Sexual Fundamentalism and Performances of Masculinity: An Ethnographic Scene Study

ABSTRACT The study on which this paper is based examined the experiences of students in order to develop a theoretical and empirically grounded account of the dynamic social forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced by youth in their unique contexts of North American urban schooling. The ethnographic scenes, organized into four “beats,” theatrically render the cultural performances of youth and researchers in the context of a diverse urban drama classroom. In this classroom, students, teacher, and researchers engage in a lively and often disturbing debate. Questions about the ways in which sexuality and other identity markers are socially constructed and performed, how the moral, gendered and discoursed cultures created in classrooms re-inscribe historical inequities are central to the ethnographic scenes, drawn from field notes, researcher reflections, interview transcripts, and the epilogue which follows. Aspects of youth culture, performance (cultural and artistic), the construction of identities–particularly in relation to theories of masculinity and the (heterosexual) “pass”–are deconstructed in the epilogue.