High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.
CJ Pascoe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado College. She teaches courses on sexuality, social psychology, deviance, gender and education. Her current research focuses on gender, youth, homophobia, sexuality and new media. Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, won the American Educational Research Association's 2007 Book of the Year Award. Dude documents the relationship between homophobic harassment, heterosexism and masculinity in high school. In it she suggests ways we might begin to redefine gender norms that are damaging to both boys and girls. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.
