{"id":1222,"date":"2015-03-19T13:03:58","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T13:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2015-09-09T21:59:07","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T21:59:07","slug":"drawing-race-and-class-boundaries-with-sexual-discourses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2015\/03\/19\/drawing-race-and-class-boundaries-with-sexual-discourses\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawing Race and Class Boundaries with Sexual Discourses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe fag\u201d and \u201cthe slut\u201d are both symbols of contemporary gender relations. Stories about each provide social mechanisms for bonding, betraying, and belonging. Research suggests<\/a> that \u201cfag\u201d and \u201cslut\u201d are among the more ubiquitous insults traded among young people. Each is simultaneously all about sexuality and has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. For instance, most of CJ Pascoe<\/a>\u2019s research participants in her study of the use of \u201cfag\u201d<\/a> among boys at River High said that they would never aim the insult at someone who is \u201cactually gay.\u201d Pascoe suggests that this indicates a need for a more nuanced way of understanding sexuality\u2014not as some thing<\/em> inhering in specific bodies or identities, but as something capable of operating to discursively <\/em>construct social boundaries in social life as well. \u201cSlut\u201d is used in similar ways\u2014as a mechanism of gender policing. Most of the research focusing on either is primarily about gender policing and gender and sexual inequality. But, research shows that sexual discourses play a key role in racial and class inequality as well.<\/p>\n

\"51TJlLPKAJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Pascoe discovered that \u201chomophobia\u201d didn\u2019t fully explain exactly what she observed at River High. It was a gendered and racialized form of homophobia that Pascoe refers to as \u201cfag discourse.\u201d Fag discourse is all about drawing boundaries around acceptable masculinity. Boys hurled the insult at each other in jest, sometimes at random, and as a part of a social game\u2014one in which they were incredibly invested. But it was a \u201cgame\u201d primarily played among white boys at River High. There\u2019s a whole section of her book dedicated to \u201cRacializing the Fag\u201d that explores the intricacies of this interesting nuance associated with fag discourse. At River High, Black boys and white boys rely on distinct symbolic resources when \u201cdoing gender.\u201d For instance, paying \u201cexcessive\u201d attention to one\u2019s clothing or identifying with an ability to dance well put white boys at risk of being labeled a \u201cfag,\u201d but worked to enhance Black boys\u2019 masculine status. Pascoe also discovered that Black boys were unable to rely on fag discourse in quite the same way that white boys did. Indeed, though they were much less likely to use the term, Black boys at River High were much more likely to be punished by school authorities when they did. Black boys were also the only students reported to school authorities for saying \u201cfag\u201d by their peers. White boys, in other words, relied on racial hierarchies to control the meaning of the discourse such that saying \u201cfag\u201d was interpreted as \u201cplayful\u201d and \u201cmeaningless\u201d when they used the term and \u201cdangerous\u201d and \u201charassing\u201d when Black boys did.<\/p>\n

\"armstrong<\/a>In a separate study of sexuality in college life<\/a>, Elizabeth A. Armstrong<\/a>, Laura T. Hamilton<\/a>, Elizabeth M. Armstrong<\/a>, and J. Lotus Seely<\/a> investigated the meaning of the term \u201cslut\u201d among college women. This paper<\/a> is a part of Armstrong and Hamilton\u2019s larger research project and book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality<\/em><\/a>. Armstrong et al. discovered that \u201cslut\u201d had a fluid meaning for college women. Not all of them understood the same sorts of behavior as putting someone at risk of receiving the insult. At the institution at which the study was conducted, they found that social status among women fell largely along class lines. \u201cHigh-status\u201d women were almost entirely upper and upper-middle class. This was at least partially due to the fact that performing the femininity necessary for classification required class resources (joining a sorority, having the \u201cright\u201d kind of body, hair, clothes, etc.).<\/p>\n

Armstrong, et al. found that high-status women used \u201cslut\u201d to refer to a specific configuration of femininity, one they defined as \u201ctrashy.\u201d While high-status women rarely actually deployed classist language, their comments relied on understandings of performance of gender stereotypically associated with less-affluent women\u2014what Mimi Schippers<\/a> would refer to as \u201cpariah femininities<\/a>\u201d\u2014and allowed them to situate their own sexual behavior and identities as beyond reproach. Similar to Julie Bettie<\/a>\u2019s study<\/a> of white and Mexican-American girls, Armstrong et al. found that performing \u201cclassy\u201d or \u201cpreppy\u201d femininity (a performance that is simultaneously gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed) worked to shield high-status women from \u201cslut\u201d stigma.\u00a0 The low-status women in Armstrong et al.’s study understood \u201cslut discourse\u201d to be more about sexuality than gender. Situating themselves as outside of the alleged \u201chookup culture,\u201d low-status women used \u201cslut\u201d to stigmatize the sexual behavior of high-status women (sex outside of relationships). In an analogous way to Pascoe’s findings regarding race and fag discourse, these classed differences involving women drawing moral boundaries around femininity were enforced unevenly. While both groups reconstituted \u201cslut\u201d to work to their advantage, casual sexual activity posed little reputational risk for high-status women, so long as they continued to perform a \u201cclassy\u201d configuration of femininity in the process.\u00a0 Similar to Pascoe\u2019s research, high-status women here relied on symbolic class boundaries to control the meaning of the discourse such that participation in casual sexual interactions took on a different meaning when coupled with \u201cclassy\u201d performances of gender.\u00a0\u00a0 Here, class worked to insulate high-status women just as race worked to insulate white boys in Pascoe\u2019s research.<\/p>\n

Both studies illustrate important intersections between sexuality, race and class. Sexual discourses are invoked in a variety of ways throughout social life. They play an integral role in policing gender boundaries. But it is also important to continue to consider the role that sexual discourses play in bolstering boundaries around race and class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe fag\u201d and \u201cthe slut\u201d are both symbols of contemporary gender relations. Stories about each provide social mechanisms for bonding, betraying, and belonging. Research suggests that \u201cfag\u201d and \u201cslut\u201d are among the more ubiquitous insults traded among young people. Each is simultaneously all about sexuality and has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. For instance, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":1223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30335,55,26,175],"tags":[34984,34982,20802,34980,49,20803,34983,14,25810,34989,34981],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feminist-sociology","category-gender","category-public-sociology","category-sociology","tag-c-j-pascoe","tag-dude-youre-a-fag","tag-elizabeth-armstrong","tag-fag-discourse","tag-homophobia","tag-laura-hamilton","tag-paying-for-the-party","tag-race","tag-sexual-prejudice","tag-sexual-stigma","tag-slut-discourse"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/files\/2015\/03\/51TJlLPKAJL._SY344_BO1204203200_.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}