Dude You Re A Fag Essay

In 2007, C. J. Pascoe wrote the novel, “Dude, You’re a Fag,” to give readers an inside look on sexuality at an American high school named River High. Throughout the book Pascoe tries to get a sense of the relationship between the different sexualities of the high school along with their genders. The novel is written with the high school being the social institution. Pascoe did her experiment for a year and a half and throughout the year and a half she discovered a plethora of information to fulfill her knowledge on the situation. Where she focused on males and females, she tended to focus on the males a little more than the females, and with this she found that a major way that boys acted out to express their masculinity was to use the word “fag,” which we might have presumed from the title of the

The dictionary defines it as a term used to refer to a male homosexual, and also as a dislikable person. With that being said, the individuals at River High that were being called fags given a homosexual status and being brought down because of it. In contrast, gay was not normally used as a term referring to homosexuals, but rather a word that was used when something wasn’t cool. The book begins with the students at River High performing a skit called, “Revenge of the Nerds.” In this skit, two students act out a variety of different “stereotypes,” starting out as nerds, and then switching to gansters, and lastly to gym rats, with the girls in the skit picking the new and revised nerds because they were now dressed in new seats and towards the end of the skit had scared the gansters away and were therefore seen as very masculine and cool. Most of the experiment that Pascoe was doing revolves around this general idea. For those confused about what masculinity is, Pascoe also takes the time to explain all of the different kinds of masculinity within the first couple