having an identity and a group for me. So I didn’t feel that pressure… Later, Will elaborated on how he came to curb his discomfort with identifying

with theater, an activity that he frequently observed other men avoid because of “the

social risk of […] appearing gay, appearing effeminate, appearing, uh, less masculine,

um, weak.”

W: I didn’t feel comfortable for a long time. Let me start off with…I don’t think, uh, yeah, I definitely didn’t always feel comfortable. It took a long time through high school to get to the point where I sort of was proud of my position in the social hierarchy. And towards the later half, I started getting leadership positions within my theater group, I sort of became the go-to intelligent-theater-person-leader. And I was among the upper echelon all of a sudden and I received like president, you know, the higher-level positions where you could fraternize with the Student Council president and there’s definitely a royalty to high school. And so because I had…I was able to work my way up the theater ladder, I felt there was some pride that went along with that, social pride, and I think that helped me get to the point where I was comfortable and people couldn’t…even if they made fun of me they would never do it in front of my face because I clearly had stature, I guess, um, and I was proud of…you know, my name would be on the posters, for example, for the upcoming shows. That was a huge point of pride for me.

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But despite the esteem he found in theater, Will initially had considered theater a

last resort because it did not represent masculinity:

W: My mom was the only who got me into theater. She tried really hard, again ‘cause I had supportive parents, to try to help me find passion. Sports never stuck. I tried every sport in the book. Robotics never stuck. So theater was kind of a last resort and it was always my last resort and it was a great last resort and it is for a lot of people. The implication here is that it was not a painless process for Will to be proud of

the high achieving, theatrical identity that he eventually developed by the end of high

school. He first had to acknowledge that athletics and robotics, activities associated with

adolescent masculinity, were not ingredients of the identities he could successfully

pursue. Once he accepted that notion, the threat of appearing un-masculine dissipated in

comparison to the pride and validation that theater, leadership, and achievement yielded.

Leadership in the arts and other non-athletic student organizations was prevalent

throughout my interviews with high achieving, gender non-conforming men. In contrast,

leadership in school-based activities was minimal among the high achieving,

heterosexual and normatively masculine men discussed in the previous chapter. Dylan

was a leader in his vocal ensemble group, was president of his senior class, and was

involved in the few theater opportunities his school offered. Eduardo held an elected

position in his student government, was president of his Latino student organization, was

active in his school’s multicultural organization, and used all of these platforms to raise

awareness about racial and ethnic inequalities in his school. Matthew was the president of

his school’s Gay Straight Alliance and came out to his entire school at an annual school

assembly on LGBT issues. And Alex, like Caleb, attained an extremely high level of

musicianship, serving as president of both his high school’s wind ensemble and choir and

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playing trombone for three regional youth orchestras. All six of these men continued their

respective involvements in theater, music, and social activism into college, with most

pursuing an undergraduate major in the very field in which they had found refuge during

high school.

In each case, these men described themselves, usually humbly, as having achieved

in their specialty at a level significantly hire than any of their classmates, suggesting a

feeling of exceptionality and mastery that may be surprising given the potential stigma

associated with their un-masculine activities and attitudes. However, to be clear, with the

exception of Matthew, the men I interviewed did not attend high schools in which they

felt diverse expressions of gender and sexuality were well-received. They shared

numerous accounts of gender non-conforming male classmates who were dancers,

singers, actors, photographers, writers, and activists who faced persistent overt and subtle

bullying and homophobia. But they also talked of examples of men, like themselves, for

whom high achievement had supplanted the potential for them to be victims of “the fag

discourse” (Pascoe, 2007). Will described his high school friend, Jake, whose leadership

and intellect seemingly overshadowed his effeminacy.

W: One of my good friends was Student Council president and he, um, was very effeminate presenting, very intelligent. He also happened to be our salutatorian, second in the class. Um, very awkward, not traditionally masculine, but highly respected. Not all…not by all communities, but he was the Student Council president and he gave a speech at graduation. Um, he was not a traditionally extraverted person but he was just really…even if people rumored about his sexuality, he seemed to be above everything. Um, and I think it was largely due to...yeah, it has to be due to his intellect. Um, so while he was different and I think he had a hard time assimilating with groups, he was still thought of as a leader. And he could be. He was a good leader. Eduardo described a high achieving gay classmate named Brian, whom he

suggests may have been the target of name-calling:

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E: He was I think a dancer, singer, he did all sorts of musical theater. Um, I think he was one of the few, if not the only, openly gay student in our class, I think so. Um, was very, uh, flamboyant about it, so I think that wasn’t something that my school was ready for at the time. Um, and he was very academically achiev-, uh, high achieving so he was liked in the high achieving students’ circle but the other, in like the wider, uh, system, students probably called him names and things. But Eduardo later said he could not recall any instances of Brian experiencing

overt bullying. Instead, he shared the example of another very low achieving,

academically-disengaged transgender student at his school who was a consistent victim

of torment. This contrast illustrates that high achievement, while often associated with

effeminacy, may serve as a protective factor for gender non-conforming boys because

their achievement locates them, in the words of Will presented earlier, “outside the realm

of the sexual” and therefore as lesser targets of homophobia. Will added:

W: Because, academics trumped everything, especially for men. If you were smart, you were an alien to the mainstream but you were a respected alien, if that makes sense. This important assessment, which I found embedded in the majority of the

reflections of both subsamples of high achieving men, was that high achievement is

highly salient for the identity to which adolescents are ascribed in the high school social

context. This condition is why the seemingly masculine high achieving men from the

previous chapter were compelled to engage in precise behaviors and activities in order to

maintain their masculine status, without which they would have fallen in with the nerdy

boys they ignored in their AP classes. But also importantly, the salience of high

achievement is also what this group of gender non-conforming men was able to seize

when they accepted their incompatibility with the masculine ideal of their peer culture,

and from it they found self-worth and empowerment in homophobic environments.

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Consequently, upon analyzing how these twelve stories demonstrate the primacy of

academic achievement, my conclusion is that because these six men had resolved to cease

trying to prove a masculine (read: athletic) identity, their alternative accomplishments

empowered them and reinforced their sense of high achieving identity.

Mentors and the Promise of Adulthood Furthermore, each of the six high achieving, gender non-conforming, sexual

minority men I interviewed mentioned the close relationships they established with

teachers and adult female mentors during high school. Their descriptions suggested that

their academic achievement, exceptionality, and advanced maturity produced an

attraction between older individuals and themselves. Some shared that they were close

with a teacher in the context of a larger story, like Alex, who noted “we were very close”

when describing his conversations with his physics teacher about the prevalence of

underachievement among boys. Will made a similar comment, explaining that “‘cause

[he] was really close with the theater director,” he would often serve as a teaching

assistant in the director’s drama class and the two would remark at how difficult it

appeared to be for boys to be comfortable taking on a character’s role. For other men, like

Dylan, relationships with teachers provided important refuge from the frustrating social

landscape of the peer culture.

D: Um, you know, I mean I found my lifeblood through these strong female teachers who actually cared about like, like I could, you know…like we would trade reading lists from summer and like, we would read the same books and like talk about them in history and stuff, um, and like I developed sort of a friend group who decided…we stopped going to lunch at a certain point in our academic careers and we stayed in the art room and made our art with the art teacher and she loved us. Um, those people…and it was not their job, you know, like it was never anyone’s job to do these things and I’m still friends with those women.

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Adult mentors played especially important roles for the two low-income students

whom I interviewed, Matthew and Eduardo. Matthew was raised by a single mother, who

suffered from anxiety and multiple chronic illnesses, and their family received welfare

benefits, including subsidized housing, for the duration of Matthew’s childhood.

Teachers rewarded his obedient, high-achieving identity and actively supported his

growth and ambition:

M: I’ve always been oriented towards adults and not my peers and, uh, teachers I think have always recognized that in me. Like I was quiet and studious and introspective and always high achieving and particularly teachers have kind of taken me under their wing and just encouraged me to, “Okay here’s an extra book. Read this,” um, or, “Here’s a special task,” when I was even younger, in elementary school or “I need like a special helper to do this,” and that would be me because I was so well behaved and, and so…I was such a good kid (laughs), I never did anything wrong. I was terribly afraid of getting in trouble and, um, so I’ve had particular attachments to teachers. When I got to high school, it was my English and my history teacher who was the originator of the Gay Straight Alliance, like I still see them, still meet up with them, um, who said, “You really have something special, um, talent that you need to develop.” (laughs) “This academic thing you can do,” so, um, they were definitely my mentors, sure. Eduardo, whose mother remarried several years after his father left their family

and returned to El Salvador, grew up in an economically unstable household. During high

school, he lived with his mother, stepfather, and three siblings in an apartment that he

described as a “shack” […] in an alley” with a numerical fraction in the address, all of

which he considered visible markers of his class background. Like Matthew, Eduardo

found a mentor who invested specifically in his academic development:

E: I would be where I’m at now had it not been for my…my cousin’s godmother who is an ESL teacher and she taught most of my uncles, um, what little English they know. Um, she’s white and she…the first, the very first day I met her, she introduced me to the concept of an AP class. Um, we had a long conversation and ever since she’s kind of, I’ve always considered her my mentor ‘cause I, I didn’t know what AP was prior to that.

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The influence of these adult figures supported the men I interviewed on their

paths to college, and in their seniority and status as educators, they may have symbolized

the potential for a fulfilling adulthood via education. As has been suggested by Pachankis

and Hatzenbuehler (2013), academic achievement during adolescents can provide gay

youth with the social and economic capital to “escape” to a context more accepting than

the culture of their high school. Interestingly, despite the fact that all of these students

were remarkably successful in an institutional sense in high school, they were all

extremely eager to graduate and pursue the next stage of life. Dylan, who attended high

school in Tennessee and relocated to Boston for college, expected to vacate his

hometown without looking back:

D: I mean I started looking at colleges when I was in my sophomore year. You know, I was one of those, like “Where am I gonna go?” Um, my qualifications were that it had to be over a thousand miles away. I succeeded. […] D: I mean I entered high school with a little bit of assurance and every year that passed I was like, “One year closer to gettin’ out of here,” “We’re getting out of here,” and then by the time I was accepted to college I was like, “Bye bitches.” Will seemed to recognize through our conversation the promise of acceptance that

college had offered to he and his gender non-conforming classmates:

W: College was an escape. I didn’t apply to a single school in New Hampshire [where I attended high school]. And I think that’s the same with all of my gender non-conforming, stereotypically non-masculine friends. Yeah, I never really thought of that, but college was an escape, a place, a refuge almost…less that we were doing this for success. Additionally, as Alex and Dylan illustrate below, feeling a sense of difference

from their peers because of achievement and gender expression compelled gender non-

conforming men to seek new experiences that they considered to be far beyond the

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ambitions of their gender-normative, average-achieving complacent peers. For these men,

forfeiting their claim to a masculine identity and cultivating an identity based on greater

achievement had also yielded what they viewed as greater ambitions than those tethered

to traditional masculinity.

A: The ones who kind of had things planned out and wanted to go places outside of this town, um, were seen as different and that was always something I wanted. I never wanted to stay. I think most likely for the rest of my life, I’ll never want to stay in the same spot. I’m always like aiming for the next thing while their goal was, “How can I stay here and be mildly successful at what I do in this town and not have to leave?” So that was a very big difference. D: Um, I think it’s rooted in a desire to…I think anyone who wants to leave their environment has a certain sort of ambition about them. Uh, even if that’s Jack Kerouac smoking a lot of pot and like driving. Um, it’s like, it’s like I just don’t know if…you know, like I think about when I was in the fifth grade planning my trip to France, in the silliest way, but like already that’s a goal that requires money, that requires a certain knowledge of the world and access to like resources. I mean it just immediately…whereas, if I was…if my main priority was going to the football game on Friday, that requires much less ambition. Like what ambition does that require? None. Like get in your car. Lastly, some men emphasized the potential for liberation and empowerment that

knowledge, and particularly self-knowledge, could offer them. Matthew, who majored in

gender studies in college, felt that higher education had allowed him to further explore

his passions and understanding of his own identity.

M: I realized that there was so much about that me that I could learn from academics, once I got away from, out of high school. […] It’s always given me the greatest feeling of satisfaction and productivity to work on my ideas and articulate them well and I love books, always have, always will. Meanwhile, Caleb, after growing up in South Carolina, sought higher education in

order to explore new paradigms outside the scripts represented in his community. In

support of the conclusions I’ve written above, he connected his openness to new

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possibilities and his related achievement to his awareness of himself as a person who did

not embody a traditional adolescent masculine identity.

C: …but also being dissatisfied with the particular social milieu of this, the South Bible Belt mentality that I…grated on me for many different reasons and that it was something that I felt people were stuck in a narrow paradigm of how they were experiencing thinking about the world and that I, I needed to dedicate myself to attaining knowledge of all sorts of things in order to break out of that. […] C: So I think that non-normat-, my non-normative status in terms of gender and sexuality contributed to my will to, um, discover new things or discover new potential or potential ways of structuring my life and how I see the world around it. And so that, that would contribute to my high achieving academically. Conclusion D: You know, I mean of course the pursuit of knowledge is not something that’s considered masculine. It’s not considered attractive for a man of that age, a boy, like you know, I mean, especially in the eyes of other…when the culture’s determined by how many points you score on a team, that doesn’t equate. As I walked away from each of the interviews with these six high-achieving,

gender non-conforming, sexual minority young men, I was repeatedly struck by how

much thought and reflection they had obviously invested in understanding their own

gender and sexual identities. While there was extraordinary diversity in the demographic

aspects of their respective high schools, hometowns, and families, what remained most

surprisingly consistent was their intense awareness that others did not judge them to be

masculine. They spoke openly about the attributes that made them effeminate and about

the discomfort they felt in traditionally male arenas. Their responses did not contain the

shame or embarrassment that I thought I might elicit with my questions about status,

difference, and belonging. Instead, each uniquely conveyed that they had come to terms

with the disparity between their own subjectivity and the hegemonic ideals of

masculinity, and it was clear that they had foregone aspiring to those expectations many

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years ago. In response to the masculine emphasis on athletics, heterosexuality, and

contrived carelessness, for these men adolescence had served as a period during which

they closed the door on what seemed to be a tenuous claim on an unappealing masculine

identity and, in its place, opened numerous windows that made a spectacular range of un-

masculine passions and pursuits accessible to them. With their concern for performing

masculinity subsided, achievement in realms that their peers deemed feminine, in which

they agreed academics were included, was compatible with how they perceived their un-

masculine selves.

Again, I do not mean to suggest that renouncing a masculine identity as a male

can be described as a straightforward exercise. However, in comparing the experiences of

these two distinct classes of high-achieving men – those who successfully performed

heterosexual masculinity “despite” their investment in academics and those who

identified as sexual minorities and considered themselves gender non-conforming – I

found that in cases when young men saw themselves as capable of maintaining a

publically masculine self, they worked hard to absorb their academic achievement into

their masculine identity by engaging in athletic participation, charm, classroom humor,

masculinity-affirming friendships, and undercover effort. Alternatively, men whom the

peer culture assigned a subordinated masculinity looked in the mirror during high school

and came to acknowledge that attempting such strategies would be ultimately

unproductive. Instead, a high-achieving identity, which carried sufficient power and

esteem to avoid homophobic torment, powerfully defined how others understood them

during high school, and they were satisfied with this because they looked forward to the

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eventual rewards of their high achievements. And from my observations, each of them

was grateful for his achievements and for the opportunities they had afforded.

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CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

“You’re just kind of not masculine if you’re intelligent, if you care about things like academics.” – Alex, 19, gay man

In an educational environment in which academic achievement runs counter to the

dominant construction of adolescent masculinity, where, as Dylan argued in Chapter 5,

young men’s status is determined by how many points they score in a sports game, it

seems unsurprising that the popular discourse tell us that so many male students are

reluctant to invest their effort into school assignments, grades, advanced courses, and the

pursuit of higher education. High schools are just one of many sites wherein hegemonic

masculinity polices the actions and attitudes of boys and men, sustaining patriarchy by

privileging those who most embody the idealized performance of manhood. As a breadth

of literature has indicated, because scholastic effort, concern for “mental” labor and

learning, and obedience to teachers and school rules are represented as unmasculine and

therefore feminine, boys who strive to succeed in school are deemed effeminate and face

homophobic hostility. Moreover, Patrick’s account below explains that for men, the

incongruity of academic engagement and adolescent masculinity make high achievement

a primary defining quality for high school boys’ identities, further disincentivizing

academic achievement among male adolescents seeking popularity and peer status:

P: Um, I think for girls, it was more...you could…it was easier to be, you know, smart, take the more difficult classes and still be popular and for the guys, less so. I think for the guys, you would take, you know, you could take the higher-level classes, um, but that would…that would be how you were viewed first. Um, it wasn’t, you know, you’re taking these higher-level classes and we think of you at the same time as like a runner, at the same level. You know, it was more, you know, that kid in class asking the questions, doing well on the tests and that was… that was the first thought about you.

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Grounded in a recognition of the gendered social consequences of academic

achievement for high school boys, this research project sought to illuminate the beliefs

and practices of boys who did achieve at a high level despite the sanctions that

discouraged them. Specifically, this objective was partitioned into two questions. First,

how do high-achieving masculine performing men reconcile their investment in

academics with an acceptably masculine identity within their peer culture? Second, how

might high-achieving men whose gender expression and sexual identity denied them

access to an acceptably masculine identity relate differently to academic achievement,

given that their subordinated position in the masculine hierarchy potentially evaded the

tension of studious versus masculine?

With respect to the former question, extensive interviews with six high-achieving

heterosexual adult men revealed that accomplishing a masculine identity and moderate

peer status compelled these high-achievers to enact specific practices to acquire social

capital and largely comply with the standards of hegemonic masculinity. Travis, Jason,

Patrick, Russell, Joey, Nate, and many friends and classmates who were much like them

participated on athletic teams, established relationships with popular male peers, learned

to fluidly navigate a diverse network of social groups, and used humor and congeniality

to appear casual, carefree, and not especially invested in their school performance.

Consistent with the research of Francis et al. (2012), these strategies functioned to

balance their social and academic identities – to exemplify the “full package” – and kept

their achievement from stifling their integration with the popular, average- and low-

achieving guys at their schools.

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Turning to the latter research question, the “best little boy in the world”

hypothesis, first introduced by Tobias (1973) and later examined by Pachankis and

Hatzenbuehler (2013), along with R.W. Connell’s concept of subordinated masculinities

greatly informed my thinking about the experiences of boys whose gender presentation or

sexual identity marginalized them within their high school’s social hierarchy. As I

conversed with Caleb, Alex, Eduardo, Matthew, Dylan, and Will about their relationships

with masculinity, popularity, athletics, and academics, I discovered that, rather than

wrestle with the stigma of their identity, these young men had detached themselves from

the normative standards of adolescent masculinity and found their strength in their

exceptional academic, musical, theatrical, and leadership talents. From their educational

opportunities and close relationships with adult educator-mentors, these gender non-

conforming men recognized that academic achievement could facilitate future successes

in alternative communities that would embrace their differences. Thus, in acknowledging

their childhood feelings that they would never accomplish a masculine identity, it was

possible for these men to find empowerment in their exceptional accomplishments and

high-achieving identity.

Limitations and Potential for Future Research

The design of this research study was limited in several ways. First and most

importantly, the findings collected from the narratives of the twelve men in the research

sample are intended to only represent these men’s interpretations of the social and

educational experiences of themselves and their high school classmates. While these

findings illustrate a great deal about how high-achieving boys navigate an institutional

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and social context that places academics and masculinity at odds, because the entirety of

the sample was not randomly generated and participation was also self-selecting, the

results presented here cannot be taken as representative of all high-achieving masculine

performing or all high-achieving sexual minority men. Instead, these findings might serve

as a theoretical foundation for future research with a much larger, random sample of

individuals.

Second, it ultimately fell beyond the scope of the research questions to fully tease

out the copious variations in race, class, and school type for the men represented in the

sample, although these differences are absolutely essential to fully understanding student

achievement. As stated elsewhere, five of the twelve men in the research sample attended

private, religious high schools and while their descriptions of these schools allowed me to

reach some conclusions about socioeconomic differences between participants’

experiences, a great deal more research could be generated about how the religious and

moral perspectives taught in these schools and communities shape male students’

identities and achievement.

Additionally, while the statements of the men represented here consistently

privilege the challenges that adolescent boys face, the ongoing educational inequities of

girls and young women deserve equal concern and consideration. A notable example of

such research is Julie Bettie’s 2003 examination of the academic and social experiences

of Mexican American and white female students at a rural California high school,

focusing on how adolescent girls’ performance of gender is influenced by their class

identities. The style and expression of each of clique Bettie observed served as cultural

markers of their “race-class specific versions of femininity” (61). Furthermore, such

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differences contributed significantly to the female students’ academic and occupational

outcomes, with middle-class performing students’ economic and cultural capital enabling

their enrollment in the college-prep track and working-class students’ limited resources

contributing to their vocational aspirations and overall lack of awareness about

postsecondary opportunities. My research shares Bettie’s attentiveness to how high

school students integrate academic achievement with other pieces of their identity and

such processes warrant further study among both girls and boys in order for schools to

augment achievement among students of all genders, sexual identities, races, ethnicities,

and class backgrounds.

Final Thoughts

At their most basic level, the findings I have presented here indicate that it is

rarely an uncomplicated process by which high-achieving male students navigate their

high school peer culture. The perpetual threat of being labeled nerdy, gay, or a “teacher’s

pet” helps us to understand the social pressures that dissuade boys from investing effort

and care into academic achievement. This interpretation is notably contrary to the

opinions of “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker, 1963) like Hanna Rosin and Christina Hoff

Sommers who seek to blame schools’ and teachers’ bias towards the “natural” strengths

of girls and unwillingness to adapt their educational practices to the “natures” of male

students. Diverging from these authors, I argue that the norms and ideals of hegemonic

masculinity that dominate the adolescent peer culture in a given school context govern

the acceptable behaviors available to boys, thereby creating a social environment that

generally rewards carelessness, lack of effort, defiance of authority, and physical over

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mental activity. While the twelve high-achieving men represented in this study found

ways to overcome these circumstances, their journeys involved significant self-

awareness, self-regulation, and personal sacrifices, approaches that may not be

developmentally available to all male adolescents.

Thus, if educators and parents aim to address the so-called gender achievement

gap and improve the academic performance of male students, our culture cannot continue

to uphold ideals of masculinity that conflict with the attitudes and behaviors that facilitate

student achievement. Ideologies of masculinity that marginalize men who are

conscientious, intellectual, artistic, sensitive, cautious, and public about their emotional

investments and efforts are products of the same system of gender inequality that

disadvantages women and girls. Challenging the authority of hegemonic masculinity in

order to disrupt the patriarchal structure and open up broader possibilities for expressing

one’s gender and sexual identities is a critical enterprise for redefining the meanings

associated with high achievement in the adolescent peer culture. I suggest that such a

transformation requires teaching about gender and all other dimensions of social

inequality in at least one of many possible high school contexts so that adolescents, as

they experience a critical period of social identity development, have the knowledge and

skills to recognize, analyze, and disrupt practices and attitudes that perpetuate unequal

power and privilege. The reproduction of a class of wage-earning manual laborers

through the upholding of a distinct working-class representation of masculinity is an

important example of such a system of inequality of which it is meaningful for working-

class young men to develop consciousness.

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The significance of integrating an exploration of gender and sexual inequities into

high school contexts is articulated by Jessica Fields (2008), whose text Risky Lessons:

Sex Education and Social Inequality calls on readers to invest in the transformative

potential of school classrooms to foster students’ sexual subjectivity and comprehension

of social and sexual justice. Fields argues that,

Teachers and students need opportunities and support to challenge – not evade – conversations, interactions, and other everyday practices that restrict the terms of legitimacy and belonging. Creating a space within the classroom where oppressed and nonconforming sexual identities are visible and valued would allow teachers and students to foster inclusive models of sexual well-being and belonging in classrooms, schools, and broader communities. School-based sexuality education also represents an opportunity to pursue the structural changes necessary to open, honest, transformative sexual communication. Henry Giroux writes that schools need to give students “the opportunity to develop the critical capacity to challenge and transform existing social and political forms, rather than simply adapt to them” (1992, 74). In a critical sexuality education program, students and teachers might confront and suspend – even momentarily – the gender, sexual, racial, and class inequalities with which they contend both inside and outside the classroom (173).

This passage is especially potent given the ways I have shown that the twelve

young men in this study adapted to the hegemonic masculine structure under which they

experienced adolescence. These high-achieving men made accommodations, by engaging

in acceptably masculine practices or forfeiting their identification with masculinity, in

order to maintain a positive self-concept and negotiate their peer culture, but

unfortunately their schools did little to help them understand or critique how their

achievement affected how their peers’ evaluated them as teenagers and as boys. Thus,

rather than subscribe to essentialized discourses that suggest that “boys will be boys” and

that schools must accommodate boys’ “natural” strengths and capacities to improve boys’

academic outcomes, educators, administrators, and policy makers must commit to

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acknowledging the enormous role of peers, status, and ideology in shaping how young

people interpret academic achievement.

Canadian advocates for interdisciplinary courses on feminism and gender studies

at TheMissGProject.org highlight twenty reasons why high school is an important period

for young people to examine gender inequalities, including:

1. because we go through our mandatory formal education careers without ever encountering a critical study of gender construction and socialization, and most importantly, its implications 3. because studies and experience show that young men feel the negative effects of constructed masculinities as well 14. because young boys and men are never really provided with a safe space to analyze and discuss "masculinity" and the standards and strictures it imposes on their lives 15. because the government cannot fully address the reasons why many boys and young men are now having difficulty in traditional curriculums without addressing the construction of gender and its implications 20. because the current curriculum has no way of examining the complex ways in which sexism, racism, heterosexism and other forms of discrimination are intimately related and linked

These statements substantiate the urgency of educators and students at the

secondary education level to develop school-based curricula and interventions that

provide an understanding of gender as a social construction in order to eliminate

stereotypes about which students are expected to be high-achieving and what

achievement means for a student’s social identity. We must help our students to

recognize and challenge status hierarchies embedded in gender that potentially stigmatize

or discourage high achievement in particular populations of students, specifically boys,

low-income students, and students of color, because their achievement is viewed by their

peer culture as incongruent with other facets of their identity. In doing so, we aim to

revise academic effort and success as equally compatible with, and available to, all

students, thereby interrupting the reproduction of social and economic inequalities that

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result from problematic stereotypes and inequitable expectations regarding students’

educational outcomes.

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APPENDIX 1: SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW GUIDE Masculinities & Academic Achievement

Principal Investigator: Sean Ashburn

School, Peer Norms & Gender

1. Describe salient characteristics of high school: size, grade levels, levels of classes offered?

2. What do you remember about the family and community culture of your schoolmates? Socioeconomic and racial backgrounds of student population, college attendance, types of parental occupations?

3. Can you recall who were considered the popular students? How was popularity attained? Were there multiple groups? How did they relate? What qualities did students have that earned them popularity?

4. Describe most popular girl classmate: activities? School engagement and performance?

5. Describe most popular boy classmate: activities? School engagement and performance?

6. Were the qualities that gained popularity the same for guys and girls?

7. What were the priorities of the typical guys in your high school?

8. Where there guys in your school who didn’t fit this description? How were they different and how were they treated? How did they do in school?

9. Were guys who excelled at school usually popular? How did classmates view them? Were they romantically successful?

10. How did you perceive the academic culture of high school: Who were the high achieving and low achieving students and friend groups? Did achievement-level correlate were certain activities, or attitudes, or styles?

11. Describe highest achieving girl classmate: how did she spend her time? Who were her friends? What did peers think of her? How did she dress?

12. Describe highest achieving boy classmate: how did he spend his time? Who were his friends? What did peers think of him? How did he dress?

13. Were there any guys who were especially good at balancing school and being popularity? What were these guys like? Activities? Families? Demographics?

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14. Were there certain male students who were considered “geeks” or “nerds”? How were they perceived?

15. Were they any openly gay male students? How were they perceived by other students? How did they perform academically? Personal Reflection

16. Describe own family: family composition, parents’ occupations, attitudes towards academics and college, academic pressure?

17. Describe your peer group and their attitudes towards academics

18. Describe own academic performance in high school: types of courses, grades, extracurricular activities? Would you describe yourself as high or low achieving compared to your classmates?

19. What were your priorities as a high school student? Was doing well in school important to you? Why or why not?

20. Did it feel normal, common, or expected for you as a boy to (do well/not do well) in school?

21. Did you think much about your plans for after high school? Do you think most guys did?

22. As a high school student, in what other ways did you feel you were you similar to and different from the typical guys in your school?

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