An Experiment...

Ok, well I have to confess to being a little disappointed...

I have tried several creative apporoaches and really been completely disatisfied with the amount of interest any of my endeavours have gathered...

I am going to post a 10 year old paper from university (all mine!) just to see if it generates a comparable number of reads to anything else I've actually spent time writing.

My earlier offer in "Will Blog For Clics..." still stands...

Here it is:

In reviewing George Smith’s “The Ideology of Fag,” I will follow its main line of argument, highlighting what I feel is significant and exploring the issues Smith raises. The article should be, in my estimation, compulsory reading for any educator. This sentiment is in partial contrast to Smith’s citing of Rofes who states:
These (gay) students—from every ethnic and racial background, in urban,
suburban, and rural schools—have sat passively through years of public school
education where their identities as gay and lesbian people have been ignored
and denied. They have done this because of their own fears and isolation, and
because of the failure of gay men and lesbians to effectively take up their cause
(309-311).
It is my view that Rofe is “blaming the victim.” I would argue that significant changes cannot take place until we confront hegemonic heterosexuality. To blame gay men and women for not emancipating gay youth is to shift attention from the culpability of homophobic teachers, students, administrators, and parents, and makes gay men and women responsible for the achievement of such emancipation. As Smith later demonstrates, the threat of violence and social sanctions is too real to put the onus on gays alone “to actively take up their cause.”
Smith was perceptive enough when designing his research to recognize that to look at gay students would entail looking at two distinct experiences. Firstly, there are the experiences of gay students who “passed” as straight. By and large this group continued on to University after graduating high school. Secondly, there are the experiences of gay students who came out or were “found out” and either dropped out or were pushed out of high school. These participants were contacted through a street outreach program because, unfortunately, the consequence for them of having no high school education was life on the street. Interestingly, Smith also found this group to be “bright, engaged, and engaging”(311). It is possible that Smith’s perception of his participants was a partial result of certain discourses that he shared with them because of their sexual orientation. Two conclusions might be drawn from this second group of participants. These students dropped out of high school because of social pressures not academic shortcomings and we may just have to face the fact that gays are perhaps disproportionately brighter than the rest of the population!
It should be understood when reading the article, and Smith acknowledges this himself, that his participants may to some degree misrepresent the experiences of gay youths in schools. Smith writes: “what struck me about these young men was the positive attitude they had about being gay. although [sic] this was probably tied to the fact that they were largely self-selected and all were ‘out’ at the time of the interview” (314). The cumulative effect of these student accounts is that we get the impression that they endured some humiliations and violence, but ultimately emerged from high school to be at ease with themselves and without permanent physical or emotional damage. To this challenge, I would answer that these accounts still enable Smith to outline how ‘fag’ is constructed as a social object. I will, however, concede that Smith’s accounts do not register the intense agony, victimization and lasting physical and emotional injury that is likely the case for the percentage of gays who are still in high school or did not come forward in the self-selection process.
Smith describes the process of identifying the “fag”: “Actual appearances are treated as ‘documenting,’ ‘pointing to,’ or ‘standing on behalf of,’ a presupposed underlying pattern”(315). This underlying pattern is the ideology of “fag” which certain actions or behaviors may invoke. What is quite significant is that the person being identified as “fag” by a certain behavior or action need not be gay at all. The underlying pattern exists and is available to explain or answer any number of suspect behaviors like lisping, standing limp wristed, or not liking sports. Ultimately, whether or not the identification is correct is insignificant in view of the fact that the ideology of “fag” is perpetuated and of the stigma and repercussions attached to being a “fag” are clearly broadcast. In the end, certain behaviors or identities have been proscribed and heterosexuality maintains its place as the dominant hegemony.
The identification process of “fag” is itself part of a more problematic reality for gays that stems from the fact that everyone is presumed to be heterosexual unless certain behaviors indicate otherwise. This puts a significant amount of pressure on many gays to stay closeted and also gives the impression of there being fewer gays in the population than is really the case. I have seen sources place the percentage of the general population that is gay between 10 and 20 percent. Yet in most high schools it is rare to have more than half a dozen students who are “out”—in a high school of 8 or 9 hundred this amounts to something like a half a percent. This certainly leads to the misperception that gays are in the vast minority. Were fifteen percent, or so, to be out, then this large a number would have to be acknowledged, could gain some degree of solidarity and, to some degree, acceptance. However, the current reality is that heterosexist hegemony wages an effective divide and rule campaign within the ideology of “fag.” Gay interviewees mention not being able to ask other students if they were gay for fear of being wrong and exposing themselves. The fact that most gay students try to pass within high school keeps them from mounting any sort of substantial resistance.
Perhaps the most important contribution Smith makes to the social process of establishing the “fag” is the way in which he implicates speech and text in the role of determining the “fag.” As Smith writes: “finding the “fag” is socially, indeed dialogically, organized in speech, primarily through gossip, and sometimes textually in the form of graffiti”(316). As his exhibits indicate, the conversations of many students in high school centered around who was a “fag” and for what reasons. The diction used to describe “fag” is itself pejorative—“queer,” “dyke,” “cocksucker” and positions people in relation to “fag.” It is very rare (and magnanimous) show of resistance that the “fag” in Exhibit 20 was able to respond, “I am so, and I’m proud of it.” Interestingly, he was able to appropriate text, in the form of the pink triangle, to mount his resistance. This gives an impression of the power of text in mediating relations of power between the hegemonic (read heterosexual) and subordinate identities (read gay) within the gender regime. I do not wish to pursue this point to far, however, because this brave young man did ultimately end up quitting school.
There is another way in which text is a part of establishing and regulating “fag.” Smith looks at the importance of graffiti in producing “fag.” In Exhibit 20 an interviewee recalls a boys’ washroom in his high school that had “Anyone caught going in this washroom, we know is a faggot” scrawled somewhere within it. This little bit of graffiti is in fact a massive coercive tool. Not only does it create “fag” as a possibility and something to be avoided, monstrous and despised, but it also “coordinat[es] a social course of action—a form of consciousness : Even if nobody was seen using this toilet, everyone is alerted to be on the lookout for a possible ‘fag’(321). There is a hint of irony here in that heterosexual freedom might possibly be constrained as these young men overtly seek to avoid being labeled “fag” and therefore avoid the washroom. This is largely because, in the process of identifying “fags,” correct identification is subordinate to producing “fag” as an object to be loathed.
The anecdote of the washroom is also a disturbing account of the complicity of a reputedly progressive English teacher in reproducing the ideology of “fag.” The fact that he participated in the “game” of determining who was a “fag” by teasing the students who stood too close to the washroom meant that he perpetuated the ideology of “fag.” The fact that the student who reported this anecdote identified the teacher as being more progressive than most others gives an impression of the ubiquity of the problem of homophobia within schools.
Smith’s article is disturbing in the sense that it traces the experience of “fag” from the moment that “fag” is produced as a social possibility, through being identified as “fag”—quite possibly incorrectly, to the moment when the homophobe reacts to the “fag” with verbal and or physical abuse. In his accounts, Smith finds “how the social organization of homophobic courses of action unfold in school settings, starting with talk and ending in physical violence”(318). At times, Smith makes the chain of events sound like an inexorable process. One interviewee responds to the word “fag” when it is used by homophobes as being a particularly hate laden word. Another participant marvels at the fact that even though he was openly gay he never experienced any more severe physical violence than being jostled in the hall. Another student recalls being tripped with his lunch tray in the cafeteria. We need look no further than the evening news for evidence of homophobia in its more extreme forms.
Once “fags” have been identified then, interviewees mention, the process of social exclusion begins. In Exhibit 13 the participant talks about how exclusion can escalate into open harassment. It is not difficult to conceive then why the interviewee in Exhibit 14 speculates that “George” was actually driven out of school because of his severe feelings of exclusion. There are serious consequences for being found out and the threat of physical violence is only one of them. The social exclusion that the “fag” feels is a formidable barrier to learning.
I opened by saying that it was my opinion that the article should be mandatory reading for everyone practicing in education. It was largely Smith’s theorizing of graffiti that persuaded me of this. He points out that graffiti can be used to identify the “fag” and “a depersonalized form of threat and harassment against an individual is produced, coming from no one in particular, but inciting readers in general to marginalize and attack the gay student they identify”(320). Not only does the graffiti lash out locally, but, as I have discussed, the text as a form of discourse serves to create “fag” as an ideological possibility and positions people in relation to it. “Fag” is something that you allow yourself to be identified as at your own peril, something from which you stay closeted, and/or something you openly search out and persecute. Graffiti are a particularly intransigent problem to face insofar as they are rarely erased. Perhaps in the minds of many administrators “fags” are something that simply do not exist or the existence of which they will not tolerate to exist within their schools in which case they come to view graffiti as either harmless or proscriptive.
There does seem to be some silence in Smith’s article around the issue of knowledge produced by gay students. There are a number of public washrooms I have used where I have noted gay men soliciting gay men. I would be interested in knowing if this is something that takes place at the high school level, or if gay students (aside from the triangle) tried to mount any resistance against heterosexism or omnipresent heterosexuality using graffiti.
In the section of the essay subtitled “The Dialogic of the Stigma of ’Fag’: Gay Consciousness and Self-Identification” Smith points out some more of the consequences of the ideology of “fag.” Smith opens by stating that “students first learn to identify “fags” and how to treat them through the social organization of talk and text in school” (321). This can make for a pained and difficult process of self identification for some students. They learn that “fag” is something monstrous even before they learn their own place in the gender hierarchy. Exhibit 25 demonstrates the lengths it is necessary for some students to go to in order to not be found out. This student acted so vehemently when being accused of being a “fag” that he convinced his accuser that he was not. The subtext of this is that he had to ostensibly acquiesce to the notion that a “fag” is something abhorrent. Even though the student had a chuckle to himself after his accuser left it is conceivable that there would be a certain amount of self loathing for young gays who first learn that “fags” are to be abhorred and then later “Yep, I’m gay.” The duplicitous behavior that is a survival mechanism for a number of gays crops up again in Exhibit 46 when the interviewee talks about being persecuted by a physical education teacher whom he at times suspected of being gay. Here again heterosexist hegemony is served—gays police themselves without heterosexuals ever having to intervene.
Again, Smith and I both speculate that there is potentially a significant number of gay students not represented in his research—the percentage of gay students without adequate self-esteem to step forward during the self-selection process. More research needs to be done to determine how negative and contradictory feelings play out in young gay and lesbian lives. It is only by reaching these students that we will begin to get a better understanding of how to tackle the problem of how low self esteem intersects with gay at-risk school behavior and suicide.
I will close with a few remarks about how the school as an institution is implicated in the ideology of “fag.” I have already touched on its complicity in not erasing homophobic graffiti. Hopefully the day will come when it also has to answer for the silences in its curriculum. Not only does Exhibit 53 point to the omissions of gay history and literature, but as a practicing high school teacher I can bear witness to the fact that there is nothing in the English or History curriculum that explicitly addresses homosexuality (I do not intend the term as a pathology). The consequences of this for gay students is inexcusable. Not only do they face persecution from their peers and teachers, but they are, as far as their studies are concerned, something that does not exist.

WORKS CITED

Smith, George W. “The Ideology of ‘Fag’: The School Experience of Gay Students”.
Dorothy E. Smith ed. Sociological Quarterly, Volume 39, Number 2, pages 309-335.
Berkely: University of California Press, 1998.

“The Ideology Of “Fag””
Article Review

For: Kevin Davison
By: Russell Dawson
Course: GEDU 6557 (02)
Date: 14 April, 1999