Visited a secondhand bookstore and found Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change (2016) by Pascoe and Bridges!
Whereas we often easily recognize women's lives as gendered (in fact we have established entire classes, departments, and bodies of scholarship around women's studies), masculinity is less easy to recognize and often seems invisible. Men's lives, however, are just as organized by gender as are women's. We too often fail to appreciate this. Why? Because power renders certain identities and structures less visible than others. The mechanisms that afford privilege are often invisible to those on the receiving end of that privilege; meanwhile, what makes people marginalized is all too apparent to the marginalized. As Michael Kimmel writes, "Marginality is visible and painfully visceral. Privilege is invisible and painlessly pleasant" (1990:94). When privilege is "working," those most advantaged by systems of power and inequality are relatively unaware of their advantages (e.g., McIntosh 1988).
So why is it so important to recognize men as gendered? Because gender is one of the major ways through which power structures, privilege, and inequality are reproduced—in addition to (and in combination with) race and class. Therefore, it is important to see men as gendered because masculinity replicates power and affords power to those with that identity. It is important to investigate masculinity to understand the ways in which politics, the state, institutions of school and work, religion, family, and nationality are infused with, and themselves shape, masculinity.
When we see inequality as an issue of individual hate, bias, prejudice, or in Sarah's words, bigotry, we can miss the way it operates in organizations like American High and in social institutions in general. These processes, the processes that make systemic inequalities look like individual ones, do the work of reproducing inequality with little overt hate or formal exclusion while simultaneously covering up this reproduction. Even in an organization where inequality is seen as undesirable, normalizing processes like that of the student citizen reproduce inequality without explicit processes of marginalization. Thus inequality at a school that has no room for hate becomes a matter of highlighting exceptional threats, individual feelings, individual solutions, and rituals of tolerance among young people and staff, rather than addressing the mundane and everyday ways inequality is instantiated.
- C. J. Pascoe, Nice is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (p. 183, 2023)
It may be tempting to think about racialized emotions in terms of hate or rage, emotions that we associate with racist beliefs or practices, but as Bonilla-Silva points out, these emotions don't necessarily need to be negative. In fact, racialized emotions at American High suggest that a focus on love and kindness can cloud the existence and persistence of racial inequality while seeming to address it. This regime of kindness- from signs about hate, to interpersonal niceness, to positive messages on a bathroom poster, to dictates about politeness that include avoiding politics- may be something that allows White folks to feel like they are addressing racial inequality while simultaneously permitting them to avoid the hard work of actually interrupting racial inequality, interruptions that may come at a cost to them.
- C. J. Pascoe, Nice is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (p. 71, 2023)
This silence about the MAGA hats symbolizes a more general approach to racial inequality at American High. When talking about the assembly and the silence that followed, Lisa, a White parent of two American students, suggested that the lack of a public response had to do with conceptions of diversity itself at American. As Lisa explained, "It turns into this weird, well, you have to honor my diversity of being a MAGA person. You're the hater if you don't want me to wear this hat in your face." Diversity, in this sense, becomes less about purposeful inclusion of historically excluded groups of people and becomes quite simply about a celebration, or at least a tolerance, of difference. Difference itself becomes a valuable social goal, whether or not that difference has historically been rooted in, shaped by, or been given rise to by inequality. We might think of this type of diversity, a diversity that celebrates difference regardless of power differentials or inequality, as a benign diversity.
A benign diversity approach positions diversity as a cultural value, but limits the linking of diversity to inequality, instead framing something like racism as an individual problem of offense or hate rather than a form of systemic exclusion and domination…
- C. J. Pascoe, Nice is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (p. 70, 2023)
Amid this joyful celebration, Nancy, a middle-aged White mom, turned to her son as they walked out of the auditorium and asked with a gentle smile, "Are you inspired?" The members of the GSA ended the night by taking selfies with each other and with the drag queens amid an excited, festive energy more typically exhibited by young folks at school celebrations like homecoming, prom, or football games.
From my seat in the back of the auditorium I watched their delight and joy as tears ran down my cheeks, tears that spill over even now as I write this story. On this night, the ability to bear witness to a queer celebration in and facilitated by a school with parental support felt like the joyful culmination of years of queer and ally activism by and on behalf of young folks. Not only were these students experiencing an affirming school-based event free from harm and harassment, they were also getting to participate in a specifically queer form of celebration- drag. Drag shows have long been an important part of LGBTQ life, emerging out of collective and often underground practices in marginalized communities. Historically at these gatherings, shows, or balls, men would "cross dress," often an illegal practice then, and participate in a beauty pageant-like event involving dancing, humor, and competition. These festive events became important gatherings, as well as locations of joy and celebration in queer communities. To have a drag show at a school suggests that rather than being merely tolerated, meaningful parts of LGBTQ life and culture can actually be a part of in-school life for young people, something that is especially important in a time of rising transphobia and anti-queer sentiment in some public schools. Putting on this show allowed young folks to participate in a ritual that connects queer generations, allowing them to rejoice in their identities and community in a deeply emotional way, which makes what came next even more notable.
In a regularly scheduled GSA meeting in the weeks following the show, Rose, a young White teacher with turquoise hair who served as an adult advisor to the group, let club members know she needed to share with them some feedback she had received about the show from the district's equity coordinator, Vanessa. According to Rose, Vanessa expressed three specific concerns: First, she worried that the trans students would be the target of public outrage and anger if there was pushback to the drag show. Second, she suggested that the drag show may affect trans students who were not "out," asking what if "people ask to borrow a trans student's wig?" Finally, according to Rose, Vanessa proposed that the drag show itself could be offensive to trans students since drag usually consists of cisgender folks dressing like the "opposite" here Rose gestured with air quotes-"sex."
- C. J. Pascoe, Nice is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (p, 42-3, 2023)
[When organizations employ a diversity regime and use their power to co-opt the language of equality to deny material equality. It’s the responsibility and fault of the role, not the individual being coerced to enforce the rules of the depersonalized/abstract organization, yeah? Everyone is always just ‘trying to do their job’ while simultaneously claiming that they aren’t complicit. I wonder if we’ll see a new wave of terminology to reclaim and clarify the meaning of words like ‘diversity’ that have been strategically bleached of all meaning.]
