Punishing Black Masculinities in School

Ann Arnet Ferguson’s (2001) book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, is a wonderful school ethnography. I regularly assign what is probably the most reproduced chapter in the book—“Naughty by Nature”—in courses I teach about gender. She deftly illustrates the ways that teachers, administrators, and public schools more generally participate in criminalizing young black boys and masculinities.

The book is probably best known for Ferguson’s conceptualization of what she refers to as “adultification.” “By this I mean their transgressions are made to take on a sinister, intentional, fully conscious tone that is stripped of any element of childish naïveté” (here: 83). Young black boys’ behavior is interpreted through discursive frames usually applied to adults and their bad behavior is understood to stand not only for what they are capable of, but of who they will become. Pascoe (here and here) finds something similar in her discussion of boys’ use of “fag” in school. Black boys were punished more heavily and immediately for using the term while white boys were often ignored.

Ferguson also, however, has a fantastic discussion of physical space in the school—the social sites of punishment. She highlights the significance of the spaces in which punishment occurs in wonderful ethnographic detail. The second chapter of the book—“The Punishing Room”—details two separate rooms in the school reserved for students who misbehave: the “Punishing Room” and the “Jailhouse.”

Laud Humphreys’ Discussion of Space in “Tearoom Trade”

Re-reading Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade (1970), I was reminded of his wonderful analysis of sexuality and space. For those unfamiliar with the study, Humphreys studied sex between men in public park restrooms. He was interested in how these interactions occurred and who was involved. His results were astounding. He found that a large percentage of the men participating were married, many were religious (mostly Catholic), a large percentage were either in the military or veterans, and–perhaps most interestingly of all–a large majority of the men that did not identify as gay were socially and politically conservative. In fact, Humphreys found that only 14% of the men in his study could be said to be a “typical” gay man. Most of them, in fact, were not gay (meaning they did not identify as gay). Rather, these were heterosexual men who sometimes (and for many of them often) had homosexual encounters in public restrooms.

Humphreys’ work is regrettably most commonly discussed as an example of unethical research (see here and here for notable exceptions). He went undercover studying this practice, serving as a lookout (or “watch queen”) for police or anyone else who might pose a threat to the men involved. During his research, he also recorded the license plate numbers of participants’ cars and used public records to obtain names and addresses. A year following his research, he interviewed about 50 of the men under the guise of a survey study on mental health. The ethics of the research have been a hot topic in research methods courses since the 70s. Focusing solely on whether or not Humphreys’ research was “ethical” or not, however, sidesteps a conversation about what he actually found and why his research was so important.