The Ideology of “Fag”: The School Experience of Gay Students

Abstract

used to devise ways of seeing social organization in the speech and graffiti in which the ideology of fag is realized in schools. His conception of the dialogic explicates the relationship between researcher and informants, as well as the dialogues internal to informants' narratives. Excerpts from their stories create windows into the local practices of the ideology of fag as they experienced it and made available the social organization of their everyday school lives. Analysis focuses on how speech, whether as verbal abuse or homophobic graffiti, concerts antigay activities, articulating to the wider organization of gender and the school as a regime. Informants' stories describe how fag as a stigmatized object is constituted in gossip. Aspects of youths' appearance are interpreted with reference to fag as an underlying pattern. Everyday practices of fag-baiting, such as poking fun, teasing, name calling, scrawling graffiti on lockers, insulting and harassing someone, produce the fag as a social object. The language intends a course of action isolating the gay student and inciting to physical violence. Verbal abuse both is and initiates attack. As a form of public speech, graffiti constitute a depersonalized form of threat and harassment. Whether a gay student is identified as fag or not, he acquires a gay identity/ consciousness through the practices of the ideology of fag. What the article describes is a normal part of school organization. The social relations of heterosexuality and patriarchy dominate its public space. Being gay is never spoken of positively (in these informants' experience). Teachers are reported as being generally complicit by their silence if not actively participating in the ideology. Attacks on and ostracism of gay students are taken for granted. The heterosexism of the regime makes fag the stigmatized other and, reflexively, fag as stigmatized other feeds into the regime's heterosexism. Thus, the gay students' stories show the school's complicity in the everyday cruelties of the enforcement of heterosexist/homophobic hegemony. Gay and lesbian youth attend schools throughout the nation .... These students-from every ethnic and racial background, in urban, suburban, and rural schools-have sat