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MAKE ME A SANDWICH, BITCH:
MASCULINITY AND OTHER HOPELESS CAUSES AT AN ALL-
BOYS
CATHOLIC SCHOOL

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Kevin J. Burke

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MAKE ME A SANDWICH, BITCH:
MASCULINITY AND OTHER HOPELESS CAUSES AT AN ALL-BOYS
CATHOLIC SCHOOL
By:

Kevin J. Burke

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy

2010

ABSTRACT
MAKE ME A SANDWICH, BITCH:

MASCULINITY AND OTHER HOPELESS CAUSES AT AN ALL-BOYS
CATHOLIC SCHOOL

By

Kevin J. Burke
This work examines the ways that discourses and ideologies made present in an
all-boys Catholic secondary school come to de/ limit sexual and gendered
possibilities for young boys, most particularly in regards to masculinities and
spiritualities. Implications for Teacher and Catholic Education are discussed in
particular in this critical autoethnographic study. Further, issues of
(em)power(ment) come to the fore as social and religious sanctions become

navigable (or less so) after repeated exposure to the socializing institution that is

the high school.

Copyright by
KEVIN BURKE
2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures .................................................... v
Chapter 1 .......................................................... 1
Chapter 2 .......................................................... 33
Chapter 3 .......................................................... 74
Chapter 4 .......................................................... 108
Chapter 5 .......................................................... 150
Chapter 6 .......................................................... 186
Chapter 7 .......................................................... 20

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Wearing the Required Uniform ............................................... 86

Figure 2 Dicked! (Student Drawing) ..................................................................... 137
Figure 3 BFFL (Student Drawing) ........................................................ 224
Figure 4 Sample Note (Student Drawing) ............................................. 226
Figure 5 Make Me a Sandwich (Student Drawing) .................................. 242

Practice and Discourse in an All-Boys Catholic School

Chapter One
Introduction

One thing I ’ve never learned in all my years of meandering unsupervised through the
world of boys was how to predict what they might do, singly or in groups, what startling
kindness or humdrum cruelty they might choose to engage in. (Chabon, 2009, p. 243)

”We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be ”
(Merton, 1965, p. 19).

”It is the group that is the bearer of masculinity, in a basic way” (Connell, 1995, p. 107).

Fr. Tom, resplendent in white alb, draped in priestly vestments fitting for
the end of the Catholic Church’s liturgical year, marooned as we are between the
passing of Christmas Day and the last whimper of its attendant season, brings a

close to the Eucharistic portion of this first Friday mass of January.

” Behold what you are,” he intones.

A white orb of unleavened bread the texture of brittle wafer, held aloft in
two hands, shadows his face as he addresses his 701 students who are seated
uncomfortably in chapel shirts and ties, and perhaps more importantly,
hardwood chapel pews. Their shifting, their attention is itinerant, but they are
held awake by their discomfort. Anyone slumped forward — asleep or
meditating on the Paschal mystery — is shoed upright by hovering religious

brothers in black cowls.

Dramatic pause.

” Become what you receive.” Eyes closed for a beat, and there in his hands
still, before he places the simple mixture of pressed flour and water back in its
filigreed bowl, resides the Body of Christ. Transubstantiation: the Catholic
dogmatic belief that the priestly caste have the power to invoke — and return the
congregation for those brief instances back to the Last Supper of the
historical / Divine Jesus Christ —words to make bread, flesh. It would seem
necromaniacal if it weren’t so much a part of the rhythm of being faithful to the
Church. And thus, written into the code of my life — and that of most of the boys
here —through hours and decades of inhaled incense and expunged sin. But

man, if you think too hard about it; to be a God-eater?

Given my druthers I might, as resident oddball —not faculty, not staff, not-
quite student— suggest that religion classes at the school address the great
debates of the monks Radbertus and Ratramnus. Both, rather unimaginatively
wrote works called De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (Concerning the Body and
Blood of Christ). The latter in his 9th century folly — pilloried for its blushing
scientism — suggested that there might just be a difference between the sign and
that which it signified as regarded the holy practice of the Sacrament of the
Eucharist; the former, a fellow monastic and Benedictine demurred: sign and
signifier were too much for poor, faithful minds to process. God merely veiled

the presence of His flesh in the mystery of bread and His blood as wine because

humans — we weak-willed masses — couldn’t handle the cannibalistic
implications (Bakhuizen Van Den Brink, 1974). This, at least, might spark some
interest in Mass, aside from the occasional senior fainting in his pew, or the odd
bloody nose. But then interest, I’ve found in my four months in the school, is
largely moot; theological questions remain subservient to the Purpose: to expose
the boys to the practice of the mass(es). Thinking about it (religion, as with

schooling) really isn’t the point; doing it is.

Flanking Fr. Tom on the altar are Fr. Phillip and Fr. McNick, each dressed
down, as it were, in stoles embossed in rich reds and golds with the seal of the
Augustinian Order: A heart, aflame, bisected diagonally by a Celtic(ish) cross
. and an arrow. The violence of the image, facially, is stark. And as McNick and
Phillip bob and weave through the rhythms of the final blessing of the day, they
beat with an external heart afire, presumably for the Lord. It all might seem very
Temple of Doom, were it not imbued with the resident trappings of the sacred and

the transposition thereof awash as we are to be in sin and unworthiness.

Mass, today, has been long. A two hour phenomena admixed with a
speech from an alumnus (St. Rita, ’80) who sings ”This Little Light of Mine” and
awards, given on the front of the altar of the marble-and-brass chapel which is
attached to the extreme northern end of the high school, for students of the

month. The boys wilt at the shoulders hoping, at least, that first period (they’ve

told me this repeatedly) will be further foreshortened by the extended chapel

time.

And then, with the procession of the Cross from chancel to nave, we are

sent off, to go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Mass dismissed, the boys shuffle by me, dragging their feet on their
journey back to class, in that funk of sleep and deadened eyes born of the
disappointment at a near-snowday and the literal beginning of the second
semester. In fits of pique they tear off their chapel ties and unbutton top buttons,
free (sort-of) at last. Nods in my direction and mixtures of ”What’s up, Burke,”;
and I get up to leave, to write, finding the expanded words that Father Tom
engraved into the sacredness of this past Mass in its context. St. Augustine, the
adopted founder of the Augustinians — stewards of St. Rita of Cascia High School
since its opening in 1905 — in a 4th century reflection on Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount is to have preached, ”Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out for
you; behold what you are, become what you receive” (J epson, 2008). Salvation:
In the reflection upon, and shaming of, the earthly flesh, that one might become
God, or at least God’s hands on Earth, loving and serving. This is my data, a
study of beholding (boys), of shaming (boys), and the salvific properties of
schooling (boys). In my smug moments I dare to call it research. I can only
hepe, by way of fidelity to a critical lens that I’ve more Ratramnus in me than I

yet suspect.

What follows is a fiction, full of truths. It is the gathered fruit—bruised
and overpolished — of a semester spent shadowing four students in the senior
class of St. Rita High, an all—boys secondary school on the Southwest Side of
Chicago. As a man, a researcher formed by his experiences in a similar
institution less than two miles distant, I came to the research—just as I come to
its telling— an interested (if not interesting) party. My history, a mixture of pride
and the growing disdain of a man increasingly discomfited by the Home (the
school/ 3) of his childhood, is rolled up in all of this data. It is this history, too, in
the converse that dictates that which I am too close — too snowblind from
experience and fondness and a self-conscious (and unconscious, too) distancing
from the past— to realize that which I will not see. This is the insider missing the
forest for the trees, I suppose.

To present the data without acknowledging the impossibility of the work
of removing Memory (as it blinds and reveals, both) — that of the researcher and
the neighborhood surrounding him—from The Study would be dishonest, it
would be the worst kind of dissimulation, ”pretend[ing] not to have what one
has. To simulate. . .to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard, 1994, p.
3), a move toward ”substituting the signs of the real for the real” (p. 2). Rather,
my hope is to engage in the process of ” genuine reflexivity. . .achieved by
subjecting the position of the observer to the same critical analysis as that of the
constructed object at hand” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 41), knowing well

that ”one cannot disassociate the construction of the object from the instruments

5

 

of construction of the object and their critique” (p. 30). Here all is constructed
and conflicted but these need not be agonistic relationships.

In the interest of frankness, then this study has become a critical post-
modern autoethnography, trained on the discourses which lead to the
construction of masculinities and spiritualities, composed of data collected
through field notes generated during a semester’s stint as a participant observer
at St. Rita, filtered through the eyes of an interested and nascent/ troubled
researcher. Rose (1989) helps here, suggesting the tenor of these clashes, noting
”It is an unfortunate fact of our psychic lives that the images that surround us as
we grow up —no matter how much we may scorn them later— give shape to our
deepest needs and longings” (p. 44). I have, in some ways, gone home to my
research amidst a swirl of self-scorn at the needs and longings bound to be

uncovered by the work.

The sieve, particularly as regards critical engagement with schooling and
most particularly schooling in/ de / formed and shaped by religious doxology,
can never be fine enough. This I believe. Mine is, (un)fortunately rusted and
holey a product of a lapsing of faith in the rituals of a theology (of God, of race,
and of place, too) that troubles me; patched with new screens, of different
materials constantly, shiny theories of resistance and schooling, the work of this
study has become a pastiche of confused ideas of manhood, religiosity, and the

gerrymandered lines between research and living. Hint: there may not be a

difference. It’s all been very messy. Which is good. But it makes for fitful

sifting.

From August of 2009 until January of 2010 I ’enrolled’ three days a week
as a senior student at St. Rita. I was able to follow the daily course schedule of
four different students (one a month), collecting data in school situations,
broadly defined (e.g. athletic contests, intramural activities, in hallways, the
dining hall, the classroom, etc.). In the process I found strong support for
Nespor’s (1997) suggestion that ”what kids value most in school are
opportunities for interactions with peers" (p. 124). As a pseudo-peer my
involvement on a personal level, as a ”classmate” provided a ready lens through
which to examine/ experience the play of ideology, institutional, and individual

power at the nexus of student—to-student interaction.

This study, then, is an attempt to examine the ideologies of a school; of a
Catholic school; of an all-boys Catholic secondary school. It is a project meant to

elucidate how religion (as proxy for patriarchyl, quite often) helps form

 

1 I’ve chosen, here, not to use the concept of ”big ’P’” patriarchy which is probably most tersely
defined as ”a single overarching structure of domination between men and women" (Mac an
Ghaill, 1994, p. 10) because of course this is not always about what I would render as an overly
simplistic relationality between and among men and women. And of course the hope is to
complicate notions of both power and gender through the research here. It is vital, though, to
note that the Catholic Church is (and has been) institutionally calcified as a patriarchal
institution, from the structure of the clergy to the language of the Mass over the centuries. It is, in
short, an organization run by, and in many ways created to perpetuate the status of, men while
defining what’s possible in the process of being a man as well. The school (and its boys and this
researcher) are subject to these realities. Some of what is talked about, then, is how patriarchy
comes to simplify and complicate our lived existences.

difference. It’s all been very messy. Which is good. But it makes for fitful

sifting.

From August of 2009 until January of 2010 I ’enrolled’ three days a week
as a senior student at St. Rita. I was able to follow the daily course schedule of
four different students (one a month), collecting data in school situations,
broadly defined (e.g. athletic contests, intramural activities, in hallways, the
dining hall, the classroom, etc.). In the process I found strong support for
Nespor’s (1997) suggestion that ”what kids value most in school are
opportunities for interactions with peers” (p. 124). As a pseudo-peer my
involvement on a personal level, as a ”classmate” provided a ready lens through
which to examine / experience the play of ideology, institutional, and individual

power at the nexus of student-to-student interaction.

This study, then, is an attempt to examine the ideologies of a school; of a
Catholic school; of an all-boys Catholic secondary school. It is a project meant to

elucidate how religion (as proxy for patriarchy‘, quite often) helps form

 

1 I’ve chosen, here, not to use the concept of ”big ’P’” patriarchy which is probably most tersely
defined as ”a single overarching structure of domination between men and women” (Mac an
Ghaill, 1994, p. 10) because of course this is not always about what I would render as an overly
simplistic relationality between and among men and women. And of course the hope is to
complicate notions of both power and gender through the research here. It is vital, though, to
note that the Catholic Church is (and has been) institutionally calcified as a patriarchal
institution, from the structure of the clergy to the language of the Mass over the centuries. It is, in
short, an organization run by, and in many ways created to perpetuate the status of, men while
defining what’s possible in the process of being a man as well. The school (and its boys and this
researcher) are subject to these realities. Some of what is talked about, then, is how patriarchy
comes to simplify and complicate our lived existences.

assumptions — thus presented as (im)possibilities through the official and
unofficial curriculum—through schooling about what it means to become a man
in this certain context in its specific history. It is, further, a project that I hope
examines how these officialized discourses are reshaped -made sense of, made
nonsensical, too —by the young men of the school in their daily lives. In the
process I seek to explicate how students come to make sense of and exercise—
through resistance, capitulation, and otherwise — their own power amidst the
discourses of the school around / through/ and by religion and gender and,

necessarily, sexuality.

I am concerned in this dissertation with 1) the myriad versions of
masculinity2 that are made (im)possible in an all-boys Catholic school by
examining 2) the ways in which religious ideology related to gender and
masculinity — spoken and unspoken, etched in curriculum and stone —-comes to
color the experience of a schooled life as well as 3) how a purposefully single
gendered context might provide a site for the (re)production of sexualit(ies) and

masculinities. In order to make sense of the study I will utilize R.W. Connell’s

 

2 The problem of defining masculinities in relation and opposition to femininities in the school
would bring welcome complexity to the analysis here. In following the thread of the research
and in conversations with students and faculty, it became apparent that to be true to the data,
though, it was apropos for this study to name everything performed in and in the name of the
school as a form of masculinity. This reflects, of course, a (probably) troubling and (certainly)
limiting view of what is possible in the actions of those defined as boys and men, particularly by
their actions in school. But it also remains consistent with the ways the boys and their faculty
understood and came to relate to the world of St. Rita.

 

notion of multiple masculinities, with a Foucaultian focus on discourse and

power.

”Behold what you are,” (in shame); ”become what you receive”
(passively). This is, imprinted on the holy features of a religious ritual, the
largely unspoken assumption upon which so much of schooling is based. There
is pushback, though. Mt. Carmel High School, an institution similar in profile,
location, and history to St. Rita began me on this journey. Their twinned
histories, as well as the genera of Catholic schooling, in this ethnic enclave at the

very edge of a city will follow shortly. A vignette first, a flash to childhood:

As I walk through the front doors of Mt. Carmel High School, wrapped in a
surround of college-gothic fascia, beset by a solid stone cross, a simple glance up
confronts thirteen-year—old me with the mantra of the place. In stolid brown letters — no
script, no trilling ”L’s”; no flying buttresses herefor this, it might seem, is business, the
external all pomp — I read: ”You came to Carmel a boy. If you care to struggle and work
at it, you will leave here a man.” Second person. Direct address. It is as If a Carmelite
priest himself is telling me so. Entreating me even. Confronting. And though I did not

attend Mt. Carmel3, I will never forget that inscription, for it has come to mean so

much — most especially as I read it here, as I seek to critically examine its message -— to

 

3 Each Catholic school in the area holds an entrance exam. Every school’s test, aside from those
on the North side of the city, occurs on the same day — generally on the second Saturday of
January. Where you test, in essence, is where you will attend. So the lives of 70‘ and 8th grade
boys and girls, like myself, become a-brim in the fall semester with open houses as they are
wooed by pep bands, insufferable hallway tours, and the not-so-subtle architectural lessons like
that I learned in my brush with the Carmelites here.

 

me, to the men in my life educated within those walls and gone through doors — marked

by very similar crosses — much like them.

This work was born of a desire to dig more deeply into the kinds of
struggle, and work that might just occur to produce (various versions of) the
man abstractly referred to on the frontispiece of Mt. Carmel High School and
other schools like4 it. Make no mistake, please, the above epigram is not meant
to encapsulate the ideology of all Catholic schools, but rather serves here as
synecdoche for the manner of assumptions perhaps made (and un(der)explored)
by religious and non-religious schools as regards the work of becoming a man in
a religious context. What I saw, gathered and created, with/ through/ by the
school and the boys housed therein over the course of the semester was a great
deal of all manner of banal cruelty tempered by equal measures of startling
kindness, much as Chabon suggested in the epigram above. What follows is my
attempt not to predict such acts, but to describe them in a richness of theory
brought to bear upon the work of becoming what was received and conceived

and deceived at St. Rita High School in the Fall of 2009.

 

4 The word ’like’ is tricky here. While each school would argue that it has a unique charism
informed by historical and theological as well as ongoing pedagogical ideals, I mean to draw
attention to the similarity in approach to gender-segregated schooling as well as a rough
correlation which runs along the lines of a self-conscious Catholicism. Too these schools are
drawing from roughly— and competitively — the same demographic of student: white-ethnic,
working class, parochial school educated. The difference falls out in the details, or so I hope this
study will illuminate.

10

 

Catholic Education and Local History

Parochial schools, on a whole, provide education for roughly 11% of the
K-12 school-aged population nationwide, affecting directly — pedagogically —
somewhere in the ballpark of 6.2 million young men and women (”Private school
enrollment,” 2007). Sifting further, we find that Catholic schools account for
about a third of this number, enrolling something close to 2.2 million students in
the 2008-2009 school year. St. Rita is one of 461 single gendered, Catholic K-12
schools extant in these United States. Its ilk provides a version of the above
promise of a gender-separated education for roughly 215,000 American students
(McDonald & Schultz, 2008). These numbers are not meant to provide fodder for
an argument about representation nor representativeness; rather they are meant
to help explicate a simple and oft ignored point in educational research:
Parochial schools exist and are an integral part of the education system in the
United States. And yet very little theoretical (let alone critical) work about what
these schools do (well or poorly or uniquely) is present in the literature. What
does get written often amounts to cheerleading for the cause (e. g., Kearney, 2008;
McCloskey, 2009) or is limited to / by statistical analyses of test scores. That is,
the vast majority — to the extent that it exists — of empirical (theoretical, or
otherwise) research on parochial Catholic education is A) written by Catholics to
B) justify and / or C) prove the efficacy of Catholic schooling as a (favorable)
alternative to public schooling (e.g., Bryk, Lee, 8: Holland, 1993; Grace, 2002;

Hoffer, Greeley, & Coleman, 1985). That this work exists is less troubling than

11

that a critical literature that interrogates foundational assumptions of self-
consciously religious education is largely lacking, particularly in light of the
possible implications of intentionally organizing a school around religion,

specifically segregated by gender.

Catholic education is part of a larger network of schooling, as Catholicism
is also, we can argue (and feminists do) a part of larger and dangerous discourses
about gender and masculinity (Chernin, 1994; Daly, 1985; hooks, 2002; Spong,
1992) and thus this work is not just about religious schooling. It is about
indoctrination/ socialization which all schooling, in the end, must be. As is any
project which seeks to impart knowledge of any kind upon and to children.
Though we can argue that religious ideology is different in kind from the desire
to ”create a moral, disciplined, and unified population prepared to participate in
American politics” (Carper, 1998, p. 16), the processes by which devout followers
(dilettantes, agnostics, and atheists too) of Christ and willing citizens of the
United States are produced in schools are similar. Indeed Horace Mann and
Noah Webster saw their common schools movement as inherently tied to ”the
principle of virtue and of liberty” in order to help students form an inviolable
attachment not to religion but to country (Nord, 1995, p. 75). It was a religion of
country as divine over the Godhead. That said, it is still important to understand
the unique historical circumstances out of which the American system of

Catholic schooling grew as a way to grasp the kinds of historical discourses

12

which (may) still affect practice, pedagogy, and mythology within such schools.
Because, after all, in Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge, knowledge is always

produced in history under specific conditions.

Catholic schooling as a formal network in America began in New York
City under an Irish immigrant, Bishop ”Dagger” John Hughes. Traditionally the
founding of the current network of 7,248 schools has been seen as a reaction to
Anti-Catholic violence as well as an objection toward a perceived Protestant bias
inbred within the curriculum of municipal public schools — rooted specifically in
mandatory study of the King James Bible —in the 18408 (Nord, 1995). Lazerson
(1977) further suggests that Dagger John turned to the creation of separatist
schools ”to preserve minority rights” (p. 302) of ethnic Irish and German
immigrants5. Coupled with state injunctions that sought to protect the rights
(often repealed and reinstated almost on a rolling basis as control slipped in and
out of the hands of Know-Nothing/ Nativist legislatures in subsequent years6) of
the now burgeoning Irish Catholic immigrant population, this alternate model of

schooling created the flashpoint by which public schools were free to move from

 

5 The Italians, too abject, were left out of the equation at the time. Useful to note, too, that Mother
Elizabeth Seton’s school-considered the originator of Catholic education— predates Hughes’
attempt at creating a system of schooling by thirty years. We might rightly ask why this
narrative is less well known, perhaps a manifestation of very real gender troubles in / with the
Church and the stories it (and historians) chooses to tell.

5 Indeed it was around this time, Carper (1998) reminds us, that Illinois and Wisconsin made it
mandatory for children between 7 and 14 to attend sixteen weeks of public schooling a year. The
Bennett and Edwards laws, respectively, were meant to undermine sectarian religious education
as Catholic and Lutheran schools were seen as corrupting the idea] of evangelical Christianity
espoused through public schooling (p. 18).

13

a Christian denominational spirit, to the new doctrine of late 19th century
Americanism. So we can say, though these two systems of schooling have

diverged, they share historical and ideological roots.

The Irish in Chicago faced similar issues of resistance as their perhaps
more cosmopolitan cousins in Gotham on their path to assimilation. The
Protestant founders of Beverly Hills-Morgan Park on the far Southwest side of
Chicago had a hunch the Catholics moving from the inner enclaves of downtown
might be trouble. As the Rock Island rail line expanded transportation
possibilities out to the unincorporated area of glacial ridgeline— originally called
Washington Heights and later Blue Island —that had served as a German
Lutheran stronghold from the early 1870’s, a wave of Irish began to flee their
slums and tenements in search of land and security. When, in 1924, Fr. Michael
Hurley was finally able to secure a small parcel of land just west of the newly
laid tracks at the lip of Lake Michigan’s ancestral southwestern shores, old-guard
residents were up in arms. So much so, in fact, that a cross was burned on the
future site of St. Barnabas Catholic Church. The Protestants sensed a
demographic shift; the Irish (truly a race at the time, though since faded to an
optional ethnicity for most Chicagoans to trot out in mid-March) Papists
multiplied at nearly improbable rates after all. And the neighborhood began to
go Kelly green. Catholic parishes — Christ the King, St. John Fisher, St. Walter, St.

Cajetan- sprung up throughout the neighborhood to serve the burgeoning Irish

14

 

 

 

commuting set and the Lutherans and Methodists fled to the newly founded
suburbs immediately to the west. It was the neighborhood’s first version of

White Flight (Oswald, 2001).

The high schools, serving the bursting parishes and their expanding
middle class aspirations for advanced education, came next, dotting the
Southwest Side. Within a seven mile radius buildings sprouted as various
Catholic religious orders jostled for the souls and minds of the young

immigrants. They included:

De La Salle (1889), Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (1900), Mother McAuley (1900), St.
Rita of Cascia (1905), Maria (1911), Leo (1926), Hales Franciscan (1946), Mendel
Catholic (1951), Academy of Our Lady (1952), Brother Rice (1956), St. Francis de
Salles (1958), Quigley South (1961), St. Lawrence (1961), Queen of Peace (1962),

and Marist (1963).

So a young (white, ethnic) Catholic had options. None of the secondary schools,
at the time of their founding though, were co-educational. In the fifty odd years
since Marist opened, however, a number of schools have closed or been forced to
merge into mixed-gendered schools in an attempt to survive dropping
enrollments. This as tuitions rise in the face of sagging religious vocations and
the skyrocketing costs of actually having to pay a faculty. Some stalwarts,
including St. Rita remain, however, becoming in ensuing years increasingly,

doggedly even, committed to their founding ideals of single-sex education. Just

15

 

what those ideals are, and why they necessarily exclude girls (or certain perhaps
non-conforrnist boys) relies either on a commonsense allusion to the-way-things-
have-always-been, or is attributed to research (often cited) from education
psychology circles that points to gender difference without questioning its (and

single-sex schools’) role in creating those same differences.
St. Rita of Cascia Catholic High School

The research site, St. Rita, is a secondary school run by the Augustinian
fathers, who took over the school after the Archdiocese of Chicago closed
Quigley South7, a seminary high school that had been operating on the location
into the early 19905. St. Rita of Cascia sits8 on the northwest corner of 79th and
South Western Avenue at the crossroads of Chicago neigthrhoods marked —
pocked, perhaps better describes it —by the effects of Irish/ Polish/ Italian ethnic-
turned-white-flight begun during the 19603 and more or less completed in the
early 19908 when Irish political bulwarks kept Beverly to the south white (and as
of the early 20003, cul-de-sac’ed off). Too, Midway airport maintained a western

border as big box stores developed near the airfield and began to replace hastily

 

7 My brother attended Quigley South; my father Quigley North. Neither were options when I got
to high school age and so I went to Marist, an all-boys’ Catholic school south and west of St. Rita
which has since gone co-ed, like a great many Catholic secondary schools, in an effort to remain
financially viable. My sisters all attended all-girls’ Catholic schools in the area and my mother
went to St. Scholastica (what a name!) on the north side of the city, itself single-gendered, too.

8 I mean this, actually, in two ways. The building of the school is named after the historical figure
Rita Lotti, true, but it also contains a shard of her finger bone, a relic housed in a shrine within
the school’s chapel.

16

constructed slum housing and four-hour-nap hotels. Lake Michigan provided an
incontrovertible lapping eastern border and heading north up Western Ave. will
take one on a tour of what (some) whites might describe as progressively worse
urban blight until the street regentrifies north of Madison avenue, the people
getting paler and the homes brown(ston)er. Make no mistake: it has been the
continual disinvestment in the infrastructure of these neighborhoods by the city
of Chicago beginning most prominently under the first mayor Richard Daley that
has pushed property values that were already artificially low in the Black Belt9

conspiratorially low.

This is important, not because I will be able to address fully the very real
and troubling racial context that underlies any discussion of education in this
region of Chicago in particular —I won’t — but because it is one layer of the
history of the place, of the school. And it is part of the silences that construct the
discourses into / through which the young men who attend the school grow.
That is, if they are anything like me: a white son of the South Side (or the Soxside

for your typical baseball fan), a Catholic, and immersed in the mythology of

 

9 Philpott (1978) provides a ready history of the creation of this geographically restricted region
set up by city policy to contain blacks who migrated north during the Great Migration of the
twenties and thirties. Daley, in fact, is said to have built the Dan Ryan expressway, specifically
for the purpose of maintaining a western border to the thing, an eight lane moat reinforcing a
very real color line (Royko, 1971). It didn’t work. In part because of ”blockbusting” real estate
agents who capitalized on the FHA's ”red-lining” policy restricting lending (and pushing down
property values) in areas containing ”inharmonious racial groups.” But also Daley’s own official
and unofficially bigoted policies led to further racial discord which allowed for the exploitation
of a great fear of miscegenation. The Black Belt, thus, expanded west beyond the Dan Ryan, and
south beyond Hyde Park because of panic-peddling agents, cultivating the seeds of prejudice
among ethnic whites who justified their flight along economic lines.

17

Christianity, of Irish Chicago, of racial Beverly then they will know only that
their school is largely white though the neighborhoods that surround it no longer
are. So on with the business of life, back south down Western toward home, or
west and north to Midway to Scottsdale or Hegwisch to the isolated
neighborhoods kept white by powerful ethnic politburos. A quick look at the
demographics of the school tells me that, at least on surface I may be correct as
St. Rita-all-boys, 9-12, and enrolling 701 young men- serves a population that
is roughly 70% white. One of the fairy tales of the place is that this is normal. It
was certainly normalizing for me at Marist. Feminists have long suggested that
gender (and any attempt at analyzing the production of it) requires the adoption
of an intersectional lens (Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996; McCall, 2005; West 8:
Fenstermaker, 1995) and so any examination at the school and gender it would

appear, requires an attending to race as well.

Fr. Tom McCarthy O.S.A.10 is the former principal and current president
of St. Rita. He is also an alumnus of the school and a native of Beverly. When I
proposed the study of masculinity and spirituality — ostensibly in all boys

Catholic schools writ large, but located in its particularities —at St. Rita, he was

 

1° O.S.A. is the abbreviation for the Augustinian order and it stands, as one might imagine, for
”Order of St. Augustine.” The charge of the Augustinians involves ”the gospel imperative of
love of God and neighbor-which Augustine sees as one, since we love our neighbor in God and
our God in our neighbor— ” which ”becomes for the followers of Augustine their particular
charism in friendship and hospitality” (”The Augustinians,” n.d.).

18

incredibly welcoming and eager to engage in the project seeing it as a way to
improve the school which, based on his personal history with the place, is very
dear to his heart. After a tour of the building —which I remembered vaguely
from events there when I was a child and my brother was enrolled —he handed
me three documents meant to help me familiarize myself with the pedagogical
approach of the Augustinians, the history of the school itself, as well as the
personal life of St. Augustine. This was actually my second encounter with the
beginning of my education about what it means to be a ”Rita man.” On the
exterior of the building is a frescoed rendering of the motto of the school — and
ostensibly of the Augustinians — ”Veritas, Unitas, Caritas.” Truth then unity then
love. A convenient trinity of Latinate terminology. The order of the terms is not
accidental, and we need only turn to the Gospel of John for verification. Christ
as the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 8:12) provides a process, through a
mindset, toward an end goal — and in true Christian triplicate, all three are one.
So it is with Truth, presumably attained through the brotherhood of the school,
achieved in the work of love. Therefore, for the young men of the St. Rita affixed
on the walls is a constant reminder of just what is to occur upon entering the
school: the search for one Truth (Christ), achieved in lockstep (Unitas) with God
(who is love, again from John, 4:8). This is one of the very first (and most
prominent for administration and alumni, at least) stories with which the
students of the school will come to interact, even in passing, throughout their

days at Rita; too the notion of Truth, Unity, and Love becomes one (three?) of the

19

ways that the experience of the school, of the ideology and the discourse and
thus the way power and gender get played with at St. Rita will come to de/ limit
the world for students, in turn seeking to form them as beings in that schooled
world as well. In a way, my education at the school had, in these initial

meetings, already begun.
Catholic Wonder Tales: The Saints

It is only with the gradual rise of the Christian Church, which began to exploit magic and
miraculous stories and to codify what would be acceptable for its own interests, that
wonder tales and fairy tales were declared sacrilegious, heretical, dangerous, and
untruthful. However the Church could not prevent these stories from being
circulated; it could only stigmatize, censure, or criticize them. At the same time,
the Church created its own ”fairy-tale” tradition of miraculous stories in which people
were to believe and still do believe. (Zipes, 2006, p. 53)

Uh—oh.

Picture me, please, slowly twisting one of the two scrolls which encircle
my neck. Nervous. Another finger has been pushed out of my own weakening
dyke of faith by the pressure of this overwhelming rationality, historicity,
inscrutable reason. I am digging, as I read the above, into my own past,
wondering at the constructed ”marvelous but fallacious instrument of” collective
”memory” (V ersaci, 2007, p. 90) that has cast various shadows upon my faith in
God. Perhaps and probably the tension in my hand, as I finger the scapular at
my throat is rooted in my belief that stories are what I have faith in and my

(theological) stories come from an inherently political institution, very much

20

rooted in the contentiousness of the human affair of creating the soul to repress
and then save it (Daly, 1973). The Catholic Church, is thus actively engaged in
reifying its own power through the work of ”teach[ing] that which is other,
opposite, and inferior” that we the humble laity might ”cease to be other”

(N odelman, 2008, p. 68) through assimilation into a conservative ideological
project. One way to bring the flock into the fold is through church doctrine,
another is through schooling; the third is in the stories we tell about fantastical

plebes (like us) made holy, beatified. All this in Jesus’ name, of course.

I have, as Trites (2000) recalls ”grow[n] to maturity trained in the ways of
such institutions” (p. 22) raised in a very specific language of belief, outlined by
ideology but highlighted through the dazzling firework-ed stories of saints and
sinners (martyrs, heroes) who have become easier to love than a Church that
deeply troubles me, that continues to alienate. Make these stories mere fairy
tales and all I have left is a great anger at the re / op / pression of a tradition-
bound (really, Pope Benedict? Still getting after condoms in Africa? Really?) and
woefully immodest clerical-patriarchal hierarchy and its very human drive for

power.
Shit.

The Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

21

”The fairy tale was intended to play a major role in the socialization process” (Zipes,
2006, p. 86).

”Ideology is not ’a political policy. . .it is a climate of belief’. . .[and] we believe some
ideologies so deeply that we consider them Truth” (Trites, 2000, p. 24).

”Truth. . .is not necessarily the same thing as fact” (Versaci, 2007, p. 60).

I was nine when my older brother, thin, invincible and prone to passing
out with the light on while I pretended to sleep on the bunk below, rolled me my
first brown scapular. This was the Communion of our neighborhood. As much
as alcohol and racism and the vestiges of an Irish ancestry branded us South
Siders, this simple piece of cloth made us men of Christ. In her gift to St. Simon
Stock—this is how it’s told to us11 — in the unfathomable middle ages (knights
and damsels and chamber pots in my mind), the Virgin Mary bestowed favor on
all those who were her scapular in good fai th. Chief among the fringe benefits of
belonging to Mary’s club is the stipulation for free passage to heaven. This
ensured all those venal sinners out there fortunate enough to get a twenty seven
cent string with two elaborately screen—printed guesses at a saint and the mother

of God that they could avoid centuries of severe hair-pulling discomfort in

 

1‘ Doctrinal and historical information available at: http:/ / carmelnet.org/ scapular/ scapularhtm.
A caution: This is not stuff for the faint of faith, or the skeptical, or the lapsing. Particularly in
light of assumptions collected by Clark (2003) that suggest ”anything associated with

childhood. . .exists only to be outgrown" (p. 65), which might best have cited 1 Corinthians 13 for
its inspiration: ”When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a
child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways.”

22

Purgatory. It also pardoned the mortals their rages, defilements and sexual

dalliances.

They tear off easily. This is relative of course. Say: they tore off easily
when my prime occupation was front-yard football. Here would-be tacklers
went for hoods, ankles and scapulars; anything to slow you down in the frost of

a November Chicago night.

Always after it happened, after the game ended of course, the dilemma
was burial or holocaust. Sacred objects such as these, blessed by priests even,
cannot be thrown in the trash to languish with coffee grinds. Like flags or pets,
they require proper disposal. Mine usually ended up in the Coleman grill on our
back porch stuffed in with years of accumulated palm fronds. We never cooked
outside, it was either too cold or the yellow jackets had taken over. So my faith
lay —more or less in-tact—nestled in years of accumulated ash, entombed in

rusting chrome.

But it’s odd that they broke so readily, come to think of it, because once in
5th grade on the West Side, I had to really work to cut one off to sate a heathen

referee.

”No jewelry.”

First of all, only gays wore jewelry. I learned that on the playground early

on. An earring in the wrong ear marked you open for ridicule for life. Oddly, rat

23

tails were socially acceptable. Secondly, it was more than ornamental. It was
faith, it was home and if I collapsed on the court and died that day I’d be going
to hell for hitting Kim Vick in the forehead with a marker on the playground that
morning. Her welt—it really was impressive; even said ”c-r-a-y-o” before
disappearing into her hairline — and my severed scapular spelled an eternity of
fire. I cried in the stands, sawing at the thread with a key. I’ll haunt him, I

thought, already gnashing my teeth.

As I got older, though, this kind of blind faith in a hellfire as well as a
heavenly backstage pass started to make very little sense. Some digging brought
me to a conflict of stories as allegory and the Bible as Truth. Then there’s this: St.

Christopher, I have only recently discovered, may never have actually existed.12

After St. Christopher was officially discredited (or defrocked, maybe de-
realed, I don’t know the terminology) screwing nervous travelers for centuries to
come, I decided to look up St. Simon, just to check on his relative reality. I’d

been wearing the scapular gifted to him by the Virgin Mary for years.

 

12 http: / / www.catholic.org/ saints / saint.php?saint_id=36. In some sense, I suppose it doesn’t
matter, but it is hard to explain Catholicism as monotheistic when we already have the Trinity
and then these sub-deities and their cults running around making up miracles, wonder tales.
Their spread, then, as with my own experience of the scapular story runs along very similar lines
with Zipes’ (2003) theory of memetic cultural transmission. The thought is that notions such as
”belief in life after death” caught on by ”parasitiz[ing]” (p. 4) the imaginations of early Christians.
And so it might be with various Lives of (now fictional) Saints. These stories of miraculous saints
(in the Catholic church of my youth, after death, a person could only be beatified if three miracles
were attributed to them; the number, I believe, has since been lowered. We expect less of our
saints, I suppose. Or our capacity for storytelling is running out; perhaps our dubiousness has
been piqued by cases like St. Christopher.) are what get illustrated in text and stained glass. They
are exciting, mysterious. Troubling.

24

—*—______-A

I found things.

Some I knew: He founded the Carmelite order of priests and brothers. Good
men. Spiritual, practical. Fans of football, basketball and minor emotional
abuse —nothing traceable, nor too deep; mostly guilt. Mt. Carmel high school
near us claims a cadre of professional athletes and the neighborhood abounds

with the brown and white of the Caravan faithful.

I didn’t go there for high school. I chose Marist (a mashup of Mary-in-
Christ) for academics. This reasoning was only barely acceptable. It created

problems. A friend’s father reminds me of my poor choice whenever I see him.
He was English. Pale, bad teeth.

He was a hermit. Who wasn’t? Skellig Michael in Ireland was beautiful. I
can romanticize honeycombed cells: men cloistering on a wind-tom cliff

overlooking a wild Irish sea.

He lived for a decade in a tree trunk - yes, IN a tree trunk - on leaves and roots.
It was at this point that the Virgin Mary appeared to him and gave him the Brown
Scapular to spread to all who needed saving in her grace. He returned to his home
speaking in tongues of his vision, carrying a brown cloth, preaching the word of salvation

through enrollment in Mary’s corps...

My eyes stopped there. I heard a cartoon screeching— the kind usually

preceding a collision—in my head. Flashes of fumbling madness came. A vision

25

in a tree, in a tree(!). Transubstantiation has become reasonable and I'm
reincarnated a failed Catholic wearing a useless bauble, the vestiges of a mad
saint. Always the hypocrite, I left it there, limp, meaningless for the first time;

my faith still embodied in fraying cloth.
As I said...
Uh-oh.

This could be paralyzing, I suppose, but part of becoming an academic
involves holding commonsense notions up to the — hopefully - prismatic light of
scrutiny that we might better, as a community, recognize the truths and
falsehoods —conflicted and conflicting — that alight within unquestioned belief.
It is our task, Eagleton (1975) suggests, to become trained readers in order to
”read for. . .silences” (as cited in Trites, 2000, p. 52). The search for me thus
framed is for the discourses of faith that might have been spawned
by / in/ through the scapular (and objects and tales of faith that function as
socializing influences just like it) rather than the fact of the holiness of the object

itself. Or at least I hope so.

Because I am necessarily bounded as a scholar by my history which then
affects ”my choices” which are ”thus a blatant example of how my conclusions
are limited by the boundaries of my knowledge” (Nodelman, 2008, p. 102), some

personal history will matter here. To this end, Trites (2000) helps us understand

26

that any examination of religious ideology, of how it might get promulgated
through a ”discourse” of religious fairy tales requires that we look at how such a
discourse, filtered through ideology, ”transmits and produces power. . .reinforces
it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it” (2000, p. 114). My truths about religion are run-through by the
transmittal of power and its renegotiation manifest in the brown scapular and
particularly the silences of the history of the thing. What I came to wonder, at St.
Rita High School, an institution very similar in profile and Catholic
representation, to Mt. Carmel, are just where the fairy tales that push ideology
lie —in both senses of the word, I suppose — for students. That is, what silences
ought I be reading in the literature of my research site that create specific
religious and gendered discourses, ideologically narrowed, by their authors.
And more importantly, why are they constructed as such. To what end? For
high schoolers are, in the eyes of both church and society, still children — legally
defined, even— and to read the literature of the school is to read ”what
producers” of knowledge, ideology, religion. . .men ”hope children will read”
(Nodehnan, 2008, p. 4) but also what they hope will not be read. It helps to begin

with history, and I suspect, the wonder tales of the place.

St. Rita of Cascia

Born to Antonio and Amata Lotti in 1381, in the Italian hillside town of

Roccaporena, Margherita Lotti began her healing miracles as an infant. In her

27

parents’ fields a ”laborer working the ground with the Lottis cut his hand and,
running back to the nearby house for some bandages. . .was startled to see a
swarm of bees circling little Rita’s face” as she lay sleeping. ”Though Rita’s face
was not disturbed. . .the man instinctively began to wave away the bees with his
hand—his injured hand,” which was, upon the abrupt exit of the docile bees, of a
sudden, healed (Di Gregorio, 2003, p. 5). Years later, after much study, the
teenaged Rita announced to her parents that she wished to join the Augustinian
convent in the neighboring city of Cascia. ”As attentive parents,” I'm
suppressing a cough here, ”who knew well their daughter’ 5 natural goodness
and fervent religious spirit,” Rita’s mother and father ”may well have anticipated
this piece of news" (p. 8). Which is why, the author notes, it is odd that they
instead forced her to marry a local man named Paolo Mancini, thus altering the

course of our story significantly.

John Shelby Spong (1992) in his search for religious truth among the
repressive tradition of a Church regarding women, asks: ”What does it take to
understand the mythic dimensions that fill our religious story?” (p. 12). A
healthy suspension of disbelief, one supposes, or the unwillingness to break
down the 4th wall that keeps priests on the stage of the altar and we fallen / failing
laypersons in the pews facing their ministrations. Less glib, Spong suggests that
”origin tales,” such as those of Rita here, and St. Simon above, ”are commentaries

on adult meaning” (p. 59); they ”are not history but are a form of myth-making”

28

(Connell, 2002, p. 69). Set among an argument for a contextual reading of the
scriptures placed firmly within their Hebrew Midrash13 tradition, he pleads for a
similar reading of the sacred texts (and stories) that come to constitute the
constellation of the Christian mythology. Which—considering the relative lack
of options for women in Italy in the 14th century and their general dearth of
power within the family structure — still makes it an odd choice for Rita’s parents
to have pushed her towards marriage considering the violence rife in the Cascia
region at the time; violence that would claim her ”quick-tempered" husband's
life. Her story from here is filled up with trying to keep her young sons from
retaliating for the murder of Paolo which worked, on a technicality: they both
died of ”a deadly illness” (the Plague, perhaps) less than a year after their

father’s murder (Di Gregorio, 2003, p. 19).

On the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of St. Rita High School,
an historical shrine — a walk-through yearbook if you will — was constructed in
the open foyer at the entrance of the school’s current location. There, at the
center as one enters the hall of pictures of distinguished — and not-so
distinguished - Ritamen, is a plaque which tells the crib notes story of the
historical St. Rita of Cascia. In this version, Rita is born amidst an early mob war

and after her husband’s death, her sons are ”lost in the mists of time.” At which

 

13 ”Midrash represented efforts on the part of the rabbis to probe, tease, and dissect the sacred
story looking for hidden meanings, filling in blanks, and seeking clues to yet-to-be-revealed
truths” (Spong, 1992, p. 18).

29

time, then, Rita was free after her period of mourning to enter the convent of St.
Augustine — though the nuns were reluctant to take her for fear that the violence
that clung to her family life might follow her into Cloister. From there the
religious tale begins with devotion to the sacred heart of Christ— invoked
repeatedly as the ”restless heart”14 by St. Augustine, her patron and ends with

the stigmata. After forty years in the walls of the convent:

she spoke of her willingness to relieve Christ’s suffering by sharing even
the smallest part of his pain. Her offer was accepted. . .and Rita was
united with Jesus in a profound experience of spiritual intimacy. In this
moment of ecstatic union, a thorn from Jesus' crown penetrated Rita's
forehead and the wound. . .remained open and visible for the next fifteen

years until the day of her death. (Di Gregorio, 2003, p. 39)

Thus, then, we come further through mists of time to a school named for a
stigmatic, a child beset by bees, a mother of the mob. And on Novena
Thursdays, before school, attendees are blessed by an ornate cross, the eyepiece
of which contains the fragment of her ancient fingerbone in some relic-ed
homage to a phantasm of long-ago faith, whose remains come to color the

discourses of the boys in that early morning chapel, yes, but also those who don’t

 

1‘ At the beginning and end of each school day, we were entreated to recite the following prayer
in call-and-response form:

”You have made us for yourselves O’ Lord. . .”

”And our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

30

feel the call to pre-dawn devotion but still attend the school. For St. Rita’s name
is invoked consistently in interesting ways which indeed shape the discourse of
religion made possible, but also of gender. At least for the administration. The
boys, largely, I come to find, except in one specific alternative space, see her only
in name, in statue, and in the Prayer of the Peacemaker they must recite (or

pretend to) during opening announcements each day.15

When I talk about the study of masculinity and spirituality — or rather,
masculinities and spiritualities — as formed, reformed, and deformed in the
context of an all-boys Catholic school what I am studying, ultimately, is the play
of discourses of the place. As ”gender is not fixed in advance of social
interaction, but is constructed in interaction” (Connell, 1995, p. 35) we must
consider, as above, the ”multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into
play” (Foucault, 1998, p. 170) at the nexus of the individual negotiating a given
day, a semester, a life of schooling; Catholic and gendered schooling. Because I
am in agreement with Biesta’s (1998) analysis of Foucault’s take on discourse(s)
as coming to be through the intersubjective where ”the subject is always already
on the inside of history, on the inside of language, on the inside of the discursive

and nondiscursive practices in which she constitutes her own subjectivity and

 

15 St. Rita, messenger of peace and herald of reconciliation. Despite hardship and suffering you
lived the Gospel message of compassion and forgiveness, and showed the power of love to
conquer hatred, and to establish harmony. Help us to follow your example, and to be
instruments of Christ’s peace. Pray that our hearts may be always open, and our arms extended
to pardon those who do wrong, and even to embrace with mercy those who inflict injury. Pray
that God may use our humble gestures to touch hearts and to sow peace. Amen.

31

works at the limits of herself” (p. 11), I choose to attend to the history of the
school, of the neighborhood, and my-coming-to-self as a presage to the
discussion of how the Ritamen came to make (non)sense of their

gendered / schooled experiences. That is, there is a reason that only men are able
to turn wafer into flesh, wine into blood, and this is historically rooted, yes, but
the ways that the boys shifting in their pews come to accept or challenge, sleep
through or ignore the doctrine of transubstantiation is part and parcel of their
homelife, their relationship with friends and enemies within the school, and their
negotiation of the fairy tales about religion or white flight or who St. Rita might
or might not have been. That is, their masculinity is informed by all of these
things, sure, but they are not passive in this information chain and are ready
practicitioners of a nuanced negotiation of becoming men. None of this, either, is
fixed as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) remind, noting ” social laws are
temporally and spatially bound regularities that hold as long as the institutional
conditions that underpin them are allowed to endure” (p. 52). The discourses of
Church, school, and society (of which the first two are both part and co-
constructors) hold those priests on the altar, and the boys in the pews. However,
in word, in deed, in cruelty and kindness, the young men of the school are
constantly working (even in acquiescence and resistance to prayer) at the limits

of (becoming) themselves.

32

 

 

Chapter Two
Review of Literature

”Masculinity is foretold, told, and retold, instated, regulated, and enforced” (Corbett,
2009, p. 47).

”Words caused things here” (Ruhlman, 1996, p. 126).
Johnny: ”Where you been, Mr. Burke?"
Me: ”I was at the hockey game. ”
Johnny: ”My Mom wouldn’t let me go. ”

Me: ”Why not?”
Johnny: ”’Cause she’s gay about me going out on school nights.”

Gender/Sexuality
Some memory-work to begin:

In August of 1998 I’d splintered off a piece of my radial head (elbow)
bone. This left me, in-sling, and more-or-less helpless to dress myself for the first
two weeks of my freshman year of college. And there I was, living on a floor—at
my new Jesuit university-home — with twenty plus eighteen year old ”men,”
trying to figure out how not to get labeled ”gay" were I to ask one of them —
strangers all — to help me put pants on. This concern, that a simple action—
asking for help, albeit in somewhat extraordinary circumstances as far as
potential intimate contact went— might make me ”the fag” of the floor came

from somewhere.

My sense is that it— this fear? —was rooted in my four years in the crucible

of performative masculinity that was Marist high school: 1,200 boys and the only

33

women in sight were Religious and / or faculty. Limp a little bit on a given

day. . .gay; use a three syllable word to answer a question. . .gay; wear maroon
shorts to soccer practice. . .gay; ask a guy to help you get dressed. . .super gay. It
was, as if, as Pascoe (2007) suggests, we all had a unique form of Tourette’s. But
the labeling served a function: it kept us in line; we were practicing some version
of what Butler (1990) calls ”the repeated stylization of the body. . .which define[d]

’masculinity’ and ’femininity’” (p. 33).

We were homogeneous; we were straight; and shit were we worried that
you - or anyone — might not know. Mac An Ghaill (1994) stresses that
”heterosexuality is a highly fragile, socially constructed phenomenon” which is,
though, presented as ”fixed. . .apparently stable. . .and unitary” (p. 45) Absent,
both on my all-male floor and in my same-sexed high school were women as
potential heterosexual partners (Cameron, 2006; Pascoe, 2007) that we — insecure
and embedded in a culture fraught with, and run through by, homophobia —
might assert our heterosexual identities through the protection of a ubiquitously
present girlfriend. And so we flailed, lashed out, belittled. That to be gay was to
be less-than was selfsame, foregone. Indeed Butler (2008) as philosopher and
credited as founder of the very notion that we might queer gender/ sexuality,
notes in reflecting on the response to her seminal (sorry for that; should it be

ovarian?) work, Gender Trouble, that she initially ”sought to understand some of

34

the terror and anxiety that some people suffer in ’becoming’ [or being made]

gay,’ the fear of losing one’s place in gender” (p. xi).

This was all a part, we could argue, of our ”gender-role socialization”
which for boys ”is often characterized by negative prescriptions: Don’t be a sissy;
don’t engage in feminine behavior” (Harris, 1995, p. 43). Whether or not a
broken elbow and the resulting temporary lack of facility with a zipper was
feminine mattered little: it was made strange and thus negative, which led to a
very quick slide to ’ gay’ on the hall. Epstein and Johnson (1998) propose that ”in
schools. . .sexuality is both everywhere and nowhere” (p. 108). And it is through
expression/ repression of sexuality that gender comes to be represented and
regulated often in the hallways (and dorm rooms) of schools, an idea which
Butler (2008) attributes to the conditions of ”normative heterosexuality,” where
the ”policing of gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality”
(p. xii). Thus I was made the ’fag’ where by dint of being different from me, any
individual on the floor could assert his straight status in contrast to my sudden
suspectness. All that for getting dressed, to say nothing about what I actually

wore.

The point, though, is this: gender, sexuality“, masculinity, they are always

in process; they are constantly being reworked. To be ”fag,” for Pascoe (2007) is

 

"5 I realize, at this point, that I’m playing somewhat fast and loose with the dual concepts of
'gender’ and ’sexuality’ . That is, I’m allowing them to duel rather than separating them off and

35

‘5.

not to be at all, but rather to inhabit — to be forced to colonize, like a penal
immigrant sent by the British Crown to Australia — that agonistic space, usually
temporarily. ”Fag,” she notes,” is not necessarily a static identity attached to a
particular (homosexual) boy. Fag talk and fag imitations serve as a discourse
with which boys discipline themselves and each other through joking

relationships" (p. 54). Further:

[The] fluidity of fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a
powerful disciplinary mechanism. It is fluid enough that boys police their
behaviors out of fear of having the fag identity permanently adhere and
definitive enough so that boys recognize a fag behavior and strive to

avoid it. (p. 54)

I have come to find in my work, too, they — these boys--do not only discipline
each other but rather most anyone who inhabits their world. So it is that
Johnny’s mother —- from the epigraph above — becomes / is made gay above
through her restrictive parenting. This is something of what Connell who has

written extensively about, and is the genesis of multiple masculinities (2002) calls

 

fixing them definitionally in the body text. This is on purpose. Connell (2002) proposes that

” gender” and its attendant relations ” [is] always being constituted in everyday life[;] if we don’t
bring it into being, gender does not exist” (p. 54). Similarly Foucault (1990a) has decided that

” sexuality. . .is the name given to a[n] historical construct (p. 105) very much brought to life—and
very different from, though inevitably coming to affect the meanings attributed to the sexual act
itself—in social process. That is both gender and sexuality are constructed and because of the
shared historical context of their development as expressive and repressive concepts, each
inevitably bears heavy traces of the other. Are sexuality and gender different from each other?
Certainly; they cannot be collapsed into one category (yet), though I would suggest they are
mutually constitutive as a beginning point.

36

the ”social embodiment” of gender, which ” may involve an individual’s
conduct” and its regulation by other individuals, certainly, ”but also may involve
a group, an institution, or a whole complex of institutions” (p. 48). Families.

Kinship groups. Schools. Religions.

Gender, thus is not ”something one passively ’is’ or ’has’” but is rather
something one does (Thorne, 1993, p. 5). And it is ever (re)created in the tensions
of activities, in the webs of language, as above. This is Butler’s (1990) ”gender
performativity” where gender ”is produced as a ritualized repetition of
conventions. . .socially compelled in part by the force of compulsory
heterosexuality” (p. 31). In this view where ”nothing human is ’outside’
discourse,” and ”society is unavoidably a world of meanings” made through
language, gender ”meanings ”bear the traces of the social processes by which

they are made” (Connell, 2002, p. 65),

What to do, then, with this growing sense that all language, particularly
that which seeks to regulate action, is both ”productive as well as reflective of

social relations”? (Pennycook, 2001, p. 50). Perhaps begin with the body.
Gender and the Body

Though it is important to acknowledge that, as Pascoe (2007) asserts,
”bodies are the vehicles through which we express gendered selves” researchers

concerned with masculinities and gender had best recall that bodies are also ” the

37

matter through which social norms are made concrete” (p. 12). That is, they
become a part of the language through which gender is written and read. One
major critique of early literature on masculinities is that it located a masculinity
firmly in the male body without looking ”at the masculinizing process outside
the male body” (p. 12). The interplay, by implication— the interstices —between
the physical and the social(izing) begs attending. A body, in this understanding,
is both, in my case male by my various presentations of self", but also made
male by a whirlwind of socially generated discourses which are ever swirling
around and upon me constantly affecting my performance of gender. This is the
body as an ”’array of intersections’; articulated [in] moments in networks of

relations and understandings” (Nespor, 1997, xiv).

It is also a body which is very much affected by the educational world it
inhabits. Schools in particular are good at ”policing [children’s] bodies and
presentation[s] of self” (Ferguson, 2001, p. 65)”. Ferguson (2001) rightly trains
her sights on the (im)possibility of being young and black and male in schools
and sees a consistent linking ”of meaning in the connection between black male
bodies and fear” (p. 67). This surveilling, and coming to fear, is applied in

similar ways for Mac An Ghaill (1994) to working-class white males who in his

 

17 A manifestation of Cicero’s claim: ”Est enim actio quasi sermo corporis, by action the body
talks” (Hawhee, 2002, p. 156).

13 Catholic schools perhaps more specifically and willfully than the vast majority of their public

counterparts manifest simply through gendered and mandatory uniforms which bring in real
ways a great deal of, well, uniformity to the unexamined presentation of the bodily self in school.

38

study of a school in England, though ”born into male bodies” consistently battle
with administrations’ notion of what a boy in school ought be. This he came to
view as a frustration on the part of adults at the boys unsuccessful
”accomplishment of culturally appropriate versions of masculinity. . .within
shifting sets of social constraints” (p. 89). Many of those constraints deal directly
with presentation of the body or rather with how meaning comes to be grafted
onto this presentation. Harris (1995) Whose research is on male interpretations of
cultural messages, frames the discussion as one of control, or its lacking. As
”gender identities are molded by cultures which hold beliefs about appropriate
male” presentations of self ”younger men not in control of their own destinies
take direction for their behavior from adults” (p. 51). And adults in a schooled
setting present a decidedly jaundiced View of the male body: it is to be controlled

and in control, straight or it will be straightened. Or so the rhetoric suggests.

Much of that discourse comes to be outlined by a doctrine of Spartan
”hardening” through self-denial; particularly in light of sport(s) an area explored
by Messner (2002) who notes junctions where the body becomes ”a machine, or a
tool, to be built, disciplined, used (and if necessary, used up) to get a job done”
(p. 58). More militaristically (though not less incisive) Meidzian (2002) in her
work seeking to understand male tendencies towards violent behavior suggests
that, ”from the youngest age. . .boys are raised as soldiers” (p. 56) disconnected

from the emotionality tied to femininity and encoded with the ”John Wayne

39

“

syndrome” which demands of them a hardness, toughness, unemotionality,
ruthlessness with a constant stress on aggressive competition (p. 35). All of this
is a part of the ”masculine mystique” (p. 16) engendered through familial
relations, media influence, and societal interventionism. Ferguson (2001) notes
that this increased root in physicality requires then ”the active development of a
defense system against encroachments from others” where a masculinity
embodied ”is constructed as the practice of power plays and brinksmanship” (p.
43). In sum, boys are to be — in school in particular — aggressively in control of
their bodies; that is manifesting aggression, often, through control of their space

and that of those around them.

Sex (and sexualities) of course is the not-so—hidden discourse here.

Corbett (2009), in a unique marriage of queer and psychoanalytic theory, asks
that we consider the ways ”in which boys bodies are either erased or glossed”
through an elaborate ”phallophobia” (p. 218) which dictates how / that sex is not
talked about openly or, rather, frankly in schools. Sex is certainly talked about in
schools, but often only obliquely through official channels”. That the male body
is sexed, even as it is instrumentalized for the punishment of the athletic field, for
example, can be readily seen in something as simple (and culturally loaded) as a

choice of mascots; there is a reason St. Rita is the Mustangs and not the Geldings

 

‘9 We might also point to the histrionic rhetoric surrounding sex-education in public schools
where abstinence-only initiatives, though backed by little and shaky research, continue to be
funded through state and federal initiatives.

40

and it is all rolled—up in the implied prowess bought through the performance of
the honed male body. I choose, at this point, however to delay the discussion of
sex and the body in the interest of picking it back up as it relates to religion and

the imposition of doctrinal / assumed virginity as austerity / conquest.

One way to make sense of this embodied / imposed gendering of the male
body is suggested by Connell (1987) who posits a ”gender order” by which
dynamism of gender-definition is possible on a societal scale under ”the current
state of play in. . .macro-politics” where ”the formation and dissolution of general
categories and ordering of relationships between institutions” come to represent
the macro-politics of gender (p. 139). That is: gender is an always changing
thing, dependent on individual actors affecting large-scale definitions which in-
tum then (de)limit the possibilities of both individuals and groups to express and
live gendered lives. It’s a feedback loop, always closed, ever recursive and

massive in scope.

Such a structural understanding eliminates (fails to illuminate fully) for
this researcher the possibility for individual agential activity. For in the end
those who create and do and recreate gender do not live macro lives and the
slippage at the boundary of when structure ends and the individual begins is
problematic and often undertheorized. What we’re talking about are the
vulnerable joists here, the vagueness of just what it means to be ”between."

Cherryholmes suggests (1988), ”meaning is,” indeed, ”always in constant play,”

41

(p. 47) which supposes in some ways that which is gendered cannot rightly be
ordered, for it is always ever disordered by the very nature of a constantly
mutable meaning. They are, meaning and gender, ever between. What this
study comes to be about, however, is how meaning is made and maintained; this

is about the play.

The tension in structural definitions, such as Connell’s, suggests, that
gender is both constructed, yes, but then— with struggle, perhaps--categorizable.
And the production of a gender order is what happens when the doing and the
clone combine to build a socially normative set of behaviors. In other words the
”structure” of gender ”becomes an object of practice, because the choices and
actions of today’s [actors] re—create [extant] divisions of labor and power”
(Messner, 2002, p. 11). Thus understood, it becomes possible for Connell (2002)
to suggest that ”bodies have agency and are socially constructed” (p. 47) and

further that:

Gender is the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive
arena, and the set of practices (governed by this structure) that brings

reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes. (p. 10)

One helpful (or not, I suppose) religious metaphor might be the Christian
definition— for this study is, after all, rooted in a particular religious context— of
free will: we are all actors of our own accord under an omnipotent God who

understands and experiences time and space differently than us and already

42

knows how we will act and though He (because, well, so often He20 is
represented as male) has lived our choices for us already -— and they are then
somehow fixed in a time we have yet to come to know — we are free under that
structure to make decisions that we have, in a sense, already made in a time we
cannot hope to comprehend. Still, it is with Connell’s theorization of multiple
masculinities that this study was begun and it is to hir7-1foundational critique of a
limited View of masculinity as singular and unified that we rightly and

respectfully now turn.

Masculinities

Connell (1995) troubles the idea that masculinity is a unitary, singular,
concept. Ze proposes an expansion of the range of gendered possibility present
in the enacted world thus through a discussion of the problematic nature of sex-

role theory. The ”basic tendency in sex role theory to understand men’s and

 

20 In the neighborhood where the study takes place the all-girls’ Catholic school, on alternate
weeks, replaces the traditional ”father, son, and holy spirit” of the sign of the cross with ”creator,
redeemer, and giver of life.” A friend of my sister was pulled from the school by her parents in
the face of such degendering blasphemy(!)

21 It was brought to my attention that between the proposal and completion of this study, R.W.
Connell (male) scholar has become, operatively, R.W. Connell (female) scholar. Aside from adding an
interesting sidenote to the author’ 5 own texts and personal processing of gender work, this begs the
question of the proper pronoun for alluding to Connell. In the interest of honoring the struggle of
and pursuit for a surgical solution to sex-trait identification issues, I have chosen to use the gender-
neutral pronouns 'hir’ and ‘ze’ to refer to Dr. Connell. It allows me to acknowledge that the texts
referred to were written by Connell-marked-male while alluding to the now female-identified gender
scholar, R. W. Connell. Butler (2008) presaged this trouble of language and pronouns noting that "I
am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that
makes this '1’ possible. This is the bind of self-expression, as I understand it" (p. xxvi).

43

women’s positions as complementary" (p. 25) belies studies which note that "sex
differences, on almost every psychological trait measured, are either non-existent
or fairly small” (p. 21). These small differences, however, in the male and female
sexed-bodies, ze argues, are ”culturally cued" to be exaggerated (p. 21) and so
the difference that makes a difference is projected / encoded as across genders,
rather than within them. The male role, as socially embodied, could remain
singular and separate from the female role unless we begin to envision a theory
of multiple masculinities rooted in the notion that ”gender is not fixed in
advance of social interaction, but is constructed in interaction” (p. 34). And so it
is with masculinities which are indeed myriad and unsettled and always in
negotiation. ”To recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough,” though;
”we must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity:
relations of alliance, dominance and subordination” (p.37). Further, ”in
recognizing different types of masculinity, then, we must not take them as fixed

categories” (p. 38).

Connell (2002) also posits the existence of ”core” and ”peripheral"
institutions within society that affect (and guide, and fasten, we ought assume)
the societal gender order, of which these masculinities are, for hir purposes, a
part and to which they co-contribute. Core institutions like ”the military, the
state [and] corporations. . .retain. . .a patriarchal legacy of male power, control,

and exploitation” while ”other institutions (educational and familiar), though

44

still retaining a patriarchal legacy, are more contested” (Messner, 2002, p. xx).
Though in this model the latter remain more malleable than the former, they all
still produce multiple masculinities which are arranged — and this is where I will
eventually depart from hir —hierarchically (Connell, 1995). At the apex, in
societal terms, is hegemonic masculinity characterized by dominant or
”compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich, 1980) which ”in a given space and time,
supports gender inequality” (Pascoe, 2007, p. 7). The purpose of multiple
masculinities as a theory was to provide a ”fluid and conflictual” model but it is,
Pascoe feels and I agree, most often ”used to construct static and reified
typologies” (p. 8) which essentially slot men and women by activity and practice
into fixed but ill-defined categories. This is the danger for this author of
structural theory, as I see it: deciding just where the giant invisible hand ends
and where individual agential possibility begins, if at all. For in the end we
might rightly decide that it’s all too deterministic and one could reasonably ask,
to borrow from/ corrupt that great Feminist student of erotic power (or the
power of erotics, say), Audre Lorde (1984), if this isn’t just all a reordering of
furniture in the master’ 3 house and really, what difference does it make, all those
deck chairs, rearranged, if the Titanic, so much hegemonic masculinity, is going

to take us down with it anyway?

A more elastic concept of of gender-cum-masculinity offered by Connell

(2002) is that of ”gender relations” (rather than ”orders,” the military connotation

45

of that term perhaps coming aligned with hir core / peripheral theory) which ”are
always being constituted in everyday life,” presumably by individual and
collective actors/ humans where ”if we don’t bring [gender] into being, [it will]
not exist” (p. 54). There’s between-ness (meaning in negotiation) possible here
and we’re closer to what Butler (1990) saw when considering gender ”a relative
point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations”
(p. 15). Still, Connell (2002) relies on an overarching ” structure of relations”
which ze insists ”does not mechanically determine how people or groups act” (p.
55). Out of this ze theorizes ”crisis tendencies” on both large and small scale, out
of which changes in gender can come when ” personal practice is structured
around commitments which are both urgent and contradictory” (p. 74). We are
still —though more relationally, one supposes, than in a rigid gender order —
doing gender stuck on / in a web (rather than a straight — pun intended — line
along a continuum) with possibilities spun out before us by the multifarious
spider that is an overarching gender structure. Call it free(ish) will. What we
lose, here, is just where structure and agency begin and end. Some of what
Connell tries to do with hir core and peripheral theory is map this out, but what
of an individual? Can he be core? Peripheral? Will I ever know if I'm
hegemonic in my masculinity? Will I always be / do as such? Who determines?

And when?

Discourse

46

Perhaps a better (or more generative, for me at any rate, and at least
different) way to engage with the idea of multiple masculinities, then, is to
examine it in terms of discourses. (2010) suggests that discourse, for Foucault,
”is everything we can access with our minds”; discourses, further, are
”continually being re-created by people as they think and talk” (p. 36). Most
importantly, however, for our work here: discourse neither controls
(determinism) nor is controlled by people. Here we find the fluidity between

Connell’s agency and structure.

Cameron (2006) in her tome, On language and sexual politics notes that, ”we
[can] take it that no expression has a meaning independent of its linguistic and
non-linguistic context” (p. 17) and thus language both creates and is created by a
social and historical reality. Further she suggests that ”every act reproduces or
subverts a social institution” (p. 18). Trites (2000), similarly, notes that ”humans
grow to maturity trained in the ways of. . .institutions” and this ”training
invariably depends on language of some sort” (p. 22). In this sense language is a
part of discourse which for Foucault (1990) ”transrnits and produces power; it
reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it
possible to thwart it” (p. 101). This understanding of discourse allows an
analysis of the masculinities produced and resisted in a school (in the face of
religious ideology) to become more ”indefinite" more potentially contested; in

essence it allows students the possibility to ”shake them up, make them fragile”

47

 

allowing for ”crossovers and osmosis” (1996, p. 137). Further, Foucault (1990)
cautions that we may not find, nor necessarily look for a rational ordering nor

progression of discourse:

We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose
tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we
must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted
discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse
and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that

can come into play in various strategies. (p. 100)

And so I’m asking, in this study, just how the notion of working to
become a man (in/ for Christ) as put forth explicitly (indeed lettered on stone
often) by an all boys Catholic school gets played with fitfully, through language,

curriculum, and bodies which are ever filtered by / through ideology.

Fendler (2010) explains Foucault’s notion of ideology this way:
”Ideologies. . .sort and filter discourses” making ”certain kinds of knowledge
accessible. . .and other knowledge inaccessible” (p. 37). And so all schooling,
religious or otherwise, in a very real sense, is the process of presenting
information in an ideologically specific way, to and for students. In the process,
silence is created. Silence, too is of significance in the formation of discourse for
rather than delineating the end of its reaches, quietude becomes a mode of

response, of resistance:

48

 

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the
discretion that is required between two different speakers — is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a
strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things
said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.

(Foucault, 1990a, p. 27)

These discourses, all, these silences, are neither static, nor are they typologies
useful for slotting precisely because they are fragile, temporal (or historically
specific) and always in play. Neither are they the only discourses that might get
mobilized within a given school at various times. Represented as / in the official
texts of the place, certain curricular discourses might, though, be considered as
perhaps seeking to produce a kind of hegemonic (or preferred) masculinity as
suggested by Connell. In this sense, then, an all-boys Catholic school will
present certain ideologies as always-already: that religion is valuable to the
educative experience and that single—gendered contexts produce certain kinds of
men. What is done, then, with that ideology happens in the negotiation of
discourses by teachers, administration, and students. This is the interplay— the
work of becoming a man, if we recall the walls of Mt. Carmel — that I sought to

study.

If gender is indeed something one performs and does, it is vital to

examine on what stages such performance occurs and for what audiences and

49

how these contexts stymie or encourage certain versions of self. For schools, it
seems, provide unique ”terministic screens” through which students come to
view, interact with, perform, and resist versions of gender and religious ideology
(Burke, 1966). They might be considered the structures, or perhaps ’institutions'

is a better term, through which (gender) relations come to be (played with).

Power

For Connell (2002) it is possible to distinguish between hegemonic and
subordinated masculinities (p. 59). These distinctions are explicitly power-laden.
In this understanding of how power exists in the world, one preferred model of
masculinity perpetuated by core and peripheral institutions (like schools)
maintains itself as dominant and is held as the ideal against which all other
versions of masculinity are measured. Any action, then, in the doing of gender
and masculinity always occurs in reference to that which is hegemonic and
defined external to (even if by and through personal action) the individual.
Drastic change in gender relations occurs only when crisis tendencies come to
”undermine current patterns” to ”force change in the structure itself” (p. 71).
The change, though we can assume, merely serves to reestablish another
hierarchical power structure of gender, where one masculinity (even if newly
redefined) is always held in preference above others. Wheat from chaff. The
idea is that though resistance might occur, it is always occurring in relation to an
oppressor by the oppressed; and though revolution through crisis might come to

be, so too will a reordered structure reconvene itself when the dust settles.

50

V

Nothing, to simplify, goes sideways or diagonal; all in this scenario is bottom-up
or top-down. Again, while multiple masculinities and the power in the

re/ creation of them opens possibilities for study, the limitations of Connell's
structural model lie in the assumption that power really remains in the realm of
structure, for individual actors (or groups for that matter, which coalesce) who
resist will always ever be exerting futilely and generally unknowingly in the
rebuilding of a nearly universally oppressive (unseen and vaguely defined)
structure. And the doing of gender is just the Sisyphean task of pushing
boulders up neverending hills of hegemony. It is action, sure, but futile in the

end.

Foucault, in contrast, saw ” power [a]s exercised from innumerable points
in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (1998, p. 166). If we’re to
return to Sisyphus, then, we’re all still pushing boulders, but perhaps sideways,
or down (running after them) or maybe up, but someone might be pushing along
with or against us. In this sense, then, masculinity is always being redone,
though not necessarily in reference to an always present hegemonic ideal.

Indeed Britzman (2000) asserts that it is:

Discourses [that] authorize what can and cannot be said; they produce
relations of power and communities of consent and dissent, and thus

discursive boundaries are always being redrawn around what constitutes

51

the desirable and undesirable and around what it is that makes

possible. . .intelligibility and unintelligibility (p. 36).

Discourses, thus, and the power and resistance constantly produced within them

are always unstable. ”Power" rather:

must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force
relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which
constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless
struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as
the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a
chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions
which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which
they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is
embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the

various social hegemonies. (Foucault, 1990a, p. 92)

For Foucault (1998), and this contravenes Connell, ”we must not imagine a world
of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or
between the dominant discourse and the dominated one, but as a multiplicity of
discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (p. 170).
Indeed though Connell (2002) ultimately lands on the side of hierarchical
modeling, for hir, ”power is widely dispersed, and operates intimately and

diffusely. Especially it operates discursively, through the ways we talk, write

52

and conceptualize” (p. 59). And so we must not think of a hegemonic
masculinity come to lord over other subordinated ones. Hegemony exists,
certainly, but it is not fixed in a specific masculinity, but rather is instantiated
(temporarily and conflictually) by the institutional forces of human creations and
human destructions. Rather we might better think of masculinity and all of the
doing of gender as occurring in terms of ”regulatory practices” (Butler, 1990) put
forth within discourses against and through which young men and boys — for my
purposes here—come to exercise power and resistance. Indeed ”power is
everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from
everywhere” (Foucault, 1990a, p. 93) and so ”where there is power, there is
resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of
exteriority in relation to power” (p. 95). Students, then, are constantly

re / creating, re / interpreting and resisting notions of masculinities and
spiritualities —cloaked in curriculum, architecture, dialog — that flow within the

hallways of a school, or this Catholic school, St. Rita.

As ”it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together”
(Foucault, 1998, p. 170) what better place than a school to examine the nexuses of
the production (and resistance) of power and knowledge? If indeed, ”power is
tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” where ”its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanism” (1990a, p. 86)

then the work of this study becomes the partial unveiling of discourses wrought

53

with/ by power. The examination of masculinities in an all—boys Catholic school
will come, then, to attend to the regulatory practices sanctioned by religious
ideology, local history, and school curriculum, but also those practices adopted,
perpetuated, and resisted by and among the students themselves, all of which
work to produce educated men in reference (and perhaps resistance) to each
other. The work of gender in school, for the boys of St. Rita comes in the

individual reordering of the content of these discourses. This is power-full stuff.
Schooling

”The civilized body,” Nespor (1997) asserts, ”is a schooled body” (p. 137).
Or so it comes to be viewed through a social lens which utilizes schooling as a
way to define ”permissible forms of behavior” where the suppression of ”bodily
movement and expression [comes] to code bodies as having gender" (p. 122).
And it is in schooled environments that children are perhaps most strikingly
socialized into the doing of the work of gender, which involves then the
reification of social expectations and norms around dimorphous and
complementary presentations of boy schooled bodies and girl schooled bodies.
West and Zimmerman (1987) see the ”’doing’ of gender [as] undertaken by
women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its
production” (p. 126). It would be easy to argue, then, that this hostage-taking
begins (or is insidiously continued) with the regulation and production of a

schooled / gendered body.

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Nespor (1997) reminds that schools are not a priori nor are they external to
society, held responsible for its ills and salvation as they are. Rather they are
”extensive in space and time, fluid in form and content; [they are] intersections of
multiple networks shaping cities, communities” (p. xiii). They are formed of the
discourses of a society, in other words. Gee sees big D22 Discourses as ”ways of
being people like us” (as cited in Young, 2000, p. 316) which in this case is really
about, for schoolchildren, being taught to become like the us which determines
curriculum, requires schooling, and through its processes tries to define the
possibilities of being or becoming. Because ”institutions define and sustain
practices of masculinity in which individuals can be held accountable” (p. 316)
then the institution of schooling bears examining for its de/ limiting of the
discourses for our purposes here around what is im/ possible for a gendered and

masculinized student body, in both senses of that last term.

Schools, in essence, come to define and (attempt to) restrict sexualities
through the normalization and discipline of the body. Fiske (1989) writes of the
use of the body to incarnate and intextuate the law (p. 94) where the law, and

this is particularly true, though oft unspoken, in religious contexts is rife with

 

22 I am uncomfortable with the idea of a split between big and little ’d’ discourses for the same
reason that I’m uncomfortable with the notion of hierarchical, core, and peripheral masculinity.

It requires what feels like an arbitrary distinction between what is major and minor with a certain
willful ignorance of the shifts which occur at points of interaction. Still, the notion that schooling
is about creating individuals who will become more like those bodies that have already been
schooled strikes me as wisely encapsulated by Gee in this case.

55

images and homages to heterosexual possibilities (only)23. Pascoe (2007) alludes
to a particular school’s, ”parents’ and policy maker’s” wariness ” of teen’s
burgeoning sexuality” (p. 50) to the point where ”thinking or talking about”
these developing sexual ”bodies in the classrooms becomes difficult at best”
(Hawhee, 2006, p. 156). And though school as a project ”ultirnately tries to
suppress bodily movement and expression and to define appropriate bodily
orientations” (Nespor, 1997, p. 122), still, in spite of this ramped up interest in
and trepidation about teenage sexual possibility, schools are inherently
conservative in their educative approaches to the topic. So it is that at schools
like St. Rita a homecoming king and queen are still crowned — the symbolic
married heterosexual couple, come to rule over a court of peers and presented —
at the Homecoming football game in front of thousands of fans. A parade of
sport and celibate coupling, culminating in a dance where dates are of the
opposite sex only and dancing is still regulated such that room for the Holy

Spirit must be maintained between opposite sexed bodies on the gym floor.

Here was see much of what Foucault (1990b) was explicating in his History
of Sexuality when noting that though ”sexual union" as theorized by the Romans
was ”a fact of nature” and thus couldn’t be a bad thing, it was really only ”the

possibility and the principle of the act that [were] validated (p. 112). This was a

 

7-3 Daly (1973) sees this as the implication of a longstanding ontology whereby ”the entire
conceptual systems of theology and ethics, developed under the conditions of patriarchy, have
been the products of males and tend to serve the interests of [hetero]sexist society” (p. 4).

56

regulatory regime where ”indulgence in sexual pleasures at the wrong time
[could] induce illnesses” (p. 100) both physical and moral. Thus the presentation
of heterosexual coupling serves to confirm the probability of heterosexuality in
the school, but the miming (perhaps) of the physical act as much dancing is
feared to mimic, must be belayed for a time when it is acceptable, under the
auspices of the sacrament of marriage. And of course, marriage, in the Church

and thus the school is always-only a heterosexual possibility.

Mac An Ghaill (1994) has it that ” school microcultures of management,
teachers and students are key infrastructural mechanisms through which
masculinities. . .are mediated and lived out (p. 4) where it becomes possible that
the creation of ” man” in and through education ”is not a fact but rather a specific
solution to a specific problem” (Biesta, 1998 p. 9). What we need to decide, and
this is Biesta’s take on Foucault’s ”diagnosis of modernity. . .is what kind of
answer man is” (p. 9) to the problem as created. Schooling is, in short, about
creating problems and molding solutions to those very issues. In this light, then,
it is salient here to turn to a number of studies done in K-12 educational settings
which address the formation of genders and masculinities by way of situating

my own ongoing research at St. Rita.

Barrie Thorne (1993) conducted a two-part, two year ethnographic study
at elementary schools in California and Michigan seeking to examine

”how. . .children actively come together to help create and sometimes challenge,

57

gender structures and meanings” (p. 4). In the process she sought to put an
”emphasis on action and activity” as a way of rooting out how kids ”do gender”
(p. 5). What she encountered, recalling her assumptions about structured
genders, was a stark splitting of boundaries where boys and girls came to
transgress but also reinforce the physical borders of gender. ”Boundaries,” she
notes were ”created through contact as well as avoidance” (p. 64). Though
”gender boundaries” were ”episodic and ambiguous” (p. 84) for Thorne, they
were always split down the middle of groups of boys and groups of girls. And
though the researcher reminds that ”we should treat the opposition between
male and female as problematic rather than known” (p. 109) the sum of the
research fails to question effectively the unitary categories of ’boy’ and ’girl’ as

formed in/ by the spaces of school.

Ann Arnett Ferguson (2001) draws on Thorne as a way to introduce the
contested punishing spaces used in an elementary school — or schools as these
spaces themselves — to affix fear to the state of being young, poor, black. Using
interviews with students - in 5th and 6th grade — and administrators at an urban
middle school, as well as participant-observation in classrooms and detention
rooms, she chronicles the construction of a troubling pathetic, in the sense of
pathos, development. Fear and containment, that is, becomes synonymous with
black male masculinity through the rninistrations of the school. ”School rules

operate[d],” for Ferguson ”as instruments of normalization” (p. 52) most often

58

through ”a proliferation of surveillance and assessment techniques” (p. 53). The
locus of analysis in the study lies in how ” gender acts are always and already
modulated through race at the constitutive embodied level as well as that of the
imaginary and representational” (p. 164). And further, the researcher decides
that ”we come to know ourselves and to recognize others as of a different sex
through an overdeterrnined complex process inherent in every sphere of social
life at the ideological and discursive level” (p. 170). Certainly and it is vital to
recall that that overdetermination is fed —would it be too cute to say determined

over time —by and in schools.

This onus on race (and class) is carried through in a different way in Mac
An Ghaill’s (1994) examination of the making of men— at a working-class British
secondary school- guided by the assumption that ” schooling” is ultimately ”a
masculinizing agency” (p. 1). ”Schools” in this View are ”sites for the production
of sex / gender subjectivities, ’where people conform, deviate, challenge,

I”

participate and engage with state apparatuses (p. 2). Set in a co-educational
comprehensive school, the author comes to argue that ultimately though
mediated by the discourses which surround them (overdetermined by the school
context) ”young people are active makers of sex / gender identities” (p. 179).
Caught in the midst of a restructuring of curriculum in the face of new national

standards, the faculty is presented as divided between the new and old guard,

further fractured along gender divides. The boys at the school, then, become

59

 

expert at navigating (through acquiescence and resistance as well) the vacillating
genderered expectations which dot the school. They are not hostage as
suggested above, but are rather able to work at the bindings of their restrictive

situations.

They are makers of their own identities, of course, but also of those that
are im/ possible for their peers. Pascoe’s (2007) work in the field at co-

educational River High:

”illustrate[s] that masculinity is not a homogenous category that any boy
possesses by virtue of being male. Rather, masculinity — as constituted
and understood in the social world —is a configuration of practices and
discourses that different youths (boys and girls) may embody in

different ways and to different degrees. (p. 5)

A young graduate student who spent the year with her subjects at the school,
Pascoe came to understand her work as rooted in various official and student
discourses. In the study ”fag discourse” came to the fore as a ”trope” associated
more with male effeminacy — in negative ways — than with actual homosexual
activity. Indeed ”the constant threat of [being made] the fag regulated boys
attitudes toward their bodies in terms of clothing, dancing, and touching” (p. 65).
And so it is through language, that activity and possibility become limited. One
way to opt out of this threat, for heterosexual / heteronormed boys was through

the invocation and physical presence of ” girlfriends” who ”both protected boys

60

 

from the specter of the fag and bolstered their masculinity” (p. 90). The only
other outlet was afforded ”Christian boys at River High” who had ”institutional
claims on masculinity such that they didn’t need to engage in the sort of intense”
(p. 113) discursive work of distancing from the fag as their less (openly) devout

classmates.

What to do, then, with a single-gendered context? Though more the
exception than the rule as noted in the statistics provided in the first chapter of
this text, these schools still produce men and women — like and unlike, clearly,
myself. Michael Ruhlman (1996) returns to his own all-boys — non-sectarian—
preparatory institution in a work that reads as part memoir and part nostalgic
argument for the value of schools that are organized around the specific
principle of separating boys from girls, presumably for their— the students or the
schools; we’re never really sure - own good. ”Does it not make sense,” he asks,
mirroring Cornelius Riordan, ”a professor of educational sociology. . .to learn
more about the potential efficacy24 of single-sex educational environments before

they become historical artifacts?” (p. 9).

 

2" In 2005, the No Child Left Behind act was modified to allow for single-sex public education at
both the classroom and school level. The legal and theoretical justification for such an
amendment both were taken from research collected by and trumpeted through lobbying
organizations like the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE) which cite
vast testing gains for students, particularly in inner-city contexts, when boys and girls are
purposely separated by gender in educational settings. The suggestion is that gender segregated
educational contexts might just be the saving grace for struggling public schools in this era of
high stakes testing. Many of these claims, indeed, made as regards the benefits of/ for single-
gendered education run along the lines of improved test scores, most particularly for girls in
math and science over their counterparts in co-educational settings ("NASSPE,” n.d.). Both

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While I can’t speak for the methodology nor the requisite ”scientific”
value of the text— this was more-or-less a mass market offering—and while I’m
uncomfortable with his lack of examination into the research concerning the

construction of genders and masculinities, I will say that Ruhlman’s forays into a

 

inherently and explicitly such work relies on biological assumptions of gender as a fixed and
heritable trait. Claims focused on testing gains, however, are confounded by work like that done
in England by Robinson & Smithers (1999) who note that:

The outstanding performance of the single-sex schools in the examination league tables
has much more to do with academic selection, socioeconomic background and the
standing of the school itself than with the segregation of the sexes. When, as far as
possible, like is compared with like, the apparent academic differences between single-
sex and co—educational schools largely disappear. (p. 23)

Still, there remains, as federal guidelines now provide the justification for single-gendered public
education, a certain impetus for the establishment of separate sexed schools. And though:

Advocates of single-sex education do NOT believe that ’all girls learn one way and all .
boys learn another way.’ On the contrary, we cherish and celebrate the diversity among
(sic) girls and among (sic) boys. We understand that some boys would rather read a
book than play football. We understand that some girls would rather play football rather
than play with Barbies. Educators who understand these differences can inspire every
child to learn to the best of her or his ability," (”NASSPE,” n.d.)

such rhetoric remains reliant on a model of essential and biological differences between, rather
than among the sexes. And so no complex argument about the nature of gender relations is
being made. Boys and girls by this logic still remain very different at and because of the unique
circumstances of their births, though variance is certainly seen as occurring within genders. Still,
the assumption runs that a fundamentally different context of education will differentially and
perhaps universally benefit (all) boys and (all) girls. No sense is given about how limited
possibilities within and across genders become when boys and girls are assumed to be more
different that similar and can benefit from being separated in school. There is very little nuance
here regarding just what kind of girls and boys will be produced as women and men in and by
schools that require their gender be essential(ized) upon entrance. One way to complicate this
argument, to push back on it, is to examine just how gender becomes (re)formed in a school in
the face of ideology which, perhaps, assumes that gender ”is,” rather than ”does,” as it were.

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school of his memory, as an ethnographer was helpful in certain ways. What he
notes in the text is a conflicted engagement with language that uncomplicatedly
supports Pascoe’s assertions. He records it as such, when asking a student about
the prejudice in the school — a bastion for the affluent sons of Cleveland - who
replies ”If you used the word ’nigger’ or ’kike’ in this school,” Paul says, "people
would be all over you. But people use the word ’faggot’ all the time” (p. 80).
Language. What’s different for Ruhlman, and this is in direct response to the
kind of invocation that the young men at River High were afforded in avoiding

the ’fag,’ is that ”without girls, boys can’t prove their sexuality during school” (p.

76).

This seems almost dismissive. Though I suppose it turns on the idea of
proof, particularly in light of Pascoe’s assertions that the ’fag’ is malleable and
transferable so that nothing is ever really proven. Too, though, homosexuality
may well be proven in an all-boys school, but the heteronormativity of
Ruhlman’s study forgets this in a prurient search for heterosexual outlets. That
sexuality, heterosexuality in particular, can only be asserted or proven in the
presence — or through the invocation— of women fails to take into account the
creative work boys do in and through language, body positioning, and emotional
thrusting and parrying. It also ignores the reality of nuanced and vital
homosocial activity that occurs in groups of boys, especially at an all-boys school.

The questions that might better be asked in reference to the above is, to what

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degree and in what ways can boys prove their sexuality in the absence of girls at
a school? In what ways might this heterosexual impulse — in a homosocial
environment—become malleable? And what do we do with the absence-as-

presence of homosexual (im)possibility in such an environment?

Still, what this becomes increasingly about is the formation of
masculinities (in institutions with patriarchal legacies), yes, but also a distancing
for boys from femininity which is tied neatly to homosexuality and abject status
within society, sure, but particularly in schools. Too, we note that ultimately this
work is about creating a complication of what gender really means in schools
and how it comes to be formed. For my aims at St. Rita the above is about

casting evermore light onto how:

The juridical structures of language and politics constitute the
contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this
field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating

practices. . .And the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a
critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical

structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize. (Butler, 1990, p. 7)
Religion

It is perhaps fitting that the only class I was kicked out of in my semester

of observation was a theology course. More on this later, but suffice to say the

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Augustinian Friar who taught the class — on great (sanctioned) Catholic thinkers,
incidentally — had issues with the presence of a researcher. Other teachers
clearly, in their awkwardness in accommodating me, took umbrage to my
honorary senior-student status, but endured my presence still. They, we might
argue, could be fired for denying me access — Fr. Tom, the President of the school
took quite a liking to me through my interactions with students and I enjoyed a
kind of most-favored-nation status around the place — Br. Gary, keeper of the

monastery attached to the grounds of St. Rita, could not.

At any rate, much of the juridical language of which Butler speaks, comes
from religion and its orientation to genders and sexualities which run
interference in terms of the development of masculinities. Perhaps I should say
religions, here, but I’m thinking most specifically of the Judeo-Christian tradition
as it relates specifically to my context at an Augustinian Catholic school.
Certainly we can say — and there is research to suggest —there is a pretty
consistent agonistic relationship between many and varied religions as regards
the development of genders and the possibilities for and demonization of
sexualities, but for my purposes here I’m going to narrow to Catholicism more

often than not in an attempt to remain localized.

Foucault (1990b), in his History of Sexuality reminds that an early and
ongoing Christian focus on sexual austerity —carried down in history through

the social doctrine of assumed clerical celibacy as well as the linking of sex-and-

65

marriage-solely-for-procreation— ” should not be” viewed as ” somehow ’pre-
formed’” (p. 21). Instead it is vital to note that the increased attention to
sexuality and its ethics as and development into a thing that mattered, is
historically rooted in pre-Christian traditions and concerns. What began as ”a
male ethics. . .in which women figured only as objects” became ”an elaboration of
masculine conduct carried out from the viewpoint of men in order to give form

to their behavior” (pp. 22-23).

Masculinity became about being, for men, in control of one’s appetites for
”a man who was not sufficiently in control of his pleasures —whatever his choice
of object—was regarded as ’feminine’" (Foucault, 1990b, p. 85). It was through
this Greek doctrine which valued as moral, the ability to control one’s desires,
which came to conflate sexual activity with animality, that Christianity was able
to hijack the conflicted reality that though ”sexual activity [might be] a source of
therapeutic effects” it too was run-through with ” pathological consequences”
(1990c, p. 118). The most controlled and controlling being, the martyr, the saint,
the priest was thus portrayed as a man having mastered his sexual desires to the
point where Transubstantiation, the ability to bring God into the world for the
consumption of the faithful superceded his need to stoop to the desire for

physical release. Sex was too base, essentially, for Christ.

And the austerity of masculinity, its religious pinnacle, ended up filtered

down into men cloaked in the purity of white albs at the head of 701

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uncomfortable schoolboys in a Midwestern American city preaching a Gospel
born of 2000 years of (mis / interpreted / guided) tradition. There are no women
priests in the Catholic Church in large part because the sexual doctrine of women
as objects and too feminine to be able to control sexual desire and its offspring,
emotional weakness, remains at the whispering fore of our doctrinal engagement
with the world. Spong (1992) addresses this in no uncertain terms: ”Patriarchy
and God have been so deeply and uncritically linked to gender by the all-male
church hierarchy that men have little understood how this alliance has been used

to the detriment of women” (p. 1).

Additional Feminist theological scholars see this as troubling. Well they

should. ”The point,” Daly (1973) suggests:

Is not to deny that a revelatory event took place in the encounter with the
person Jesus. Rather, it is to affirm that the creative presence of the Verb
[God, degendered and active] can be revealed at every historical

moment, in every person and culture. (p. 71)

That male clergy control the dispensation of the seven holy sacraments of the
Catholic Church (Baptism, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Confirmation, Holy Orders,
Matrimony, Extreme Unction), a reality that functions to maintain a vision of an
ahistorical take on gender and sexuality, mirrored in a man on the cross and a
man, his Father, up in heaven. In this vision of religion, women are always ever

handmaidens, passing revelation off to the Men who will carry the message to

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the masses. So it is that I wear a scapular where Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (the
mother of Christ, of God!) brought revelation to a lonely hermit in a forest. She
needed him to speak for her to gain legitimacy, to have a voice. We see this
consistently in the way prayer is formulated: because she was not God herself,
we can only pray that St. Rita intercede on our behalf to the male God in heaven.
Stigmata and all, and she is reduced to letter carrier to Christ and because we
cannot partake of the sacramental — according to Church doctrine —through a
woman, then even a female saint lacks the God-giving power of a lowly male

deacon, who is able to preach from the altar.

A vision of a new religion, Beyond God the Father, for Daly requires
”freeing. . .women and men from the sexist ethos of dichotornizing and
hierarchizing” (p. 97) in the name of tradition and Church. There is, she
suggests, an artificial divide perpetuated by the Church (and perhaps single-
gendered schools), troubling because ”religion” ultimately ”legitimates so
effectively because it relates the precarious reality constructions of empirical
societies with ultimate reality” (p. 132). To call into question assumptions about
gender and masculinities in a society requires, then, an attending to how religion
(and religious education) serves to reinforce, indeed to sacralize25, harmful and
deadly historical assumptions about sex, sexuality, and the dimorphous nature

of women and men.

 

25 Legal debates, rooted in religious assumptions, about marriage and civil unions come to mind.

68

The question of women in religion, thus, becomes the question of men and
women in religion. Chemin (1987) puts it this way: ”When a woman seriously
asks herself what it means to be a woman she is pulling at a thread that can
unravel an entire culture” (p. 25). Indeed. This is, perhaps and probably though,
a good thing. Consider Daly’s (1973) notion that women in Christian culture are
limited to two roles, and really just one: as virgin or downfall of man (either
Mary or Eve) where ”the inimitability of ’Mary conceived without sin’ ensures
that all women as women are in the caste of Eve” (p. 82). Women are, in essence,
limited to the role of mother or wife.26 Daly (1973) suggests a re-visioning of the
birth narrative of Jesus — the Angel Gabriel’s appearing to Mary and her
becoming pregnant by the male God, recall — that takes into account ”the case of
unwanted pregnancy. . .and the whole well-being of a person [as] controlled by
another being” (p. 111). John Shelby Spong, a bishop in the Episcopal Church
belies the case of the virgin birth of Mary asserting, rather, a collective Midrashic
revision of the person of Jesus. It was, he thinks, an attempt to cover over the
possibility that Jesus ”might have been an ’illegitimate’ child” (1992, p. 13) whose
past threatened his posthumous rise to prominence as a Jewish resistance to the
prominence of the Temple Cult to the point that his followers created
successively more fantastic, and thus less human, stories of his conception, birth

and life. ”What does it take,” he asks, ”to understand those mythic dimensions

 

2" The opening announcements end each day with a prayer to St. Rita, as well as ”Our Mother of
Good Counsel,” another moniker for the biblical Mary.

69

that fill our religious story?” (p. 12). A robust view of historical realities,

perhaps.

Why, at this point, in a text about boys in a school where I seek to examine
masculinities and their development, take the time to address the social context
as regards women in the theological space of Catholicism and early Christianity?
Not, certainly, to create a habit of parenthetical and footnoted allusions to the
development of (the irnpossibilities of) femininity in the Church. Women, in this
sense, have been footnoted enough, pushed to the margins in ways that emerge
often only through good and thorough critique. No. However, in a school
named for a woman, which is indeed apt to evoke her story and her intercession
in its multiplicity on a daily basisZ7it seems important to address the conflicted
role of women within the pantheon of Catholicism as an historical body, as well
as their ongoing oppression (very visible to the boys who, though taught by
women in class and compelled to pray to the statue of a woman in chapel, will
perhaps never see one on the altar in their four years at the school, and certainly
never ministering at it). In other words, in order to become men in the Church, it
is more or less required that one accept the ways in which women are belittled
liturgically as a rite of passage into Confirmed (sacramental) masculinity, which

is taught (explicitly and implicitly) as necessarily oppositional of/ to those

 

27 A number of classes end throughout a given student’s schedule with ”St. Rita, pray for us."
Too, this is a near universal invocation with athletic teams at the school.

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mothers, girlfriends, and female avatars in stained glass at the sides of the church

building, and the Church consciousness.

"The word ’religion’,” James Carroll (2001) reminds, ” shares a root with
’ligament,’ meaning ’tie” (p. 73). And so it is that boys-becoming-men are tied
(bodily of course, but socially, and historically on top of that; say discursively) to
the religious and educational conversations that bind them to their school, to the
undertheorized tenets of their faith tradition. We see some of this in the ways
that the young men of St. Rita chafe at the directives of female teachers which
Connell (2002) might attribute to ”a refusal of men to be under the authority of a
woman. . .in many religions among them the Catholic Church” (p. 6). In absentia
and abstractly it is perfectly fine to pray for help to a woman saint, but she of

course can’t give you a JUG28 for insubordination.

These boys in a very real way are tied to the violent historical doctrine
which colors red the troubled history bf men and masculinity in the church.
They are Mustangs for their assumed physical prowess, for it is their sex that
makes them strong; it is no accident either that a rival school is the Crusaders
and another the Caravan, two blatant and untroubled allusions to good Christian
soldiers gone on Jihad to the Holy Land. And though ”the history of [religion

and] masculinity, it should be abundantly clear, is not linear,” (Connell, 1995, p.

 

23 A Catholic school’s answer to detention, the acronym means ”Justice Under God.”

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198) it is safe to draw a meandering line from the violent, assertive and brutal
masculinity blessed by the popes who abided over the Crusades, to the
evangelizing conquest of the New World —those Conquistadores and bringers of
rational civilization, a Christian God, and an unhealthy thirst for gold - on down
to Vlad, in Computer Science class, when asked about his longtime relationship
with a girl from another school, saying ”I don’t give a fuck; I get what I want out

of it.”

And so, perhaps, he does. One argument Carroll (2001) makes is that the
”Church’s ’mentality of power’ ” will remain problematic until ”a fundamental
shift in its attitude toward the other, which in turn involves the issue of women’s
equality” (p. 572) occurs. It is this mentality of power as it formulates and
foments young men in school which has brought me to this study. I hope, now,
to shed light on its workings as a way of freeing up spaces for discussion about
the various workings of religions and masculinities in schools as they are
brought to bear upon, and are reflected back by, masses of young men, or
perhaps more fittingly, as they are extolled to (and ignored by) young men in
Mass. All the while holding to the notion that Lefebvre (1991) is onto something

hopeful here when he writes that:

Ideologies dictate the locations of particular activities, determining that
such and such a place should be sacred, for example, while some other

should not, or that a temple, a palace or a church [and school] must be

72

here, and not there. But ideologies do not produce space: rather they

are in a space, and of it. (p. 210)

It is, after all, the people who make the space. What follows is a description of

that space and its people.

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Chapter Three

Methodology and Methods

We must constantly be aware of the workings of sex and gender because in the historical
and cultural moment, paradoxically they sometimes make a big difl'erence even if they
sometimes make no difi‘erence at all. (Martin, 1985, p. 195)

”Make it public; critically review it; pass it on" (Shulman, 2008, p. 14).

Joe: ”You a student teacher?”
Me: ”No. I ’m doing researc .”
Joe: ”Wait, are you writing a book?
Me: ”Yep.”
Lenses

What follows is a discussion of the methods through which I encountered
the young men, faculty, staff and physical setting of St. Rita High School. In
order to bring some manner of coherence to the decisions I made, it is necessary
to take a macro View of what methodological lenses guided me through the
process. On a large scale, then, I viewed this project as Feminist and

Poststructural and of necessity, then, Critical in scope.

Feminist inquiry has long been guided by the notion that the personal is
political. Indeed much of what has been written, in the first two chapters, in fact
has involved stories of my life or memories which were stirred by my
introduction (back) into the community of St. Rita. This conceit felt necessary as
a way of unpacking my own history, sure, but also the discursive elements that
may continue to shape young men educated (and raised) in schools close to my

own, both in geography and religious ideology. To write, then, a research study

74

rooted in the neighborhood, religion, and educational context of my youth will
require some acknowledgment and indeed excavation of the personal-become-
political choices that I have made in the research, certainly, but also in its writing
up. Research, in this view, is never objective and is always messy because of the
intrusion of intentions, known or unknown, of the researcher (Harding, 1987).
Strongly tied to standpoint theory, Feminist methodology makes explicit the
partiality and bias of the researcher as a prerequisite to any conclusions made.
T00, of necessity, Feminism has long been rooted in gender research, first as an
assertion of a positive (and positivist) notion of woman in relation to work long
pursued about men, and in later waves aimed at the deconstruction of gender
normativity calcified in what was viewed as patriarchal claims to truth coursing
through a priori assumptions of sex as biology and gender as socially
constructed. In the end I intend to lay claim to the later historical moves in
Feminist gender research which aim at explicating just how gender gets defined,

most particularly in the realm of masculinities.

Later turns in Feminist work addressed Poststructuralism. The two
epistemologies dovetailed in their twinned ideas that truth is ultimately partial
(and party to power) and that context matters. Poststructuralism recoils from the
notion that there is an underlying — oft mystical — structure that determines
human reality and is outside of the purview of and possibility for human agency.

Structuralism was seen as frustratingly deterministic and Poststructural

7S

investigation came to focus on the ways in which amoebic and competing
realities and truths played upon and were played with by humans. In answer to
Marxist dichotomous ideals of power and resistance, oppressor and oppressed,
Postructuralism put an onus on the constant and creative work done by
individuals in answer to, and making nonsense of often, manifestations of power
in life. It is useful, then, for my purposes as I viewed the data as a collection of
discursive elements which are constantly partial, yes, but being renegotiated
through the work of the individuals of the place of research. In this way data is
never truly collected, but created by the researcher and his subjects even as the

researcher becomes the subject/ object of research as well.

And ultimately this is a work of Critical, what we could call exegesis, I
suppose. What I mean here is that I am working to critique the creation of
masculinities and spiritualities in a school. Because this is a Feminist project, I
will do so by examining and explicating theories of gender construction, because
it is Poststructural, I will do so in relation to the complexities of the constant
re/ creation of possibility through language, curricula, religion, etc. And because
this is Feminist Poststructural and Critical, I will refrain from providing solutions
that could be universalized outside of this specific, troubling and troubled

context.

(Critical) (Auto)Ethnography

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”Critical autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing. It is
research that displays multiple aspects of individual awareness about the
author’s critical embeddedness” where the ”main advantage of [the] method is to
let the researcher act sometimes as a researcher and other times as a participant”
(Cupane 8: Taylor, 2007, p. 11). I see this work as a critical autoethnography
because my ability (and will, really) to disentangle my memories as a student in
an all-boys single-gendered classroom in the past from those experiences of the
fall semester of 2009 strikes me as always-already suspect, particularly
considering the vestiges of history and the ebb and flow of familial,
neighborhood, and parish ties which continually threatened to wash over me
throughout the research process. To, then, claim the ability to ’report’ on the
experience of the school without making an attempt to acknowledge, deal with
and perhaps encode and thus fictionalize my own role as researcher, participant,
and alum strikes me as disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst. There are
necessarily autobiographical elements here because I will continually fail — and
have continually failed —- at any attempt to separate the me as researcher, the me
as classmate, and the me as former student from the me who struggles to exist
again in a religious / gendered secondary schooled context. To say nothing of the

me who ends up collecting / creating, collating and analyzing the data.

Austin and Hickey (2008) view ”autoethnographic interrogation” as ideal

for the ”critical appraisal of the marginalizing and privileging influences of

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culture in. . .classrooms” (p. 138). And while I take issue with a simplistic
dichotomous sense of privilege pushing to the margin, I find the methodology on
a whole useful for‘its honesty regarding the role of researcher as creator,
evaluator, and participant. In this sense, then, I am free to make decisions that
feel important about data creation. I am not so much concerned, for example,
with what may have happened to my memory between the occurrence (in class,
or at a football game) and the writing up of the action as I understand this
manner of research (and really any research at all) to be a practice in

elaborated / elaborate fiction29. Part of that interrogation requires an
acknowledgment of ”the reflexive processes impacting my identity negotiation
while in” the school (Olivas, 2009, p. 385) as well. This is not a study not about
me in other words, but rather a study about boys — and I chief among them— in a
school whose story I am telling through the lens pushing at the limits of my own

experience as a qualitative researcher.

 

2" Tyler (1986) quibbles with this term, through a bit of equivocation, in this way:

An ethnography is a fantasy, but it is not, like these, a fiction for the idea of fiction entails
a locus of judgment outside the fiction, whereas an ethnography weaves a locus of
judgment within itself, and that locus, that evocation of reality, is also a fantasy. It

is not a reality fantasy like ’Dallas,’ nor a fantasy reality like the DSM III; it is a reality
fantasy of a fantasy reality. That is to say, it is realism, the evocation of a possible world
of reality already known to us in fantasy. (p. 139)

Personally I’m more comfortable with the term ’fiction’ than ’fantasy’ and so will continue to
refer to the work as such, when it feels relevant. I will also later in this chapter, address the idea
of television-ed fantasy / reality. In this light, I will use Geertz (1973) as a guide for he saw
ethnography and anthropological research as fiction because they are necessarily shaped by their
authors and largely determined by the linguistic context and tradition through which they are
created.

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Van Maanen (1988) helps here, writing that ”qualitative researchers” do
not ”capture lived experience. Such experience. . .is created in the social text
written by the researcher” (as cited in Denzin 8: Lincoln, 2007, p. 19). Or, say:
any time that passes between experience and the written codifying of the
memory of that experience is basically moot — in ethnography and here in
autoethnography - as the ”ethnographic text” becomes ”a means, the meditative
vehicle for a transcendence of time and place” (Tyler, 1986, p. 129) anyway. And
certainly in those intervening moments anything I choose to represent in writing
will ”always be filtered through the lens of language, gender, social class, race
and ethnicity” (Usher, 2000, p. 28). But as ethnographers always ”use,
manipulate, alter, edit, discard, reduce, and recycle voices” (Segall, 2001, p. 584)
as a necessary and self-conscious part of the analysis of data, such filtering is
problematic, yes, but less so than not acknowledging its occurrence. So it is that I

have come to matter to my data just as it becomes matter-as-data.

That the research voice in this view of qualitative research ” is constituted
rather than discovered" (Usher, 2000, p. 34) means that this work, as a ”critical
conversation’ will necessarily refrain from ’solving’. . .dilemmas” (p. 37). That is,
this piece is not meant to suggest best practices in all-boys Catholic schools for
educating better men, or better Christians or different masculinities — though

certainly I have only limited control over how his work will be interpreted and

leveraged if at all —but rather seeks to raise questions about how these concepts

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and identities get defined / defied in ideologies, by and with and through
discourses. Which creates a problem of writing up this ”experiment” best solved
by offering ”experiments in writing, that is a self-consciousness about writing”
(Van Maanen as cited in Denzin 8: Lincoln, 2007, p. 19) which acknowledges that
”every telling is constrained, partial, and determined by the discourses and
histories that prefigure, even as they might promise, representation” (Britzman,
2000, p. 32). In essence, ”the ethnographic text intends to translate even as it is
meant to stand in for, social life" (Britzman, 2000, p. 28). This product is a seat-
filler at a gala event, replacing absented persons, to give the illusion of fullness.
It is an existence, but not the original which it evokes (or sits in for while the

original30 freshens up in the lobby or has a smoke outside).

”My dilemma,” as was Britzman’s ”in studying the lived experience of
actual individuals” (p. 31) is now ”how to order but not normalize the stories”
(p. 34) encountered and created in my research. This may be, at the point the text

is read, impossible. Weedon (1998), writes of a Feminist poststructuralism that

 

3° Britzman (2000) continues, questioning the very idea of an ’original.’ ”Ethnography may
construct the very materiality it attempts to represent” because:

Those who populate and imagine it (every participant, including the author and the
reader) are, in essence, textualized identities. Their voices create a cacophony and
dialogic display of contradictory desires, fears, and literary tropes that, if carefully
’read,’ suggest just how slippery speaking, writing, reading and desiring subjectivity
really are. (p. 28)

Which is to say, one supposes, that what is written loses the original at the slippages of the joists
of memory and textualization, and textualization and a reading. Ethnography is, ultimately, an
encomium for the representation of an idea.

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demands a ”subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory and in process,
constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak” (p. 177).
As I imagine this to be, in the end, a Feminist project it is important to note,
further, that such theories — and I’d include critical autoethnography here —
”suggest that experience has no inherent meaning" (p.178) and so the telling of
experience is always-already laden with and fluttered by the winds of ideologies
and discourses that (dis)order its likely coming to meaning in its retelling(s) (and
rereading(s)). When I envisioned the project, it involved ’ going back’ to high
school to make sense of the experience of the students I’d study, certainly, but
also to help myself deal with my own emergent identities as scholar and former
pupil shaped by the discourses within an all-boys educational institution. This is
selfish in a sense, which is ok, but it’s also much of how I began to make meaning
for the study, rooted in my own experiences. The study, in a way, was a search
for the stories to tell, but moreso it was about learning how to tell my story as

well.

This telling is important, but not without inherent limitations. Tyler
(1986) is particularly helpful in his examination of the ethnographic text created
in/ by discourses. Beginning with Derrida, he notes that, here, discourse is that
”which is ’the other as us,’ for the point of discourse is not how to make a better
representation, but how to avoid representation” (p.128). ”The ethnographic

text," thus, ”is not only not an object, it is not the object; it is instead a means, the

81

 

meditative vehicle for a transcendence of time and place that is not just
transcendental but a transcendental return to time and place” (p. 129) whose
purpose is evocation rather than representation. The power, then, of
ethnography lies in the ways ”it conjoins reality and fantasy, for it speaks of the
occult in the language of naive realism and of the everyday in occult language,
and makes the reason of the one the reasonableness of the other” (p. 134). In its
openness about the limitations of stories-as-told-as-remembered, it cannot
”dictate its [own] interpretation, for it cannot control the powers of its readers”
(p. 135). Which means, in a sense, that as a writer who cares very deeply about
his subjects —because I could not help but see messy and fractured pieces of
myself in them, their histories, their struggles, their discourses — though I wish I
could, I can only somewhat control how their (our) humanity will be mis/ read.

This worries me.

In essence the ethnographic text is powerful in how it acknowledges the
limitations of its powers to transform/ transfix readers in its homage to the
reality of the necessary transformation of the written subjects for the purposes of
evoking a scene, a memory, a school, a snippet of dialog. And here it is vital to
ask, then if we understand that ethnography, this occult document, ”produce[s]”
only ”partial truths, serious fictions, powerful ’lies,’...which partial truths about
our own ethnographic practices does our ’lying’ reveal? Which do they conceal?”

(Segall, 2001, p. 580). Essentially this is a challenge to / for reader and author for

82

IN:

 

 

though I know of my purposeful partial truths and powerful lies, I may not

know what they come to conceal even as I seek to flog them to reveal.

All of this is to say that in the end, with a poststructural project like critical
autoethnography, as Britzman (2000) suggests, ”representation is always in
crisis, knowledge is constitutive of power, and agency is the constitutive effect,
and not the originator of situated practices and histories” (p. 30). Foucault, for
his part, demurred about his relation to poststructuralism, particularly later in
his life as his work was increasingly pushed into the category by critics. It is fair,
though, to say that his approach to discourses and the push-pull mutual
constitution of power and resistance is better evocative of my own sensibilities
than the underlying structuralism of Connell’s deferral to masculinity’s cosmic
tumblers which in the face of crisis tendencies force reorganization of power
relations but always settle the same, falling back into a hierarchical, patriarchal31
form. Still, this work here, drawing heavily from both authors’ theories, of
necessity straddles a bit, aiming to acknowledge through such a malleable
methodology as critical autoethnography, that ”the art of life isn’t controlling
what happens, which is impossible; it’s using what happens” (Steinem, 1994, p.

258). This is a way of saying, really that ”the researcher has multiple intentions

 

31 Hartsock (1987) is useful here: ”The construction of self in opposition to another who threatens
one’s very being reverberates throughout the construction of both class society and the
masculinist world view and results in a deepgoing and hierarchical dualism” (p. 169). Of course
Connell is not talking about a dualism here, but the ever re-settling hierarchy suggests that what
really matters in the end, regardless of how many ”masculinities” are discussed, is which one is
hegemonic and which others are collectively, then, subjugated.

83

 

 

and desires, some of which are consciously known and some of which are not"
(Scheurich, 1995, p. 240). I may not, as introspective as I envision myself being,

know all that I intend. That is a ”reality” with which I am willing to part here.

”The crux of the issue” Scheurich (1995) cautions, for the researcher ”is the
interpretive moment as it occurs throughout the research process” because the
”researcher brings considerable conscious and unconscious baggage into [the]
moment” (p. 249). Part of the ’rigors’ and requirements of documents with
specific formats such as dissertations, say, is a demand that a certain order be
then made of all of those moments when memory and recording and
interpretation collide in an antagonistic instance-that-becomes data. Or so I’ve
convinced myself. It is important to note, then, that this is not— the piece
presented here — ”reality,” except perhaps in the way that reality television
projects and creates a certain hyper-real of acting-real for cameras, edited to fit
the form of a primetime half-hour slot; a ”generation by models of a real without
origin” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1). That is, perhaps, too ungenerous. This
hopefully does not fall off the cliff into simulacra or Tyler’ 5 ” fantasy,” but still,
”there is for this researcher no ’real’ to be accurately captured, no ’true’
representation of voice — our own or those we gather in or from the field” (Segall,

2001, p. 589).32 The point is, ultimately, that a certain ”order has been created”

 

32 It is apropos at this moment to acknowledge the irony of citing portions of a piece by my
dissertation director about the ways in which we fail to attend to the violence we do in the
necessary skewering (and decontextualizing) of that which we cite from the research community,

84

(Scheurich, 1995, p. 249) here in this document. And it represents a series of
interpretive research moments which have been organized through the
experiences of the author into incomplete and at times arbitrary categories
largely determined by the reading he has done and the life he has lived or the
reading he has not done and the life he has not lived. The telling of the story of a
semester at St. Rita is partial here and it is cleaner and regimented in selfish and
expedient ways. That is a condition of the form. And it ”is fragmentary because
it cannot be otherwise. Life in the field is itself fragmentary” (Tyler, 1986, p. 131)

and we are, finally, always in a field.
Methods

8.26.09

 

often in the same pages upon which we take great care to honor the supposed 'completeness’ of
voices we present/ constitute in/ from field research. I hope he might tell me at this moment,
”well, we all lead conflicted lives."

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Figure 1: Wearing the Required Uniform

I step into the main hallway, jostling among students who are, by and large,
shorter than me though the athletes tend to be wider in the shoulder and I feel a slight
twinge of intimidation. This hasn’t happened for years. Outside it’s warm and August

wafts through opened external doors, all parched grasses and exhaust fumes, to do battle

86

with the smells of the start of school: AXE body spray, and the waxed-floor-scotch—

guarded-carpets miasma of chemical old-made-new again.

I am, for the first two weeks of school — before faculty are required to switch to
’professional dress’ — clothed in the garb of a student: khaki pants, weathered brown
shoes, and polo shirt, ID prominently displayed at my collar. I have, for the two weeks
prior to this moment, participated in New Faculty Orientation as well as August faculty
Professional Development days. Too, I 've been introduced to employees of the school —
though not to the students of course — as a ”Beverly guy” (which buys me some
legitimacy for being local and because it means I have ties to the place through siblings’
friends and spouses) and a ”researcher investigating the school. ” This has not, as you
might imagine, eased some of the faculty’s concerns that I may be a NARC33. Because,
well, in the end I am a NARC, I suppose. Much of the coaching stafl for fall sports
(football mostly) has given me a wide berth. The reception has been chilly though not

unpleasantly so.

As I slide into my first period class - Senior English — I briefly check in with Mrs.
Marks, who startles at the sight of me, but recovers and points me to a student desk in the
back of the room. She gives me a suspicious look — fair enough - and I settle in. To my

right I hear:

"That kid’s like eight feet tall. "

 

33 ”NARC” is the truncated form of ’narcotics agent.’ It’s used to denote an informant or a
potential snitch of any kind or form.

—— -----

But before there’s time to engage further, before anyone can ask me who the fuck I
am (because thatI realize now is how it would have sounded) Fr. Tom comes over the PA
to welcome us back to school and in a synchronous moment that would only seem aligned
to someone attending to it, I suppose, the chapel bells begin to toll the Angelus. And so it

begins.
The Details

For the 2009-2010 school year I investigated the (re)establishment of
masculinities and spiritualities in an all-boys Catholic secondary school at the
outskirts of the Beverly Hills-Morgan Park region on the Southwest side of
Chicago. In the fall semester I attended classes (following the full daily schedule)
as if enrolled as a senior at St. Rita of Cascia high school three days a week.

Work obligations kept me from school at the bracket ends of the week, and so I
took a bloc of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday classes which provided a
kind of mid-week continuity for me and the students who came to wonder at my
regular bookending absences. In the spring semester I spent my time writing up
the study in an office provided me (complete with ”Mr. Burke” nameplate) in the
Counseling department. I was, for better or worse, separated off from the main
hallway of the school (and windowless) and thus worked largely uninterrupted
but for the occasional student who, avoiding class, and in the know as to where I
was located, would pop in to stare and laugh at the quotes I’d taped up on my

walls by way of more easily visualizing just what I was dealing with in terms of

88

data. I spent the majority of the morning writing and chose to take lunch with
the students as a way to stay connected with their lives; too this gave me the
opportunity to ask clarifying questions about what I was seeing as I was sifting
back through the data and figuring out just what stories to tell and how to tell

them.

Fall 2009

In the fall I followed four different students, one a month, through their
daily class schedules sitting in a student desk in each of my classes. Throughout
the semester I carried the same (orange) notebook and took field notes
on/ about/ regarding / in-response-to the students, the teachers, and the
classroom environments. The students, because they became increasingly
curious about what I was writing— and because they asked — were given access
to the notebook and would often take it from me at the beginning or end of class
to see what I’d written over the course of the previous hour. It came to be that
they performed, at times, in ways that would ”get them in the notes.” They
would, later in the semester as they saw I posed no disciplinary threat, take the
notebook and festoon it with drawings typical of their daily routine -— mostly
penises though, interestingly, crosses as well. Too, if a student asked a question
that went unanswered in the flow of a given class, I would occasionally jot notes
to them in an attempt to better (by my own estimation) address their concerns

than was possible in the moment, perhaps, for their teacher. This meant that I

89

spent quite a bit of time ”passing” notes to students in transgression or I suppose
defiance of the lead teacher of a given class. It made me seem more student.

Maybe.

I also, in the course of their asking — as with the student in the epigram
above —about what I was doing in the school, made a point to let them know that
they would be given pseudonyms when the text was finally written up. This
was my way of easing their concerns that I might be following them to report to
the faculty and staff just what terrible (or mundane) things they were doing.

This morphed, then, into their being able to ’pick’ their own pseudonyms which
took on a life of its own as students would approach me daily with new names,
asking how their ”character” had done the day before. In this way, they

presaged the idea of fiction/ fantasy delineated in the methodology above.

The decision to follow four different senior students gave me access to the
widest possible range of senior classes, yes, but also served to stave off my

boredom at the rhythms and repetition (and bored teaching, frankly) of the
schoolday. And though the students whose schedules I shadowed often claimed

me in interesting ways:
Kimani: ”This is Mr. Burke. He’s my white slave for the month,”

I found that for the most part I took notes on other students in classes as much as

I did on those students I was ’following.’

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For the first month I was paired with Donny, a white lower-middle class
student whose father works as a janitor at the school. Donny was a reserve
football player who is struggling, at this moment, with his GPA keeping him out
of colleges. It was through his rninistrations that I gained access to the lunch
group that came to be important early on as a legitimating body for my
introduction to the senior class as ”writer” rather than potential liaison to the

administration.

Donny put it this way, ”when I first found out you were following me I
was really worried you were going to step on my cheating routine.” It was
probably when I, sitting in between him and a friend, Colin, helped them pass
tests to each other under my notebook, that I sealed my trustworthiness. This
was not an attempt to fight the power, as it were, but rather seemed a reasonable
action in a student day where cheating on tests was more par for the course than
exceptional. I suppose there are ethical concerns which I might address here, but
really, as tests rarely matched content, I came to empathize with students who
cheated to get by and so my helping in this situation (and others) really
constituted a willful passivity (I just sat there as they exchanged papers) and

became important for my gaining ’access’ to student trust.

In October, I followed Joey, an honors student who operated at the
outskirts of Donny’s social group. Joey is white and middle class and largely,

though surreptitiously conflicted about the religious and athletic trappings of the

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“

 

 

school, perhaps part of his choosing to work at a dentist’s office in lieu of
participating in extracurriculars. When I proposed to the principal, Mrs.
Deenihan, that I might follow the schedules of different students through the
semester she—this was a self-interested choice, as I, in exchange for being given
access to the students and school, was expected to and did write up my findings
as regarded pedagogical implications / issues / problems I perceived for the
administration based on my unique viewpoint as student-researcher-observer —
placed me with Donny and Joey so that I might observe different tracked levels
to see if St. Rita was ” educating students in the same ways in both regular and

honors classes.” Short answer, and not unexpected: they weren’t.

By mid-semester I had become familiar enough with the students that
they began asking why I was following certain students and not them. As I had
only been assigned two students by the administration and having exhausted my
self-imposed one month rule, I took two students up on their offers / demands
that I follow and - in their minds .— write about them. My choices were made
based on a desire to see more and different classes, in Tirn’s case, and to shadow
a transfer student of color, in Kimani’s case. This is not, of course, a matter of

better data, but different data.

November found me with Tim, a white football player who outsized me
by about sixty pounds. He was more respectful of the workings and work of

classes than Donny, though largely because he needed his grades up for a

92

 

 

potential collegiate football career. In January he signed a letter of intent to play,
on scholarship, at a small local Catholic university. He, like a great many of his
classmates chose to attend St. Rita because of a family legacy that spans nearly

half of the school’s one hundred and five year history.

My last guide, Kimani, transferred in to St. Rita from rival Brother Rice, to
escape poor grades and the whisperings of a racist environment, after his
sophomore year. Black and the child of a single mother, he often endured
mockery for being too black for the white kids and too white -because of his
affected tone of voice—for the black kids. His grades suffered mightily all year —
he missed two football games because of academics — and I found myself
bringing two pens to class with me each day to ensure that he would have one to

still-not-take notes with.

Though it gives me pause that I shadowed three football players of four
students, this was a consequence of my initial exposure to the senior class
through Donnie whose group of friends was on the team. Still, in an institution
of 701 where nearly half of the school plays the sport, it would have been almost
odd had this not occurred. Too, as I take it that these young men are more than
the sum of their marked identities, that they were football players, while
important, means only that they will deal with the requisite discourses and
ideologies of the school and religion and masculinity in unique and affected

ways. The breakdown doesn’t discourage me, however, as the methodology

93

 

requires that I acknowledge the partiality of my own writing and the
incompleteness of the picture to be described. Too, in such a small school, where
I sat in on every senior class — except for one section of French and Theology —I
became party to, and on a first name basis with, nearly every senior. Kairos34
retreats helped with this immensely as did my work with/ through Campus
Ministry, where I became an adopted member because of my prior work in
Catholic schools and with retreats and volunteering. Indeed, I lead a group of St.
Rita seniors on a service trip the summer after the conclusion of the study. I have
become, am yet becoming always, very much entangled in the school, in the lives

of these kids in joyous and troubling Ways as we’ll see.
The School Day

I took, when possible, field notes while in the school. Generally this
occurred in classroom settings and not, in less formal spheres (at lunch, for
example). My aim, when not taking field notes actively, was to transcribe
experiences in the middle of the school day or outside of the school setting in an
attempt to ”capture” moments not previously crystallized on paper.

Additionally, as the school day was split into six class periods, the 4th carved

 

3" More on this to follow, in-depth. However, a brief sketch by way of providing context in the
interest of expanding later in the piece. Kairos is a religious retreat popular at Catholic high
schools and colleges. It is derived from the Greek, term —one of two— for time. Chronos is seen
in this distinction as quantitative and or linear in measure while Kairos is more felt or
experienced time. In its religious context, then, it is referred to as God’s time, a retreating from
the rigors of Chronos.

94

:1

I.

 

 

interestingly to include a lunch and pseudo-study hall passing time, called TDT
(Teacher Discretionary Time), I was able to transcribe my handwritten notes to
the computer, along with annotations and observations during the day by
absenting myself from 4th period classes while still being able to spend two
lunches with two different students.35 Further, I would at the end of the school
day, transcribe any experiences in the final periods of the day before leaving the

school.

Saying that I absented myself from 4th period is a bit misleading. On my
3rd day in classes, I was asked by the instructor of the senior theology class I was
observing, to ” give him some time and space to get the guys in line.” I perceived
this gentle push out the door, all eyebrow raises and import, as an open-ended
invitation to leave the course for good and I took it as my cue to not come back.

As Brother Gary headed all of the senior level theology classes, I was effectively

 

35 Regular Student Schedule

1st: 7:55 - 9:00

2nd: 9:04 - 9:54

3rd: 9:58 - 10:48

4A: Lunch 10:52 — 11:16 TDT 11:20 - 11:44 Class 11:44 - 12:32

4B: TDT 10:52 - 11:12 Lunch 11:16 - 11:40 Class 11:44 - 12:32

4C: Class 10:52 - 11:40 Lunch 11:44 — 12:08 TDT 12:12 - 12:32

4D: Class 10:52 - 11:40 TDT 11:40 - 12:04 Lunch 12:08 - 12:32

5th: 12:36 - 1:26

6th: 1:30 - 2:20

* For the first semester I attended 1st through 3rd, as well as 5th and 6th period with the students.
During 4th, because of the unique configuration/ usage of time, I went to lunch at 11:16 as well as
11:44 (in order to sit with two different groups of students) and used the rest of the time to type
up my notes from the first part of the day / visit with students informally in Campus Ministry. In
the second semester I wrote in the morning, cut down to one lunch period, and spent the rest of
4th period visiting in Campus Ministry. Afternoons were free to revise writing and to pull
students from class to aid me in my analysis of the data.

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shut out from formal religious instruction, at least in its encoded, catalogued
curricular form.36 This was expedient in that I got to spend 4th period
transcribing notes in the Campus Ministry office — located along the main
hallway and open to the students to pop in during TDT and spend time hanging
out, largely unregulated for the only time during the course of the day — and it
allowed me to build a rapport with the Campus Ministry staff, which in turn

gave me access to the Kairos retreat experience.

Extracurriculars

 

36 The senior theology requirement had recently been changed to a survey of great Catholic
thinkers, a theme which coincided neatly with the textbook for the course of the same title. Ah
curriculum. By way of introducing the class, Brother Gary celebrated the shift. ”The old class
was about love and intimacy. It was called ’Christian Vocations.’ I said ’if we don’t change it, I
quit.’ It was ruining my reputation as a teacher. It was ’light.’ All we talked about all semester
was love and intimacy.” There’s a great deal worth pinging here, of course, but as I lasted only
three days in his class it’s perhaps most relevant to note that love and intimacy are considered
trivial. This is most striking in light of the fact of the class’s former title which could have
encompassed more than love and intimacy had the instructor so chosen; it would seem the
Church ought best concern itself with vocations, considering their dearth—at least as far as
entering the religious / contemplative life is concerned — in the last forty years of so. Still there is a
certain salaciousness with which love and sex are discussed in a schooled, particularly a
religious-schooled environment, which centers on a coming to control (and being controlled)
(Nespor, 1997) rooted in, particularly in this case, a masculine idea of ”domination of oneself by
oneself” where to be at the demands of sexual pleasures was to be ”immoderate. . .shameless and
incorrigible” (Foucault, 1990b, p. 65). And so the choice to teach vocation as love and intimacy,
then to frame it as a burden, is a bit of a red herring, understandable considering the Church’s
ambivalent (problematic and horrific) response to allegations of clergy sex abuse over the prior
decades. A friar (a generic term for any male in a religious order) like Brother Gary is not
supposed to be interested in the sex, in the pleasure, in the intimacy of his students and so chose
to frame his previous course as an inconvenience, and consequently ’light,’ perhaps using it to
impose ”social and sexual normality” centering on control of desires through ”discipline and
punishment” (Fiske, 1989, p. 90). This might, too, all be sour grapes because he kicked me out.
But, from what the students reported, they really only watched movies in the class anyways. So
there you have it.

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As it is certainly the case that masculinities are engaged with in different
ways in various spaces, I embedded myself in as heterogeneous a set of activities
as possible throughout the year. In the process of the school day I observed
student interaction with faculty and official curriculum in classes, and masses, as
well as those casual conversations that occurred in un(der)officiated spaces like

hallways, the dining hall, and outside on school grounds.

Before I discovered / moved to my office in the Counseling department, I
was able to make Campus Ministry (CM), because of a welcoming director who
graduated from the same University as I and who came to be a good friend and
confidante over the course of the year, an impromptu workspace. As the CM
office is located in the middle of the main student hallway of the building and its
doors are always open as a way of inviting students to interact with the lay
ministers (and a lone Augustinian brother, too) I caught a great deal of student
conversations here. The space served as a crossroads of sorts, with students
popping in to borrow pencils, sign up for service hours, and as an excuse to ditch
class. Later, as they became more comfortable with me, senior students would
take their TDT (if they had forgetful or lenient or exhausted teachers) during 4th
period to sit and chat around the table in the center of the room, excited to be the

subject of a ’book.’

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Further, I was able to join and observe two senior Kairos retreats37 offered
by the school and took over duties as an assistant junior varsity lacrosse coach
which gave me access to unique spiritual and athletic vistas at St. Rita. In
addition I attended extracurricular sporting and social events affiliated with,
though not necessarily located at the school itself. Playoff football games took
me to the outskirts of Chicago on frozen nights; basketball left me in a hot box of
a rival gym, clapping through the sweat; I witnessed perhaps the most baffling
phenomenon of the semester at a hockey rink in the far southwestern suburbs. I
took my partner, Lauren to the Homecoming dance as well as the school’s
Winter Fundraiser and she was kind enough to endure Saturday lacrosse and
Friday night football contests. I mention her because she became important in
much of the dialog I had with students as they tried to make sense of their dating
lives, but also as they came to struggle with just who I might be particularly

around the question of my straightness as I queered — in the sense of making

 

37 My affiliation with Campus Ministry opened doors for me in the school. Fr. Tom, a former
Campus Minister himself, asked me to run reflections tied in with the Kairos retreats after my
participation on them in the first semester and later he and the director of Campus Ministry had
me speak to all of the sophomore students on their required in-school retreats about bullying, or
rather, not bullying I suppose. It was through this office that I came to spend Wednesday
evenings with some of the boys serving at a local homeless shelter; too it was here that I ended
up advocating for taking a group of students down to Southern Missouri on a summer service
trip with members of my family. This became, before coaching began, my niche in the
officialized discourses of the school. I was easier to place, in other words, as a

researcher/ campus minister than as a pseudo-student/ hallway wanderer. This put teachers and
administrators at ease with me because I came to be seen as ’contributing’ to the community, an
image furthered after I submitted a report in January to the administration based on my
observations of classes in the first semester and cemented with my role as coach. The students
tended to be more dubious for longer; they were constantly renegotiating my place amongst
them.

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strange, prior notions —their idea of what was possible for / expected of an adult

in the context of a schoolday.

What to Write and When

The question now turns, I suppose, to just what I chose to write down and
when in the orange notebook. To say that I jotted what I found relevant to the
question of masculinities and spiritualities in a Catholic school really isn’t
narrowing too much as potentially — especially when I’m looking at discourses
and have chosen to use Foucault’s broadest definition of these — anything might
apply in any case. So I’ll say this: I took notes when it felt like students were
being exposed (and / or reacting) to specific versions of what it meant to be male
or masculine. I’m thinking specifically of, for example, commercials which
during Channel 1, semi-required viewing at the start of first period, presented
limited and traditional notions of males as sexually predatory and physically
dominant or served as ciphers for military recruitment. Too, Ijotted down
instances of language that felt like it was being used to give shape to what is
possible and allowed for a person coming-to-be a man in a school. Often enough
students in the course of the day, were they to complain about schoolwork for
example, were told by faculty and coaches, both male and female, to ’man-up,’
and get down to business. The implications of such an invocation of manhood

I’ll dig into more deeply in the chapters that follow, but suffice to say that such

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utterances weighed heavily on my consciousness as I floundered through my

revisited schoolboy day.

Also, I attended to the ways in which boys in the school came to
physically interact with each other and with teachers and with the environment
of the brick and mortar school. There were interesting regulations, informal and
negotiated continually, around who could touch whom and how and much of
this has to do, I think, with the way that athletics and tradition play a role in
de/ limiting masculinities at St. Rita. This fed directly into discussions with
students which I initiated about the usage of terms like ” gay” and ”fag” which
weighed heavily on regular daily discourse and served as markers for possible
action and sanctions surrounding particular forms of kinship. Additionally,
pictures bore portent throughout the semester and the year, both those
peppering the hallways of the school and those created in semi-secrecy by the
boys in a unique manifestation of and alteration to Pascoe’s fag discourse. More

on this later.

I was also particularly drawn to discussions among the students regarding
women, in the abstract but also in their lives, most particularly as they
envisioned —and boasted about— them as sexual objects. This set up a ready and
intriguing contrast when considering the role of the fairy / wonder tales of St. Rita
and the multiple ways and times that the boys were impelled to pray to their

Mother Mary or the Mother of Good Counsel throughout the day.

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'm

Interviews

I chose not to conduct formal interviews with the students over the course
of the first semester. Neither did I engage faculty in such staid attempts at data
creation”. Instead, as it felt more congruous with the rhythms of the schoolday
and allowed for a certain flexibility while still allowing me not to be ’expert’ in
the sense of appearing adult (and agenda-laden, complete with formal interview
protocol and recording device, say, at times, when I had a moment, I would tried
to engage with the Ritamen in what I’ll call informal ” flash” interviews aimed at
capturing their thinking in an instant and trying to interrogate their intentions or
consideration around a specific conversation. Sheurich (1995) in a critique on the
possibilities afforded through/ awarded to the process of interviewing and the
celebrated representation of truth and voice in its transmission to paper-as-

III

research suggests that a postmodern interview requires playing around’ or
experimentation. ..[in] ways that highlight the indeterminacy of interview
interactions, ways that allow for the uncontrollable play of power within the

interaction. . .what we need are some new irnaginaries of interviewing” (p. 250).

In the interest of agreeing, I suppose flash interviews to have been created in

 

38 This would be an important aspect of further research, but I didn’t much have the time during
the school day to engage with faculty in anything more than informal chit-chat, due in large part
to my remaining loyal to the student schedule which only afforded me four minutes between
classes. It would be interesting to get faculty’s sense of their own conveyance of masculinities
and spiritualities and then compare that with the ways students read such messages to check for
dissonance, resistance, reprisal, etc.

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“‘-

brief moments where the curiosity of researcher / subject/ researched bore further

examination.

As such, I never entered a given day or class period — though we were
particularly free during gym, as I didn't participate actively but chose to sit on
the side and observe basketball or water polo, etc. and was generally surrounded
by students who were ’injured’ which really meant that they didn’t feel like
changing out of one uniform and into another— aiming at interviewing a given
student. But if there was space and a student asked me what I was writing
about, or I felt the need to try to clarify my thinking or purposes I might try to
engage in a moment of dialog about why things were happening the way they
were happening. What follows is an example, from a day in gym sitting with
Tim (this was November) and Sean, the starting goalie on the school’s very

successful varsity hockey team and an honors student:

Me: ”So you’re at a Catholic school but people don’t seem too religious. Why do
you think that is? I mean you can’t avoid it to a certain extent because you pray

in class and you go to Mass and you guys wear the crosses, but. . ."

Tim: ”I dunno. People just do it ’cause they have to. Like I try to be a good

Catholic. My mom makes me go to church but I try not to make her make me.”
Me: ”Why do you go?"
Tim: ”Because that’s part of being a Catholic.”

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Me: ”Does the school do anything to enhance that?”

Tim: ”Not really."

Me: ”What does the school do well?”

Tim: ”Um, like I’ve been around St. Rita my whole life. I mean it’s fun. I’ve been
coming to football games as long as I can remember. It just feels like home. It

just feels like family."

Me: ”What does the school do to make that happen?

Tim: ”Well, we’re here all the time.”

Me: ”So it’s ok for a guy to be really into hockey or football, but would you have

anyone say they were really into religion?”
Sean: ”You might have a few. But not many.”
Me: ”Why?”

Sean: ”Because we’re young. Like you can talk about it on Kairos, but that’s

because they make that all you talk about there.”

The point was to engage them about an issue I was trying to sort through around
the role of devotional religiosity in the school. Also, too, it was a way to help the
boys become familiar with the kinds of research questions I might be asking for

my ”book” so that they, should they feel so compelled, could come back to me

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-it

 

later with insights. This was a technique I employed specifically in reference to
the physicality / sexuality / fag discourse questions I had. I realize that the format
of these interviews isn’t particularly unique, but my point in calling them ”flash”
is that they began and ended as quickly as students moved near or away from
me in informal periods during the day (at lunch, in hallways, in Campus
Ministry, and in gym within school generally, and in the stands at sporting
events outside the schoolday) and their purpose wasn’t necessarily determined
before they happened.39 This was the extent to which I engaged in interviewing
through the process and it was the form I chose to use, typing up my memory of

the interchange at the next convenient moment.
Beyond School

As the year progressed and I became more involved in and
knowledgeable about the senior students’ lives, I was privy to two additional
points of contact with students. Once one of them found me on Facebook, and I
accepted them as a ’friend,’ the floodgates opened. It was here that they were
able to find out more about my life— they often, after looking at photo albums
asked if I had a twin brother; I don’t, but we do look a great deal alike — and I

was able to keep tabs on their interactions on each other’s ”walls.” I have chosen

 

39 This is, maybe, not entirely true. I had multiple purposes, as I’ve written, for the interviews so
I suppose I should say that the intent of any given flash was as malleable as the time and space in
which it was instantiated, reliant on who was present, and perhaps the weather as well as the
food in front of us, or the score in the game we were half-watching while we talked.

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-m _

 

 

not to include too much data from this sphere —for a number of reasons, really,
chief among them being my own admittedly troubling lack of theory in the field
of digital rhetorics —but will occasionally utilize the site to confirm notions of
relationships / friendships between and among students. Facebook was a
window through which the boys were able to integrate me into their lives
outside of school, most specifically surrounding the realms of dating (through
pictures from various dances and parties) and drinking. These are not generally

mutually exclusive, it should be noted.

The terminology used at the school among the boys to describe this kind
of low—level surveillance, through which the young men kept in touch outside
(and even during by way of surreptitious smartphone access) of the school’s
walls, was ”creeping,” as in, ”I was creeping your pictures last night, Mr. Burke.”
The term itself bespeaks a kind of discomfort with the level of exposure to the
outside world put forth through digital social networking, but its connotation
was in most cases utilized as a goad to both spur and limit peer interaction over
the internet. In a larger sense, I suppose I could be said to have ’creeped’ (never
the grammatically correct ’crept’ in this etymological system) the boys lives as
thoroughly as possible all year in as many ways as they were willing to grant me

access and in other manners over which they had no control at all.

The second point of contact, and one from which I drew quite a bit of data

in the second semester came through the serpentine distribution of my phone

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flan—f"

 

number among the seniors. I gave my cell to one student so that he could text
me scores from a big rivalry football game that I couldn’t attend in the early fall;
too in November I gave it to another student so that we could coordinate a
midweek volunteer trip to a homeless shelter. From there, after it became clear
that I didn’t much mind the contact and sensing that I might just be flattered by
it I guess, I began to receive texts and phone calls from various students,
generally on weekends, inviting me to social gatherings so that I could ”write the
real book"40 of what goes on. Tempting as that might have been, I chose to let
most phone calls — and certainly any after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays —
go to voicemail for the sake of transcribing the message with the idea of using it
in this text. Generally the boys called and texted to ”talk shit”1 — more on this

later—in affectionate ways and I found their contact flattering and considered it

 

40 There were times when I thought about the possibility of attending a party for the sake of data
collection but ended up deciding to err on the side of legalistic concerns (minors and alcohol and
all those wonderful trappings) though it would have been enlightening to see the boys in an
’altered’ state, under the influence of alcohol (and harder drugs) and girls. Two texts which
skirted this line, Rebekah Nathan’s (2005), My freshman year, in which the author returned as a
”freshman” to the dorms of the University of her employ and Jeremy Iversen’s (2007) High school
confidential, where the author posed —successfully by his account— as a California public high
school student over the course of a school year, set a precedent for at least considering the idea.
However, as a guest with no purchase on the space and access to students granted me, beyond of
the good will of St. Rita high school, and considering just how open to ’creeping’ the young
men's Facebook sites were as well as their penchant for posting essentially everything that
occurred on a given weekend, it seemed wiser to limit myself to school sponsored events.

41 This is, in essence, a form of what Willis (1981) found among his lads in the influential work,
Learning to labor, where ”taking the piss” or ”having a laff,” (p. 12) meant good-natured (for the
most part) ribbing and mockery served to mark lines of connection and brotherhood among male
friends in the school. As I held no known, and certainly no exercised, official disciplinary role
within the realm of the school, the boys felt increasingly free to integrate me into their routines
involving the thrust and parry of affectionate linguistic challenge. This extended further into the
sphere of physicality— touching, hugging, mock tackling—as the year were on as well.

106

a point of trust. This was their way of acknowledging that I wasn’t a formal
faculty member or representative of the school —because I had no desire to deal
with them punitively, should I find out where and how much they were
drinking— and letting me know they were making sense of my role in their lives.
This is something I’ll discuss at length to follow, my role as researcher in their
lives and how they came to make sense of me, as it certainly affected the
manner/ kind of data to which I was exposed and thus that material with which I

could co-create, categorize, and conclude.

By way of beginning, let us go now to lunch.

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Chapter Four

Fag Discourse

”One can never really ’go native’. . .at the same time, it is the experience of living village
life that offers the insight and vantage point needed to ask relevant questions and
understand the context of the answers given” (Nathan, 2005, p. 15).

”Ought not education to bring out and fortify the difi‘erences rather than the
similarities .7 ”
(I/Voolf, 1929, p. 88).

Abjection is the aflect or feeling of anxiety, loathing, and disgust that the subject has in
encountering certain matter, images, and fantasies - the horrible - to which it can
respond only with aversion, with nausea and distraction. Kristeva (1982) argues that the
abject provokes fear and disgust because it exposes the border between self and other.

This border is fragile. The abject threatens to dissolve the subject by dissolving the
border. (Longhurst, 2001, p. 19-20)

The purpose, until now, has been to describe the general conditions of the
research. From here we will telescope in on the mise en scene of life at St. Rita
High School from the view of an outsider with insider tendencies. The overall
hedge is always that same sex educational settings seek to set limits on gendered
possibility at the assumed rigid lines of sexed difference. This is the frame, the
limits of which are described by teacher discourse, religious ideology (manifest
in the masses and classes of the school, but also in the cluttered accoutrements of
hallways and rooms peppered with iconic imagery), and historico-traditional
ideals of what a Ritaman must become over his four years. Masculinities are
fostered here. Specific targeted masculinities are preferred. Where it gets messy

is when the boys get ahold of their own discursive possibility.

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Lunch

Huey is pounding the table again. Both arms, fists clenched, whatever
detritus left from the twenty or so minutes of consumption, rattling with his
mock-rage. He’s a big kid, a former fullback and a weighlifter; there is a force to
this.

”Goddamnit, Burke. I said it ’cause I wanted to say it. I will fucking
tackle you, gayboy.”

This is lunch. The closest we’ll come to the unfettered physicality of
Bakhtin’s (1998) ”carnivalistic act” (p. 253) beyond the athletic fields that ring the
physical space of St. Rita the school. Here we are all freer from the sweeping
scan of classroom surveillance and besides mostly we outnumber the dining hall
monitors who are by and large too put out by the added duty to care immensely
about what’s going on. Some of the football coaches quietly dip into their spit
cups by the windows behind us. They ignore most any uproar short of punches
thrown.

This space, this time in lunch, is where the constant ”mock crowning and
subsequent decrowning of the carnival king” (p. 252) can be said to occur most
demonstrably within the building of the place. It is the apex of the verbal
jousting that ebbs and flows throughout the day. And yes, it is gay. Or rather, it

is always about being and not being made gay, wielding that word and its close

109

cousins and all their attendant meanings, like goads. There are gauntlets all over
the floor.

It is here that fag discourse reigns, and it is here further that hierarchies
are too unstable to endure. Boys will adopt the gay pose, boys will emplace it on
others, boys will hook it on chairs; it’s everywhere and it’s in reference to
straightness, yes, but not as its abject opposite necessarily. This, I think as we
throw out the remains of another meal together, all those cheese cups and
polymer chip bags42, laughing too loudly at something or other on our way to
5th period, is Foucault (1998) and power, ”the name one attributes to a complex
strategical situation in a particular society” (p. 166). For it is only in knowing
(how to alter and manipulate) the rules and strategies of the discourse that one
will thrive; there is no opting out. And it is at lunch that these complex power
strategies come to be constantly renegotiated, flouted, and reconstituted in ways
that call into question Connell’s (1995) hegemonic masculinity where, by all
rights ze argues, ”through the everyday working of institutions. . .the dominance
of a particular kind of masculinity [should be] achieved” (p. 213). It’s just not
that simple, I think as we flow out the double doors and into the athletic wing,
headed back to class with the verve of the well-fed (or at least the overly fed on

processed food, say). The crown just never settles.

 

42 I am ribbed roundly for eating fruit everyday, even as Nick who sits next to me, pours electric
yellow nacho cheese into a Cheetos bag and squeezes the heart-attack mixture into his mouth.

110

And despite the violence of it all, I’m really not too concerned about
Huey. In the end he’s more prone to pull me into a one-armed embrace as we.
walk back to class, whisper ”I’m just kidding," and then push me into the
oncoming pedestrian traffic of a hallway-period change than he is to actually
tackle me. The physical I’ll deal with later, though. For now I’m more interested
in the play of language, this ”struggle for control over the meanings and

pleasures” (Fiske, 1989, p. 70) of it.

The same, only different

Like Pascoe (2007) I see this work as looking at ”masculinity as a variety of
practices and discourses that can be mobilized by and applied to both boys and
girls” (p. 9). Unlike Pascoe, I am not housed in a co-educational environment
and so of need must focus in on how the boys“3 navigate un/ accept / ed / able
practices and discourses. As her work was the text that made my own feel
possible, I will take a moment to pay homage to a good and thorough and like-

minded study, while reserving the necessity of diverging from her path at two

 

‘3 Schools such as St. Rita —and really most any K-12 educational institution co-ed or otherwise—
operate around the (asserted or subtle) notion of binary and complementary genders. ”The
claim," Corbett (2009) writes, ”of this binary precedes any boy: boys will be boys by not being
girls” (p. 91). This is preternaturally enforced by the school in its self-assertion as an all-boys
environment, ignoring of course, the presence of female faculty and staff not to mention the
’men’ who work at the school as well. What’s important for us here, though is the idea that
”gender is rarely, if ever, totalizing” (p. 15). And though ” gender is routinely conflated with
anatomy, and gender is routinely conflated with that which produces our desires and personality
traits” (p. 91) these are not deterministically limited by the structure of a school and its binary
assumptions. There is play for the boys in becoming the Ritamen the school expects and this
involves the work of reconstructing masculinities constantly.

111

critical points which rely on the unique situation of St. Rita high school for their
articulation.

So itis that I agree that ”it is important to look at. . .masculinizing
processes outside the male body” (p. 12) most particularly in terms of discourses.
Pascoe found in her study that for high school students, males in particular the
terms, ”gay and fag ” were used ”interchangeably when they referred to other
boys" (p. 37) and fag discourse, which she came to call this mode of relating to
and regulating each others’ actions / possible selves involves ” the fag" being ”not
only an identity linked to homosexual boys, but an identity that can temporarily
adhere to heterosexual boys as well” (p. 53).

This lexicography often seemed to devolve into a kind of Tourette’s for the
boys, a phenomenon to which Pascoe refers. Though I found that the students at
St. Rita used the term in more creative and wide-ranging manners than
explicated in her study, it was, yes, mobilized to regulate an assumption of a
”lack of masculinity” where perceived ”male effeminacy” (p. 59) occurred as with
Luke (in reference to a classmate worrying about college applications) who noted
with bombast, ”they know you get your hair done, so you’re a faggot and won’t
get in” or Kobe who, in answer to my question about a classmate’s name which
kept eluding me, said simply, ”that’s Zach. He dyes his hair and tans. That’s
gay.” What finality.

But, this wasn’t just always about keeping classmates in line, and this is

something Pascoe chooses not to address. The discourse itself at St. Rita came to

112

be associated with or rather came to flesh out any manner of frustration or
perceived helplessness for the boys. Early in the first semester, when I was just
getting my student legs under me, Qualter, a senior who spent most of first
period reading the Chicago Tribune (and the majority of the rest of the day
wandering the hallways) turned to those of us sitting behind him and in
reference to a popular Chicago hockey player, with a certain exasperation said,
”Dude, that's fucking gay. Burish got hurt.” Similarly, when grades came out,
he told me that his low average had to do with the student teacher (a woman)
”being gay as fuck,” about him turning in work. I should note that as a student,
he was always marked by his lassitude and so these statements weren’t growled;
it would have been hard to categorize them as anything other than offhand.
Note here that a woman was made gay, as with Johnny’s mother in chapter
three, but so too was the situation of an injury. This latter example points to a
notion of the term which is rooted in something other than the lack of
masculinity for it is not Burish who is gay for being hurt, but rather the fact of
being hurt in the abstract and his assumed resulting absence from the team that
is gay.

Later, trying to get a handle on just how the discourse functioned, I
pressed a student, Dunbar, on the issue after he called something ’ gay.’

Me: ”Why’s that gay?”

Dunbar: ”Well, it’s not really gay, just stupid.”

113

This is not necessarily out of the purview of any given teacher’s (or parent’s or
coach’s) experience in the hallways of a school or at home or on the field of sport
where the conflation of gay with undesirability or stupidity‘t‘bccurs frequently.
What the boys indicated, and what Pascoe further suggests, though, is that this
usage, is not necessarily intentionally (read: maliciously and / or purposefully)
homophobic45 — though it certainly could be read that way. Rather it came to
function as a way of reordering the unexpected in a given day or it could become
utilized as a stock rejoinder as when a teacher, responding to a student question
about parking told him, ”well, we have assigned spots." The student non-
plussed and really only half-paying attention to the answer as he walked out of
the room said, ”Oh. That’s gay." Similarly when Chunk a senior who came to be

a confidante through our work on a Kairos retreat, asked why it was important

 

44 This has been a subject of recent PSAs from the organization called ”'IhinkB4YouSpeak" which
has enlisted celebrities for ads warning of the unintended effects of saying "that’s so gay.” One
tagline notes, tongue firmly in cheek, ”you wouldn’t say, ’that’s so Mexican.”

45 It’s not that the boys weren’t homophobic. They were, though mostly in the abstract as their
actual contact with homosexuality remained in the realm of the media where gay is played as
camp. No student was ’out’ at St. Rita, a situation owing to any number of factors, including its
location in the largely conservative South Side as well as the Catholic Church’s agonistic
relationship with homosexuality and homophobia. Interestingly, the only openly gay person at
the school was a former priest-and current vice principal. At lunch one day, when the boys told
me about Mr. B, they said that it was ”fucked up" and ”sick” that he was at the school but no one
could articulate why that might be the case. They weren’t concerned with his sexually
approaching them but rather focused on the abjected status of potential male gay sex (Mr. B left
the Cloth and currently lives with his partner) which was a way of helping them place him as
with Robin Peace’s (2001) discussion of cultural dissonance surrounding the reading of lesbians
as ”matter out of place. . .an improper body” (p. 50). This is homophobia, yes, and the potentially
dangerous mobilization of fag discourse in and out of classes in the school went largely
unaddressed but the line where misunderstanding due to a lack of empathy was never in danger
of being crossed in favor of physical violence. Were there ’out’ students at the school, the
situation might have been very different.

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to study World War II, and was told by the history teacher that ”A lotta people
died in [WWII], why?” he just said, rolling his eyes, ”gay,” and got back to the
serious business of not paying attention to class. Too, in the parking lot after an
intramural game, Nick pointed out his car to me as we walked back to class,
”You see my hoopty over there, Mr. Burke? With the lights flashing?” Unsure, I
asked, ”Is that a Mitsubishi?" to which Kimani, who had wandered up behind us

II

said, simply, ”Yeah, it’s for faggots. So fag discourse is not something that
lends itself only to the regulation of possible masculine lives, but it does serve as
an important part of providing limits to / for that particular situation.

The school, mind, does nothing to make fag discourse an explicit part of
the curriculum. It is, as it were, the hidden curriculum of the place. That, of
itself, does not make St. Rita unique. However, what I intend to argue here is
that the single-gendered context requires the development of strategies for
utilizing fagging differentially than in a co-educational context. This, in turn,

affects the ways that masculinity gets folded into the origami of a Rita student

becoming a Ritaman.

Girlfriends
Returning to Pascoe (2007) we find that there were two unique points of
departure through which boys could opt out of active participation in fag

discourse at River High, the school where the author conducted her study:

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”The ways boys talked about heterosexual practices and orientations in
their interviews reveal[ed] that their public sexuality was as much about
securing a masculine social position as it was about expressions of desire or
emotion” (p. 89). In this sense, the Ritamen were a bit different for they, in the
absence of openly gay students (there was an active gay presence at the school
Pascoe studied) talked only fleetingly - and in rehearsed and specific spaces —
about sexual conquests which were always assumed to reside in the heterosexual
realm anyways. And so relationships and sex — this I will discuss at more length
in a latter section of the text — weren’t often evoked in the process of fag
discourse. We might think of it in legal terms. In Pascoe a boy was straight-
until-proven-homosexual; at St. Rita every student was straight. This latter
assertion we can assume to be untrue considering representative statistics on gay
populations in the larger society. However, it does bespeak a kind of intolerance
written into the code of the school — through religion and neighborhood politics
most assuredly — that coming out most likely also meant getting out (of Rita and
Beverly).

”Girlfriends,” then didn’t protect ”boys from the specter of the fag” (p. 90)
in the same ways at St. Rita as they did for Pascoe. This is partially due to the
fact that girls were physically absent from the hallways of the school and thus
couldn’t be regularly brought out on display by the boys during the day. And so
they weren’t ”treated” in the same ways ”as resources to be mobilized

for. . .masculinity projects” (p. 107) because in most cases an invocation of a

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girlfriend in the midst of the schoolday would actually lead to an accusation of
softness, and a lack of proper confrontational masculinity. It would have
indicated an inability to properly respond to an accusation, in other words.

Kimani, for instance, stopped me in the halls one day to tell me he’d seen
Ben, a friend from the football team " shopping at Hollister with his girlfriend.”
Shaking his head in mock-sorrow and looking at me with knowing eyes, he
smiled into ”I was like, that’s so gay.” Note that it’s not the act of shopping
necessarily that is gay here — as Kimani was of necessity at the mall, too, if he
indeed saw Ben and would have been presumably shopping himself — but rather
the state of shopping with a girlfriend that is considered abject. This is indicative
of homosocial elements present which fed into a certain jealousy of women/ girls
taking time away from ’proper’ male friendships. This discourse ran throughout
the hallways and extended, of necessity, into social lives outside of the school
day. More on this later.

For now, however, it’s important to attend to the discomfort the young
men had in discussing sex and relationships involving women on a whole, a
product, I would argue of the abject status of ’being in a relationship’ conveyed
through fag discourse at the school. Odd, this. But to be in a heterosexual

relationship was ”gay,” most particularly if one actually talked about it (even if

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boasting of sexual prowess unless pressed for details by someone else) and
especially if the relationship took away from time with one’s ”boys.”6

A quick note here on this concept: There was a level of homoerotica
present in visceral ways that the young Ritamen related to each other. We will
delve more deeply into the relational split between one’s time with the boys
(who are similar and understand me) and girls (who are different and
problematic) in a later section. But it is intriguing here to play with the notion
that the way that the boys policed each other’ 5 relationships external to the
school played into -— and perhaps could be argued to have come out of — early
Greek notions of ethical systems of manhood rooted in notions of self/ other
mastery the codification of which let to ”an elaboration of masculine conduct
carried out from the viewpoint of men in order to give form to their behavior”
(Foucault, 1990b, p. 23). In some ways, then, these titillating lines of questioning
about my heterosexual relationship beyond the homosocial bonds we’d formed

in my short time in the school was part of their coming to re-order me in the

 

46 In a conversation at lunch one day, Johnny, a football player, was catching flak for leaving a
party to ”hook up” with a girl. In an attempt to point to the boys that they were, essentially by
attacking him for leaving them to spend time with someone else, the jealous girlfriends they
warned each other about avoiding, a conversation about friendship ensued:

Me: ”So when is Johnny, or anyone, supposed to hang out with girls? Like you guys are in
school together all day, and then you play sports, and then you’re supposed to hang out with
your boys at parties, so when is there time?”

Villa: [Who had a longtime girlfriend himself] ”You can do it on Sunday.”

Me: [Playing with fire, but still within the rules because I’m laughing as I ask in exasperation]
”Well, I mean you guys are always trying to avoid this ’ gay’ tag, but isn’t it kinda gay to only
always hang out with guys?”

At this point the entire table breaks down and Villa, in his default rage mode, laughing dismisses
me with a ”Who the fuck are you Burke? Whatever, you fag.”

We’ll return to this scene in-depth in a later section regarding relationships in a larger sense.

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scales of mastery/ domination related to the formation of acceptable behavior
sexually and socially. I was not, in essence, outside of their rules of conduct and
my between-mess (student/ faculty) was what they were testing.

Cameron (2006) writes about the need in ”homosocial encounters between
men” to ”carefully manage” interactions as a way to ”ward off the spectre of
homosexuality.” One way to do this is to assert one’s own ”heterosexual
masculinity by contrasting” the self ”with men who are taken" or constructed
through talk as ”insufficiently heterosexual or masculine” (p. 174). This then

I”

leads to ”what Eckert means by the ’heterosexual market which is ”a set of
social arrangements whereby girls and boys, though still socializing mainly with
peers of the same gender, reorient their relationships around the norms of
heterosexuality” (p. 175). How to do it: put the fag on someone else, often
through verbal sparring or even through dominant (and homoerotic) physicality.

Two different exchanges were illustrative of an initial foray into carnal
curiosity, followed by increased discomfort when the rules of the discourse
weren’t properly engaged. Both came following the Homecoming dance which I
attended with my girlfriend as a way to connect with the students, yes, but also
for the purposes of study.

Generally the workings of fag discourse operate in a certain circularity. If
one is called gay, it is on him to ’tag’ the next person, thus removing the label

from himself. We’ll see a literal / physical form of this later when the boys

created pictures-as-tags representing a kind of fag discourse, but in the case of

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verbal interdiction the ”tag” worked like a kind of gay hot potato. The idea was
never to allow the latest round of fagging to land on one’s person for long. This
verbal play was maintained by the assumption that to be ” gay” in any sense was
a negative thing (we might point to Church and social teachings regarding the
abject status of a gay individual as a few of many sources for these perceptions)
that might lead to a boy’s being suspected of actually being gay were he not
sufficiently bothered by his character-impugned. So it was that in any
conversation, often everything anyone did, could be called into the field of play
as ”gay.” It just meant that the person throwing the barb could easily distance
himself, and quickly, from the latest salvo coming his way.

I chose not to engage in the game in this way, invoking special status as a
researcher to, instead, grill the boys on ’why’ they said things rather than playing
along with actively fagging another student. At lunch the following day, the
same student who was excoriated for shopping at Hollister turned and with
what might best be described as a shit-eating grin nudged me:

Ben: ”You pound it out after the dance, Mr. Burke?”

Me: ”What’s that mean, Ben?”

Ben: [Laughing nervously and looking around for support] You

know. . .You gonna make me say it?

Indeed I was going to make him say it. The boys were fascinated by my
relationship very briefly but mostly in its physical particulars but really only, I

learned, in an attempt to draw me into some form of the back—and-forth of

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making-the-fag the terms of which they were familiar with and could better
dictate. Now it could be that, because I am an adult, they were only comfortable
pushing so far but that doesn’t strike me as an issue considering how settled they
were in asking initial questions. It was when I didn’t take the bait and chose to
steer away from the call-and-response of the fag discourse that they lost their
bearings, as evidenced by this exchange from the same day in History class:

Packer: ”You got some hot squish47, Mr. Burke. You should be honored.

Did you post up that squish after the dance?”

Chunk: ”Yeah, did you post it up?”

Me: ”What’s that mean?”

Chunk: ”Getting some."

Me: ”What’s that mean?”

Chunk: ”Hooking up.”

Me: ”What’s that mean?”

Scott: [Annoyed] ”Sex, Burke. You faggot.”
Here I benefited from the ability as researcher to play dumb for the purpose of
trying to draw students from euphemism to technical terminology. Also it was a
way to avoid engaging in speaking about whatever carnality they were searching

for, but it was also a way to avoid getting drawn into, for a time at least until

 

47 ”Squish” is a term used to refer to women, or rather girls usually of a certain sexually targeted
age. The principal of the school, a married grandmother was never referred to as a squish, but
my girlfriend and most of the girls that the boys referred to carried the name. I’ll get deeper into
the etymology of the term in a later chapter, but feel free to use your imagination regarding its
origins as well as what ’posting up’ might mean for now.

121

 

‘—

Scott put a coda on the conversation, the inevitable fag dialectic. It mattered not,
in the end that I had a girlfriend or that I might have slept with her after
homecoming, I was still a faggot for not taking up the linguistic challenge. And
though I opted out (or at least tried to), always, of engaging actively in the
discourse, I was still made gay in spite of the situation of my girlfriend. Women
or the possibility of heterosexual sex, in the end, were never feasible excuses for
rising above (or sidestepping I suppose) fag discourse. The value, above all, was
getting the ”fag” off of oneself and onto another. There were no time-outs to the
game (save Kairos), either, and so the boys were constantly on-guard, out of a
perceived necessity to keep the specter at bay. In a sense, then, at the school we
were all faggots just as we were all Catholics. The latter, though, wasn’t seen as
nearly so dangerous as the former and so denouncing one actively while perhaps
resisting the other passively sufficed in the establishment of an order among the
boys that said it would have been gay to be outwardly liturgically faithful, but an
uneasy truce could be agreed upon around scapulars and tattoos of crosses.

The idea, of course, is that linguistic facility was important for navigating
the school day. Further ways of interacting regarding heterosexual assertion
were affected by the single-gendered nature of the school; were St. Rita co-
educational, the above might have played out very differently. The Catholic

heritage of the school further formed discourse for the boys.

Religion

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Pascoe found that ”religion played a key role in how or if boys deployed
practices of compulsive heterosexuality to shore up masculine appearance and
sense of self” (p. 112) but noted that ”the table at which the Latter Day Saints
convened during lunch was ” one of ”the least homophobic and sexist location on

campus!” (p. 112). This she viewed as initially surprising—note the lone
exclamation point in her entire text —but found through her work that ” Christian
boys at River High had institutional claims on masculinity such that they didn’t
need to engage in the sort of intense interactional work. . .characteristic of
contemporary ’compulsive masculinity” (p. 113). Her postulation is that
” because the Christian institutions of which these boys were a part have
remained relatively stable regarding issues of gender difference and equality,
these boys had less need for interactional practices and gender power” (p. 113).

Perhaps so. But I think we can argue that the Catholic church is no less
Christian than the Mormons and yet, fag discourse and all its attendant
trappings was alive and well at St. Rita and indeed came to affect the
actionability of most any boy within the school. One argument we could make is
that the boys attended St. Rita not so much for its religious character (though
their parents might certainly have been enamored of the Catholicity of the place)
as for its tradition, athletics or because of a lack of (perceived, and this was often
racially charged as noted above) good public school options. These are

sentiments encapsulated by Joey, a student who lives within a half mile of me,

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who when asked told me he ”came to Rita cause there were Rita dads on the
block.” Alums, fathers, athletes all and a tradition continues.

Conversely as the boys at River High were choosing to sit together in a
community of Christians at lunch they were putting their faith at the forefront of
their activities; certainly it’s possible that they felt no need to dig deeply into the
inborn homophobia of ”fagging” another student. Or perhaps they did so
indemonstrably, deferring to Holy scripture for their prefabricated moral
guidance. We don’t know based on Pascoe’s work as she wasn’t privy to much
of their world.

Boys at St. Rita weren’t sitting together at lunch or in the fleeting moments
between classes to share their faith, necessarily, or because their being Catholic
was their unitary and consolidating shared trait. This happened largely in a
separate space on Kairos which we’ll talk about later. So to try to deflect based
on religion wasn’t an option left open to them. We are all (assumed to be)
Catholic, the line might go, so quit being such a faggot. I’ll get more in-depth
into the state and function of religion as interpreted by the boys when volleyed
by the school — in myriad ways, of course —later on but suffice it to say that
Jaime, a student from the nearby Westlawn neighborhood (where a great many
students grew up), was fairly representative in noting that ”yeah [he] went [to
Rita] cause it’s Catholic, but for [his] Mom mostly.” Raff, a sort of henchman for

Huey at our lunch table, told me once, ”not a lot of guys are very religious. Like

124 ‘

the school is, but we aren’t.” Or at least they skirted a line of appearing not to be
within the school, though outsiders might View otherwise for various reasons.

The above is interesting particularly in light of a trend among the seniors
who, upon turning 18, flocked to local tattoo parlors to " get inked." This was, for
many of the guys a rite of passage and a number of them chose ethnic or familial
markings (one boy had the initials of his father and stepfather, both of whom had
passed away, embossed on each of his shoulders for instance) but the vast
majority of the Ritamen chose crosses as their permanent skin-designs. In
addition, the boys were constantly (compulsively?) the scapular and shirts from
the school, inevitably marked with the Augustinian seal. Curious about this
devotional48 turn in religiosity, I pursued it at lunch asking about why there were
no students who were ”out” (in the sense of being openly gay or openly religious
in a strictly catechetical manner actually) at the school, wondering if it had to do
with the Catholic character of the place:

Nick: ”We’re not very welcoming.”

Me: ”Is that something, like a social thing or because of religion?”

 

43 Also known as ”Paraliturgical devotions” these are actions and modes of worship that exist
outside of the traditional liturgy (or Mass) of the Church and are at times, often even, in
contradiction to Church teachings. The Catholic Church is most noticeably accused of such
heresy as ”Mary” worship for its intensive focus on the story and symbol of the mother of Christ.
In reference to this manner of concern, Fr. Tom was always careful to let us know at Novena that
the cross containing a portion of St. Rita’s fingerbone, though we were blessed with it and it was
considered a first class relic— defined as ”the body or a portion of the body of a Saint”
(”Information about Holy Relics,” n.d.) —was meant as a symbol of St. Rita’s faith and devotion
and that we weren’t praying to her, but with her to God. And so it is that Catholics in particular
are always asking for intercession through patron saints. It might be worth noting at this point
that St. Rita is the patroness of hopeless causes. I might have uttered a few devotional prayers to
her on the sly myself in the process of writing this.

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Raff: ”N 0, it’s not a religion thing; it’s definitely social.”

Ray: ”We're like cafeteria Catholics. We pick and choose.”

Religion was, for the boys, the situation of the school, and it loosely
colored (indeed, in indelible ink for some of the boys) discourse in unique ways,
yes, but was never used to preempt fag discourse, nor did they see it as outlining
it. They were able to pick and choose, as Ray says, and so they inked crosses into
their skin without thinking necessarily about the implications. It was
ornamental, like the scapular, signatory of their status as cafeteria Catholics, just
as their St. Rita shirts made them Ritamen in the public square. Religion was not,
at least to the mind of the young men I was surrounded with, the reason they
were unwelcoming. Interestingly, though, they didn’t have a response when I
pushed them further, asking if they really did have a choice regarding religion
and specifically prayer, since they were required to pray every morning and
afternoon, and further required to attend chapel monthly. It might be we can say
that they were affected at least partially by the Church’s problematic relationship
(or lack of one) with its gay flock, not to mention clergy. But no one, neither the
boys nor the teachers, was citing Leviticus. It can be said to be part of an
offshoot of the ways that teachers and administrators dealt (or didn’t deal) with
the situations of masculinities for the boys.

If there was a religion to which the boys actively ascribed, then it would
be St. Rita football. Athletics on a whole were intrinsic to the school’s identity

and sense of self; indeed the administration walked a razor’s edge here, trying to

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. _ w‘

sell academics while maintaining competitive programs which brought in big
money from alumni donors. Participation in sports was not compulsory, but
because of the relatively low number of students and the profusion of teams at
the place, a significant portion of the population of the school played at least one
sport. As such, athletics and particularly football were significant factors in the
boys senses of self, their masculine projects.
Athletics

It’s perhaps unfair to pick on the sport of football as it tends to be easily
made totemic of athletics-as-violent-masculinity writ large in America. But
football is big business at St. Rita and beyond (even in the midst of a major
recession, the National Football League sat on a revenue of somewhere around
eight billion dollars in 2009) and, stuck in a world of fiscal exigencies, where the
new reality of a contemporary Catholic school requires — this is especially true on
the South Side where so many options still exist, each school seeking to carve a
specific niche, filling some perceived need — aggressive recruiting of students.
There is nothing, then, quite like drawing 12,00049 fans to a Friday night rivalry
game, for revving up 8th graders eager to be a part of something big and exciting
and new. This is why the school is raising money for a new Fieldturf football

field to the tune of something around $800,000.

 

‘9 Parking for the game against despised and despicable— to hear the students and even the
administration! tell — Brother Rice Crusaders spread miles into adjacent neighborhoods. Rita
won the game and bragging rights for the year in front of one of the largest high school football
crowds this side of small-town Texas.

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Such is the milieu that ”coach” is an honorarium at the school, one I
picked up from a math teacher about a month into the first semester. I felt
conferred upon. I mention this because in terms of academics, much of the first
semester centered on keeping athletes eligible. Speaking with Tim, the football
player who I followed in November I asked about the cheating I saw as rampant
on Wednesdays in an effort to pull grades up for Thursday grade checks,
required to play in games on Friday. He replied in an offltand manner, well, ”I
mean every teacher’s a coach, so they don’t care.” The point being, athletics
matter a great deal in the school, football more than most, and football coaches as
much as anyone50. So, their— coaches — influence on the discursive function of
masculinity and language, particularly as regarded effeminacy (perceived or
enacted) and outlined through an adult version of fagging inevitably came to
trickle down to the boys attitudes and language where it was reinterpreted and
emplaced in a given day.

It was when Kimani became ineligible for the first of his two games that I
found out about the pink jerseys. In Illinois a student with two F’s may still
practice with his or her team but may not play in games. As a goad for his
failing players, the head football coach at St. Rita had procured pink jerseys that

ineligible players were required to wear / endure during their time of ineligibility.

 

50 After a three-loss 2010 campaign, in spite of winning the city championship and four years
removed from a state title, the head coach (an alum, even) found himself dealing with — largely
anonymous — calls for his removal.

128

They were failing classes and, through the pink jerseys, failing the test of
masculinity dictated by cultural messages attached to colors. Pink is feminine,
the script reads, and to be ineligible is thus to be made the same. Indirectly, too,
then came a linkage between stupidity (as tied to bad grades) and failed
masculinity which was marked as feminine.

When I asked Kimani about the jerseys he didn’t want to talk much either
out of embarrassment or frustration, but Qualter who was a team manager, like a
bird always chirping in our ears in first period was more than happy to tell me
they looked ”really gay” on the field. Indeed.

Messner (2002), in his study of gender and athletics, writes of men and
boys who fail at a given masculine project in sport as being made ”symbolic
’women’” easy targets as the ”pussies and faggots” (p. 35) of the team. From
here it wasn’t much of a leap to the various instances when teachers / coaches
spoke to / of students who were struggling (or complaining) in classes as needing
to ”man-up.” They simply needed to shed their inappropriate failed masculinity;
they needed to take off the pink jersey of faggotry. This borderline abusive
psychology is part of what Messner calls ”a contextual normalization of
violence” (p. 50) which leads to the proper hardening of men who are meant to
instrumentalize their bodies for the purpose of being punishing (rather than
punished). As a pink jersey, one can never punish the opponent because s/ he
cannot play in the game; the only way to get to that point is to become masculine

again, to man up, and pass classes. ”This acceptance of body contact and

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borderline violence seems to be based on the idea that sports is an area of life in
which it is permissible to suspend usual moral standards” (Miedzian, 2002, p.
183), which might not be so bad a thing were it not overtly clear how sport and
its attendant morality (or lack of it) bleeds into life, school life in this case.51

While following Tim, I had the good fortune of sitting in on the head
coach’s Anatomy class. And while Coach Krupke was always gracious in his
interactions with me, he — an alum of the school, mind - though, played into the
staff’s version of fag discourse which, while more muted than the boys, certainly
signaled its presence, acceptability, and malleability at the school. Our first
interaction came at faculty orientation when he was told we’d all be required to
wear ties, like the boys, to chapel mass throughout the school year. ”Well that’s
frickin’ gay,” was his response. As offliand as the boys. In the presence of the
students, though, he wasn’t as blatant in his usage. His discursive forays were
more oblique.

Once, after asking Tim to grab a model of a skeleton from a cabinet in the
back of the room—which apparently contained two skeletons — he noted in the

intervening time as Tim struggled with the fragility of the thing while carrying it

 

51 I’m reminded of Mr. Patemo, in his opening address to students on the first day of Computer
Science class, talking about how much he preferred teaching in an all-boys’ school to his prior
work in co-ed environments. ”It’s great. If you guys are pissed, you just get in a fight, throw
some punches and it’s done." Girls, in contrast, were prone to gossip and backbiting, by his
measure. Boys, the message clearly went, don’t gossip and they solve things by physical
contact/ contest. A little blood, a split lip would solve most everything. Another young male
teacher often forced boys who got too mouthy in class to hug each other as a way of mitigating
conflict. Joe, embarrassed and unwilling to hug his rival, whined, ”why can’t we just be men and
box or something.”

130

 

 

 

to the chalkboard, ”You know what? That thing cost about four grand and it
didn’t look that bad when I got him. But you have things around an all-guys’
school “and you tend to break things. The thing’s totally warped. [Pause] Yeah.
He used to be straight.” He laughed, catching his unintended double-entendre.

Tim, picking up on it quickly noted: ”Yeah, there’s another skeleton in
there and they were kissing.” This followed by more or less embarrassed and
sidelong laughter from the class. With a wink from the coach we moved on to
the details of phalanges and metacarpals. But the precedent was set.

Later in the month, in the midst of the supposed Swine Flu pandemic, he
turned to current events to make a point, asking:

Coach: ”Anyone get the H1N1 shot?" [Hands raise] I would highly

suggest it.”

Student: ”Is that what Tim’s "sick with?”
Recall for a moment that Tim was in the midst of his senior season and working
toward placing himself in a position to garner scholarships to play at the college
level. He was, all season long, a starting offensive lineman and integral to the
offensive success of the team.

Coach: ”I dunno.”

Student: ”Is he not gonna play in the playoff game this week?”

Coach: ”Yeah, he’s gonna play. He’s gotta toughen up.”
There is an intriguing mix here of health (the coach is a former nurse,

incidentally) concern and lack of concern. The vaccine is important and the

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illness is real and daunting, but the game is paramount. This is, in some ways,
understandable considering the pressures of a job where succeeding at a rate of
ten wins for every three losses is viewed as mediocrity.

However, what we want to note is a further tagging of weakness to illness
and on down the line to an abject version of masculinity. Football is where, for
Meidzian (2002) the link to violence and masculinity is welded for boys; even
boys sick with pandemic flu must learn ”to take unnecessary risks that will
endanger their and others’ health and lives” (p. 201) where ”the language of
sport is filled with insults suggesting that a boy who is not tough enough, does
not live up to the masculine mystique, is really a girl or homosexual” (p. 202).
Not tough enough to play hurt or sick? Then perhaps you are not strong enough
to ”man-up,” and perhaps, further, you are then gay or woman, both being abject
and undesirable as identities.

We see an example of this compulsory manning-up most strikingly in an
exchange that occurred at the end of November, just as I was getting ready to
move to a different schedule and leave Anatomy for good. In a discussion about
skin ailments, Coach who as you’ll note often tied his pedagogy to the real-life
situations of the boys, asked:

”How many of you are wrestlers? [Hands rise] What kinds of skin

diseases have you had?

”Impetigo.” ”Ringworm.” [These shouted from the masses with a certain

pride of the survivor, maybe]

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Coach: [Rhetorically] ”Why does that happen to wrestlers always? Well,
you got guys sweaty rubbing up on each other [here the boys start to
snicker at the thought and the possibility of another double entendre]
and you got an open wound. ..[pause, smiling] I mean, I realize we could
be describing a lot of things. . .[The boys start to lose it, the wrestlers are
punched in shoulders; they look embarrassed]. . .but let’s not get into that.

I mean I don’t want to do that to the wrestlers.”

What he doesn’t want to do to the wrestlers, of course, is make them
symbolic fags through their association with a sport that involves a great deal of
pseudo-intimate contact. There is a certain embarrassment in Coach’s
comportment as he really doesn’t mean to call into question the masculinity of
the wrestlers through his unintentional fusing of their activities in a sanctioned
athletic contest with homosexual sex. No. He doesn’t want them to man up in
this situation, but only to talk about the skin ailments associated with a sport
conducted in close contact in humid spaces, the perfect incubator for Staph.
These are communicable diseases, yes, but not the ones associated with the
feminized gay man. They are more badges of courage and he, attend please, is
apologetic at an unintentional fagging. The boys notice, of course.

Another interesting manifestation in terms of athletics and the sacrificial
nature of the body for the good of the violent contest came out, pun intended, in
a discussion with Kimani before class as the team prepared for a supposedly

daunting opponent. As a defensive tackle in a 4-3 defense, Kimani’s main role

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was to take up space in rushing situations so that the middle of the field was,
effectively, clogged thus forcing ball-carriers to the outside and into the waiting
arms of contain-minded linebackers. The strategy of it is less important than the
understanding that in most situations, Kimani was asked to dive into legs in the
interest of creating a pileup. Relaying some coaching in anticipation of, a mythic
(they turned out not to be much of a team in the end) opponent and their granite
and monolithic offensive line, he told us, ” Coach told me, you have to grab
ankles. These are some big, fat fuckers.”

The euphemism alludes to a derogatory term for gay male ”bottoms” in a
sexual position, who are said to grab their ankles in the process of being
penetrated. What’s interesting, of course, is that Kimani is being asked to take on
the passive sexual role in a gay phantasmic coaching-allegory. Bersani ((1987)
suggests that in the pantheon of structured male sexual behavior, ”in terms of
activity and passivity,” we see ”a correlative rejection of the so-called passive
role in sex” both hetero and homosexual. So it is interesting that Kimani, must
now man-up by, to borrow from a baseball maxim, taking one (well, many over
the course of a game really) for the team. This suggests a confused rhetorical
imposition of the fag which occurred occasionally in classes in ways similar to
this:

Student: [Talking about the chapel shirt, required for Mass days] ”I don’t

like wearing these things. I feel gay.

Student 2: ”You look gay. If it helps, I’m gay too.”

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H—

 

Here we find an empathic gayness, or a voluntary passivity, perhaps. This is not
a rhetorical challenge for either student: they both must suffer the gayness
together; they are both made gay in service to the Mass, they are tagged until
they can each shed the chapel uniform so why not take it together? And why not
preempt others’ labeling by taking the passive role, actively first. Kimani is
cloaked in a team ethos where he must sacrifice his body for the team in a way
only a gay man gives up his power, voluntarily feminizing himself through
actively taking the passive role in sex (I know, I know, such paradoxes). In a
different scene, we see a student ribbing another for his gayness, but reassuring
him that it’s ok because they will suffer the indignity together.

Both situations, Kimani’s and that of the students’ in chapel ties, are
instances where school—sponsored discourses called into question masculine
ideals in ways that invoked or allowed students to invoke gayness as a coping
strategy. The school required a certain mode of dress which the boys found
inconvenient or offensive to their independence (preferring the slouchy style of
polos-not-quite-tucked-into-khakis); it also required that Kimani subvert his
individual desire for statistics, say, for the good of the team. Both situations,
again, played upon a need for the student to subvert independence (of dress, or
creative athletic play) for the monolith of a school discourse that dictated what
was appropriate on the field or in the chapel. Boys coped by becoming gay
together in service of (for Kimani) or resistance to (the chapel ties) the

requirements placed on them by representatives of the school.

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One final instantiation to indicate just how embedded fag discourse had
become in the flow of the school comes from a first period history class in
December. From across the room, as the teacher Mr. Creighton walks towards
them, we hear an exchange between a senior football player, Johnny, and his
friend, a basketball player named Hanns:

Johnny: [Talking about a student at another school] ”That kid is such a

faggot.”

Mr. Creighton, overhearing: ”Whoa!” [In disbelief]

Hanns: ”You can't say faggot? [Genuinely baffled]

Mr. Creighton: ”No!” [Emphatic.]

The boys had never, to their knowledge, been corrected by teachers regarding
their usage of the gay terminology. And so the slur, faggot, had become so much
a part of their lingo that to say it aloud in front of a teacher was not only not
taboo, it was indeed shocking to them that such a thing might be verboten. I
would suggest that both young men were so much ensconced in the fagging of
the school, but also of sport, that such terminology became second nature, almost

totemic. And speaking of totems. ..

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Dicks

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2 (Student Drawing): Dicked!

137

 

__EL“-

 

 

 

It was on the first day of New Faculty Orientation that I initially started
hearing about them. We were, the seven of us coming into the school as
newbies, gathered in the ad hoc conference room of St. Rita seated in the midst of
late August humid-heat wondering just how much of the daunting week-long
agenda laid out in bullet point on papers in front of us, could possibly come to
fruition. A few of the first-year teachers itched visibly to set up their classrooms;
the basketball and wrestling coaches traded barbs on their Blackberrys. In the
end, we spent the morning shuffled through successive presentations and
welcomes from various dignitaries of the place. Here we got much of the party
line on the history of the school as well as details about grade submission and
contract expectations. The rninutia.

Exiting lunch, on that Monday, though and speaking in an offhand
marmer to a female Spanish teacher who asked about the dynamics of an all-boys
school, Mika a veteran of thirty-plus years, and a mother of two alums asked
Julie, another longtime vet helping with orientation ” where to even begin.”

Mika: ”It’s scary; it’s frightening. Teenage boys looking at women of all

ages. And, oh, Julie, should we talk about their fetish? [Conspiratorially,

complete with cartoon shifty eyes to make sure no one in the empty halls
might be listening in] They will draw penises. They will attach them to
each other."

Julie: ”You don’t want to react to this. I would suggest just tearing them

up and throwing them away."

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Mika: ”It’s a guy thing and ignore the smells, the farting in class.”

It may well be a guy thing”. It may well, further, be a guy thing in an all-
guys’ school. What I found, actually, was that the discourse of it just being a part
of the school came to constitute A) why the issue was never addressed by the
faculty and B) why the boys continued drawing away. This was a continuance of
the unspoken policy regarding the profusion of fag discourse: it's just how they
are / talk/ draw and how they always will. Tradition, recall; one that will never
undo itself because it’s not engaged critically by faculty; one that will never undo
itself because the boys see the penises as a chance for play in what they see as the
rigid structure of a school; one that is viewed as generally harmless precisely

because the boys never take sharpies to pictures of saints. The impermanence of

 

52 I am reminded here of Nespor’s (1997) discussion of socialization in schools in reference to the
”hiding away of natural functions (as in the example of farting. . .)” in favor of ”a socialized an
rationalized body” (p. 127) the purpose of which is meant to define ” the inappropriateness of
farting in public” as ”so basic that it doesn’t rate mention” (p. 129). In a sense, the boys and
faculty both conspired to laughingly (in the case of the students) and disgusted / dismissively (in
the case of the faculty) flout social rules of propriety which functioned outside the walls of the
school. This was part of the ” grotesque” if you will, of the all boys high school, where bodily
functions particularly in their ”dirty aspects, should become means of evading, resisting, and
scandalizing” normative social power” (Fiske, 1989, p. 97). This sentiment became most
prevalent in discussions about students’ decisions to attend an single gendered school:

Nico: ”I like to fart.”

Dunbar: That’s not why you went to Rita, not to fart.”

Nico: ”No, it kind of is. Like I couldn’t do that with girls around."
Cody: ”You also don’t have to worry about showering in the morning.”

So the boys were able to construct an ethos of grotesqueness in the absence of same-aged (and
thus sexually available) females who, as we’ll see in the next chapter, were often

manifest/ idealized / dehumanized in their minds as outside of the dirty aspects of the physical
shitting and pissing that remained the realm of boys.

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fag discourse — affixed to nothing but the ethos of the boys and the teachers and
their coaches —allows its permanent status. None of this is written in a text, or
on a wall and so it is perpetuated through the discursive flow of the classes of
boys. Were someone to scrawl ”fag” on a classroom door, things might change
but for now it’s just boys being boys harrnlessly in disposable (supposedly)
ways.

And then, tipped off, I started to see them everywhere. Once while sitting
on the altar after a Kairos event, I caught sight of a small crudely rendered penis
on a strip of tape in the middle of the chair in front of me. It seemed, after a full
semester in the school, oddly apropos. Boys cribbed them into my notebook
when I wasn’t looking, they showed up on the spines of textbooks, on crumpled
looseleaf littering the floors of classrooms, and drawn in pen in the middle of
polo-shirted backs (this was rare; mostly they were temporary and disposable).
They were the cave paintings of the place and it was a constant low-level source
of anxiety for students, whenever touched on the shoulder or the back, as to
whether someone had hooked a drawing onto them. Interestingly it was
extremely rare to find them inked in permanent places. So they were absent
from the stalls of the bathrooms — as was all graffiti, actually — and none were
etched in desks or on walls in common areas. No, these were fleeting and
(re)placeable, pictorial manifestations of the fag discourse out of which, I’d
argue, they came to grow. As with the discourse that seems to have birthed

them, they were most often attached to a person or his belongings and only for as

140

long as it took him to transfer it to someone else. The chair in the chapel was an
anomaly though I suspect it was a way of always placing a penis on the ”back”
of whomever sat in that chair, in perpetuity. Or at least until faculty or
maintenance found it and threw it away.

The construction ranged from a quick scribble on a scrap of paper to the
ornate and intricately strategic as with a young man I sat next to who spent an
entire Spanish class crafting a hook out of multiple paperclips. This was his red
herring. He then fastened the student in front of him, just as the bell rang, to his
chair by a belt loop with the paperclip contraption so that, when the boy was
distracted trying to free himself, he wouldn’t notice the penis, cut from notebook
paper and with a makeshift hook at the top, being simultaneously clipped to his
collar. Mission accomplished: the victim worked at loosing his belt loop and
walked out of the room, penis adorning his shirt, like a necktie in reverse.

Similar to the ” specter of the fag” (Pascoe, 2007, p. 14) where young men
are always attending to the possibility of their own (and others’) failed gender,
here boys were periodically (spastically and with a certain slapstick quality
really, considering their inability to reach the middle of their own backs)
checking their shirts to make sure they hadn’t been, well, dicked. The most
striking— and comical, actually —that I saw was a case in a Physics class where
one student rnimed with the back of his pen, drawing a penis on the polo of a
classmate who then spent the better part of the next two minutes untucking his

shirt and trying to pull it around his body to see if he’d been drawn on, whining

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all the time, ”If there’s a Wiener on my back, I’m gonna be pissed.” There was no
Wiener, however, just the possibility -— the spectered tracings — of it.

I was reminded through all of this of my time in high school. Required to
wear one of three colors (white, blue, or yellow) of oxford button down dress
shirts, our range of options was fairly limited. I did, however, make it clear to
my mother, who was kind enough to buy the things for me through my career as
a secondary schooler, that on no occasion was there to be a fabric hook on the
back of the shirt, above the middle pleat. These, at our school, were called ’fag
tags’ for no discernible reason other than they just were and always had been
called that. And anyone who had a shirt with a fag tag was subject to having it
(the tag, not the whole shirt) ripped off at any point, leaving twin holes where
fabric tore from fabric. This was getting off easy. Leave the fag tag and you
were like to get physically hazed and often guys unlucky enough to have shirts
of this kind just tore the fag tag off themselves before wearing them. Once the
thing was gone, so was the specter, much like the penis tags I observed at St.
Rita.

Psychoanalysis has made a great many claims regarding the status and
symbolism of the phallus. Indeed we might argue the entire field was, er,
inseminated by a certain Freudian ”phallic narcissism” (p. 176). For Lacanians
”the phallus is master-signifier, and femininity is symbolically defined by lack”
(Connell, 1995, p. 70). Later Feminist critiques often centered on notions of

”phallogocentrism” and its role in language and ”cultural intelligibility” (Butler,

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1990). The initial and flawed distinction between biological sex and socially
constructed gender turned upon this assumed (and untroubled) presence and / or
its lack. These are battles of identity still being fought around, now, gender
testing and hormonal markers meant in the end to clarify and simplify for
readers (of culture) categories of "female” and ”male” which are always-already
presupposed anyway.

Perhaps most striking in popular culture of late, we find the case of Caster
Semenya, the South African sprinter who has repeatedly been subject to testing
(scientific and in the court of public opinion) to determine if she’s lacking enough
in the penis department to compete as a woman.53 The upshot is that Semenya
performs too athletically to be ”woman” and gives the appearance in her
muscularity of being a "man.” That s/ he has been subject to multiple
(humiliating) and intrusive inspections of the genital region as well as blood and
hormonal tests and yet results remain inconclusive suggests a betweenness that
is only problematic because defined so, externally. Semenya just wants to run;
the world needs young Caster to run with those most like her and can’t quite
figure out just what that means to soothe the unease of a suddenly fragile gender
dichotomy long maintained through sport.

I mention all of this not to engage in a critique of prior engagements with

the significance of the phallus in culture or in the development of the psyche.

 

53 For a wonderfully engaging discussion of Semenya’s case and the human cost of the fiercely
guarded dichotomous gender regime, see Levy (2009).

143

And though the discussion of the phallic did indeed occasionally turn to the
abstract notion of ”bigness” which Corbett (2009) sees as still emblematic of
relevant psychoanalytic work in the development of boys, these rare displays
were more meant for comedy, were instances of the carnivalesque say, than as
assertions of personal prowess. That is, as with Packer below, the discussion of
bigness in reference to the phallus wasn’t about claiming masculinity based on
size. Rather it was a way to disrupt expectations of decorum.

Which brings us back to a single-gendered high school which relies on the
convenience of boy-as-not-girl because of the assumed presence of a penis. This
was never engaged actively, of course, but we can presume with a modicum of
certainty that any boy who took the entrance exam — effeminate though he might
be —would be admitted to St. Rita without the reassurance of scientific data
affirming the proper amount of testosterone, beyond the assumption that he
would wear the same uniform as his future Rita brothers. A girl taking the test,
well, wouldn’t be allowed to take it.

One particularly striking example from the first semester came as we
walked from class to class. Packer, an imp of a kid who reveled in his own
laziness, hiding a quick wit from administration of the school asked to no one in
particular (and because he wanted to get a rise), ”You think Jesus had a big
dick?" Knowing he’d find a response he launched then, into his prepared

riposte, ”Oh dude, think about it. God’s sending him down here to die? The

144

least he could do is give him a big schlong.” Laughter and rolling of eyes from
the boys who were very familiar with Packer’s schtick as resident pot-stirrer.

Again I bring the above up as a way of saying that, yes, the phallus was
important, but most often an extension of the discursive function of the fag and
fagging throughout the school in the form of drawing penises. Talking about
them in more than an offhand manner, as with Packer here, was a whole
different and difficult ballgame.

When I asked (repeatedly) the boys about why they chose to draw clicks
and put them on each other, they tended to answer in two specific ways, 1)
because it’s hilarious and 2) because it was hilarious in Superbad.54 Indeed both
sentiments were probably true for the boys. Many of their more meticulous
works mirrored phallic characters taken directly from the movie (a penis as head
cook at a barbeque, for example, aproned and in a chef hat) in fact. When
pressed, though, they got coy:

Me: ”So why draw them?”

Tim: ”They’re funny as hell.”

Dan: ”It’s embarrassing to walk around like that, if they have a dick on

them, then they’re kind of gay."

 

5" A teen comedy released in 2009 which featured a character who became ”addicted” in middle
school to drawing penises in various (and voluminous) detail, personifying them in myriad
ways. When he is caught by a teacher drawing ”a big, veiny, triumphant bastard," he is sent to
counseling and becomes, we assume, reformed. The film ends with a montage of the character’ 5
more creative and detailed works of art. Interestingly, he never places them on anyone else,
instead hiding them in a secret notebook.

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Me: ”So but why is it funny to put a dick and balls on someone?”

Tim: ”I dunno, we’re just immature?”

Dan: ”Nah. They’re easy to draw and we see them every day, I guess.”

Tim: ”I mean think of how stupid you look, walking around with a dick

on your back.”
Later in the semester when I engaged another group of students I tried a
different tack:

Me: ”Well, but guys, you say everything is gay, and that’s a bad thing, but

what’s gayer then, than putting a penis that you’ve created onto someone

else?”

Raff: ”No, it’s not gay for the guy who draws it.”

Mick: ”Also, it wouldn’t be funny to draw a vagina.”

Dunbar: ”Yeah, they’re just not that funny looking.”

Raff: ”And it’s a little bit embarrassing to have a dick on you, like you can

laugh at it and then if it’s in their notebook maybe they’re a little gay.”

Note, please, as with other linguistic turns in fag discourse, one is not
made gay by initiating the sequence. One is, rather, potentially fagged
temporarily if he is subject to the hooking of a penis, and he is then impelled to
pass that penis along (on)to someone else. Vaginas don’t enter the picture as
they aren’t ”funny.” This is part and parcel of some of the rhetoric the boys
spouted as regarded the shortcomings of women, a topic which we’ll address in

the next chapter and it helps them close their ranks of homosociability under the

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auspices of brotherhood; a brotherhood formed through the mocking
pseudosexual relationships characterized by and carried out through fag
discourse.

We might also suggest that the ”problem” of the hooking-of—the-phallus is
rooted in the homoerotic undercurrent ever-present in the school. To dick
someone was to take an active role. The boys, focused as they were on the image
of the penis, were still constrained by the notion of gayness that would be
implied / indelibly attached were one to actually take his flesh-and-blood dick out
and place it on someone in the classroom. This would carry informal social as
well as formal disciplinary sanctions in the school. It was not a part of the
accepted discourse, in other words. But, turning again to the Greeks and
Foucault’s (1990b) analysis of the role of mastery / active/ passive roles in sexual
relationships (homo and hetero) we find the idea that ”in sexual behavior there
was one role that was intrinsically honorable and valorized without question: the
one that consisted in being active, in dominating, in penetrating, in asserting
one’s superiority” (p. 215). One way to View the attaching of penises is to think
of it as a type of penetration: of making a classmate passive in accepting the
phallus; it is in effect a form of domination, a marking of territory, through the
claiming of sexual dominance. And again, as with other aspects of fag discourse,
it was mobile and remained unchallenged because perceived as somehow

impermanent by the administration and teachers.

147

Vital to the discussion is the understanding that though the boys were
largely unable to find ways of opting out of the discourse, there was never any
winner. It was never settled that one or another boy was safe and wholly
straight and beyond the reach of the specter of the fag. At any moment he could
be brought back into line either with a penis placed on his back or in his
notebook, or with a barb thrown from across the table. This led to a constant
recycling of discursive sniping that frankly got trite for its sheer repetitiveness.
As a result though, the boys found their sexual possibilities within and beyond
the school diminished through the regulatory regime which demanded that they
constantly be on-guard, policing their own gendered and sexual performances
and those of others. Unable to establish a solid ground of dominance or safety
among their peers, they turned to women as outlets for (psychic and verbal)
aggression, seeking to reestablish a kind of order which reassured their safety as
self-defining sexually. And though faculty didn’t engage directly with the
students in the recursive labeling and re-labeling they still as in the case of Julie
and Mika’s dismissiveness and Coach Krupke’s overt (on the field) and allusive
(in the classroom) deployment, largely condoned the practice. It was a part of
the tradition, of the brotherhood, and it bonded all the boys in a bind of the
threat of the fag and its creative outlets such as penile implanting.

All of this, again, was shaped in an environment for and by boys,
assuming that the absence of women fostered a constructive (and it was,

certainly) presence. That is: the administration and the students set fences at the

148

boundaries of gender. Masculinities flourished in ways, it was assumed, they
wouldn’t have were there girls wandering the halls during school hours. St. Rita
fashioned itself as a place apart from women, laying aside the irony of its name.
Let us turn now, to the ways in which masculinities came to be formulated

through rhetorical engagement with women and heterosexual relationality.

149

Chapter Five

Women: Squishes and Not-Squishes
Boys and men are left to traffic in women, construct them outside of mutual recognition

with little to no acknowledgment of the dynamics of separation and dependence that
color, construct, and embroider men ’s and boys sexualized love relations. (Corbett, 2009,

p. 42)

”I t was an ethics for men: an ethics thought, written, and taught by men, and addressed
to men — to free men, obviously. A male ethics consequently, in which women figured
only as objects” (Foucault, 1990b, p. 22).

”Women sufler because both men and women alike have trouble seeing women as fully
human, autonomous subjects; instead they remain closer to objects” (Roach, 2003, p. 38).

One of the ways that St. Rita High School, as a single-gendered and
Catholic institution affected the discourses around masculinities came in the
form of a relationality to women. The boys worked within the constraints of an
artificially constructed ’male’ world in the school where their contact with the
women-made-other by their absence in student desks was limited to interaction
with faculty as well as the religious iconography of the school. This made for
unique points of departure in gender relations as the young men asserted
masculine poses when contact with, or conversation about women occurred. I’ll
argue that the masculinities, the possibility of masculinity occurred in much the
same way as with fag discourse: the school provided a loose frame of restrictive
disciplinary gazing and the boys willingly pushed at its edges at every turn.

Hockey

150

This is my first hockey game. We’ve plunged headlong into a Chicago
winter characterized most strikingly by its sleepy gray days, which give way too
quickly to the howling cold of pitch black nights. Tonight, Saturday, St. Rita is
playing my alma mater at a rink in the far southwestern suburbs. For a moment
as I ready myself for the drive I am torn as to who to root for, but recalling that I
never made it to a hockey game in my first go-round in high school, I settle on
the team full of students that I know as opposed to the name on a jersey that
used to mean a great deal more to me than it does now55.

Walking in, I find a rink, abutted by cold — everything is cold this
December - metal stands, backing up to the concrete outer wall of the arena.
Across from where we (the fans of both teams, split down the middle by
allegiance, roughly separated at the rnidline of the ice) sit, the two teams shuttle
back and forth over bench boards, preparing for the start of the game. I have to
walk past the Marist faithful to get to the St. Rita side, feeling an odd twinge of
guilt as I do. These ties run deeper than I supposed. This has much to do with
tradition.

A good portion of the senior class and some few juniors who pal around
with the various groups (and who most likely provided rides as payment for

their passage) mill behind the far goal or stack themselves eight deep up in the

 

55 As an educator, and a teacher educator further, it intrigues me that there seems to be so little
research on teachers who return to their former schools (or rival schools) and how this might
affect pedagogy, as well as educational outlook. I would suggest it as fertile ground for further
research, most especially as schools seek ways to hook into the affinity of alumni by
differentiating their institutions from surrounding rivals.

151

stands from the Plexiglas boards to the low steel support girders which sweep
from the pitched ceiling above the ice, on down to the low-hanging lode-bearing
walls against which the collapsible benches come to rest. The Dean of Men56, a
hulking mass of a being — there are well-founded concerns for his health; New
Balance outfits the football coaches and had to make a special warm-up for the
Dean, Mr. Dee, as their largest size, a 4XL was too small—has planted himself on
the lowest bench of the stands. He is in the section next to the students, such that
any of the boys who might want to insinuate themselves into the Marist crowd
and cause mischief will have to pass by him first. He cuts an imposing figure;
the Ritamen stay out of trouble. Sort of.

I get a number of ’hellos’ as I sit down and the boys stop by to see how
things are or to razz me about Marist’s chances in the game. It’s always an event
seeing an adult from the school outside the confines of the grounds of the place.
They ask about my girlfriend in sly and elbow-y ways. I am wearing a St. Rita
baseball cap to signal my allegiances to them; they seem to appreciate it. It
would seem odd, I decide, to sit in the student section, and so I plant myself
three rows back from Mr. Dee and watch, hockey sure, but the stands mostly.

Both are fascinating.

 

5" Rita’s name for what would probably pass as the Dean of Discipline at other schools. Coach
Dee ran JUG and was in charge of parking and uniform issues as well.

152

Most of the guys are dipping.57 Their costume of choice runs from St. Rita
sweatpants to St. Rita sweatshirts and back again through a mess of blue, red,
and Augustinian pierced-heart seals. The main variant tends to be gear from
college or professional football and basketball teams. Also there is the odd grade
school t-shirt. This is the first time I’ve seen the full force of the football team at a
social event as they are, clearly, limited to the field of play during Friday night
gridiron contests. They are a rowdy bunch. I note that, unlike the football stands
which are dotted with parents, yes, but also packs of girls from neighboring high
schools, the St. Rita student section at Orland Ice Arena is completely devoid of
young women. And then I see and hear why.

During the first period, a group of intrepid girls from Marist makes the
trek from left to right, passes by Mr. Dee and with furtive looks begins to walk in
front of the seniors. It’s a flirtatious move, full of sidelong glances, giggling and
pushing. At that point, as if rehearsed (and I find out later that they’ve been
doing this for years, so I suppose it was rehearsed), Luke a wide receiver on the

football team jumps up and starts chanting:

 

57 This is a form of chewing tobacco. It’s the vice of choice for a number of the boys because,
unlike smoking, they can hide that they’re dipping in school, in class even. Too, it doesn’t make
their clothes smell and so parents can retain a certain plausibility to their willful ignorance of it if
they want to. Something like chewing gum, one puts it between the front lower lip and the
bottom teeth and sucks the juice. I have heard of guys who cut the inside of their mouths so that
the tobacco gets to the bloodstream more quickly. Often the football players will ” throw in a
pinch” during lunch, or at least they would until it was explicitly banned after a bottle full of
discarded chaw spit (a ’spitter’) was thrown in the stands at a football game, hitting a mother
who in turn wrote a letter to Father Tom. Shit, as they say, hit the fan. However, because a
number of the football coaches chew, they tend to be more lenient in allowing the boys leeway as
with Mr. / Coach Dee at the hockey game who looked the other way while boys spit into cups,
bottles, really any receptacle available.

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”Girl. Girl. GIRL. GIRL."

Within seconds the entire section is on its feet, pointing at the young
women as they walk by, shouting in unison:

”GIRL! GIRL! GIRL! GIRL!”

Abashed, the interlopers make a quick turn and beat a hasty retreat to the
safety of their own side of the stands. The boys break into high fives and
laughter, settling back into the hockey game which has become suddenly
incidental. I’m a bit stunned. Coach Dee shakes his head. Play on the ice (and in
the stands, I find) goes on. The scene as above repeats itself each time a high
school aged female comes through the human barrier of the Dean of Men. By the
end of the game, various girls are used to the treatment and venture over just to
test for the reaction. The boys remain dedicated to the trope, however, and each
time the girls are driven back to the safety of the gender heterogeneity offered by
the Marist side of the stands.

The next day, considering the experience and admittedly a little
exasperated by the whole thing, I ask Mr. Paterno, a veteran of co-educational
alternative and Catholic secondary schools, if he’s experienced anything like it
elsewhere. He says that he’s not seen it anywhere he’s worked. As he walks
away toward his classroom he laughs:

”Yeah, it’s like Thunderdome.”
This is a reference to the gladiatorial arena from the third and perhaps

most famous film in the dystopian Mad Max series, where Mel Gibson and Tina

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Turner clash amidst the wreckage of a violent and dying world. Dramatic,
perhaps, but I get what he’s saying: it’s loud, intimidating, and scarily baffling in
the moment. Later, I ask Luke, the ringleader, about what I’d seen. He chortles,
”It’s just a joke. Like it’s not a pick-up or anything. You just don’t bring girls to
hockey games.”

Right. The list of places you don’t bring girls, of course, begins with
school for these boys and extends like foreboding tentacles to a great number of
places I’ve found. The fundamental split in gender relations sold and constantly
reinforced by the notion and practice of single-sex education has served to gird
troubling- even if presented as trifling at times — assumptions of physical and
emotional differences between boys and girls, men and women. Such that

separation is seen as, and becomes, natural and even necessary.58 At the hockey

 

58 This was— and perhaps still is —rooted in assumptions about sexual appetites and their need
for control. It’s a sentiment echoed by a math teacher, Mr. Latke, who tells me that:

”The original reasoning [for single sex Catholic schools], and let me think how to say this, was to
keep the boys away from sex and inappropriate things until they were old enough to handle it.
Like now you got girls pregnant in grade school. That didn’t used to happen.” The homage to
the halcyon days of moral certitude aside, we see this concern with preserving the sexual
austerity of boys in its original (and largely unaltered by time really) form in Foucault (1990c)
who noted that ”virginity [was] not simply abstention” for the Stoics, but was rather ”a choice, a
style of life, a lofty form of existence that the hero chooses out of the regard that he has for
himself” (p. 230). Thus the choice for boys to attend an all-boys high school is one supported by
the twin regulatory gazes in society: one that sees them as too uninformed to avoid sexual
promiscuity in coeducational environments and one that celebrates them as heroic (as special) for
’choosing’ the austerity of a single-gendered context. Note, of course, that the (assumed) absence
of a possible homosexual desire here. Foucault spends a great deal of time explicating the
complexities of ’boy-love’ for the Greeks and Romans who saw the practice as natural, but one to
be controlled as a measure of manhood, in favor of, but also silent partner to the more dominant
and (re)productive heterosexual bond. Boy-love in this Catholic school might best be referred to
as ’brotherhood’ a phrase foisted on the boys from the first day of orientation. They leave, upon
graduation, with Rita brothers, entering a brotherhood of countless alums. Note above, too, that
Mr. Latke cites teen pregnancy as problematic and places the trouble solely on the girl who has

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game, indeed at all hockey games, the boys take glee in raucously labeling young
women ” girl” from the safety of their crowd. This functions both to keep her
away from the safety of the male space that is the stands at a contest, but it serves
also to extend the gender-limited context of St. Rita High School beyond the
schoolday. In effect it makes all school events, all-boy events. And while girls
were present in numbers at basketball and football games, they were most often
clustered in groups separate from pods of boys who stood and half-watched
games and half-watched them. I’ll suggest, further, that the presence of Mr. Dee
who presents a significant physical barrier, serves as semi-official sanction for the
kind of shouting-down of women that happens. As long as the boys maintain
their language in a clean way (there were no ’fuck yous’, though the tone could
have been interpreted that way), they were within the sanction of the school.
Though they might wield the term ”girl” like a cudgel, it was indeed accurate
and unoffensive in form, if frightening in function. The school observed as the

boys self-segregated and even provided the gatekeeper to make things official.

Pollut/ed/‘mg Women
Cut to a moment in class in December when Mr. Paterno, looking for a

student who had been absent for the better part of the week asked, ”What’s

 

somehow gotten pregnant. The trouble, it seems, is that girls get pregnant and this somehow
vaguely implicates boys, but essentially in the sense that they will then become tied down by the
consequence of sex, bonded to a girl before having the chance to find brotherhood.

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wrong with Keck?” The response, given with equal parts gravity and sarcasm
was, ”He’s got a girlfriend.”

This offhanded tethering of boy-to-girl-to-trouble is the crux of the issue
for the school. Boys are the business of the place. And they will be boys, in all of
their expectant and self-fulfilling differentness from girls. Such is the condition
of setting, well, conditions that include only the bodies of boys (and older
women, who are sexually unavailable to them) in an educational environment.
The single-gendered school inherently relies on certain assumptions about what
maleness includes (and excludes of course). In the case of St. Rita, as with Fag
Discourse, the self-evidential separation between boy (gendered and sexed) and
girl (gendered and sexed) became the excuse for not addressing discursive
elements which shaped masculine possibility and impossibility. That is: if we
rely on the fact that boys will be boys by not being girls, then we don’t have to
deal with a great many problems because they won’t exist (like sexual contact
within school, for example, or the danger of teen pregnancy because, well, boys

don’t get pregnant”).

 

59 In October an Augustinian priest visited the school to give an anti-abortion presentation. The
slide show, displayed to the entire school (in four shifts) in the auditorium was produced in the
early 19903 and relied on slippery statistics to ”prove” that abortion was always regrettable and
that human life existed from conception. These are not unusual arguments considering the
Catholic Church’s ongoing crusades against, say, condom use in African nations ravaged by
AIDS. However, throughout the entire presentation, all examples were rooted in the feminine.
Women got into trouble and made bad decisions and that led to abortions which were forbidden
by God. Only at the very end was there a single summative statement made by Fr. Tom, who
said ” gentlemen, we’re men, and these are important issues that we need to think about.” That
was it: back to class with images of aborted fetuses and fallen women on the mind.

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In essence, the school provides the a priori frame: you are boy, which in
turn then means ”rationality with absence of emotion” (Miedzian, 2002, p. 32)
(except on Kairos which we’ll discuss in the next chapter) and the veneer of
”hard[ness], tough[ness]. . .ruthless[ness], and competitive[ness]” (p. 37) traded
in throughout social media and in pop psychological texts which assume most
famously, different planets for men and women. The school provided light
surveillance and kept a semblance of order, as with Mr. Nee at the game who
would have jumped at the appearance of vulgar words, say but chose to ignore
the functional and verbal bludgeoning of young women daring to pass through
the senior section. The boys, knowing this, worked within the frame through
discursive traditions, pushing at the edges of acceptability, manufacturing and
repacking difference that had already been sold to them through the very
separatist structure of the school.

' As long as the boys fell within acceptable —read: traditional — limits of
gendered expectation, then they were free to play with masculinity however they
saw fit granted it confirmed the school’s sense of public decorum (at events such
as the hockey game) and didn't challenge staid notions of dress code, say, or hair.
So it was that hair had to be shorter than the collar. It could grow out as wide
and up as far as the boys liked, but once it hit the collar of the polo shirt, it
became a sanctionable offense. Women wore their hair long, boys, Ritamen
didn’t. The uniform was part of the bringing into line of the school. Wearing the

”SR” outside of the walls required that a Ritaman act with a certain sense of

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decorum which meant seemingly, not throwing a bottle of discarded spit at a
woman, but throwing her gender at her in loud and crowd-backed frenzy was
fully acceptable.

GIRL! it is, then and she is certainly not boy, nor is there much of any
overlap. Keep her away from the school, so that the boys will learn to keep her
away from their section one supposes. I am reminded of a presenter— during
professional development in summer orientation—who, with all of the faculty
present, launched into an odd, unbalanced, diatribe. He was an alumnus of St.
Rita, a former teacher, and some sort of retired CIA operative. A self fashioned
Jason Bourne. His lack of usable pedagogical content aside —the presentation
was more a series of tales of his exploits in assassination plots he ”couldn’t go
into details about” -- there were moments when he encapsulated the sentiment of
much of the faculty, which came to rest in the minds of the students as well:
”What is it about boys? There’s something wrong; we’re not right. We’re wired
different— we know this — than girls; girls’ll just sit and listen. Boys won’t.
They'll just smell and push limits.”

Though teachers approached me after (I, the guest, recall) and told me
that they weren’t on board with much of what special-ops-guy said, they were
apt to turn around and shake their heads at the ”knuckleheads” in the school
when it was brought to light that penises kept appearing on walls, or girls were
fended off through chants confirming their girl-ness. That’s just how they, these

predictably unpredictable creatures, are. Boys will be boys, wired weird and all.

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The boys, sensing complicity, ran with it most blatantly in the case of fagging
each other, but also as outlined in their approaches to women.
’ Anxiety, Sickness, and Crap (Literally)

Mac an Ghaill (1994) in The Making of men: Masculinities, sexualities, and
schooling suggests that there is a certain sexual anxiety for heterosexual boys at
the high school level due to their own self-assessed lack of acuity with women as
measured against the suggested sexual ferociousness attributed to masculinity in
social messages. He notes that in his study boys ”preferred to talk about
[women] rather than spending time with them” (p. 104) citing further, Connell’s
argument that this ”male heterosexual ambivalence towards women should not
be read as an aberration, but rather as an intrinsic aspect of" what ze calls
”hegemonic masculinity” (p. 105).

I’ve asserted before that I don’t support the notion of a largely static
hegemonic masculinity in the sense that Connell utilizes it. Rather, I see more
play in the power and resistance present. I will, though, support the notion of
heterosexual ambivalence. Note that Keck is sickened by the act of having a
girlfriend; he is literally made unhealthy by spending time with (sexually
available) women; he’s not missing school to be with her, he’s missing school
because he’s been contaminated by his connection with her. In a sense he has
become less of a man by engaging in the trappings of heterosexuality. And while

this sort of thing could be seen as functioning as an extension of fag discourse —

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Keck is emasculated by the contaminating women around him — seen in the
conversation with Anthony here:

Me: ”How do you know if people are gay, Ant?”

Anthony: ”Like if they’re really feminine. Or if they hang out with just

girls.”

Me: ”Well isn’t that the straightest thing you can do?”

Anthony: ”Not if you’re not in it to get some.”

Me: ”So you can’t be friends with girls? Aren’t you supposed to be

friends with a girl you’re dating?”

Anthony: ”Yeah, like I’m dating my girlfriend and she's my best friend,

but it’s different. And besides, like I have guy friends and I’ll go over to

their houses and it’s just guys then my girlfriend is for later."

Me: ”Isn’t that first part kind of gay? I mean it’s all guys.”

Anthony: ”No. [frustrated] Now you’re messing with me.”
Of course he’s right, I was just messing with him at that point, but the
information seemed vital. Notice he has to walk the line between heterosexual
and homosocial relationships, all outlined by the possibility of being made gay
should he become too attached to his girlfriend. It's a fine line to walk.

What the rhetoric at the school (at lunch, in hallways, in classes, on the
field; really everywhere and most visible, of course, on the altar populated
exclusively by men) became about, though, was the fundamental differences on a

biological and social level between boys and girls. Something consistently

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reinforced through media messages, yes, but also through the very structure of a
school which excludes women pupils on basis of their being, well, not men.

Daly (1973) furthers her point that women are treated as impossibilities in
Christian contexts most notably through the exclusivity of the clergy. ”Non-
Semites or persons over, say, thirty-three, have not been universally excluded
from the priesthood on the basis that they do not belong to the same ethnic
group or age group as Jesus” (p. 79). Women, of course, and especially in the
Catholic Church, have been limited to roles as ”brides of Christ” (used
specifically in reference to religious vocations), specifically because they are said
to lack the ”particularity” of Jesus, the fundamental assumption of which lies in
his gender, his sex, which separated him from the women of his life and of our
modern lives still.

In a physical sense at St. Rita it came down to, often enough, the boys
drawing a strict distinction between their own humanity and the questionable
nature of the embodied humanity of women. Two exchanges highlighted this
most notably. Once, in Campus Ministry I heard a student between classes as he
made an offlrand comment about women and defecation. Mike notes jokingly,
when I question him on it that, ”yeah, they’re not human. No I'm kidding. But I
just don’t want to think about them pooping. It’s just gross.”

Me: ”Why?”

Mike: ”Because it’s a playground right near a sewage plant.”

Me: ”But isn’t that the same for guys too?"

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Mike: ”Yeah, but I don’t care about that ’cause I’m not gay."

Me: ”You don’t really believe that women don’t poop, though right?

Mike: ”No, but I don’t want to talk about it necessarily.”

Me: ”But you brought it up.”

The lesson here seems to be that women are just fundamentally different beings
whose bodily processes separate them in the sense that what makes them
sexually attractive also makes their necessary functions as humans (defecation,
menstruation, etc.) repulsive. And fascinating, in a gawker-at-a-car-crash sort of
way. This is some of the ambivalence Mac an Ghail makes reference to: Mike
doesn’t want to talk about it, yet he broached the topic to no one in particular in
a more or less public space in Campus Ministry. It was my probing on the topic
that he wasn’t used to.

My presence makes critical engagement with the topic possible. This is
not a conversation that Mike can have with a teacher, subject to the disciplinary
constraints of the school as he would be. And he’ll not get pushback from his
schoolmates. My betweenness (not student / not teacher) allows him to test his
hypothesis of dehumanization to see if I’ll confirm with him. I don’t, and things
get dicey. I would suggest that some of undoing the troubling rhetoric of
gendered difference would come from spaces where boys could try out and
undo these women-are-different-and-less-than strains of talk. The school,
though, has no space for this aside from Kairos which ultimately, we’ll find,

functions as a conservative institution for re-instantiating traditions.

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Later, in class, I caught the tail end of a discussion of three boys who all
had girlfriends and were engaged in a téte-a-téte about them:

Petrbach: ”Girls just don’t fart or poop.”

Anthony: ”That’s a lie.”

Toth: ”Maybe yours does, Ant.”

Anthony: ”No seriously. I walked into a single bathroom after a chick and

it stunk and she hadn’t flushed. She was a MILF60 though."
In the end, the boys know that women both fart and poop. The point, though, is
that they are not supposed to do either in the presence of men for it will call into
question their sexual availability / attractiveness as well as the strict boundary
lines demarcated between maleness and femaleness. It’s a study in the breaking
down of fragile borders which Longhurst (2001) discusses in terms of the abject
and the notion that difference, especially those differences around which the
gender binary is constructed, might just rely on artificial assumptions which
become more threatening the closer they come to melting away through critical
examination.

Thus the boys get to revel in their own ”’grotesque bod[ie3]”’ and their

I”

requisite ”’earthy realism (recall their discussions of farting in class)

characterized by being ”intransigently, obstinately dirty” (Fiske, 1989, p. 99).

 

60 Similar to the term ”Cougar,” which indicates an older woman on the prowl for younger male
sexual partners, MILF is an acronym that stands for Mother I’d Like to Fuck. It’s used fairly
liberally at the school and came most prominently from movies targeted at the age group,
particularly American Pie.

164

Here we see very clearly where notions of ”the body” as ”the power-bearing
definitions of social and sexual normality [is], literally embodied, and [it] is
consequently the site of discipline and punishment for deviation from those
norms” (p. 90). To be masculine, in this sense then, is to revel in not being
woman. It is to be loud and to yell and to point out that women are different,
either by literally pointing them out as they walk by at a sporting contest, or by
taking away their ability to deal with and process human waste. It might be
worth noting that there is a general dearth of women’s bathrooms at the school.

Go figure.

Your Boys

At lunch again. Johnny is, as I approach the table, catching grief from
Huey. Late, I settle as quietly as possible into the flow of the conversation. They
are talking about the weekend, when Johnny left a party full of his friends, his
Boys, to spend time / hook up with a girl he’s been seeing. As noted in the
previous chapter above, Huey is pissed -— though not truly angry; this is rather a
way of ribbing Johnny for being under the sway of a girl — that his friend has
broken the brotherhood code and eschewed party time for intimate moments
with a girl. He is, as Huey says, to do that sort of thing on his own time, on

Sunday if anything. I try to probe for a rationalization here:

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Me: ”But Huey, all you guys talk about is girls or being gay. Why is he
getting shit for hooking up with a girl? Shouldn’t that, then, prove he’s
not gay and make you happy?”

Huey: ”He ditched his Boys for a girl. That’s fucking gay. You gotta do

that shit on the side, Burke."

Two things to attend to first. At this point I was versed enough in the fag
discourse of the school to understand that this wasn’t really about Johnny's
heterosexuality being called into question, but I wanted to hear how Huey would
work out the problem. He drew, by the way, knowing nods of agreement from
the eight or so other boys at the table as he talked. This was really about the
bonds of homosociality formed in the school, being extended beyond its tiled
and worn walls and into social lives. Rita brothers were Rita brothers even in a
basement in Bridgeport, drinking clandestine beers and the bond forged on the
athletic field or in Mr. Latke’s class extended outside the brick and mortar of 77th
and Western. The common terminology would be, though the guys used it
wryly, ”bros before hos."

Further it seems that girls are at best side projects to the work of being
with one’s Boys. They are entities —largely amorphous and interchangeable in
the way they’re discussed (or more often, not discussed) by the young men—
serving the practice of heterosexuality and assertive heterosexual public
masculinity, but always they were secondary to one’s Boys. Cross that line and a

student in the school risked being called ”whipped” and losing his friends; many

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was the case that a guy got heavily involved with a girlfriend, broke up with her
and had to try to reestablish himself with his Boys at the school. In essence there
was a choice to break up with the girl or with the Boys, unless he could work out
a way to accommodate both, in which case the girlfriend was always the side
project, the Boys the main show. 13 this any real surprise, though, considering
that girls have been excluded from the main socializing element (the school) of
the boys lives?

This affinity for male companions runs in direct contrast to the work of
Harris (1995) whose survey research relied on assumed dominant male messages
and asked men to rate their perceived correlation with various social roles
expected of men. Some of the contrast might be attributed to age difference (he
used 560 males of various ages, but did ask them to answer first how they felt at
age 18, so the results are at least loosely related in chronology) and methodology
of course. But note that Harris found that men "do not make male friendship a
priority in their lives” and have intimacy patterns determined at a young age by
” mothers” who ”teach adult men to turn to women for emotional support” (p.
107). Now granted we might not call the Ritamen ”adult men” yet but if alumni
speakers at monthly masses are to be believed, then the bonds of friendship and
emotional support established at the school extend well beyond the years of
matriculation. And they inevitably rely on the mythical ideal of the Ritaman
who is tied to school and current and former students through the bonds of

brotherhood (again, mythic) forged in years playing at, with, and for the school.

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This is, I would argue, characteristic of the work of a single-gendered
context necessarily invented in tradition and Catholic messages for the purpose
of selling a notion of brotherhood — as a pedagogical tool and team bonding
activity, yes, but also as a way to foster a closeness with the organization which
relies heavily on donations from alums to survive. The Boys become lifelong
friends and women, outside of the officially Church-sanctioned sacrament of
marriage, remain incidental to this. Friendship, in essence, becomes intertwined
with allegiance to the school, as well as the tradition of the Church and the
disentanglement of the three through lifetimes becomes unnecessary: a number
of alums from the 1940’s and 1950’s were waked in the chapel over the span of
my time there, carried out by their Rita brothers on the way to their final resting
place. Wives, if still alive, walked behind the casket, disconnected from the act of
the Mass, and the physical act of the final passage from school to ground.

The lessons of the school are lifelong. They begin and end with tight
homosocial bonds that are fiercely protected institutionally (women are allowed
into very few spaces Within the building of the school and only at dances and
sporting events which are heavily surveilled; their role is further diminished in a
funeral mass where they are, at most, escorted in and out by men who run the
ceremony, and provide the escort to the final resting place). Women have, at
best, an ancillary role to the main project of masculine bonding. Or they are
totemic of the religiously aspirational which we’ll see evidence of momentarily.

Regardless the Ritaman from cradle to grave becomes more and more powerful

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in service to the tradition of the school. The boys mock this openly as seniors (in
high school) and pine for it as seniors (aged) at their alumni gatherings. The loop
gets closed largely in the making—strange of the creature that is woman.
Tradition and (Un)Available Women

As a production and producer of tradition, we find that each year the
school produces a promotional poster full-up with photos from the previous
year, overlaying the Augustinian seal and outlined by a unique slogan. This is
used for recruiting’s sake, but it also comes to shape the ethos of the students --
and eventual alumni— as each poster, after it is retired, comes to rest on a wall of
honor, blown up to billboard proportions, in the dining hall. Similarly, every
classroom is adorned with multiple rectangles of propaganda. Slogans always
begin with ”The St. Rita Family" and are then followed by the year’s tagline.
Recently one showed up taped to the outside of my office door, it reads: ”The St.
Rita Family: A Timeless Tradition.” Others around the school include, ”The St.
Rita Family: A Bond That Never Breaks,” as well as ” Remembering Our Past, As
We Work in the Present, to Build for the Future.” Of themselves these might be
little more than collages, condensed yearbooks adorning the school and bringing
some color to otherwise drab 1960’s era school-construction, all seafoam tiling
and re-re-re-painted stand-alone knocky radiators. But this is about consistency

of message; it’s about building tradition (107 years of it and counting) to the

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point that the main foyer of the school houses a mini-museum commemorating
the centennial of the place“.

When an individual receives the Baptismal rite, he or she is told by the
celebrant, a male priest or deacon, ”I claim you for Christ by the sign of the
cross.” This is for life, recall, as one cannot be un-baptized in or rather out of
Catholicism as we’re still in some ethereal race for tallying souls, I guess.

In a similar way, then, these boys are being constantly claimed in the
name of St. Rita High School for life. It begins with their opening first-year
retreat when they are all handed buttons with the acronym IALAC (I Am
Loveable And Capable, by special dint of their status as new members of the
community) and their first t-shirt. For a great many of them, their induction
begins before that with parents and uncles schooling them in the gospel of
Mustang football and baseball from the time they can walk, and from what I saw
in the football stands, much earlier than that, even. Beyond this, they become
members of a century-old brotherhood, the institution of which only recently

allowed for its first female principal. That brotherhood, I found, left little room

 

61 The school has only existed in its current spatial form since 1990. Before that, it was emplaced
at 63rd and Claremont, two miles north and east. This is an interesting study in the ideas of
theoretical space and place in the sense that the St. Rita High School to which older alums hold,
no longer exists in the same space but it remains emplaced for them as a combination of ”lived
space” and ”concreteness, immediacy, and cultural affect” (Soja, 1996, p. 40). It is not the
building, the place of 7740 3. Western that means St. Rita to them, but rather the history, the
memory, the brothers of the old space which remains at the fore of their loyalties. The
implications for my ”returning” to home to do the study resonates with these fluid spaces. My
high school has changed a great deal over the years, but its name is fixed in amber in my
consciousness, even as I adopt more malleable notions of historical discourses in relation to St.
Rita.

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for women, particularly those of sexually desirable ages. The boys had to find
ways to accommodate for their physical urges, yes, but also for their need to play
out the scripts of socially accepted dating rituals. This led to a strained
relationship between the rhetoric of brotherhood and its attendant homosocial
ideal, and the budding relations with women that some of the boys found
beyond the school walls. Loyalty was required, but exceptions could be made.
On Sundays. For squishes.

What to do, then, with women and the constant bombardment of media
messages and gendered expectations62 that dictated a certain amount of interest
in and desire for sexual attention from attractive and attracted girls? Because,
even an all-boys school, if it’s to become a ”family” with a century’s worth of
existence to trumpet, requires women if only as props in support of an enacted
(and expected) heterosexuality.

Fromm had it that masculinity hung on a specific ”contempt for women"
(as cited in Connell, 1995, p. 18). Not wholly outside of the purview of an all-
boys school, certainly, but it misses an important point of departure: the boys at
St. Rita didn’t feel contempt for women on the whole, but rather women of a
certain age rooted in their sexual desirability, the taproot of which I sensed, came
from a fear that the brotherhood might be disturbed by the intensive work of

heterosexual coupling (and eventually) marriage. That is, they didn’t feel

 

‘32 Connell (2002) gives a nice synopsis of studies which examine the formation of gendered
expectations through mass media (p. 11, 37).

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contempt for mothers or even older female teachers. In fact they often became
quite closely bonded with the older women who ran the attendance office as well
as the dedicated teachers who remained at the school well past the age at which
the boys eyes might linger on sexualized body parts. The distinction, of course,
came in the sense that these women were largely de-gendered by their implied
loss of sexual desirability. Problematic, certainly, and I don’t mean to draw away
from the misogyny that I did see and hear from the boys, but there was a certain
skewed logic to it that struck me as more complex — and discursively constructed
of course — than might otherwise be assumed.

I’m reminded of two different exchanges with Kobe in reference to Mrs.
Leahy, the principal and his calculus teacher and more importantly a
grandmother in the final year before her retirement, as contrasted with his
interactions with and feelings about Ms. Garcia, a Spanish teacher in her late
twenties.

Me: ”Kobe, how come you guys are silent in Mrs. Leahy’s class? Is it

because she’s principal?”

Kobe: ”I dunno. It might be because of that, but it could be that the stuff is

so hard.”

Me: ” But you always complain about how hard Spanish is, and you guys

are all over the place in Ms. Garcia’s class. Do you take advantage of Ms.

Garcia ’cause she’s young?”

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l:

Kobe: ”I try not to because I’m doing pretty well in her class and I want

her to treat me like a student. But I think other guys do it ’cause she’s

younger.”

Me: ”But you guys flirt with Ms. Garcia.”

Kobe: ”She flirts with us!” [Indignant, and actually he wasn’t completely

in the wrong here]

Me: ”Why don't you flirt with Mrs. Leahy?”

Kobe: ”Sick. ’Cause she’s old and she looks like Chicken Little.”
The boys, it seems, saw Ms. Garcia (who was unmarried) as a challenge because
she was still in a range of sexual possibility for them. They saw her, in essence,
as sexually possible, probable even for the more cocksure. She was, thus, treated
far differently and with much less diffidence or deference, really, than the older
and sexually unavailable Mrs. Leahy. Mrs. Leahy, in effect, didn’t represent a
threat to their homosocial relationships because she was beyond their purview of
attraction and thus would never ” steal” one of their boys from them. Ms. Garcia,
well, she just might. It wasn’t, again, that the young men of my experience
viewed all women with contempt63; this turned on the specifics of their age and

potential for stealing away the attention of their Boys.

 

‘53 Ms. Garcia dealt with waves of young men who tested her constantly. She was also the
recipient of numerous romantic overtures from the seniors. Her willingness to reject their
advances —none of these notes and Valentine’s made their way to the older Mrs. Leahy —led to a
defensive and recriminatory ”hatred" for her. She was caught in a bind of flirting with the boys
to keep them interested or shooting down their hopeless mooning, and losing them to weeks of
bitter disappointment.

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Squishes

Ruhlman (1996) on returning to his own all-male secondary school felt an
odd aura in the air of the place, which he could only suss out by suggesting that
”while girls [were] not physically present, their influence [was] always in effect”
(p. 48). I found out some of how this echoed at St. Rita relatively early on, as I sat
in on a History class and overheard some of the boys planning a weekend trip to

a college in Michigan (of all places). Packer, our imp, was asking a few of his

 

friends if they were ” going up to Squishigan.” Sleepy, a fellow football player
replied:
No way man. We can’t call it that. Cause there’s no girls there. Dude
we went to a bonfire at my cottage and every night we put up a
bedsheet toward the water that said ’Bitches wanted,’ on the pier and
shined a flashlight on it and no one even showed up.
Romantic, eh? And shocking that women could resist such an eloquent siren
song. This though, prompted me to try to turn around a discussion with Nico
and Chunk about the terminology after Nico asked ”do you have a squish,
Burke?"
Me: ”What does that mean, Nico?”
Nico: ”Well, it’s kind of awkward to talk about. . ."
Me: ”Why, Nico?"

Scott: (always tired of my questioning) ”It’s sex. He means sex."

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Me: ”But it can’t just be sex, though. Do you mean the woman and the act

of fornication with the woman?"

Nico: [Brightly] ”Yeah, it’s the total package.”

Me: ”So why that word?”

Nico: [Stammering now] ”Well, you know, it’s like. . .if you think about the

sound. . .and they, well. . . [He halflreartedly mimes grabbing

breasts]. . .squish.”

The word, we find, means a sexually attractive girl and it comes out of sounds
presumably attributed to the sexual act, but also to the feel of a woman when she
is grabbed in various sexually coded bodily places (the breasts and the rear end,
primarily). It came to. be used as a fairly versatile and comedic term for its
onomatopoeic qualities as when Packer asked me if I was taking my ”squishy,
squishy squish” to the Homecoming dance.

Squishes, it turns out, were quite the topic. This isn’t highly surprising
considering Ruhlman’s assertion above about the always-present-absence. The
dialectic at St. Rita manifested itself in unique ways and I think this has much to
do with the single-gendered context and specifically the onus on brotherhood. In
contrast, to the ways in which Pascoe (2007) found her subjects constructing
masculinity through tales of sexual conquests most especially as rooted in the
grosser details of sexual acts characterized by ”farts, feces, and blood” (p. 104),

the Rita students were, as mentioned before, more likely to build a masculinity

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around one’s Boys first and then his squish, second. The details of the sexual act
were largely absent from discussion.64

Rather, the sense was that engagement with and commitment to a squish,
meant a certain weakness as noted above with Keck and his sickening girlfriend.
Trumpeting attachment, a way to garner masculine footing in Pascoe’s
coeducational study, meant certain mockery in the groups I came to run with.

Token, a widely recruited basketball player, was roundly mocked for a
keychain he first (accidentally) brought out of his backpack in Physics class. It
was simple enough, just leather strings holding in descending order his
girlfriend’s name in block letters. A teammate, frowning at Token, and looking
to me mournfully sighed, ”She cut up his playa card with them scissors, Burke.”
To be playa, of course, is to be potentially sexually promiscuous. Turning in
one’s playa card, meant tethering to a girlfriend. A dangerous act in the school.
Still, boys, in the face of a heavily disappointed crew of Boys, committed
constantly but not as it turned out, continuously. This was easy to monitor

through Facebook, where relationship statuses changed from ’single’ to ’in a

 

64 There were exceptions. Parker was holding court in the hallway as I walked by once
surrounded by listeners who had become, over the years, careful about parsing his truth from
bombast. Most people saw him as an exaggerator if not a flat-out liar. Regardless, like a clown
he was entertaining. He was telling, in this instance, a story about his girlfriend: ” Dude, she sent
me a text. It was hilarious. It said ’don’t give me any more jizz [slang for semen] showers.’ I
fucking busted all over her back Friday night. And she was chasing me around ’cause she was
pissed." This is Pascoe’s graphic bragging in stereo. But the accepted notion after Parker left was
that he was just telling stories to be heard. Truth was another notion. Still, that he felt the need
to entertain/ brag in this way does bespeak a certain masculinity constructed through grossness
and demeaning sexual interaction with women. This was an exception to the rule, as I found it
however.

176

 

relationship’ seemingly on a rotating basis. In the end, though, the larger
rhetoric focused on staying as far away from squishes for as long as possible.
One, in effect, had to commit to the relationship with the school, with the Boys,
and to sports and even academics; squishes came last.
The Buffer of School
School was a haven from girls. It was not, however, a space devoid of
very specific and telling imaginings of women. Which is perhaps why young
female teachers caught so much flak in classes: they were invading in their
corporeality what was to be an exclusively male space. Mr. Latke, who
considered himself ”old school” (and he’d been there for 51 years, as student
first, and teacher after, so I suppose if anyone could take that label, it would be
him) recalled a young female teacher who left the year prior to my coming:
”They ate her up; there was a fight and she just had to leave the next
period ’cause she was so upset."
He rolls his eyes.
”See when I was hired there weren’t any women on faculty and I thought
it would be that way always. But they hired the first woman teacher and
the boys, I mean I felt bad for her, were just brutal. The things they did
were just terrible. The boys put pictures of naked women on her charts 30
when she pulled them down, there they’d be. The boys know that
wouldn’t bug me. Plus I speak their language, so we have an

I”

understandin .

177

The idea being that the school ought to be a protected space from the invading
forces of the abject other: girls. The boys picked up on this discursive element.
Me: ”But you guys like girls, right? Why wouldn’t you want to be around
them?”
Mick: ”Sometimes we just need a break from them.”
Raff: ”Yeah, like we like ’em, but we don’t really want to spend time with "l

them.”

' '1‘. 0‘.

 

Ir “I'Ti' Ill.

Funny to think about the break that Mick speaks of, considering the fact that the

i

worlds of these boys were so heavily male: they went to school with boys, played
sports with them, and constructed social spaces outside of school where they
hung out exclusively with their Boys. I wondered intermittently what it was
exactly they needed a break from.

They need a break it turns out, not from persons in the specifics, but rather
from their expected stereotypes. Or put another way, they needed to be away
from the one-dimensional image of girls: dramatic, emotional, disruptive, and
always reveling in their not-maleness. In the world of St. Rita, mutually
constructed by the school, teachers, and students alike, women would only bring
complication to a simple environment where guys can just be guys (to say
nothing of the creative work they do navigating what kind of ’ guys’ to be, of
course).

Luke: ”I wouldn’t want to go to a co-ed school.”

Me: ”Why?”

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Luke: ”Girls ruin school. ’Cause here we can just do whatever we want
and not worry about it.”
The question, of course, is what specifically that vague ”whatever” to which
Luke alludes means and further what exactly girls would be ruining, something
Dunbar, Nico, and Matt helped me figure out:
Dunbar: ”Guys’d act differently [with girls around] and guys would be all
distracted, and guys would show off and change how they act to impress
them.”
Nico ”Yeah, like I wouldn’t have the GPA I have now and I wouldn’t be
sleeping in class, that’s for sure. I mean you’ve seen me when I wake up
[sadly from a pedagogical standpoint I had; the seniors spent a great
deal of class time napping] and it’s not pretty.”
Matt: ”I think it would be stricter with girls. Like we wouldn’t be able to
be ourselves and teachers wouldn’t let us get away with as much as
we can get away with now.”
Gone would be, in effect, the farting with impunity, and the fagging, and the
space apart and more importantly, gone would be the bond of brotherhood and a
century of tradition in the face of potential heterosexual hazards, those great
pregnancy liabilities from Mr. Latke’s worldview: women. The school is a place,
as constructed by faculty and students, for boys to be boys in the most
stereotypical ways, away from girls. It's a place where Mrs. Byrne can tell me

that ”our young men are very territorial” in the same sentence that she worries if

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they will be offended by the potpourri (” too girly?”) masking the backed up
sinks in her science classroom. It’s a place where Mrs. Marks, sarcastically refers
to Macbeth as confirming that ”women are the root of evil, the downfall of man,
five years of teaching and not an argument against that” and Nico quietly in the
back of the room can mutter in sardonic response, ”do my laundry,” and face no
challenge as he garners nodding snickers; it’s a place crafted by faculty who say '5‘:

”this is a place that’s full of opportunity with room for professional and spiritual

 

growth” and then, as an aside when speaking of losing a contest chide, ”well, I’m .
not holding any grudges, just because I’m a girl,” ; it is a place where Raff, finally,
can tell me that he is ”ripshit” about being ratted out for some disciplinary
failing, spitting, ”You don’t tell on someone at an all-guys’ school. Seriously, you
just don’t.” Because that is a flouting of the rules of brotherhood, which are
inevitably defined by the fact that only brothers can exist safely in the school. To
”tell” is to become the mythical girl, the gossip, the weak link. This girlness
(femininity), as we’ve seen, is unacceptable on the football field, as much as it’s
impossible for young female teachers in the classroom. Man-up.
Where this (almost) breaks down

Bishop John Shelby Spong (1992) has made a literary career out of trying
to reappropriate the Bible and its corresponding meaning from what he
perceives as the very real danger of literalism (Religious Fundamentalism, if you
prefer). Of the Virgin Birth, and in reference to the birth narratives of Christ in

general he writes, ”the myths and folk wisdom of a particular day always shape

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the understanding the people have of their intense experiences” (p. 35). His
argument turns on the Apostles’ gradual literary reconceptualization of Jesus the
Christ after his crucifixion. He first analyzes the increased focus on the birth
narrative of Jesus from non-existent, ”Mark, the first Gospel, wrote his story of
Jesus’ life with no allusion whatsoever to Jesus’ birth or origins” (p. 42) to
mythically prominent in later tales of the writers (or their composites more
probably) Luke and Matthew.65 This, he sees as the alteration in the function of
the Jesus-story for early followers as they transitioned from thinking of
themselves as Jews to Christians. As the text is centered on a Feminist critique
meaning to reassert the Gospels’ status as Midrash (a composite of mythic tales,
carrying social context and thus contextualized social meaning) he turns the
headlight of his work onto the increasingly narrow role played by Mary (the
”Mother and Magdalene, too) as the Gospels were developed.

The fulcrum of Spong’s argument lies in ”the figure of the
virgin. . .employed as a male weapon to repress women by defining them. . .to be
less human than males, to be the source of a sexual desire that was thought to be
evil, and therefore to be guilty just for being women” (p. 198). His exegesis of the
re-creation of Mary both born of virgin herself and birthing God virginally
focuses on the crafting of her as a character ”who was hailed as the ideal model”

of womanhood while covering up the fact that she was, discursively, ”totally

 

55 John, the fourth Gospel (excepting those many companion stories considered apocryphal by the
Church) is not part of the Synoptic tradition and thus begs a different analysis, he argues.

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defined by men” (p. 214): the men who wrote of her, the men who preached her
impossible virtue, the men who grew up praying for her grace. This is much in
keeping with Mary Daly’s (1973) early — and wicked controversial at my
undergraduate institution, of course — work which excavated the two essential
Biblical models for women in Christianity: the fallen Eve, who tempted Adam
(read: as all women are viewed as coming to tempt men, inevitably) into his
own— and our great— fall and the virginal and thus impossible Mary. For

though a woman might remain chaste and embrace marriage with God through

 

religious vocation— a recreation of the heterosexual cultural model — she, unlike
Mary, was not of a virgin born herself, mind. The neat trick which ties up the
loose ends, of course, is the presence of Original Sin from which Mary was
exempted. The final say being that ”the inimitability of ’Mary conceived without
sin’ ensures that all women as women are in the caste with Eve" (p. 82) and to
blame for being, first and foremost, and for being so audacious as to not be Mary
in the process.

The fact remains: my subjects and I attend a school for boys, named after a
woman. Odd, that. These Rita boys are schooled in a context which consistently
reinforces the message of mythical and chaste and impossible women. Faced
with a decision as to how to handle their own hormones, but also the general
Need to interact with women in their lives, they turn to the models provided
them. The girls in their lives, flush with their own sexuality and a sexuality

foisted on them by social messages, confronted as well as the boys desire of

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course, face impossible ideals. Or rather the boys, in figuring out how to interact
(or deal) with the women who inevitably come to invade their boyspace at St.
Rita High School, return in ways knowing and unknowing, to their tradition and
their faith. Or said more accurately: The traditions of their Faith which dictate
prescribed and circumscribed roles to its liturgical women.

In the chapel of the school, during new faculty orientation, Mika faced us
as we sat in the pews awaiting the arrival of Father Tom who was to give us a

tour of the significant iconography of the place. She quipped darkly, ”this is the

 

only time you’ll see me standing up and speaking in front of church.” Too true.
Had we looked behind us on our progression into the chapel, we’d have noticed
above the central nave banners listing the many roles of St. Rita in her lifetime:
Mother, Widow, Wife, Nun and by title, Saint. If we were then to take a walk to
the small shrine to St. Rita set to the side of the liturgical space, we’d find a statue
imagining her bodily. At her forehead is a telltale drop of blood, a sign of the
stigmata“, In full habit, she holds a rose aloft in prayer pleading to and bleeding
with Christ. Across the church, on a diagonal opposite is a shrine to Mary, the
mother of Christ who was raised bodily into heaven upon her death. On the
altar is a picture of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. These three, Mary,

St. Rita, and Monica the Mother of Good Counsel compose the female trinity of

 

6‘5 Emblematic of the five wounds of Christ from the crucifixion, the stigmata was often
”awarded” to especially devoted followers who suffered with Him as a symbol of their
synchronicity with holiness. They appear at the wrists, the ankles, and the forehead in statuary
and pictography.

183

the school. Students on any given day will ask Mary, St. Rita, and Monica to
pray for them multiple times. They pass in the hallways and particularly in
classrooms, pictures, mosaics, and various other guesses at the bodily
manifestation of the patronesses in their lives. They are, in effect, surrounded by
indelible imagery of women who are sainted, mothered, virginal and so devoted
to God as to become afflicted with the nail and thorn marks of Christ or to have l'.‘
given birth to Him.

The point is that indeed Mika will only ever very rarely speak from the

 

front of the chapel because her story has not yet been written by the Church. It
may yet get written; we don’t know. But the women the boys see, pray to, and
come to admire are always mothers, wives, ethereal, saintly, desexualized, and
quite frankly, dead. I would suggest that the gap in treatment between young
female (and mostly single) teachers and those older married and grandmotherly
women in the school turns on this discursive element. They have models of
respect in their faith tradition — one hammered home for the vast majority of
them from the time they entered Catholic school in kindergarten— for mothers
and for those women seen as sexually undesirable for the very impossibility that
they might have ever had sex. Younger teachers face impossible odds because
the only other group into which the boys can hope to lump them is with the
young women in their lives outside of school who certainly don’t fill the bill as
chaste or motherly or saintly simply because they exist in the world in the only

ways open to them as yet. They are fallen in the rhetorical tradition of the

184

Church, Eves all, and the only way the boys know to interact with them is
through the ongoing discourses of sexual conquering and punitive disrespect.
They are, most importantly of course, not male either.

The school, in essence, functions as an arm of the Church in limiting the
lived possibilities of women and men through religious iconography of
impossible models. The boys, working to reconcile this with cultural messages
of sexuality and desirability settle on a compromise which suggests that a school
for boys would be ruined by the presence of ”real” girls though it is protected by,
and named after, mythic ones. Their space apart is a space away from all those
fallen tempting Eves who would draw them away from their Boys and further
from the theological ideal of a carefully crafted narrativized saint and mother
and wife. This, however, is not universally true. It takes, though, a space apart
for the boys to open up to different possibilities of humanity for women and
themselves; it is on Kairos that these discourses change and the boundary
between masculinity and the emotionality of femininity are openly played with

and examined.

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Chapter Six

Kairos: A Space Apart
Heterotopias are. . . fleeting, transitory, precarious spaces of time [that] Foucault sees [as]
increasingly converging in compressed, packaged, ’invented’ environments that seem
both to abolish and preserve time and culture, that appear somehow to be both temporary
and permanent. (Soja, 1996, p. 160-161)

What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose
vocabulary and links it makes use of and whose code it embodies? What would remain of
religious ideology — the Judeo-Christian one, say — if it were not based on places and their

names: church, confessional, altar, sanctuary, tabernacle? What would remain of the
Church if there were not churches? The Christian ideology, carrier of a recognizable if
disregarded Judaism (God the Father, etc. ), has created the spaces which guarantee that it
endures. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 44)

”I want therefore to reflect for a moment on this space and the opportunity it provides us
in reconsidering the scope and sense of cultural analysis today” (Chambers, 1993, p. 93).

Until this point I have attempted to illustrate the effects a school, an all-
boys Catholic school has on the gendered (and masculine) possibilities of the
students it enrolls. Further, I have tried to delineate ways in which the boys are
creative in resisting, reappropriating, resenting, and reasserting the discourses of
the school (and the culture at large which defines its possibilities) as their own in
a swirl of becoming probable beings.

Thus we have discussed the swarming discursive functions of fagging and
the ways the school shelters boys from certain difficulties in navigating the
dialectic (present as it may be in society at large) by its formation as a single-
gendered space. In another manner, we have examined the ways that the

school’s construction of mythical women enables students’ feelings of

186

Ti'm'fi'h-rrnl

entitlement as part of the process of separating themselves from the sort of
”female pollution” that Thorne (1993, p. 83) encountered in her observation of
differently gendered spaces in coeducational schools. Both of these strains of
analysis required a familiarity and at the very least a limited engagement with
the religiosity of St. Rita High School. We have touched upon the charism of the
Augustinians and taken a critical view of the stories, or Catholic wonder tales,
through which much of what passes for religious faith for the boys comes to take
form. This is, notably, braided with the tradition of the place, which takes on a
pseudo-religious role as a way of ensuring that brotherhood is what the boys
learn, affixing their loyalty to the school, with the gender, and with the Catholic
faith. The school essentially presents itself as a place special in the world, and in
many ways separate from it. This is the school as shelter from women and
proving ground for the heteronormativity of conservative religious ideology. At
this point it makes sense to dig into where much of this cathexis for St. Rita (the
school, the woman, the tradition of brotherhood) as a space apart from and
important in the world comes from: Kairos.

To be becoming a man, a Ritaman, is to navigate the streams of fag
discourse on a daily basis. It is to be made not-woman in the halls of the school
(or pseudo-woman on the football field, perhaps), and it is to constantly reform
oneself in relation and service to the evolving tradition of the place, to ”Conquer
today; prepare for tomorrow,” as one popular wall sign entreats. What the

school wants, recall, is a Ritaman. What he is the faculty and students can’t quite

187

describe. Such was the diversity of answers around the term that I stopped
asking after the first month because there was no anchor to the responses. Well,
that’s not entirely true. There were many forms of platitude, t-shirt slogans and
all a bit banal to be honest: he respects the ’SR’; he acts as a gentleman; he tucks
his shirt in; he has his brothers’ backs, etc. It’s not that these answers are untrue;
it’s that they’re largely un(der)considered. One becomes a Ritaman by going to
Rita, they mean. Which is true.

The phantom ideal served as both disciplinary mechanism (a Ritaman
wouldn’t do that) and filial tie (there are Ritamen in all 50 states; we are
nationwide) utilized to claim everyone from the school for the purpose of
continuing its legacy. The Ritaman is an everyman as long as he's an alumnus.
Under that umbrella, well, the boys worked at shaping a self. The only
mandatories in a boy’s time at the school were fag discourse, a negotiation of
women mythical and real (and their reconciliation into a decision to respect one
and debase the other), a negotiation of the will of one’s ’boys,’ and the senior
Kairos trip where the first three prerequisites found their undoing (or a
reordering, perhaps) at least temporarily, in a lodge in the middle of Illinois
cornfields.

Prayer

Prayer, outside of the Kairos experience, was most often utilized within

the school as a classroom management strategy or tool. Think of it as Catholic

bellwork, if you please. Each class was to start with some manner of religious

188

 

invocation and for the most part teachers were accommodating of the
administration’s request. These were not, however, deep treatises on personal
faith (though they could have been, internally) but by and large were rote
prayers repeated en masse (a Hail Mary, an Our Father; less often the Glory Be, but
as often as not, the Prayer of the Peacemaker“, an evocation of and homage to, St.
Rita). It was religion functioning on a microlevel as control. Talking during class
was disrespectful to teachers and students; screwing around during prayer was
disrespectful to God (and do you think you’re more important than God, young
man?). Still, to appear respectful during prayer is different from actively
engaging in a deeper process of spiritual reflection. It, this appearance, requires
only a tucked-in shirt and the mouthing of words. Religious devotion wasn’t
gradable, and it would be difficult to give a JUG for a boy’s mumbling through.
As long as he was in line, that’s all that mattered.

The boys read this fairly adeptly and used the nonchalant nature of the
practice as well as its repetition to blunt the spear of evangelism into a persistent

buzzing of religion necessarily present in a Catholic school attached to a chapel,

 

67 The legend of St. Rita relies heavily on her initial rejection from the convent, after the gangland
deaths of her husband and sons. The Mothers superior feared an invasion of secular violence
into the Pax Christi of the religious sanctuary. Troubled by the impression of her family, Rita had
a vision while praying that her ”three heavenly patrons” told her "there was but one more thing
to do” and the ”gift of peace. . .would unlock the doors of Saint Mary Magdalene Convent” (Di
Gregorio, 2003, p. 30-31). Emerging from her trance, she sought her extended family and
brokered a peace with the neighboring Mancini family, bringing an end to generations of
sabotage and murder on par with, one presumes, the Hatfields and the McCoys. Sufficiently
appeased, the leaders of the convent allowed Rita entry to the novitiate and she became the
peacemaker evermore.

189

 

mazed with hallways full of iconography. This strategy of passive resistance is
perhaps best exemplified by the following discussions, both from stolen
moments in Campus Ministry. The first occurred upon the visit of my advisor, a
cultural Jew, who delights in questioning (on any number of levels). He began:

Avner: ”What does it mean to be Catholic?”

Nico: ”It’s just the same as every religion to me. Maybe because I’ve never

studied any other religion.”

Avner: ”What about your kids, will you raise them Catholic?"

Nico: ”I think it’s important. You decide that you want to be Catholic at

Confirmation. And it’s a healthy lifestyle to me because it doesn’t limit

you too much. Then I can send him here.”
What followed was a spirited discussion among a number of the boys and Avner
about the workings of sexual release and sacramental confessional forgiveness in
the Church. Most memorable (and the exchange above illustrates it well) was the
notion that religion, for Nico, is so much regurgitated prayer which doesn’t get
in the way of the life of a high school boy, nor the life of his imagined parental
self. Like the school itself, it provides the loose limits of how one will raise his
children, say, but doesn’t require much application or sacrifice of the self in the
process.

To a man (loaded term, I realize but even Butler self-confessedly struggled
with pronouns), each student professed his hope that his sons, should he have

them, would attend the school, presumably as Catholics. Lost in these

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daydreams is the whole process of getting to the point of having children (with a
woman, always). But it bespeaks the importance of continuing the tradition of
the school and its brotherhood, as well as the handing down of the Catholic faith
in preference over the assumed engagement with a partner in the creating and
raising of a child. In some ways we can forgive the young men, at 16 and 17 for
not knowing the workings, nor really considering the ramification, of siring
children beyond deciding prematurely that they will raise them in familiar
environments (Catholic faith, read, and St. Rita). But the idea is to highlight the
notion that religion and the school, in essence, become naturalized choices for
Nico and others. Becoming a man is having a son who goes to St. Rita.68 The
boys either aren’t giving themselves up in the process, or don’t realize how much
they’ re being molded through years of Catholic school. I would suggest it’s a
little bit of both as they mold the faith into their self-asserted Cafeteria (pick and
choose) Catholicism characterized most starkly by the paraliturgical devotions
they settle on over, say, older doctrines of celibacy, weekly fasting, or attendance

in mass on Holy Days of Obligation.

 

63 This is of particular interest to me as a pedagogue and nascent scholar in Teacher Education
because the boys provide a trenchant analysis of the quality (or rather its lack) of the curriculum
they endure at Rita, most particularly in the senior year. Josh, a student in E-Music with me told
me from the start that I ”should write about how St. Rita is the worst school around.” Kimani
mimicked a popular platitude among the students when I began following him, smiling,
”welcome to daycare, Mr. Burke." And, finally, as Scott settled in for a nap during one of the
many movies shown in his History class, he was told ”Hey, this isn’t the Holiday Inn.” Gallows
humor to a T, he shrugged, ”It’s the St. Rita Inn. We’re getting serious value for education here.”
Why send your son to St. Rita, then, knowing this? So he can continue the tradition.

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Later in the semester when I’d been asked to read the morning prayer
over the PA, I stumbled a bit over the wording and discussed my embarrassment
with students during a break in periods after the event. Mike reassured me that
it was fine: ”Don’t worry about it. Nobody cares.” This fed into a conversation
about the upcoming all—school mass the next day.

Rob: ”You can write down all the people who are sleeping."

Matt: ”I take pieces of paper out and see how many times I can fold them

before it gets impossible."

Me: ”I don’t get it. You're at a Catholic school, but you guys ignore

everything the administration does in terms of religion.”

Rob: ”Well, like I believe in God, but we only have mass once a month

and it’s like three hours long, so I sleep.”

Of course the boys didn’t ignore everything the administration did regarding
religion in the school. They couldn’t, subject as they were to walking by imagery
of Sts. Rita and Augustine throughout the place, and covered in Augustinian
seals as they were no matter what they wore from the school. And they couldn’t
abstain from attending mass or praying at the start of class. However, their
attendance never presupposed an active participation. The school wanted future
priests; the boys wanted to sleep.

Religion, through all their years of Catholic schooling (and Rob, Matt, and
Nico were all parochial lifers) had become a functionary of discipline and

surveillance. If they were in danger of being scolded for prayer in the chapel

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(with heads down) in the same way they were being scolded for sleeping in
chapel (again, with heads down) then they were going to resist passively this
extended form of classroom management in the same way they embroiled
themselves in schoolroom battles about seating arrangements and pop quizzes.
Scapulars and tattoos were choices, masses and prayer were requirements and
inconvenient ones. The school could require them to be there, and some of them
might even serve as acolytes on the altar, but they would still find modes of non-
participation like, say, placing a piece of tape on a folding chair, ripe with a
newly inked penis. Having a presence does not always denote that one is
present, in other words.

The Kairos retreat, however, represented something very different for the
boys. It was in this space that they were able to transgress the rules of discourse
surrounding fagging and women without fear of recrirnination or social sanction.
It was here, in the space apart from school69, that they were able / forced to come
to an extended religious encounter and it was on the retreats that the senior class,
without fail and to a (Rita)man, flouted traditional masculine tropes of emotional
distance, demonstrative loving physicality, and religious indifference. They

became evangelical Catholics, if very briefly. The Kairos experience was

 

59 A space one might presume to find in the sacred space of the chapel, say. But fagging and
clicking and women-debasing were all constantly in play at the fringe of the pews, though
quietly. These were not discourses that could be checked at the doors, even while dipping a
familiar hand in Holy Water and sanctifying oneself with the sign of the cross. Nope, this was
still part of school no matter how much the administration tried to jazz up the practice with
modern music and guest speakers. Kairos allowed them to leave behind the discursive traditions
that limited bodily and spiritual familiarity back at the school in ways that Church never did.

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manufactured as a heterotopia, in effect which for Foucault ”begins to function at
full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional
time” (as cited in Soja, 1996, p. 194). And Kairos is most certainly all about time.
God’s Time

The term Kairos wends from two origins. The first derives from early
Greek orientations to time, the sense of which later generations of Christians
appropriated for the sake of grafting on God. Chronos is, in its modern
interpretation of the ancient ideal, lived linear (see: chronological) time and
Kairos is felt time; it is contemplative time; it is time apart: God’s time. The
offshoot, in the field of Rhetoric, had / has Kairos as ”the opportune moment," or
the point at which action and creativity occur. It is creation. This is easily
enough, for the faith-filled, brought back into the fold of theology in the form of
God as prime mover, or the manifestation of action itself: God as the moment.
Also, similar in form and pronunciation comes the earliest Christogram, which is

essentially a monogram or a mash-up of letters used to signify the Christ. The

conflation of the Greek letters ”chi” and ”rho” forms the ChiRho, seen here: *.
Before and concurrent with its adoption by early Christians as a symbol of their
faith (twin to the simple line-drawn fish, often used to mark early secret
gatherings of believers in those legendary catacombs) the roughly juxtaposed
letters had been used by scribes to mark passages of particular value or

relevance, where the symbol stood for chr Wston, meaning ’ good’ (Grant, 1993, p.

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42). This manner of religiously vital marginalia continued well into the monastic
era of Europe, in fact. So there’s a history here, and it's been tapped into for
interpretive purposes.

This playfulness with time (good and God’s) is something very much a
part of an individual’s Kairos experience as the first thing that the Campus
Ministry staff and student leaders (drawn from former retreatants) do upon
arrival is collect candidates’ cell phones and watches. The idea being that they
are to leave chronos behind and give themselves up to God’s time. They are to
become disconnected from the world of school and settle into the hard work of
retreating from what they’d known. From there, ironically, the lead team70 is
heavily scheduled and immersed in the details of the newly abandoned chronos
as a way of exhausting the possibilities of the compact three day retreat; the point
is also to physically, mentally, and emotionally (as well as religiously as a result)
exhaust the candidates as a way of breaking down their inhibitions. Avner was
kind enough to point out that this separation from time and its attendant sleep
deprivation is the same tactic used in interrogation programs (torture?) for the
purpose of disorienting victims in an attempt to solicit information. Fair enough.
We might think of Kairos the retreat as a bit of torture, considering Church

history (read: The Spanish Inquisition for starters) and the assumption still

 

70 Student leaders for the Kairos retreats are chosen by Campus Ministry from applicants who
have already attended the experience themselves. Students and adults, actually, who are
attending Kairos for the first time are called ”candidates."

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written into the sacrament of Confirmation that men and women entering the
Church as adults are to become soldiers for Christ. There were absolutely
moments of immense pain on the retreats.

The larger point for now, though, is that the school places great value on
the Kairos retreats. Every senior is encouraged to attend. Every senior goes.
This is a mix of coercion (the alternative is a mandatory one day encounter with
Father Tom; a senior retreat will be made, Kairos is the preferred mode of
delivery) and the mythic lore that is built up around the experience. When the
retreats occur — six times throughout the school year - teachers of upperclassmen
are requested to make accommodations to the instructional schedule so that
candidates and leaders don’t miss vital information. This means that from
Tuesday to Friday over six weeks out of the school year, the entire senior class --
with a few rare exceptions when teachers find creative ways to deal with the
inconvenience - is sidetracked wholly from the work of scaffolded content.
Those left behind on chronos end up marking linear time with a whole lot of
movies. The interruption of classes amounts to almost an entire quarter, mind.

In addition, teachers who wish to help in planning and attending the
retreat are welcome, indeed encouraged, to volunteer (and they do, fairly
readily) and since candidates receive letters from past retreatants as a major part
of the mystique, all members of the school (including boys who have not yet
gone and aren’t supposed to know about the letters, but inevitably find out)

engage in a frenzy of surreptitious epistolary affirmation in the weeks before a

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send-off. Each team of leaders and candidates, at the conclusion of the retreat, is
given a hooded sweatshirt that reads "St. Rita Kairos” on its front with the
unique number of the retreat, preceded by the letter ”K” to denote when they’ve
attended on the obverse side. This is a convenient way of cataloging the school’s
ongoing belief in the power and influence of the thing. I was fortunate to lead
K96 and K97, so this is a long-standing tradition and one that heavily influences
the ways the school thinks about itself. It also affects the ways students think
about and come to connect with the school. The sweatshirt, much like the tattoos
that came later, becomes totemic of a Ritaman’s having passed through the
vision quest that was Kairos. He was a different man on that retreat; the
sweatshirt is a ready reminder that he is part’of an exclusive club.

To assume that a retreat sponsored and run by the school, designed by its
leadership, and shaped by its religious ideals is actually a retreat from the
tendrils of the place would be naive. What I will suggest, though, is that the
actual move in physical space, shifted from 77th and Western, to Plano, Illinois,
allows the boys latitude in their masculine projects. The administration at St.
Rita looked to (and talked about) the retreat in terms of lasting religious
formation. Fr. Tom is director of vocations for the Augustinian friars; the hope is
something so vital would bring boys to the old model of the ultimate male in the
Church: the priesthood. They’d settle, of course for renewed religious devotion
and Ritamen leading a spiritual community among themselves. This was their

ideal, their masculine model. The boys reflected back a very different picture.

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Soja (1996) ciphers for Baudrillard in writing of simulacra, by noting that
”as our ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined
weakens, another kind of reality — a hyperreality — flourishes” (p. 238). The
Kairotic, for these St. Rita seniors is a hyperreality of interconnectedness, furious
prayerfulness, and emotive bombast. It is where their discursive masculinity
within St. Rita the school meets and clashes with the intensive heterotopia that is
a retreat into another, smaller and differently delineated St. Rita: that of the
idealized, open, and uncloaked Ritaman who willingly espouses his belief in
Christ, his respect for women, and his love for his brothers. And no one calls
him a fag for this loving, though it may be the closest to an erotic / spiritual
homosociality that he approaches out in the open in his time in high school.
What is it?

In early September, while sitting in history class not learning about Teddy
Roosevelt, I overheard Jack and Chunk talking about Kairos. It was my first
encounter with students that dealt with the retreat. This is understandable since
only a small percentage of the senior class had yet attended the week away. Of
necessity, as a way to maintain a candidate count of roughly thirty per Kairos,
Campus Ministry holds five senior retreats a year, and the sixth is exclusively for
juniors so that there will be leaders available for the first retreat of the next
school year when the junior class has moved into their end-of-days at the school.
The scuttlebutt around Kairos hadn’t reached the fever pitch resultant from the

initial October candidates’ ebullient return. One of the rumors that has always

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surrounded the experience is that there exists a naked mass.71 This is one of the

” surprises” of the retreat and it is used by those who have moved from candidate
to alum to build a rapport and sense of mystery or rather trepidation around the
experience for the students who expect to attend. In the context of St. Rita High
School, the marked queemess that was the possibility of a naked mass served as
a frightening force; while on the retreat, this notion of fear would have felt just as
absurd. I realize more and more just how odd a concept this is.

What actually occurs is ”mass as they’ve never experienced it before,”

I‘D—WE'RE m.- m

where in a bit of comic theater, the leaders of the trip confront the candidates in
the chapel wearing only towels and ask if there is trust in the room. Two long
days deep into the timelessness that is Kairos, the candidates inevitably say
”yes” and are then told (because they know the rumor of ”naked mass”) to start
to strip. There is some mumbling and worried laughter, but they were

asked/ ordered to trust and so they do. Socks first. They are stopped before they

 

get completely naked — though on K96 we did have boys in boxers and nothing
else— and told that the mass will actually be a teaching mass. This is an
informative, though torturous because it is at the end of two sleepless days, three
hour affair where Fr. Tom explains all the symbolism and history behind the

ritual of Catholic services. That the boys on the retreat are so willing to be naked

 

71 Though I will go further into my own extensive history with the Kairos experience
momentarily, it is worth noting here that the naked mass rumor existed when I was in high
school myself—though my high school didn’t hold the retreats—and floated too through the
buildings of my Jesuit university as well.

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in the presence of others bespeaks the odd absence of fag discourse on the
retreat. This bears further examination”, but let us return to the classroom and
Chunk and Jack:
Chunk: [who later led K96 after attending K95] ”I heard there was a naked
mass.”
Jack: [who later led K98 after attending K96] With a bit of bravado mixed
with nerves. He wants to be right, here. ”They don’t do that; it’s just to
scare you."
Chunk: ”My brother told me, like five people were sitting around all just
crying on it. That’s so gay."
And of course, in the realm of the school this emotional breakdown would be
quickly reigned in by the rigors of fag discourse. It would, indeed, be gay. Prior
to their retreat, both boys were certain that they would at best endure the
experience (this was the tenor of the remainder of the conversation as I heard it)
and certainly not cry — nor, gasp, get naked —rooted as they were in the spliced

notions that to emote in such a way was abnormal and feminine, thus made gay.

 

72 Why a naked mass? I assume it has origins in the beginnings of the Kairos retreat and may
have something to do with the early disciples of Christ being fully submerged, naked, for their
Baptism as they ”died,” shedding their old life, to emerge from the pool into new life as
Christians. But it takes on a different significance at an all-boys’ school of course, because all
nakedness as I found, was especially charged. That the event was really no big deal while it
occurred struck me as emblematic of the temporary out-of-timeness that they boys were
experiencing.

200

Their tune, after the retreat changed. As did mine after my first foray into God’s

time. In a sense, we were all very much laid bare.

My Kairos

I was a senior in college and had been on the waiting list for the Kairos
retreats presented under the auspices of the Ignatian Society (a collection of
alums from Jesuit high schools who incorporated their experience into both club
and continuation of their own fondness for their secondary schools at the college
level; we all found it sort of'annoying and cliquey, but they ran Kairos, 30.. .)
from the beginning of my first year in Boston. I’d waited and been wicked
impatient about it. But in October of 2001 I had finally gotten the nod. It was,
you’ll recall, a tumultuous time.

Beyond the rhetoric of a united front and the calls of ”we will never
forget,” the United States was in economic freefall and New York was still under
what we might best call martial law in the wake of 9 / 11 and the subsequent
anthrax mail scares. Bombings had begun in Afghanistan and between classes
we roommates of four years paired in half dozens in adjoining suites in
Rubenstein Hall, spent hours glued to CNN. There were whispers of a revived
draft. Lost in my own father’s military shadow, I had inklings of enlisting. As
well, I had a scheduled interview with General Mills, but no suit to complete the

picture of corporate aspiration. All was a-muddled, in other words and life

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.41

 

seemed huge; graduation loomed. It felt like the right time to step away. God,
they always said, called you to Kairos when you were supposed to go.

Seven of the twelve of our suitemates had attended all—boys Catholic high
schools. Nine of the twelve had by this point made a Kairos retreat, half had
subsequently returned to lead them. Omar, a practicing Muslim of Palestinian
origins, had politely passed; Mikulitz just didn’t give a shit. Which meant that I
was the last one and after all of the build-up from eight years of legend (high
school and college) it was pure relief to finally step on the bus and head to the
bucolic Green Mountains to find God.

I narrate this not to speak of religious revelation, though it may well have
occurred on my part. Rather I write it as a bit of confession. Apropos, I suppose,
given that word’s religious connotations and Foucault’s enduring critique of its
function as well as its clear influence on the structure of the retreat. This research
has felt, all year, very much like a visitation to avatars of past selves; nowhere
more so than on Kairos. And so to see the seniors ball their way through their
candidacy —especially as their world lies in the tumult of recession and war,
even as they think about endeavoring into a big and wide and confusing
universe beyond St. Rita —felt hard. It was, in essence, a challenge to get distance
which is why I became increasingly enamored of the closeness built into
autoethnography. Distance is impossible. It punctures me to critique the

experience.

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an?

 

 

The details of my moments on God’s time in college are mostly moot here.
Suffice to say I cried a great deal and felt religiously convicted (in both senses of
the word) and skipped my General Mills interview to take on the challenge of a
teaching life. I made peace with the memory of my father, his twenty-one gun
salute, the horse-drawn caisson, the monochromatic grave marker overlooking
the Pentagon at Arlington National Cemetery. I didn’t enlist. Or rather I
enlisted in a different kind of service.

I also started wearing the scapular again; at twenty-seven, I got the
Jerusalem Cross (symbol of the Kairos retreat at Boston College) tattooed at the
base of my neck, a reminder of a passage from Thomas Merton that begs us to
attend to the fact that ”we do not exist for ourselves.” But I didn’t start going to
Mass regularly, I still prayed half-heartedly: At most, I reengaged with the
paraliturgical and began a journey of teaching religion with my fingers crossed
behind my back. Some of my motivation for entering into this research project, if
I’m to be honest, is to try to make sense of this hypocrisy: I don’t believe in the
story behind the scapular, though I will always wear it because its tradition is

part of who I was growing up”. I am increasingly aware that the cross on a

 

73 Men in the Beverly neighborhood start wearing their scapulars, rolled up in a style I’ve not
seen replicated elsewhere, from early grammar school. This enables them to last long after the
pictures on lithographed paper inside have disintegrated through the sweat and showers of
countless nights. I have had them rolled for me by my father, my brother, my friends. I have
rolled them for my nephews and my male students. It’s a bit like the laying on of a mantle; a
symbol of maleness handed down through the ranks. It will always remind me of home, and the
men in my life who I have loved. Occasionally it reminds me to pray, to whom I do not know,
but still the words come.

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whole—but particularly the one at my back, for its second name is the
’Crusader’s Cross,’ given as it was to those misguided and murderous knights
who hacked their way to Jerusalem in red rage against a dehumanized other — as
symbol can rightly mean ”two millennia of bloody crusades and pogroms”
(Carroll, 2002, p. 15) but there it remains, buried in pigment below my agnostic
skin. So I got that the boys were devastated on their retreat, and I got that they
wore scapulars and had the Augustinian crucifix needled into arms and legs, but
I needed more: to understand. To survive my own contradictions masculine and
spiritual.
Off the Bus

Halting time, God or no God, takes quite a bit of work. After ninety plus
retreats, however, St. Rita has it down pretty well. From the moment the
candidates step off of the bus in Plano, they are regimented to the minute from
Tuesday’s opening until Friday evening’s closing back at the school in the
chapel. The overall structure of the retreat involves talks, given by adult and
student leaders, followed by small-group discussions co-facilitated by peers
meant to allow or force candidates to deal with the topics of the preceding talk.

Each day involves a mass of the Eucharist, prayer is led by students at
each meal, and there is about as much free time over the course of the days as
there is sleep. Neither exceeds ten hours. The constant movement, the lack of a
discernible schedule, and the missing watches and cell phones (and computers

and video game equipment) build a relationship of dependence in the

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candidates: they are to follow the orders of the leaders and as they no longer
have time, their orientation to themselves begins to break down. New ways of
being, of relating, of discussing become rapidly possible. Small groups, further,
are decided upon before the retreat occurs and are organized to separate close
friends and to account for ethnic diversity (race and grammar school being a
strong determining factor for who hangs out with whom back at Rita).

The onus of the retreat is on the individual: what will you do differently?
How will you reflect? How are you neglecting God and your self? The talks are
harangues disguised as personal testimonials. Because they are dressed with
filigreed care in the confessional mode, candidates are trained from the first
”share” that they are to disclose. Nightly leader meetings function as check-ins
to ensure that people are sharing. If they aren’t, they may be pulled aside by a
leader to ”see what is wrong," which is really a way of forcing dissidents into
line. All of this is coded in the language of attending the self. A hyperreality of
(solicited) openness and emotion necessarily occurs. Both are manufactured by
the format of the retreat, or by God, depending on how you choose to believe.
Talks

It is worth revisiting the purpose of mining Kairos here. Seniors who
have gone, as well as alums who return to the school, speak of the experience as
the time when they were most or first cauterized to St. Rita High School. More
than anything, it is when they come to think of themselves finally as Ritamen

and that this occurs in a space that is outside of the schoolday and beyond

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athletics, is intriguing. In a great many ways, also, Kairos is the capstone on the
experience of what could be called mission and ministry at the school.

The retreat from chronos, from school, is what ends up linking them
indelibly with the place of St. Rita High School. This occurs as they, seniors,
prepare to move into, society tells them, the real world and it is in this Kairos
space, too, that they are able to try on roles and friendships and emotions absent
from / otherwise articulate in the discourses of all-maleness of their high school
experience. They are changed by the heterotopia of a time without time where
they are compelled to encounter Christ as within themselves and within others.
That this ~— the retreat as a space apart, embraced by the boys — occurs suggests to
me that alternative spaces could be set up within the school itself where students
might engage in thoughtful discussions about the function of and issues
surrounding, for example the regulatory function of fag discourse and its
attendant resulting limitations for / on masculinities. Similarly it provides a
window into the kind of discursive possibilities regarding women and gender
expectations on a whole, should the school wish to pursue such ends outside of
the Kairos retreat. In other words, the Kairos experience is viewed as an
interruption of the real life of the school. It might be leveraged to interrupt in
more fruitful ways, more often, and at the building of the school itself.

A Conservative Project
What I will choose to argue, though, is that Kairos is the school’s way of

not dealing with these things — the messiness of boys-emotional, the

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dehumanization of racism and gender discrimination, all topics spoken of and
cried over on Kairos — on an extended level. Or rather it’s a convenient mode of
replicating the kind of sexism and homophobia present in chronos, by encasing
in amber forays into liberality of feeling and expression on the Kairos weekend.
It is a convenient space for ghettoizing emotional openness, engagement with
critical gender work, and personal religious revelation. The boys continually
and violently cry thinking about the ways that their mothers and fathers love
them. Or fail to. They talk about how much they care for their girlfriends. They
hug each other and hold hands. All of this goes back underground upon return
to the school. As it was the only curricular space in which students were
compelled to discuss issues such as masculine expectations placed upon them by
society, or their treatment of the women in their lives, or even their faith as a
personal journey over the course of their four years, we find that the retreat is
really a way to engage issues in an alternative space (and reality) and then to
leave them there. Because we always have to return to chronos and this clever
splitting of time makes it very easy for kids to come back from Kairos (the term is
Kai-high), leaving all the discursive openness of their moments away within the
vortex of timelessness that was three days apart. God’s time, in essence, where
they find themselves, exists apart from the school and from life at home and to
talk and hug and sob like a guy on a Kairos retreat would mean serious social

sanction back at St. Rita.

207

'mm-h—‘fnfi

 

The cathexis of the weekend ends up becoming reintegrated into a loyalty
to the school and to the Rita brothers encountered differently in Plano. The love
of brotherhood and school comes back from the retreat on the bus with the boys,
in effect; the crying, hugging, prayerful openness does not. Why, though?
Leadership

It begins with the student leaders. Each leader is assigned a talk of
approximately fifteen minutes or 30. Each talk is bracketed by two songs chosen
by the student as an intro and outro. This is a meme repeated throughout the
week, to the point where candidates know to become silent the moment the first
song plays, as it means the leader is descending the stairs into the basement
room used for group gatherings, to share. The second song signals the end of the
talk and a collective deep breath at the close of an emotional rollercoaster.

From the first talk candidates are taught by the example of the leaders that
they are to all get up and give the leader who has just spoken a hug for sharing.
It’s a form of release and a way to thank them for opening up to the voyeurism in
the room. Awkward at first, the mass hugs get more and more teary as the days
melt into each other. This is, ultimately, about creating a pattern and a
disciplinary structure. After the talk, small groups are formed as a way for
students to share their stories in relation to the one told by the leader, who has
primed the emotional pump. Once this is complete, there is a short break to

refill on food and have a smoke, and then reload: new leader, new talk, same

208

 

song structure, same hugs, and the repetition begins to wear them down. They
share.74

And the leaders bear/ bare their souls. On the retreats I attended one boy
spoke of losing his father and then his stepfather before the age of fourteen.
Another talked of his elder brother’s death by heroin overdose; one admitted to
failing his friends in the room when they needed him most because of his own
arrogance, still others mourn their own addictions to alcohol or other drugs, they
lamented their lack of respect for their girlfriends and mothers. One boy spoke
of his role in an almost-race-riot and the humanizing intervention of a counseling
program which brokered peace between black and white participants. These are
deep-set secrets. None of these tales are discussed in the course of the school day
at St. Rita. The leaders cry as they talk, their audience sobs; the small groups
begin to bond. It’s a process of wearing down wariness at first, and from there
it’s almost necessary to reign in the sharing as boys pour out all of their concerns,
and fears, and deaths, injuries, shortcomings. N 0 one sleeps because they are
furiously journaling or communing in late-night ad hoc gatherings. This is the

only place they find where that kind of sharing has been made possible. There is

 

7" It’s important for me to assert that I do think that Kairos is an important experience for the
seniors. They do speak in subtle and wrenching ways about the pressures and failures (and
successes and dreams) in their lives. There is an odd community of sharing that’s formed and I
was proud of the leaders and the candidates on their time away. Clearly, as evidenced by my
tattoo and continuing will to help out on the retreat (I gave one of those talks I’m analyzing here)
I’m of a mind to believe that something important occurs. That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m
not struck now by how carefully managed and manipulated the emotion and soul-baring really
is. Nor does it mean that I’m not deeply troubled that what feels very possible for young men on
Kairos is immediately impossible again once they step back into ’Chronos.’

209

 

 

snot everywhere. Boys pray voluntarily and in groups and they start to try to

figure out what they’ re feeling.

 

Allis in the confessional mode, understandable when considering
Foucault’s (1990a) historical View that ”the confession became one of the West’s
most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (p. 59). There is, repeated
by the boys, the compulsion to judge Kairos as the time when they finally

realized who they really were. This would not occur, they insist, were it not for

the Rita brothers who accompanied them on the journey; they are brothers who
shared openly of themselves and in the end confessed to major shortcomings.
Their truth has been produced.

At the outset, candidates are asked as they listen to ” Be open. Be Honest.
Let Go.” and ”Let God.” The rest takes care of itself.75 To a man, each leader
speaks about his or her (female faculty attend) story — tragic tales mostly, but not
always — and the way that they realized who they really were and how they were
failing themselves / their parents / their God on their own Kairos retreat. It’s a
nice little tautological argument for the effectiveness of Kairos: Kairos was where
I found myself. If you follow the directives we’ve given you, you will find
yourself as well. If you don’t, well, you didn’t open up enough to God on

Kairos. Surrounded by the messiness of the confessional mode, boys come to

 

75 Not really, of course. The week is heavily planned and the product of ninety-plus trial and
errors before it. It appears natural to the candidates, though, particularly because time has been
taken away.

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share and to rethink their orientations to people around them. It’s all a bit of
clever manipulation which isn’t to belittle the intensity of the experience for the
students: this is where they find a space to share in ways they couldn’t at home,
at school, in the world. No one ever asks why this level of emoting happens only
on retreat, though, because Kairos is God’s time and we’re outside of chronos
and so things are easier here. ”One confesses,” Foucault (1990a) insists:

In public and in private. . .in pleasure and pain, things it would be

impossible to tell to anyone else. . .One confesses — or is forced to

confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal

imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by. . .threat. (p. 59)
Familiar with the confessional from their lifelong engagement with the
sacramentality within the Church — Confession is offered in the chapel at Advent
and Lent; students miss gym to attend, whether they confess with a priest or
not—the boys are well-exposed to the form. They are also familiar with the
absolution that comes with the sharing of hidden sins. Kairos, by modeling
through leadership the kind of confessional it requires and then producing small-
group situations where boys are compelled to confess of their own darkest
regions, is essentially an orgy of reparative talk. It is confession writ large and
primed by four years of hearing about the life-changing process of Kairos, the
boys take the moment and run with it. Their stories are unique and their
emotions are real, but the space is carefully manufactured precisely to avoid any

genuine spontaneity. Indeed a boy on the second retreat told the leaders on the

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second day that ”it fucking sucked” being there. He was told to get in line or to
call his mother to pick him up. He did neither and on the final day, thanked his
parents and his Rita brothers for the experience. His confession came. It was
demanded.

Returning

The ”counter-site” of Kairos has to end in its physical reality for the boys
after their Tuesday to Friday journey, however. They cannot exist in the
heterotopic space anymore. Soja (1996), cribbing from Foucault writes of the
heterotopia, as various spaces beyond time ”in which all other real sites
within. . .culture are ’sirnultaneously represented contested, and inverted’" (p.
195). The senior Kairos retreat represents the school and is fostered by its
Campus Ministry and yet the work of the week is an inversion of the traditional
discourses present in the school and at school-sponsored events. All is in
relation and opposition to regular time. The idea that they are on Kairos and not
at home is hammered home every time the students pray together and sing
openly, or almost get naked, or try to look at a watch that isn’t there.

This is not forever though because, well, Plano isn’t home and it’s too
expensive to house students out there. Chronos beckons, as does the school and
the life the discourses of which the boys have subverted over the course of three
days (no one has been fagged, no penises are drawn, no women belittled in
public spaces). Which of course means that the problem of stepping back into

chronos must be addressed. The retreat accounts for it this way: there are three

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days of the experience filled with leader talks. The final talk is entitled The
Fourth Day. It is during this leader’s share that we are told that the fourth day of
Kairos is the rest of our lives. It is up to us, it turns out, to recreate Kairos in our
world back at school, at home, on the playing field, in life at large. The fourth
day, we are told, exists as long as we want it to. Or as briefly. It is on the
individual. We are already moving away from the collective, the reformation of
new friendships, new religious discourses, a hugging, crying masculinity is
rendered immediately fragile. The improbability of ”living the 4th” weighs on
us suddenly.

On Friday candidates and leaders are greeted in a secret closing ceremony
back at St. Rita in the chapel. Here parents and family of the students are present
as well as Ritamen who have made the retreat in the past. When candidates
enter they are cheered first, as heroes returning. From there, team leaders
present them with wooden crucifixes symbolic of the weekend. Before everyone
is free to leave and collapse into sleep, all the candidates are compelled to speak,
from the altar, about their experiences. They are told that all of the love that has
been given to them by the community, in letters most especially ought to be
reciprocated. A compulsion to tell parents they are loved is conveyed.

They inevitably thank their parents for the letters76 that were sent, and for

the opportunity to attend the retreat and St. Rita High School, but what most

 

76 We might call Kairos an epistolary retreat. A month before a given retreat occurs, the Campus
Minister sends out rnissives to families of candidates requesting that parents, siblings, extended

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prominently comes out of this final fitful bit of openness is a need to talk about
their new Rita brothers, gathered on the foot of the altar, in the shadow of the
Augustinian cross hanging behind them, who have helped them through this
harrowing reckoning with their own shortcomings and the difficulties of their
coming-to-be on Kairos. Then that’s it. They are sent home.

Fr. Tom reminds the parents that ”if you sent a slob, you’ll be getting a
slob back,” and he’s right. The lessons of Kairos, all that openness, all that
crying, and hugging, and all those entreaties to live the Christian life in
community by and large, end there. Students might return to lead the retreat,
and a surprising percentage of them most certainly will get tattoos of crosses to
indicate their loyalty to the personal relationship with Jesus, but come Monday
they are back in the space of fagging, the space of school and the space of
symbolic women who are impossible. The inversion, on return to 77th and
Western, is neatly undone and it begins as we disperse for home when the boys
are handed back their watches, their cell phones. Chronos and its discourses
come with the trappings of linear time.

The Secret (No not that one)

 

family, and friends, write letters about their love for their son/ brother, etc. They come in piles
and one of the big reveals of the retreat is this packet of letters showing the boys just how
important they are to the people back on chronos. It’s a beautiful moment, actually. But the form
also ensures that the conversations that might happen upon return, are first fixed in writing
which, to my mind, makes them more difficult to talk about because the template has been set.
Parents and friends write what they cannot say aloud. Kairos both encourages and entombs the
conversation in script.

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The neat trick is that much of Kairos is a secret. This means that the letters
written to candidates, from parents and family and friends who have attended
the retreat are revealed on the second day of the experience. Too, the shared
prayer and reconciliation as well as the Friday closing are explicitly kept from
non-candidates. Leaders remain a mystery until the bus arrives in Plano. This
builds the mystique of the retreat for younger students, certainly, but it also
ensures that all that happens on Kairos cannot be discussed openly after the
retreat, in the school. So any attempt to build frank conversations about religion
or gender or sexism, which are engaged with constantly on the retreat, has no
space in the school because the secret is paramount: it makes the retreat
explosive for new candidates. The 4th day becomes a personal journey at best.
Which is ok, but it bespeaks the school’s usage of the retreat as an essentially
conservative project. The secret of the retreat limits its scope in potentially re-
forming spaces in the school.

At the closing, Fr. Tom describes to the parents a bit of what occurs from
Tuesday until early Friday. He suggests that for those few three days the boys
lived together in genuine Christian community ”perhaps for the first time in
their lives." Two points of note: one that the Christian community is, just like the

school, an exclusively male space77and that it occurs on Kairos, but not in

 

77 Spong (1992) writes of the erasure of women from the Gospels over the course of their
development. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he asks ”Do we not have the right to be
accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and [Peter]?” (p. 189).
The idea being that women were present, of course, but remain nameless, subjugated for the

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chronos. As they leave the retreat the boys are being trained already to know
that they are to contain much of what they encountered in the remembered space
that was the retreat itself. They are, in essence, done retreating and now must
move forward back into the discourses of a world that will have little patience
for the emotion, the honesty, the confession of the retreat. They were different
kinds of Christian men on Kairos, and their, OUR, tattoos are desperate grasps at
a remembered heterotopia where masculinity takes on a very different discursive
function. It is no wonder, then, that candidates eagerly apply to lead (to go back
to timelessness!) and write letters for their friends with such verve.

Kergyma

In Christian theological studies, the Kerygma is the ”basic story of Jesus”
as it ”took shape in the first months and years after his death” (Carroll, 2001, p.
25). This is one way to account for the different versions of the Gospels -—both
sanctioned and apocryphal —which are best considered Carroll argues ”history
remembered" or ”prophecy historicized” (p. 129). This is one way, in other
words, that the birth narratives of Jesus came to be. The first Gospel authors
didn’t find the story of the birth compelling (or necessary), but as the discursive
function of the Christ came to be shaped in history, the tale of the birth (the

census, the shepherds, the guiding star, all of it) bubbled up from the surface

 

purpose of building a narrative about the male bond of Jesus and the Apostles. One of those
bonds recall led to perhaps the most famous denial in history, not to mention the betrayal that
caused it. Friends like these...

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borrowed in bits from other legends and religious traditions as a way to
comment on his adult meaning. This is mythology. Just as I believe the tale of
St. Simon Stock seeing the Virgin at Mt. Carmel is mythology; just as I believe the
historical woman St. Rita’s stigmata is mythical. ”But to assign the birth
narratives" or any religious wonder tale I’d say, ”to mythology is not to dismiss
them as untrue” (Spong, 1992, p. 45).

In the lives of the Ritamen, and in my life as well, Kairos becomes
integrated into our own humble kergyma. It is part of how our history is
remembered by us and it suffuses the basic outlines of our faiths (lapsing,
vibrant, or otherwise). Beyond that, it’s mythic and impossible for its fleeting
heterotopic inversion of the discourses we navigate daily, weekly, in life at large.
That it’s impossible and mythic, though, doesn’t mean that the confessional
space was invalid. No. Instead, we might think of the process and experience of
Kairos as more of the Carnivalesque, as ”a pageant without footlights and
without a division into performers and spectators” where ”everyone is an active
participant, everyone communes in the carnival act” which is ”not even
performed; [rather] its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those
laws are in effect” (Bakhtin, 1998, p. 250). We all were complicit, were alive in
Kairos, in the writing of letters, in the setting aside time, in the demands of
confession and emotion and then, poof, with the reintroduction of chronological

reality again, the laws fell away.

217

 

I’m intending, in other words, to call to light the ways that the school
manipulates the concept of split systems of time — the carnival istic life — to isolate
certain more or less unsanctioned or undesirable masculine traits / failings to a
space beyond the school. This is the opportune moment for the maintenance of
the Patriarchal: Kairos as Carnival, as a heterotopic space, fleeting and very
much unreal upon reflection.

Kairos, I think, is a conservative project for St. Rita High School. It is a
week which unintentionally in its earliest iterations at least, came to bond the
young men of the school with the tradition of the place. It is a way to engage in
theology in a different space and it’s part of selling vocational formation to the
young men. The boys read this. What they miss most, though, after their time in
leaving Kairos — and this is the continual bond rooted in paraliturgical
devotion — is the open community where it is finally safe to be vulnerable, to be
effeminate in the sense of being emotionally available, and to ”find” oneself.
They come to tether the school with the opportunity to attend (to) this new and
fleeting discourse and much of their religious faith stems from a desire to be back
in the heterotopia of Kairos. Tattoos, like Kairos, are timeless. Scapulars don’t
end. They are not classroom management. Individual masses end and sleeping
(or praying in a sleeping pose) still gets them scolded. To be a Ritaman finishing
up after four years, we find, is to pine for the space apart where the ”true”

person, the man they could be, is revealed — vulnerable, open, religious,

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confessional, and awash with emotion — ironic in its / his careful construction by

the school.

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Chapter Seven

Yo, Burke. Make Me a Fucking Sandwich:
or Making Sense of The Researcher

The sights and sounds of boys at play have correlated with my efi‘orts to capture the lives
of boys, in particular the movement, the aggression, the competition, the rivalries, the
friendships, and the muscular eroticism that inform boys lives. (Corbett, 2009, p. 2)

”We’ve got to develop relationships with these kids, and relationships involve feelings,
not simply content or information” (McLaren, 1980, p. 111).

We must not look for who has the power in the order of sexuality (men, adults, parents,
doctors) and who is deprived of it (women, adolescents, children, patients); nor for who
has the right to know and who is forced to remain ignorant. We must seek rather the

pattern of the modifications which the relationships of force imply by the very nature of
their process. (Foucault, 1998, p. 169)

I suppose it’s fair to say that I had liberatory ideals coming into this
project. As much as I’m of a mind that research such as this is really about
exposing the workings of dialogism and its effects in the lived and breathed
masculinities and religions of the boys at the school, still I pretended to (hide my)
emancipatory claims. I couldn’t help it; I’ve years of Liberation Theology
encoded in me. To this end, I will suggest a call for the usage of ”Flash
Interviews” as minimally invasive instruments for helping subjects engage with
their own voices and knowledges within research contexts. First, though, I need
to deal with the interruption that was me.

This means, really, that I got heavily involved in the world (their homes,

. their loves, their spiritual struggles, their mistakes and triumphs) of the students

at St. Rita. It was inevitable. They adopted me (and I, them; perhaps too

220

 

 

uncritically on both sides). I became a curiosity, for the faculty, but most

 

particularly for the students as they jostled to read my notes, to laugh at their
being quoted, and to figure out how I felt about them. I identified with their
struggles, gave them my phone number to catch up on athletic updates, became
a target of their late-night-drunken-reveries, and begged them not to drive in
altered/ drunken states. I worried. They came to feel like younger siblings — I
there was one exception and I’ll take time in a moment to deal with his case — I
and it was often difficult to parse my developing emotional connection to their [
battle to thrive in an increasingly complex world, from a need to be critical in my
data creation. Theoretical frameworks fortunately, account for messiness and
this messiness, I suppose, became my data.

What follows here is a brief look at the ways the boys negotiated the
presence of a researcher in their social and schooled lives. I will propose that, in
the end, their making sense of me — and my coming to establish myself in the

school and with them as subjects / friends / students — had a great deal to do with

 

(the pursuit of / the clash for) mastery. Foucault (1990b) makes a great deal of the
Greeks and the valuation of a masculinity of moderation. The highest order of a
man, in effect, was one who could take what and all that he wanted (sexually or
otherwise; with boys and women or both) but chose instead the self-controlled
middle road of ethical restraint. He was in the view of Isocrates, ”capable of
moderating the power he exercises over others by means of the mastery he

establishes over himself” (p. 174). Power equals the possibility of domination as

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well as the benevolent (mostly) employment of its tendrils beginning with
domination self and desire and extending outward to peers. We were all seeking
to lead, in some way at the school, and some of what Fag Discourse and the
sublimation of real women (in service of their Mythical Mothers and Sisters,
frozen in amber by tales easily controlled and edited by administration and
utilized in prayer and devotion constantly by the boys) helped us to do was
show that we were ”completely in command of [our]selves” (p. 81) just as we
affected and de/ limited the actions of those around us at the lunch table, in the
classroom, through the hallways.

The purpose is to illustrate, as thoroughly as possible in a very brief space,
how much a researcher such as myself came to matter to and have an effect on
the data presented. I became, in no small way, some part of how they developed
their masculine selves. As an agent both of the school and of an indeterminate
origin beyond it—most of the Ritamen couldn’t figure out how I was surviving if
not employed by the school, no matter how many times I explained my situation
to them —I was a liminal agent through which the boys might reirnagine the
possibilities of masculine adulthood. I hope not to overstate this but I do feel I
was read uniquely and my embeddedness helped the boys consider me (and
themselves) possible in different ways. That I had no disciplinary role in their
lives was confusing and freeing and that I was willing to engage in conversations
that challenged or questioned those discourses that felt normalized (fagging,

dicking, distancing from women) opened up a unique opportunity for them to

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examine and become meta-cognitive about their development as men. Flash
interviews amidst the flow of their days were vital for this. They became, in
essence, willing characters in the dissertation-that-was-their—lives. My
intervention was not necessarily intentional and I have no measure to suggest
that I’ve ”altered” their masculine and spiritual development beyond the
conversations I will examine here.

Still, as research, just like teaching, involves a certain manner of seduction
in order to exist, I will look at ways in which the boys were seduced by the
presence of a researcher. Further I will have to, then, take up the case of one
student who resisted this seduction and how that affected my status in the school
as I became a victim of bullying and what that meant for my own masculinity
and the way power was given meaning in my life. I want to delve into three
specific realms of making sense here which all have to do with the negotiation of

multiplicities of power relations. The first begins with a picture.

Shalom!

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Figure 3 (Student Drawing): BFFL

In my third month, while following Tim, I spent my 6th and final period
each day seated next to a young man named Murph. Later, I would come to
know Murph very well through Kairos and lacrosse78but on this sleepy day in
November I knew little about him aside from his penchant for needling teachers

with an elusive sense of humor. Perhaps he liked me because I laughed at his

 

78 I became a junior varsity lacrosse coach despite having never played myself nor really ever
having seen the sport played. It was a learning process and I spent the winter running the
conditioning program for the varsity team. This was one way as a young male in the school, to
gain different points of access to the senior students. Because, ultimately, I coached junior
varsity, I never ended up having to take on an authoritative role with the boys I’d been following
through the year. Murph was a starting middie for an emerging varsity program.

224

 

 

jokes; maybe he was just bored; I suspect though that it was something more. At

any rate, in the midst of a discussion about the context under which the novel
Frankenstein was written, he turned to me and said below the drone of the
teacher he was ignoring, ”Mr. Burke. I’m gonna draw you a picture.” And he
did - For the better part of the period. In some ways I felt guilty that he wasn’t
catc I'u'ng the import of Mary Shelley’s formation as a Romanticist and the specific
situations of her cautionary tale about blind scientific ambition. But really I was
curious about the picture. He handed it to me on our way out of class and I
ended up taping it up on the wall of my office, amidst the other detritus passed
to me throughout the year. It wasn’t rare in its being given to me by the
Students — they were constantly passing me notes or leaving them in my bag.

The following is more or less representative of the message I’d get:

225

 

Figure 4 (Student Drawing): Sample Note
What was unique, though, about what Murph handed me was the detail.
It, S not my intention to do a full visual analysis of the contents of the piece,
tI'ICDIJgh there is rich ground to be tilled there (from our muscularity and the
homosociality of a shared waterski line, to the bikini-clad girls waving from the
desert island, not to mention poor Moss who is being devoured by a wayward
Shark). Rather I want to use this picture and the note from Chunk — its unused
{Q‘tx‘cractiom grating to my English teacher eyes, still —to stand in for all of the
waterials handed me by the young men of St. Rita over the course of this year in

the school. The function of these pieces of looseleaf folk art, different in kind and

226

form from the other art prevalent among students (penises mostly, but also
crosses on paper and skin) was to remind me that they — the students I wasn’t
explicitly following— were present and worthy of inclusion in the text I was
composing. Also, it was a way of confirming for the students that I was different
from a teacher, but also not-quite-a-student. I never saw notes nor pictures
pas sed between students and never, still, saw them passed between students to
teachers. For some reason I filled that space. And much of that had to do with
the fact that the boys liked the attention. These notes and drawings were, in a
sense, a form of courting me.

These were spaces that the boys were able to examine and try on
Secluctive homoerotic roles: to find love, sex even if only the prurient elusive
Possibility of either or both. It’s probably telling that of all of the notes and
Pictures that I received, all but one came from a student with whom I’d
experience/ d Kairos. And of course Kairos is (made to be) all about (the fleeting

expression of) love. Plato uses the character Xenophon to aid Socrates in
elaborating a dual notion of true love which turns upon the difference between
" \Ove of the soul and love of the body” (Foucault, 1990b, p. 233). What Murph
mixes in his display of ”full-bodied muscular eroticism colored by vigorous
exhibitionism” (Corbett, 2009, p. 14), his peers like O’Dea, Dunbar, and Chunk
fifiher plumb with their brief and variously un/ ambiguous love notes.
couched in a debate about the relative social value of ”boy” love, ”Plato puts this

question aside [and] raises the question of what it means to love" (Foucault,

227

1990b, p. 236). This is some of what the boys are trying to figure out, through the
researcher who presents an unique situation at the school: an outsider with
insider knowledge who readily engages them at the level of their own
productive realities and presents no readily available sanctions when they speak
of their own selves, in vernaculars, as characters willing to seduce and be
seduced.

I don’t mean to suggest that the boys were or weren’t looking for some
manner of actual physical romantic connection with the researcher — though that
certainly might have been the case for some students; recall that no one was
”out" at the school and so there was no venue for expressing that sentiment.
Rather I mean to put forth the notion that the boys at the school were very
comfortable with performing for an audience and I was a differently captive one.
That they were so fascinated by the field notes I took, constantly searching for
their own role in the text, suggests that they valued the opportunity to be
seduced into the role of character just as they sensed that they were shaping the
narrative through specific interventions, like the notes and pictures handed to
me or slipped under my door.

The notes and pictures served as reminders that they, the students, still
existed should I not have seen them in a while (for the first semester, when I’d
return to school on Tuesdays, I was subject to persistent questioning as to why
I’d not been present in class on Friday and Monday; I was perpetually explaining

that I taught elsewhere on those days. This never seemed to fully register.) and

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further that they were available and willing to be intextuated. They were, in
effect, performing in order to be connected to ”the book” but perhaps also, more
closely connected with me.

Knowing, as they did, that I was writing—and this was my stock answer
when asked — about ’the development of masculinities and spiritualities’ at an
all-boys school, they readily played into the language of the examination. This is
partly because of the conversations we continually engaged in around the usage
of ”fagging” and ”dicking” in the school. Also, though, it was some of their
wanting to remind me that they knew I was still there and to suggest that they
were, too.

Once, on picking up my computer bag from the Campus Ministry office
after a day at school, I had a note that read, ”O, I Burke. I type things! I gay.
Love, Dunbar.” Signed in his pseudonym, Dunbar was checking in and
performing in a way to reconnect with my work as we often had discussions
about the genesis of fag discourse and the creative usage of the term ” gay” in the
school.

The punctuation is ambiguous in the note, though. It’s unclear whether
Dunbar is suggesting that he is gay, or that I am. Probably it’s both since, in the
ubiquity of fag discourse, we were all gay at some point. Corbett (2009) plays
with this noting that ”Faggot = anything. Faggot = everything. The ubiquity of
faggot [and ’gay’] redoubles its meanings, and at the same time diminishes its

meanings, or at the very least blunts them through sheer repetition” (p. 173).

229

 

’Gay,’ as with faggot for Corbett, is a rich and generative term here, bespeaking
Dunbar’s willful condensing of my gendered possibility, say, but also exploring
as with Murph and the others, the homoerotic possibility of a term and a love,
let’s say, that has found a soulful outlet colored by a certain anxiety that my
disappearing might mean the window has closed just a bit. This anxiety about
inclusion extended to my monthly shuffling of schedules.

Burke! Where you Been?

There was a certain in-built disorientation to the rhythm of my
observations. The constant, of course, was the time in lunch with what came to
be two calcified groups (two lunches, recall) of seven or so students. Also there
came to be a consistent stream of boys who passed through Campus Ministry
during fourth period, particularly immediately following Kairos retreats.
Otherwise, though, on the first of each month I managed to throw my own little
universe in the school completely off-kilter. The benefits of following a new
student each month— a reduction in boredom at largely underengaging
classroom content; new encounters with different classmates; wider exposure to
differing teaching styles and teaching spaces —far outweighed the drawbacks.
Still, the first week of any given month was more than a little like beginning
anew: finding a desk and then an informant group around that location,
navigating suspicious teachers, cataloging wall-art and back-of-the-shirt art,

mapping new hallway routes. . .all of the mundanities of initiating research in a

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school. These changes I figured on. The reaction of the boys, I hadn’t
anticipated.

Because my new schedule often took me on altered routes through the
hallways as I tried to find my way between classes in the four minutes allotted, I
often lost touch with the compafieros I’d made over the previous months. These
were the casual contacts, the soft—sells in E-Music or English 4 who moved slowly
from stolen looks back in the direction of the mysterious ”writer” at the rear of
their class, to asking me what I’d written during a given period, to a level of
comfort where they began doodling in my notebook as they walked by, often
pausing to ask me about my squish. Always these minor informants, though
important in my adjusting to the rhythm of what could be an incredibly boring
day -I gave up coffee in solidarity with the students who weren’t allowed to
carry any liquids into their classes and often paid for it with lethargy and slight

withdrawal headaches —lost touch.79

 

79 As the year went on, the vast majority of the senior (and junior and sophomore) class found my
profile on Facebook. I was added nearly universally as a ”friend" which gave me a presence in
their lives in cyberspace (so often differently represented than their lives in real-time) but that
”add” didn’t denote any substantive contact necessarily. This was really just a way of collecting
friends in numbers. I became another chit mark on their way up the ladder, which was fine. I
mention this, though, to say that unlike teachers and administrators at the school, I had access to
the profiles of most of the seniors and was privy to the groups they created and joined and could
comment on some of what I saw posted on various pages. They did not hold back at all in terms
of what might be called ”foul” language and ”inappropriate” content. At one point, Packer went
through an album of mine and captioned a number of my pictures. This led to a frenzy of
commenting back and forth among the boys in which they wrote things they perhaps ought not
have. But these were things that they put on each others’ pages and so I was, in essence, more
student in cyberspace than even at school.

231

 

 

Eventually, though, we would meet again. This was usually through
some glitch in a route I’d taken and then, there they’d be. It’s really not a large
school, I know, but somehow it was possible to lose people for a week or two.
And they’d greet me with a mix of relief (that I’d not left) but more strikingly,
anger. Always it was the same: wondering where I’d gone (”I switched

schedules. I’m following someone new.”) and then recrirnination at my betrayal

for leaving them. I had become a part of their day and that I was exercising my

. 1—

right/ privilege as an adult by choosing to alter my own schedule was an affront

“Fit

to the rapport we’d developed. It was a stark reminder for both of us that I
wasn’t really a classmate; I was a researcher and our relationship had been based
on usury on my part. Jake, encountering me in the hall outside of lunch put it
best:

Jake: ”Where you been, Dr. Burke?” (I tried for months to explain that I

wasn’t a doctor just yet, but he seemed to like the idea- there was no

one else in the building with a PhD — and the uniqueness of it)

Me: ”I switched schedules. I’m following Tim now.”

Jake: Walking away, sort of laughing but with an edge in his voice: ”Fuck

that. You’re a traitor.”
Once, after seeing Packer for the first time in weeks, he looked at me with faux-
crazed eyes and rnimed slitting his throat saying, ”you’re dead to me.” Like so
many interactions with the boys, I knew he was kidding, but not. In a sense this

betrayal came to feel very much how they reacted when someone was spending

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too much time with their girlfriend. I had, in essence, betrayed the Boys for the
mistress that was my research.

I suppose I don’t blame them. The seductive part of my research was the
possibility that I might just be genuinely like them. Or, further, that I might
genuinely like (love?) them. I was interested in their inner lives and I asked
questions that empowered them as possessing a knowledge that I couldn’t
possibly conjure myself. In the face of an official curriculum that they viewed as
largely oppressive (if not deadening), evoking images of daycare or worse, the
Holiday Inn, they finally had a chance to engage with content in school that was
interesting (for them and me): themselves. I’m not intending to suggest that I
was interesting to them; rather the possibility that someone was taking a shine to
them as valuable founts of knowledge gave them a reason to come to class other
than to sleep or to fuck around with their friends. We shared intensive months,
moving through a kind of accelerated courtship from doubt to the embrace of
trust, and then I’d disappear revealing myself once again not as fellow student,
but as adult who could readily transgress the hard and fast rules of restrictive
scheduling. In a way, I used them for their data and got out for selfish reasons:
more and different dialogic situations and the desire to stay awake in the face of
stifling quizzes and repetitive lectures.

It’s not a huge stretch, then, to liken our relationships with small
courtships throughout the year. As there was a persistent homoerotic element

floating through the school centered quite often on the casual grabbing of

233

 

 

 

crotches, or the occasional mock arm-in-arm skipping of friends in hallways, but
always (all ways) rooted in some sort of slightly taboo physical contact, their

losing me from sight (and schedule) carried real weight. I was no longer present,

 

physically. I couldn’t be groped. Nor could I provide spaces in the middle of
class for them to, in turn, provide the knowledge I lacked (or projected to lack).
They were always asking to be interviewed, but rarely seemed to realize that we

were constantly interviewing each other in classes, in moments when I’d stop the

 

flow of a conversation to ask for clarification as to why someone might be called
” gay” for having a drawn penis hooked on his belt, but not so when he reached
around a classmate to rub pectoral muscles in the midst of a Physics lecture.
When I left them, we broke up; our dialogic space disappeared and their fag
discursive days lost those interruptive/ interpretive possibilities. They could no
longer share knowledge, coo, and woo me with what they came to think I needed

to know.

 

So of course they drew me pictures. Of course they left me notes in my
bag and of course they added me as a friend on Facebook and occasionally
flamed my page. This was their way of being remembered; it was an attempt to
remain connected with the character that they saw themselves becoming in the
imaginary text of my ”book.” Is it possible that they exaggerated their usage of
fag discourse and their penis regalia in my presence as a way to better place
themselves in my hallowed notebook? Absolutely. That magnification, though,

doesn’t to my mind negate the data we created, it only bespeaks their

234

incorporation of my presence into the life of the school. I was another way to be
masculine; I was another way to be masculine around; I was a validation of their
resident knowledges even as I challenged them on why they did things. They
welcomed that challenge and it changed everything I wrote down in the first
semester and come to write here. They were always searching for ways to make
sense of me, to reign me into an intelligible form.
You Didn’t Pick Up

The phone calls began around Thanksgiving. It was by this time that the
majority of the core group (again, something around fifteen or so students
mostly from lunch and then radiating outward through athletic and parish ties)
had decided that I wasn’t intending on ratting them out to either the
administration or their parents. They began prodding me, insisting that the ”real
book” would be written on weekends, if I’d only hang out with them. This was
part of the bravado of being seventeen and convinced that the art of rebellion,
that specific instantiation they’d chosen, was the most original and unique way
to flout the establishment’s rules ever in the history of human creation“. Which
is to say that the boys were really enamored of how much alcohol they drank
and how awesome it was to be drunk.

They were right in a sense about the ”real” book: I could have written

much I’m sure about the function of partying and alcohol(ism) in the lives and

 

80 Everything is always in superlatives at seventeen, no?

235

 

 

 

development of these young men, most particularly as it related to masculinity —
how much you drank was important for example, as was how little you showed
that you had consumed Herculean amounts; the point was volume measured in
pyramids of empty cans, not sloppiness. But the legal ramifications of being
present and party to minors and controlled substances felt huge and the rigors of
research, luckily in this case, gave me an easy out as I insisted that I was
beholden to the project as it tied to the school. True or not, it worked and they
backed off, choosing another route to keep me abreast of their exploits.
Anyways. They started calling me at all hours. I wasn’t particularly
inclined to pick up at 2AM when I saw one of the boys numbers illuminated in
the fog of interrupted REM sleep and” so I let them go to voice mail, always.
Which was perfect for the sake of transcription. What I got from those phone
calls was another example of the boys need for validation and their consistent
seeking to remain a part of the project. They were, again, in character and
reminding me that they knew I existed beyond the school. This was another way
of encountering me in the hallway, of insisting on mattering as material for the
text. Here’s a sample of one of the longer exchanges from early January. I’m
including the message in its entirety for the sake of presenting the complexity of
the different relations to me that each student has taken for himself. Note,
please, that the form consistent in each voice mail was a compulsion to shout a
message and then hand the phone off. These were always communal displays of

” affection”:

236

Music and voices both blasting in the background

Raff: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Don’t say a word. Kevin? (With an

 

uptick and lilting, almost. He’s delighted to call me by my first name) It’s
your friend Raff from Kairos. I’d just like to say that you’re mine and
Huey’s bitch and we fucking killed you. Motherfucker. And now, here’s
Packer...

Packer: Hi Mr. Burke, it’s your favorite: Packer. I just called you to tell

 

you that you know this is my world and you’re just livin’ in it. . .and. . .ah,
we’re having a good time right now but I assume you’re not cause you’re
a coward and all you do is just write your little gay book that nobody’s
gonna read (if only he knew how true a statement he was making here,
eh?) and it’s not gonna get published and you’re gonna fail your

assignment cause I said you will and now I’m passing the phone to

 

Murph...

A brief note before proceeding. These soliloquies, I realize, appear quite
harsh. When I showed the transcribed exchange to a teacher at the school who’d
become a friend, he laughed a bit, saying, ”You know, the weird thing is this is
their way of showing affection.” Which is exactly how I read it. There was a
certain code to these manners of interactions; it’s those closest to the heart that
earn the right to be put down. Fag discourse alights at the outlines of it. This
affection is more apparent—and less coded in standoffish masculine posturing—

in the next few monologues:

237

Click.

Murph (of waterskiing picture fame): Mr. Burke. Shalom! Um, just
chillin. Shut up, shut up. Alright, no, but Mr. Burke, I love ya and I’m
kinda disappointed you didn’t answer, wait dude you guys got to talk
already, well, love ya. We all do. We were talking about oh remember
that picture I drew you? Yeah, that was good shit. And, ah, can’t wait for
the book. I’m gonna buy it and have you sign it. I can’t read though.
Help me read? Here’s Donnie...

Donnie: Mr. Burke, I missed you the past few days motherfucker on
Kairos and on Monday, I mean Tuesday you better come to the aquatic
center and watch us play water polo cause my team is unreal (this is the
swimming pool and he’s talking about gym class). I really did miss you
on Kairos and sorry I didn’t write you a letter. I wrote 21 letters but, love
you; I’m gonna call you later. You better answer. Here’s Raff again...
Raff: Hey Burke. I was gonna tell you that: how’s it feel all those years of

college mean nothing cause your book’s gonna suck! Have a good night.

This was how the calls always ended, abruptly as, presumably, the boys

got back to the busy life of cheap beer and swilled inhibitions. The above is

representative, though, of the compulsion for outreach into my life beyond the

school. My Rita ”friends” were eager for me to exist beyond the purview of the

lunchroom and hallways and had a hunch that I might just be interested in their

habits as young men finding themselves, not just at Rita, but in their homes and

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relationships, beery or otherwise. Once a call was made, there always ensued a

certain battle for phone time as each character took his place on the message.

 

Raff played the role of ”bully" as he did at the lunch table, and Donnie settled
into his place as my kindly initial contact. This was how they were willing to be
written and how they started to, in a sense, construct a masculinity for me the
author, as well as me, the adult-who-paid-attention to them as more than athletes “J

or JUG dwellers, as failures or successes of GPA. Ultimately there was always a

‘PM

tenor of affection; this was nearly universal even when I’d been accused of
abandoning schedules and thus cadres of classmates each month. It’s not stretch,
however, to imagine how these forms of affection can / do become extended to
the kind of discourse of physical, emotional, and mental (most often, gendered)
violence that relies on an ”I hit you because I love you” line of reasoning/ abuse
to justify itself. It is perhaps the best measure of what I ”could not see” as an

insider, that this only occurred to me through the ministrations and urgings of a

 

trusted reader of mine. And of course it brings to relief, the character/ experience
of Scotty.
Scotty

My intention is not to make a caricature out of Scotty. He was by accounts
from friends, actually a kind and giving guy (”He only hits me when I deserve
it,” perhaps). I only saw evidence of that when I was finally out of his sway.
From the first week of school he decided that I was vulnerable —and I had the

misfortune of watching him exploit vulnerability constantly in his classmates in

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cruel ways that required a kind of intelligence turned toward willful emotional
abuse that made me particularly worried for/ about/ around him. . .and me — and
made me feel ill at ease at every turn. This was in direct contrast to literally
every other student I encountered who moved perhaps from suspicion initially
to at the very least acceptance of and interest in my project. Scotty, I realized
later, was pissed I’d not picked him to follow and took every chance he could to
let me know I was thus unwelcome in his world. And St. Rita was his world. I’d
not been bullied in a decade but I very quickly felt as small as fourteen year old
me, chasing my books down the hallway as the varsity soccer team took to
practicing touch-passes with my vocabulary and algebra texts.

Let us return to Foucault (1990b) and the Greeks for help here. Always
with the Greeks. Foucault puts an onus on the ”moral reflection of the Greeks”
as related to sexual behavior, yes, ”but” also ” to stylize a freedom which the
’free’ man exercised in his activity” (p. 97). The problem, of course, was that no
man was / is truly free in a society that dictates expectations around sexual
activity and so the paradox of the freedom of a free man meant that his ultimate
freedom was manifest in control, of his desires, yes, but also of the objects of his
desire. This led to the codification of ’regimen’ which was seen as ”a whole art of
living” (p. 101) focused most particularly on mastery of self (and thus others) and
the exercise of free will for ”encompassing all of a man’s activities[; it]
problematized the relation to the body and called for” (p. 102) to steal from Harry

Potter, constant ”vigilance” in the policing of the self and others. I became

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subject to Scotty’s need to extend his control, to consolidate his schooled regimen
by engaging in a mastery of the new element: the writer in the room. This, in
turn, would allow him to control my narrative. It’s telling, we’ll see, that his first
foray feminizes me but his picture aims at the destruction of my written project.
He sensed the totemic power of the text and sought to control it in a test of
masculinity and will.

Again, I write about this here, not so much for my own ego —- though that
is so much, inevitably of the research and I suppose I was hurt in a way that I
couldn’t ” get to” Scotty as I’d have liked —but to illustrate the extent to which I
became a cipher through which the boys performed masculinity, yes, but as
characters for a text on masculinity. It matters not so much that the boys called
me or drew me pictures or that I was bullied as much as it matters that these
things would not have occurred in quite the same way in my absence. I was in
some small way, a nexus through which the Ritamen chose to express themselves
and their own unique masculine and religious characters. Some embraced me as
a loving brother and coach, others embraced me as a rhetorical foil (Huey and
Raff particularly) and Scotty, well Scotty resisted seduction in his own way and
constantly.

The trope that Scotty adopted, much like Huey and Raff (though his tack
felt harder, embittered and even a bit dangerous; certainly enough to make me
feel vulnerable) lay in making me his bitch. There is much to mine in terms of

symbolic effeminacy or even the abjected role of passivity in a homosexual

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partnership, both of which we’ve touched on earlier in this text. For now,
though, I want to provide a different contextual basis because Scotty, like his
classmates, drew me a picture. He wanted to be a character, too, but his way of
going about it involved subjugation rather than adoption. This was a very
different and creative move and one that left me uncomfortable for reasons I
can’t fully explain. The other boys called me a bitch all the time; when Scotty did
it, well it stung. As much as this project is about making sense of the
masculinities of the boys in the school, it is, too, much of my own coming to a
fuller or alternative sense of my experience in the school and in Marist High

School years before. As with Murph, our relationship turned on an illustration:

 

 

 

Figure 5 (Student Drawing): Make Me a Sandwich

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This was handed to me in the middle of my third week in the school. I was still,
as yet, underestablished among most of the senior class and at best a benignity
for the faculty. I had yet to find my office, nor was my anchor dropped yet in
Campus Ministry. I felt, in essence, placeless.

The text is difficult to read, but it’s Scott telling me: ”I own you, Burke.
Go make me a sandwich.” He is also ripping up my notebook while I plead with
him, ”No! You own me. Just don’t rip my book up.” The crudity of the artwork
aside, the message is fairly clear. Part of his ownership lies in his dominance
through the violent act of destroying my research, but it also relies on a sort of
servitude represented in my preparing food for him. I am both slave, but also
woman, this connection wrought through the use of the term ”bitch.” In fact, as I
looked up from the picture, handed across rows of desks from Scotty in the
middle of the room, he stared me down and mouthed, ”I own you.” For how
much his case weighed on my mind for the first month and a half of school, I
suppose he wasn’t wholly wrong.

This went on for the rest of September. At lunch he tried to cow me:
” Burke! You’re my bitch. Where’s my sandwich?" On subsequent days in math
class, he traipsed in announcing, ”Burke’s my bitch." Later in the month when
talking about Homecoming he turned to me and asked, ”Burke, what’re you
gonna do when I fuck your girlfriend?" Contradicting himself in that same week
he elbowed Packer so that I could hear him, asking, ”Hey Packer, you know

Burke has a boyfriend? He’s a HOMOsexual. Isn’t that right, Burkey boy?” He

243

then launched into a brief campaign questioning my legitimacy at the school,
asking all of the lunch group and the entire math class by turns, ”Who the fuck is
this guy? Who do you think you are? Why are you even here?” These last three
were honest questions, I suppose, and I answered some version of them
constantly and willingly throughout my time at the school. But Scotty, well he
was disconcerting.

He often spent class periods just staring me down. It was, to borrow the
language of a contemporary comedy news show, a ”threatdown.”

This stuff was fairly tame, to be honest. It’s more or less all of the same
verbiage that the other boys used but from Scotty it felt dangerous, pointed,
more serious. Even one day in lunch when he caught me by surprise, after he
assured the table that my girlfriend’s name was ”Frank,” by telling me that he
was just messing with me, still then I couldn’t find comfort, nor distance.

It might have been that I couldn’t read him or that I was just beginning to
believe he hated me. What frightened me is that it started to feel important. I
had lost my ability to step outside of the discourse of the school; I wasn’t above it
and I had lost the ability to master the situation. I was made, in a Greek sense,
less masculine due to my inability to get control. I really, for the month of
September, couldn’t get a purchase on the kid. Then he called me, in October,
after I’d been out of his class for two weeks, when I passed him in the hallway,
”a fucking traitor,” and I started to be able to make some sense of things. What

mattered, in the end, for Scotty was much the same as with his classmates: it was

244

the attention, the wrangling of the situation to get it under control. His caustic
reaction to my presence didn’t necessarily bespeak a more trenchant need to
marginalize me in his classes or his lunchroom spaces, rather it was his desire to
be included of his own accord, on his own terms, that led him to the bullying.
He stood out in a text about masculinity as a stereotype of violent and abusive
masculinity. It was a master performance. This was his way of ensuring a space
for a character in the text. After a number of weeks, as I continually asked the
boys in my immediate surround, how I should read Scotty and his claiming me
as his ”bitch,” he ramped up the abuse. They were, no doubt, relaying my
queries. He began to relish acting the part of tormentor.

And then, at the end of September, I disappeared to another schedule (a
higher track, actually), losing touch with him until that day he called me a traitor
with a certain measure of hate and fear in his eyes. He’d lost his daily sway over
me, by that point, and in that moment became much more like his classmates
who reacted similarly to my abandoning them for greener pastures, newer data
fields, temporarily interesting classes. Scotty, in that brief moment, found
himself reconnected and pissed that he’d lost his role and found his sway
unsubstantiated. He’d lost his bitch, his role, his character. The picture, though,
remained.

Title
To be etched in text was vital for the boys. They acted as characters for me

and I reacted accordingly with a mix of trepidation, joy, fear, disgust and utmost

245

respect. Their masculinities were myriad and they were ever filtered through the
ideologies of the school which helped them produce themselves as their own
version of a Ritaman. I became a part of that picture for one brief moment. And
it was an honor to come to think of myself, in some small way, as a Ritaman as
well.

Always —without fail, and this is not hyperbole — after a student found
out I was writing a ”book” about them— the idea of a ”dissertation” being too far
removed from their experience I guess — they asked about the title. This
happened from the first days of data creation on through lacrosse practices in
April and my answer was always the same: ”I don’t know yet. What should it
be?” An old teaching trick, that: bounce it back at the student and see what
brilliance they come up with that’s worth stealing. But it was an honest
sentiment as I really still don’t know that I have a title for all of this messy work
of research.

The importance of the title, though, to the boys seems significant. I
attribute it back to their coming to sense that they could be characters in a text.
This started with their meticulous selection of pseudonyms, continued through
their combing of my notes to find quotes and jottings from/ on them, on through
their later reminders by phone call and drawings that they still existed in the
world, in my world, even though I’d abandoned the desk next to them for an
office down the hall. Their acting for me, their performance was in need of a

venue to make it significant and that venue, which came to be this text had to

246

 

have a good title because that title would, in turn, make them significant again.
Part of this work, then, has been about elucidating the ways that these boys acted
in the great dance of gender creation under the restrictive — but still generative —
auspices of St. Rita, the saint for sure, but more prominently the all-boys Catholic
school on the South Side of Chicago. St. Rita made them feel vital (and they
performed accordingly), by bringing them into the folds of the great
brotherhood — to the exclusion of women not sainted or virginal — of the Catholic
Church, certainly, but moreso into the great tradition of the Alumni of the school.
Butler (1990) reminds that because ”the gendered body is performative
[this] suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which
constitute its reality” (p. 185). So too with masculinity. And masculinities more
to the point, as well as religiosities. The lesson to remember, then, is that St. Rita
High School has no status apart from the Ritamen it creates. So too with the
Catholic Church and her much malingered clergy. Gender and religion and
schools and churches are constructed through the repeated stylizations of this
world. Writing about them, becoming a character in one’s own text is one way to
look critically at the way these acts are misconstrued, through the repetition of
Tradition, as ontological and a priori. The point is that the boys could be the
undoing of a gendered system —and a school — through the same process that
they become its reification embodied, dialoged, remembered. But they need
chances to (re)create. Which is a roundabout way of saying that though I’ve

written their and my story here, I am leaving the title of this piece for later

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I—.

new: _

consideration that they might write it for me and begin the process of critically
engaging the characters they drew, enacted, performed in the text above.
”Construction,” Butler asserts, "is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary
scene of agency, the very terms in which” agency is articulated and become
culturally intelligible” (p. 201).

My tentative liberatory critical-theoretical roots tell me that this means
part of the making of this text was the making of new and altered characters of
masculine and spiritual possibility. I’m not a flashpoint, but maybe the text,
retitled someday, serves that purpose.

Implications and Further Research

I had brunch with some nomadic student friends on a rare day in
February when we’d all landed back in Chicago simultaneously. It was pleasant
to reconnect with travelers who have radiated outward from the Midwest and
then headed back for the lovely biting wind of mid-winter. While there, I had a
brief conversation with a friend of theirs who was seated next to me. He, too,
had read Pascoe’s text for a course he was taking at a local Catholic university.
He said that his Sociology professor commented at the end of the class —
offhandedly — that the two most homophobic organizations were fraternities and
all-boys schools.

This makes sense in a commonsense, anecdotal sort of way. It also
whitewashes the complexities of some fairly diverse institutions. That’s

troubling. As troubling as the homophobia that is no doubt rampant in certain

248

spaces authorized (and created) by some fraternities and some all-boys schools?
Perhaps not. But to dismiss them in kind does not eliminate them, nor their
influence, from existence. A more productive tack, I think, is engaging with and
closely examining the discursive function of this uncomplicated homophobia for
the sake of, well, complexity and context and perhaps with an eye toward
intervention.

Research on Single-Gendered Schools

In 2005, the No Child Left Behind act was modified to allow for single-sex
public education at both the classroom and school level. The legal and
theoretical justification for such an amendment both were taken from research
collected by and trumpeted through lobbying organizations like the National
Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE) which cite vast testing
gains for students, particularly in inner-city contexts, when boys and girls are
purposely separated by gender in educational settings. The suggestion is that
gender segregated educational contexts might just be the saving grace for
struggling public schools in this era of high stakes testing. Many of these claims,
indeed, made as regards the benefits of / for single-gendered education run along
the lines of improved test scores, most particularly for girls in math and science
over their counterparts in co-educational settings (”NASSPE,” n.d.). Both
inherently and explicitly such work relies on biological assumptions of gender as

a fixed and heritable trait. Claims focused on testing gains, however, are

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confounded by work like that done in England by Robinson 8: Smithers (1999)

who note that:

The outstanding performance of the single-sex schools in the examination
league tables has much more to do with academic selection,
socioeconomic background and the standing of the school itself than

with the segregation of the sexes. When, as far as possible, like is
compared with like, the apparent academic differences between single-sex

and co—educational schools largely disappear. (p. 23)

Assumed biological differences, too, need be complicated by other factors,
particularly those in the social realm. And if gender is indeed something that we
do, rather than possess (Butler, 1990), then single-sex schools may just be as
limiting socially and academically as they are supposed to be freeing simply in
their assumption of ” the restriction of gender within” a ”binary pair” where ”one

is” always already ”one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender”

(p. 30).

Still, there remains, as federal guidelines now provide the justification for
single-gendered public education, a certain impetus for the establishment of

separate sexed schools. And though:

advocates of single—sex education do NOT believe that ’all girls learn one

way and all boys learn another way.’ On the contrary, we cherish and

250

celebrate the diversity among (sic) girls and among (sic) boys. We
understand that some boys would rather read a book than play football.
We understand that some girls would rather play football than play with
Barbies. Educators who understand these differences can inspire every

child to learn to the best of her or his ability, (”NASSPE,” n.d.)

such rhetoric remains reliant on a model of essential and biological differences
between, rather than among the sexes. And so no complex argument about the
nature of gender relations is being made. Boys and girls by this logic still remain
very different at and because of the unique circumstances of their births, though
variance is certainly seen as occurring within genders. Still, the assumption runs
that a fundamentally different context of education will differentially and
perhaps universally benefit (all) boys and (all) girls. No sense is given about
how limited possibilities within and across genders become when boys and girls
are assumed to be more different that similar and can benefit from being
separated in school. There is very little nuance here regarding just what kind of
girls and boys will be produced as women and men in and by schools that
require their gender be essential(ized)81 upon entrance. One way to complicate

this argument, to push back on it, is to examine just how gender becomes

 

31 This is not to suggest that co-educational K-12 schools do not view gender in deterministic and
essentialized manners. Thorne (2004) presents a cogent analysis of just this in her ethnography
Gender Play. Still there are different opportunities for ”playing” with gender in schools which at
least allow for a second — even if assumed opposite — possibility.

251

(re)formed in a school in the face of ideology which, perhaps, assumes that

gender ”is," rather than ”does,” as it were.

Research into the complexities of the formulation of genders as affected
and effected by single gendered schooling contexts bears fleshing out. Further
study ought be pursued into what self-consciously single-gendered schools do to
and with the boys and girls they enroll and seek to encode through their
structure of / and curriculum. Much work could be done with the ways that
students creatively engage the rhetorical strategies of their schools once they

become a part of them.

Too, as many of these schools are private and rely on a strong base of
alums for their fiscal survival, longitudinal work in relationality between and
among students such as those at St. Rita as regards the link to brotherhood and
tradition after years of what might be called indoctrination might carry value.
There are ready rolls of these alums and constant reunions meant to reconnect
them, but also to draw funds. They are, in essence, a fairly captive and well-
documented population. Research into the lasting effects of single-gendered
schools particularly in terms of the continuing role of fag discourse as well as
homosocial bonding would be well worth examination if we’re to measure some

of the true effects of a system of schooling.

"Flash" Interviews

252

I hesitate, in some ways, to claim credit for the idea of a flash interview. I
am familiar with the methodological traditions of semi-structured interviewing
that allows for a great deal of latitude in service to the whims of a meandering
and pseudo-organic conversation. But this, often enough, occurs in a prescribed
environment with parameters agreed upon between subject(s) and researcher(s)
and, well, bespeaks a kind of forethought and planning. What flash interviews
allowed in this context, was the ability to interrupt, in the midst of discursive
elements that occurred (as they occurred) to attempt to bring context for the
author. Always the boys were free to move in and out of the situation
(physically) and conversationally. At times these encounters lasted for one
question and often enough they extended through class periods as we all ignored '
the pick-up basketball games surrounding us in gym class. The point is that
these moments of inquiry allowed the students to reflect on their situation (while
still in the situation itself) but also to bring a meta-cognitive awareness and
insider knowledge that the researcher (they saw) valued and required. As the
data was then immediately encoded into the notebook they had daily access to,
they could drive later interviews and initiate them as they came across the
streams of conversation/ consciousness of peers or younger/ previous selves. It
may be that flash interviewing is not wholly groundbreaking methodologically,
but it certainly was helpful in accessing a discourse-about—the-discourse in the

midst of the researched situation that otherwise might have been impossible to

253

uncover had we all taken time to prepare to perform as interviewer and

interviewee in a sequestered room.

The Field of Catholic Education

In 2007, the University of Notre Dame hosted the launch of an initiative
facilitated by Lee Shulman at Stanford University aimed at discussing the unique
situation of Catholic education in the United States. This initial ”Carnegie
Conversation on Catholic Education" cited a general profusion and tradition of
empirical/ theoretical research on and in public schools but a dearth of work of
the same breadth and character as regards Catholic (and parochial in general)
schooling. As a means of remedying this perceived gap in the field of
educational research, Shulman (2007) suggested the need to build a ”field of
Catholic research” which ” is [in] some sense” its own ”body of knowledge"
bringing with it ”processes needed to critique knowledge claims. . .and [seeking]
to connect knowledge to other bodies of understanding and to domains of
practice” (p. 2). Further, he cautioned that ”if Catholic education is to become a
robust field, it must become a robust field of scholarship” which is of interest
outside of ”the club” of ” Catholic educational institutions” (p. 4).

In support of this new conversation and its ensuing calls for more and
broader research on, in, and about Catholic schooling those universities
participating in the initial proceedings have begun a series of biannual national

conferences (the first of their kind in Catholic Education aimed specifically at

254

producing research) looking at the unique theoretical possibilities of scholarship
in and building of the field. Notre Dame, in the intervening years, has opened a
publishing house (ACE Press) and Boston College has launched Catholic
Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice both specifically charged with
disseminating the work spurred by the Carnegie Conversation. Also, I am now a
member of a SIG for Catholic Education that has just been formed under the
auspices of AERA.

This study, then, can contribute to a nascent field of Catholic educational
scholarship at a time when the character of the work done in such a field is
particularly malleable. And so early work in critical and post-modern
autoethnography may just open up more and earlier avenues toward creative
conversations about religious ideology and its effects and goals in schooling.
This, I believe, is a unique opportunity to bring critical conversations to bear
upon the formative stages of a field’s development.

Beyond this, though, and thinking about Shulrnan’s insistence that
research in and on Catholic schools cannot limit itself in scope and become an
insular conversation, my hope is that this study will serve as a critique of the
structural limitations of previous notions of multiple masculinities, thus opening
possibilities for rethinking the role of discourse and resistive power in the
process of the (re)formation of masculinities in schools. That is, I think, that the
study may just make it more possible to examine the ways that masculinities are

(re)formed in schools by actors in reference to officialized discourses, yes, but

255

also in reference to each other. My hope is that this work will make masculinities
as unstable and perpetually reconstitutive in theory as I think they were on a
moment-to-moment basis in and around the school.

Further, in light of the legal ramifications of NCLB’s allowance for single-
sex public education as well as the tendency to rely on un(der)complicated -
biological understandings that perpetuate binary gender splits, this study may
provide an alternative understanding of just what happens (good or bad) in a
single gendered school, most particularly as regards the establishment (and
undermining) of masculinity for boys. In the process, hopefully, the work offers
a more complex View of gender segregated schooling along the lines of Robinson
8: Smithers (1999), moving the conversation from test scores as a measure of
effectiveness to a deeper theoretical discussion about just why gender segregated
schools may actually become further constitutive of the exact problems with
gender (in both the short and long run) which they propose to ameliorate.

Finally, as I am centered in the field of Teacher Education, I want to
address a common notion among teachers at St. Rita. Continually I heard
conveyed a certain sensibility about how the work of a Catholic school was
”more than a job; it’s ministry.” I won’t dare refute such an assertion of
conviction. I do believe that teachers who enter into parochial schoolwork, quite
often do so to the detriment of their retirement and certainly to their fiscal
bottom line. This rhetorical move, though, relies on a further claim that ”there’s

something missing” in public schools. Which again, may well be true. That

256

something missing, though, may just be the invocation of religion as disciplinary,
and certainly for its function as crowd control. Ministry in the sense it’s invoked,
however, bespeaks a deeper engagement with the Catholic / Christian notion of
Christ Teacher. And if there were ever a rebel of a teacher, it would have been
Christ, man and / or God. The mission and ministry of Catholic schools, of all-
boys Catholic schools might just serve, created as spaces apart from the world (of
public schooling and the ramifications of a purportedly theology-free
environment, say) as they indeed are, as radical purveyors of a new kind of
Tradition.

Carroll (2001) issues a clarion call for a third Vatican council. The second,
called by Pope John the XXIII is often seen as the time when the Church reversed
much of its damaging and standoffish policy (moving away from the Tridentine
mass, allowing the laity an expanded role in the Church, among other things).
There has been a slow retrenchment of policy over the intervening seventy years
or 30. Much of that has been written onto the minds and bodies of women.
Carroll’s insistence is that a New Reformation might just save the Church. We
might debate, particularly in light of the latest abuse scandals which reach to the
throne of both John Paul and Benedict, just what is worth saving anyways.
Catholic schools, most probably. This is where the newest generations of the
faithful might be wrought and the Church and orders such as the Augustinians
have incredible autonomy in terms of how their curricular spaces become

constructed. What ought occur, first, however, is good and radical and creative

257

research in and on these schools to determine what is done well and / or to the
detriment of its students. I would hope that this study, this work here,
contributes in some small way to the building of that New Reformation in
Catholic schools, certainly, but also of public schools as we sit at the beginning of

a new educational era being built beyond NCLB.

258

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