Abstract
A growing body of research tackles the issues of masculinity, sexuality, and homophobic bullying in schools as news coverage of adolescent sexting, same-sex homecoming royalty, and gay teen suicides across the US thrives. At the same time, the Catholic Church experiences an unprecedented dearth of young men seeking the priesthood and an ongoing global child abuse scandal. This is the world into which Kevin J. Burke introduces Masculinities and Other Hopeless Causes at an All-Boys Catholic School, a critical investigation of an educational institution that revolves around ideologies of gender and religion.
Having attended an all-male Catholic high-school himself, Burke engages in a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic methods to examine the interplay between religion, gender, sexuality, and agency in the formative educational experience of adolescent boys. The boys in his study simultaneously exist within and utilize religious, gendered, and sexualized discourses to make sense of and construct their own understandings of self. Burke describes the construction of both individual and institutional identity and boundaries through discussion of three themes: fag discourse, the discursive construction of homosociality, and a narrow conceptualization of masculinity.
He illustrates the first theme, “fag discourse,” by describing the complex ways in which the boys claim their own agency in the discursive arena of the school. According to Burke, the boys disrupt hierarchies and unsettle traditional notions of hegemonic masculinity by constantly negotiating and renegotiating masculinity and sexuality. They utilize the terms gay and fag to police classmates but also, at times, as coping mechanisms. In the specific context of an all-male school, fag discourse is also used to enforce and maintain homosocial relationships. Burke points out that the boys’ multiple usages of fag discourse do not appear to be deliberately homophobic, but being tagged as a “fag” is nonetheless described as a stain that must be passed on to another as soon as possible. It is passed on through the feminizing of another or through the act of attaching an image of a phallus to another.
Burke explores his second theme, compulsory homosociality, by describing the various ways in which women and girls are abjectified through the meaning-making processes of the boys and the school. In one of the more poignant moments of the book, he describes the boys at a sporting event shouting young women out of “their section” of the stands repeatedly over the course of the game. The shouting serves to protect the homosocial environment and brotherhood of the boys, as the presence of women and girls is framed in various ways as a pollutant. According to Burke, this compulsory homosociality is reinforced by the religious and institutional presence of women only as mothers, saints, or otherwise desexualized figures. The boys disrespect women who they perceive as sexually available because they fall into the only other female category these Catholic boys are taught, that of the toxic Eve.
The final theme, the narrow conceptualization of masculinity, is articulated most fully in Burke’s discussion of the religious retreat, Kairos. On Kairos, the boys are encouraged, and in many ways manipulated, into opening themselves up emotionally and spiritually in ways that are typically policed by “fag discourse” in their daily lives. The notion that, as men, they are only permitted to experience emotionality in very limited ways is reinforced through the implicit impermanence of the accepting atmosphere of the retreat. Burke also describes this limiting of conceptualizations of masculinity in a range of other venues including coaching strategies.
Given the complex web of discursive forces Burke enumerates, it makes sense that the boys struggle to simultaneously exist within and utilize religious, gendered, and sexualized discourses to make sense of and construct their own understandings of self. This analysis of a single-gender parochial school is refreshing, first and foremost, because it provides a rare, critical, and insider perspective on a Catholic educational institution, but it is perhaps not critical enough at times. The tone sometimes strays from explanatory to excusatory in regards to the boys’ use of homophobic and misogynistic discourses. However, the work Burke does in this book to map their agency, constraints, and the social forces informing their meaning-making processes is nonetheless a much-needed next step for Men’s Studies, Queer Studies, and Critical Theology.