This yearlong critical sociolinguistic ethnography (Heller, 2006, 2011) examines the relationship of language, positioning, and masculinities of three immigrant adolescent boys in one high school in a U.S Midwestern state. I take a discourse analysis approach, informed by both interactional sociolinguistics traditions (Goffman, 1981; Gumperz, 1982) and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (Baxter, 2003; Wetherell, 1998), to study how Tiger, Omar, and Chris performed their identities inside and outside their classrooms, how they were positioned as learners, and what these positioning acts meant for their learning. This study takes a poststructuralist perspective on the study of language, positioning, gender, and masculinities. Drawing upon Butler’s (1990) performativity theory and Connell’s (1995, 2005) concept of hegemonic masculinity, I view gender and masculinity as socially and discursively performed within or against the normative discourses of heterosexuality and hyper masculinity, and as embedded in the hierarchical power relations. Data collected consist of field notes, audiotaped and videotaped classroom interactions, interview, documents, and artifacts. With an analysis of the multiple identities that Omar, Tiger and Chris subscribed to and were assigned to, as well as the multiple forms of subordination they were subjected to, I argue that these young men’s experiences in the school need to be viewed through a framework of intersectionality, which allows us to see the compounding effects of multiple oppressions and the hierarchical order of masculinity that was constructed by the systems of power. Through analyzing Tiger’s stylized speech in a language activity over time, I illustrate that his masculinity performances were intertwined with the process of language teaching and learning. Due to the fact that Tiger and his teacher were speaking within different discourses in the same language activity, his stylized use of English led to him being labeled as a “Not Serious” student and a “problem” student in the end. Through analyzing a classroom discussion on reading, I argue that these students, their teacher, and other adults in the classroom articulated different notions of reading and performed their reader identities. I illustrate that the challenges in the reading were attributable to the differences in their views of reading, and these young men’s performances of reader identities was connected to their negotiation of masculinity. In addition to studying these immigrant young men’s masculinity performances, I examined teachers’ pedagogy and their ways of managing gender and masculinity in their classrooms. Through analyzing three teachers’ identity performances in teaching, I demonstrate that each of the teachers performed a different version of masculine identity in their teaching. However, their ways of managing masculinity were all operating within the same heterosexual normalcy and masculinity discourses, which reinforced, rather than challenged, the normative discourses. These immigrant young men’s masculinity performances were intertwined with their language and literacy engagement. For them school was as much a social space as an academic institution. Their struggle and agency in their learning and identity negotiation highlighted the need for educators to attend to their marginalized social positions and their identity work and for researchers to examine the complexity in their negotiation of sense of self and their learning inside and outside classrooms.
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