launius / brains versus brawn
Christie Launius
Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized
Masculinity in Literacy Narratives by Rose,
Rodriguez, Villanueva, and Gilyard
A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives—Mike Rose’s Lives on the
Boundary, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps, and
Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self—shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these
writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his
conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and does so, moreover, in ways
that are linked to his views on literacy and education.
A
s a longtime teacher of first-year writing courses whose research is focused
on twentieth-century U.S. working-class literature, my interest in literacy narratives is two-fold. Within working-class literature, it is my contention that
what I call the “working-class encounter with the academy” is a persistent
thematic preoccupation of twentieth-century U.S. writers from working-class
backgrounds. One of the hallmarks of these texts is the “two worlds” trope, in
which the worlds of home and school are configured as opposed and in conflict. That trope is readily apparent in four influential literacy narratives that
circulate widely within the field of composition studies: Richard Rodriguez’s
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Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1984); Mike Rose’s
Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements
of America’s Educationally Underprepared (1989); Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the
Self: A Study of Language Competence (1991); and Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps:
From an American Academic of Color (1993). In each of these books, the writers construct a narrative of their lives, starting from childhood, and offer their
reflections, analyses, and arguments about the politics of language and literacy
from this vantage point. These four texts focus on the process of acquiring
academic literacy, and the consequences of its acquisition.
In “Reading Literacy Narratives,” Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen
offer the useful reminder that literacy narratives, which they define as stories
“that foreground issues of language acquisition and literacy” (513), are constructed through and against societal notions about literacy. Chief among
these societal notions is what they call, via the work of Harvey J. Graff, the
“literacy myth,” which is a way of thinking about literacy as a sort of panacea.1
The literacy myth is the idea that increasing literacy “necessarily leads to economic development, cultural progress, and individual improvement” (512).
They identify themselves as interested in challenging the assumptions behind
the literacy myth, especially the perceived connection “between schooling and
social mobility” (512), and ask the questions, “What if education does not
necessarily mean advancement? What if more education does not necessarily
mean better lives?” (515).
Eldred and Mortensen’s interrogation of the literacy myth resonates with
recent work in working-class studies that seeks to demonstrate the ways that
many narratives of upward class mobility obtained via formal education foreground the loss, guilt, regret, ambivalence, anger, and feelings of homelessness
that accompany the process of higher education; these narratives challenge the
notion that upward mobility is always and inherently positive. For example,
the title of Renny Christopher’s article, “Rags to Riches to Suicide: Unhappy
Narratives of Upward Mobility,” gives a sense of her agenda in establishing
what she calls a “sub-genre of U.S. working class literature” (79). According to
Christopher, “The paradigm of this subgenre is the recounting not only of the
struggles of a protagonist who originates in the working class to follow the myth
of the ‘American Dream’ along the line of upward mobility, but the ultimate
homelessness with which the protagonist, who discovers the lie built into the
dream, is left, and the writers’ refusal to endorse the protagonist’s arrival in
the middle class as an unquestionably positive outcome” (80). A questioning
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of the literacy myth is also in evidence in the editorial introductions and in
many of the contributions to anthologies published in the last few decades by
and about academics from working-class backgrounds, including This Fine
Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, in which
co-editor Carolyn Law writes that “In my trajectory from working-class family
of origin to the threshold of middle-class professional status, I have suffered
a loss my present context doesn’t even recognize as a loss; my education has
destroyed something even while it has been re-creating me in its own image”
(Dews and Law 1).2 Importantly, scholarship on the working-class encounter
with the academy does not stop at “reciting class injuries” (248), to use Janet
Zandy’s phrase, because “[i]t is important to recognize and name incidents of
class prejudice, hatred even, but it is just as important to use those occasions
as compost for other projects” (248). In “The Parrot or the Pit Bull: Trying to
Explain Working Class Life,” Mary Childers identifies some possible projects
that can come from the “compost” of writing about class injuries sustained
in the encounter with the academy; these projects include “fighting to make
universities in the United States places where working-class experience can
be remembered, described, honored, and changed” (218).
Eldred and Mortensen acknowledge that not all literacy narratives work
to perpetuate the literacy myth, pointing out that the genre includes texts that
“both challenge and affirm culturally scripted ideas about literacy” (513), and
indeed the works described above fit into this category. The four literacy narratives under consideration here also cast a critical eye on the literacy myth, and
in what follows, I read against the grain to show how issues of gender inform
them;3 more specifically, it is my contention that a feminist reading of these
literacy narratives shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences
of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these
writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and moreover,
does so in ways that are linked to his views on literacy and education. Their
struggles over masculinity, then, affect not just their acquisition of literacy,
but also the political perspective they derive from that literacy acquisition, an
argument I will flesh out more fully in my concluding section.
When I first began thinking about these texts, my primary focus was on
the shared class background of the four writers; it was only after countless
hours that I began to see the significance of gender to understanding them. A
large part of why it took so long for the gender issues to come into focus is that
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they are submerged within these texts; gender greatly impacts these writers’
encounters with the academy, but it is not, for the most part, explicitly and
consciously discussed. This point is key, as the field of masculinity studies is
predicated on the opening theoretical move of making masculinity visible and
exposing to scrutiny that which had previously been invisible, and therefore all
the more powerful.4 Though these literacy narratives explicitly discuss issues of
race and class in relation to the acquisition of academic literacy, gender is, for
the most part, left unremarked on; my task has been to tease out these writers’
understandings of masculinity through a strategy of close reading.
Given that “[w]hat it means to be a man in America depends heavily on
one’s class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, region of the country” (Kimmel 3–4),
it is not surprising that there is no single understanding of masculinity in
these four texts, a result of the many identity differences among their authors,
as well as their differing relations to it. Race and ethnicity are clearly central
here, as Richard Rodriguez writes of his working-class background in relation
to being Mexican American, Gilyard in relation to being African American,
and Villanueva in relation to being Puerto Rican and having African American
friends. I would add that while Mike Rose does not explicitly reflect on how his
whiteness shapes his encounter with the academy and his narrative, his text
could certainly be read through that lens, and understood, as well, in terms of
his ethnicity as an Italian American.
In spite of this and other differences, a few commonalities emerge: all are
writing about their experience of boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood,
and thus their focus is on forming a sense of themselves as boys and young men
in relation to their friends, school peers, fathers, and father-figures.5 There is
also a focus on sports and athleticism, displays of strength, and the ability to
physically and verbally defend oneself against threats and slights. I see evidence
in all four of these narratives that these authors have an explicit or implicit
understanding that there are, to use David Morgan’s words, “two contrasting
ways of ‘doing’ masculinity . . . [which] are easily recognized within certain
constructions of social class” (170). Morgan continues, “The one is collective,
physical and embodied, and oppositional. The other is individualistic, rational,
and relatively disembodied. These can be broadly described as working class
and middle class masculinities, respectively” (170). These texts express the
belief, at key points, that working-class masculinity is “real” masculinity, and
that middle-class masculinity is not really masculine at all; significantly, these
authors also share the mostly unconscious anxiety about the loss of workingclass masculinity as a result of middle-class schooling.
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A Third World: The Conflict Begins
All four of these narratives present a clear split between the worlds of home and
school. However, they all also introduce a third world into the equation, one that
is both opposed to the world of school but is also distinct from, and in some
cases in opposition to, the working-class family. This third world comes into
play around the time of adolescence, and in fact its introduction is a product
of these writers’ experience of adolescence; its central characteristic is a preoccupation with working-class masculinity, mostly as displayed by male peers.
Further complicating an explanation of this third world is the fact that, while
it stands in opposition to the world of school, it is often in relation to school
(both the physical space of school and the values it represents) that the third
world comes into focus.
For Villanueva, the third world is el bloque. As he remembers it, the codes
of masculinity on el bloque defined his life both inside and outside of school as a
teenager. These codes included the ability to hold one’s own in an environment
rife with violence. As Villanueva remembers, “Didn’t seem to be a day go by when
there wasn’t a fight in the halls at Hamilton” (3). To survive in this world, one
had to be able to negotiate this terrain. Villanueva identifies himself as someone
who was explicitly concerned with living up to the codes of masculinity that
governed his neighborhood. He remembers (writing of himself in the thirdperson), “He was scared to be round bellied and thin armed in this new block,
in Hamilton” (4). This fear prompts him to undertake a body project. He buys
“the basic 110-pound weight set” (4) and begins training with his friend Papo.
“Sidewalk University,” otherwise known as the school of the streets, is the
name Gilyard uses to denote the existence of a third world in which he “enrolls”
around the time he enters junior high. This is a world that is definitely opposed
to the world of school, but neither is it in accord with the values of home and
family: “I became very active, and in many ways a leader, in a cultural system in
which taking from Whites was congratulated and a militant political orientation was favored over the moderate stance the school system, and the home
for that matter, would have me assume” (111). In the analysis of his narrative,
Gilyard turns to the work of Eugene Perkins, a researcher who “offers a taxonomy
of character types usually found among the youth of the Black community”
(111) to explain his “movement from being a ‘Regular’ to becoming a ‘Cool Cat’”
(111).6 Perkins’s categories are gender-specific, though they are not named as
such: The Cool Cat is a leader of his peers in large part through modeling a
valued form of masculinity. The Cool Cat “rarely allows his real inner feelings
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to surface” and is “cool, stern, impersonal in the face of all kinds of adversities”
(112). Interestingly, Perkins’s description of this character does not emphasize
physical strength, but rather “neat appearance, skill in verbal manipulation,
and an uncanny ability to stay out of serious trouble” (112). The Cool Cat, then,
relies on a cool appearance and ability to spar verbally as well as physically.
Rose’s third world is of another generation of youth culture, one that, by
comparison to Villanueva’s and Gilyard’s, seems innocent. This is the world of
1950s male youth culture. More explicitly than in the other books, Rose explains that the working-class world of his youth valued masculine good looks
and athleticism. “Growing up where I did, I understood and admired physical
prowess, and there was an abundance of muscle here” (27). He later reiterates
that “looks and physical strength were high currency” (29). His descriptions of
both his friends and teachers at his all-male high school focus on their physical attributes and their athletic skills. A boy named Dave Snyder is described
as “a sprinter and halfback of true quality,” while a boy named Ted Richard is
described as a “much-touted Little League pitcher. He was chunky and had a
baby face and came to Our Lady of Mercy as a seasoned street fighter” (27). Of
himself, Rose writes, “I eventually went out for track, but I was no jock” (27).
He seems grateful to have been included as a friend of the boys he describes,
given that he remembers himself as lacking in the “currency” valued so highly
by his peers. Rose, unlike Villanueva and Gilyard, exists on the margins of this
third world, an admirer of its values, but not necessarily embodying them.
Rodriguez is even one step further removed from the “third world” in
his narrative: his third world is the world of los braceros, a world he observes
from afar. Rodriguez describes los braceros, whose bodies he greatly admired,
as “Those men who work with their brazos, their arms; Mexican nationals who
were licensed to work for American farmers in the 1950s” (113). He remembers,
“Los pobres—the poor, the pitiful, the powerless ones. But paradoxically also
powerful men. They were the men with brown-muscled arms I stared at in awe
on Saturday mornings when they showed up downtown like gypsies to shop at
Woolworth’s or Penney’s” (113). Their power, for Rodriguez, comes from their
physically strong bodies, their display of masculinity, which stands in opposition to the construction of masculinity he pursues through education in the
English-speaking world.7 He also admires them because they don’t have to be
concerned with exposing their skin to the sun. Indeed, there seems to be a
connection between their physically strong bodies and their disregard for the
darkening effect of their exposure to the sun:
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I continued to see the braceros, those men I resembled in one way and, in another,
didn’t resemble at all. On the watery horizon of a Valley afternoon, I’d see them.
And though I feared looking like them, it was with silent envy that I regarded
them still. I envied them their physical lives, their freedom to violate the taboo
of the sun. Closer to home I would notice the shirtless construction workers, the
roofers, the sweating men tarring the street in front of the house. And I’d see the
Mexican gardeners. I was unwilling to admit the attraction of their lives. I tried
to deny it by looking away. But what was denied became strongly desired. (126)
The “one way” that Rodriguez resembles these men is that they all have dark
skin. The ways in which he is different from them are multiple. First of all, he
does internalize the “taboo” against the sun, which for him translates into a
detachment from his physical self. He is also not like them because his life,
even at an early age, is on a different trajectory than theirs. He has hopes of
achieving social mobility through education, of moving out of the working
class and into the middle class.
This “third world,” whether participated in or viewed from afar, is the
source of a conflict over the consequences of education for each of these writers. The masculinity that is valued in the “third” world of these writers is at
odds with their pursuit of education. Of the four, Rodriguez is most explicit
about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity, which, in
his formulation, is also coded in racial terms. Rodriguez’s father encouraged his
son’s education as a way to escape the life of physical labor he had been forced
to lead, but in doing so he called attention to the consequences of this choice
to his son’s masculinity. Rodriguez remembers, “It was my father who laughed
when I claimed to be tired by reading and writing. It was he who teased me for
having soft hands. (He seemed to sense that some great achievement of leisure
was implied by my papers and books)” (56).
Rodriguez’s fears of effeminacy not only come from specific interactions
with his father, but, he recalls, from Mexican culture’s “ideal of the macho”
(128), particularly in its insistence “that a man should be feo, fuerte, y formal”
(128; emphasis in original). It is this last characteristic with which Rodriguez
felt his education conflicted. His teachers encouraged him to write about his
personal feelings, something that men in his family rarely talked about, much
less wrote about. Furthermore, he felt “that there was something unmanly
about my attachment to literature” (129).
Villanueva’s awareness of the conflict between school and the masculinity
valued is also couched in racial terms. Recalling a scene from his adolescence,
Villanueva (referring to himself as “Papi”) writes, “Papo, Manny, would wonder
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aloud how Papi could ‘talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk’ and still be ‘so white’ in
private and do so well in school” (5). Papo is confused by Villanueva’s display
of what he sees as contradictory qualities or abilities. Papo believes there is
something incompatible about Villanueva’s “tough-guy” persona and the way
he seems “so white” in private. This statement indicates that, at least for Papo,
the codes of masculinity on el bloque were defined by and identified with racial
identity: more specifically, Puerto Rican and African American identities. Even
more central to my concern, Papo’s comment makes clear the ways in which
this racialized and classed masculinity is seen as incompatible with academic
success.
For Gilyard, the alternative to being a Cool Cat or even a Regular, going
back to Perkins’s terms, is to be a “square” or “lame,”8 which are clearly positions
held in low esteem within the youth culture of which he is a part. Nonetheless,
Gilyard has fleeting moments where he realizes that being a square would
make it easier for him to do well in school. Though Gilyard does not articulate
it specifically, what “lames” lack is the kind of masculinity that he valued and
that was valued among his peers. To give up being a Cool Cat would be to give
up this kind of masculinity, something that Gilyard is not willing to do.
Rose’s conflict over school and masculinity comes from his desire to be
like and liked by his male peers in the vocational track at Our Lady of Mercy.
When he is switched from the vocational track into the college prep track
between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Rose suddenly finds
himself in a different world, with different attitudes and values. The attitude of
the “Voc. Ed.” students, according to Rose, was best captured by Ken Harvey,
who “was good-looking in a puffy way and had a full and oily ducktail and was
a car enthusiast”: he declares in class one day, “I just wanna be average” (28).
Rose calls this attitude a kind of defense mechanism, in which students hide
behind a tough exterior. In switching out of the Voc. Ed. track, Rose is forced
to engage with and become invested in ideas and thinking, which at the time
seems a risky proposition, and which puts him potentially at odds with the
working-class masculinity displayed by his friends in Voc. Ed.
While the specificities of each writer’s understanding of masculinity vary,
and they also stand in different relation to that masculinity, what each shares
is a sense that there is a valued form of masculinity in his working-class peer
group and/or culture at large. Each also shares a sense of pressure to display
this form of masculinity; there is positive reinforcement for doing so, and there
are negative repercussions for failing to do so. This valued form of masculinity
is both classed and racialized, and one of its primary manifestations is physical
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strength. Though each of these writers is interested in what school has to offer,
they share a suspicion about giving up this form of masculinity.
Managing the Conflict
With regard to how these four writers manage the conflict that arises between
their desire to be masculine according to the codes of their communities and
their desire to obtain an education, one of the first things that emerges is that
there is a divide between Rodriguez and the other three writers. Though Rodriguez perceives the conflict between his desire to obtain an education and
his desire to be like los braceros, he does not act on this perception until the
summer before he begins graduate school. By contrast, starting in adolescence,
Villanueva, Rose, and Gilyard all search for male figures who bridge the gap
between working-class and middle-class worlds and who provide them with a
potential way to resolve their conflict. This difference between Rodriguez and
the other three writers is connected to the fact that Rodriguez is not an active
participant in the world of los braceros. For Rodriguez, the conflict is primarily
internal, rather than being played out among his family and peers on a daily
basis, as it is for Villanueva, Gilyard, and Rose. For all three, we see a search for
male figures who can serve as bridges between worlds; for Rose and Gilyard
in particular, this search is intensified by the absence of their fathers as they
enter adolescence, Rose’s father as a result of illness and death, and Gilyard’s
as a result of his parents’ divorce.
Villanueva finds these figures among his male teachers. He first mentions
one of his male teachers on the first page of his first chapter. Having been
tracked into a vocational high school, Villanueva remembers his experience
there as being rather grim; one bright spot, however, was his high school drama
teacher, Mr. Del Maestro, from whom he gained “an appreciation for literacy”
(1). However, Villanueva also admires the way that Mr. D, as he was called,
handled discipline problems in the classroom. Villanueva remembers, “And
for those in the room not as fascinated by Julius Caesar or Prince Hamlet or
poor Willy Loman as I am, those who are—in teacher talk—disruptive, Mr. D
forgoes the pink slip to the principal, meets the disrupter downstairs, in the
gym, twelve-ounce gloves, the matter settled” (2). Villanueva’s admiration of Mr.
Del Maestro comes, then, from a combination of his ability to explain literature
and his displays of physical prowess. What’s more, Mr. D doesn’t just display
his physical prowess, but teaches his students how to obtain it for themselves.
In addition to teaching literature, Mr. D also “tell[s] us how to stand, left foot
outside, how to put the whole body behind a punch” (4).
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Mr. D is presented as a physically strong man, one whose masculinity is
never in question, both a man of letters and a man of the streets. Mr. D’s difference from the rest of Villanueva’s teachers is underscored by the physical
descriptions Villanueva provides: “He wondered where they all came from,
these men, mostly men in an all-boys school, men with their smooth, puffy
cheeks, round bellies, rumpled suits, and wrinkled shirts” (3). Mr. D, by contrast,
is described as “A Robert Culp-like fellow, square jawed, thin but not skinny,
reading glasses halfway down his nose, thin brown hair combed straight back,
large hands” (1–2).9
The figure of Mr. D allows the teenaged Villanueva to at least temporarily
resolve the conflict between being tough and doing well in school. Villanueva
gives no indication that he ever saw his tough image as in contradiction with his
success in school. I believe this is because he saw Mr. D as giving him some sort
of permission to be both tough and interested in Shakespeare. Mr. D not only
provided an appreciation for academic language and literature, but he was also
a role model for appreciating language and literature while not compromising
one’s masculinity. Put another way, knowledge of the codes of masculinity seems
to be a second kind of literacy that Mr. Del Maestro provides to Villanueva.
Like Villanueva, Rose admired teachers who were both intellectual and
masculine. Unlike Villanueva, Rose includes attractiveness in his criteria for
admiration and status. Rose describes his biology teacher, Brother Clint, as being “young and powerful and very handsome . . . . No one gave him any trouble”
(29). Rose also provides physical descriptions of several of his college professors, including his philosophy professor, Don Johnson. “Mr. Johnson could have
strolled off a Wheaties box,” writes Rose. “Still in his twenties and a casting
director’s vision of those good looks thought to be All-American, Don Johnson
had committed his very considerable intelligence to the study and teaching of
Philosophy” (48). He later refers to him as a “golden boy” (49).
Though Rose continues to admire physical prowess and good looks, he is
also able to open up his range of admiration and see the value in intellectual
prowess. Rose introduces his senior English teacher, Jack McFarland, immediately after a passage in which he reflects on the death of his father, and in
doing so, Rose establishes what will become a pattern as he moves out of high
school and through his undergraduate years: he looks to male teachers for father
figures. But he is looking just as much for an academic mentor as for emotional
support, and McFarland serves both roles for him. McFarland introduces Rose
not only to new books and ideas but also to a whole new intellectual world,
that of the avant-garde cultural scene in Los Angeles.
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Physically speaking, McFarland clearly doesn’t fit the mold of teachers
such as Brother Clint. Rose describes him as “a beatnik who was born too late.
His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie in between the third and fourth
buttons of his shirt, and his pants were chronically wrinkled” (32). In spite of
the fact that McFarland is neither good-looking nor athletic, he nonetheless
wins Rose’s admiration, becoming a new kind of role model. As Rose recalls,
“McFarland had hooked me. He tapped my old interest in reading and creating
stories. He gave me a way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a
role model that wasn’t shaped on physical prowess alone, and something inside
me that I wasn’t quite aware of responded to that” (34).
Although McFarland provides a new kind of role model for Rose, he nonetheless twice uses the language of conventional masculinity, once in describing
McFarland, and again in describing McFarland’s effect on him. He writes, “Jack
McFarland, this tobacco-stained intellectual, brandished linguistic weapons of
a kind I hadn’t encountered before. Here was this egghead, for God’s sake, keeping some pretty difficult people in line” (33; emphasis in original). McFarland’s
strength comes from his linguistic skills, likened to weapons. Further on, Rose
remembers visiting McFarland’s apartment with some of his friends. While
there, they would engage in intellectual conversations and read books. Rose
writes, “Art and Mark would be talking about a movie or the school newspaper,
and I would be consuming my English teacher’s library. It was heady stuff. I felt
like a Pop Warner athlete on steroids” (36). Rose seems to be trying to relate
the feeling of learning many new things, and at an accelerated rate (hence the
steroids reference). In doing so, he not only likens himself to an athlete but also
likens McFarland to a coach. It is clear from this reference that Rose still highly
values masculinity and athleticism. It seems as though he feels that reading
and conversing about books and ideas is his version of athleticism.
Like Villanueva and Rose, Gilyard searches for models that bridge two or
more of his worlds, but unlike them, he does not find them within the school
system. As he moves into adolescence, his understanding of masculinity is
tied up not just in displays of physical prowess but also in a political analysis
of the situation of African Americans in the United States. Gilyard came of age
during the civil rights movement, and more specifically entered adolescence as
the movement evolved into its militant phase and violence broke out around
the country.
Gilyard recounts a visit to the neighborhood barbershop, where he meets
Boone and Mr. Shortside, who become role models for him as an adolescent.
Gilyard thinks of Boone and Mr. Shortside as teachers of a sort, and he high-
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lights the political education that comes from these men, who spend their time
discussing the progress and setbacks of the civil rights movement. He specifically contrasts their discussion of politics with his teachers’ treatment of the
same issues: “Mr. Shortside and Boone became very special in my eyes. They
gave the current events much better than Mrs. Holtzman did. More analysis
and fervor. My teacher stayed more on the side of soft regret and subdued hope.
Whereas she was detached, they had definite points of view” (84). This contrast
shows the lessening influence of Gilyard’s teachers and the growing influence
of a particular kind of black male role model, who serve as informal teachers
or, rather, teachers in Sidewalk University.
Gilyard’s political consciousness is raised by Boone and Shortside and
reinforced by his black friends. More specifically, the men in the barbershop
serve as Gilyard’s mentors for “philosophizin’” (83) about the state of race
relations, while Gilyard and his friends are coconspirators in acting out the
resulting anger and righteousness that comes from this political analysis. The
manifestations of these beliefs among his peer group were a series of decidedly
masculine activities and adventures, many of which involved direct confrontations with whites, or “white boy trouble,” as Gilyard calls it. For example, Gilyard
and his friends confront white boys who enter their neighborhood, and also
venture out into white neighborhoods to confront and steal the bikes of white
boys. After the first such confrontation, which is initiated by Gilyard’s friend
Wallace, Gilyard recalls, “I told myself I was angry at Wallace for forcing my
hand, but I was unconvincing, and with each ensuing pedal the realization grew
within me that I would gladly have volunteered had I known this adventure
would feel so great” (101). This isolated incident turns into a “bike stealing
boom” after an older boy named Big Rob shows his approval of the incident.
This older boy is looked up to by Gilyard and his friends and serves as a role
model for masculinity.
The tension between allegiance to school and allegiance to Sidewalk
University intensifies as Gilyard moves through junior high and high school.
Unfortunately, Gilyard’s increasing involvement in Sidewalk U. and the fact that
he looks to his peers there for guidance results in a heroin habit. Gilyard writes
quite honestly about his use of heroin, though in narrating how he first came to
use it, he doesn’t reflect on the ways in which his peers in Sidewalk U. influence
his drug use. He writes of meeting a man named Melvin at a summer job he
held through the Neighborhood Youth Corps. He writes “This one guy, Melvin,
was drawn to me immediately. He was friendly enough, but more competitive
than friendly. Would have dominated if I didn’t hold him at bay” (141). After a
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series of competitions (boxing, basketball), they declare a truce and become
friends. Gilyard writes, “The only thing Melvin had on me streetwise was that
he was using heroin. Snorting. That shouldn’t have bothered me so much, but
it did . . . . I hadn’t thought much about it until Melvin talked about getting
high, never suggesting I try it, but hooking me all the while” (142). It seems as
though Gilyard saw Melvin’s discussion of his heroin use as a dare, one that he
felt obliged to meet to maintain his streetwise, masculine status in Sidewalk U.
Though he doesn’t reflect on the fact, Gilyard’s introduction to and continued
experimentation with heroin comes from his desire to prove his masculinity,
his coolness, and his ability to “handle” whatever came his way.
Like Gilyard, Villanueva eventually begins to look for male role models
outside of the school system, though he does so at a much less vulnerable time
in his life, after he has served several years in the Army and is settled down
with a wife and child. These role models are a group of men introduced to him
by one of his Army colleagues, Private First Class Walter Myles. Villanueva
describes himself as looking up to these men because they “were men from
the block who had managed, it seemed to him, to keep the block while getting
college degrees. They were educated and still black, not raceless” (52–53). In
this passage Villanueva expresses the idea (or the fear) that education leads to
the loss of the block, to a state of racelessness. This fear concerns the effects of
education on racial and class identity; more specifically, it concerns the notion
that education will lead racial minorities and working-class people to identify
themselves exclusively with the white middle class. Villanueva initially focuses
on the way that the language of these men is the marker of their ability to maintain ties to the block while getting an education. He admires these men who
“spoke in abstract political terms and in generalized terms about racism and
the struggles of people of color, who spoke like academics but in the language
of the streets, kind of—calm, unaffected, intellectual Black English” (52). What
becomes clear in the next paragraph (though it remains unarticulated) is that it
is not just their language usage that Villanueva is concerned with and admires.
In the next paragraph, Villanueva describes Walter Myles’s friend Bracy
thus: “None demonstrated education without racelessness more than Walter’s
friend, Bracy. Bracy was black, dark black, thin waisted, wide backed, muscular,
the build of a middleweight boxer, black beret, black sunglasses, bare chested,
except for a string of teeth. In public, a clenched, black-gloved fist in the air:
‘Say, blood’ or ‘They it is,’ nothing more” (53). This quote makes it clear, I think,
that it is not just racelessness that Villanueva is concerned with, but also emasculation. He seems at pains here to assert the hypermasculinity of this man.
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In Villanueva’s description, the markers of Bracy’s identification with the
block and blackness are physical markers and displays of masculinity. Bracy
embodies one type of masculine ideal, and he reinforces his presentation of
this ideal by displaying the accoutrements (beret, sunglasses, gloves) of black
militancy. Villanueva also notes that Bracy’s public persona is one of few words.
Bracy is the strong, silent type, at least in public. This description of his public
persona is followed by a list of all the things Bracy talked about in private. This
description makes clear that Villanueva not only admires the “intellectual Black
English” spoken by these men, but also their strategic use (and nonuse) of it
according to the codes of masculinity. Of his encounter with Bracy, Villanueva
writes that he came to believe in “education as a way of attempting to make
sense out of the senseless, to become more, rather than to become other. Bracy
had become more black, in a sense” (53). And, I would add, more of a man.
For Villanueva, Gilyard, and Rose, the search for male role models is a part
of adolescence. Each of these three writers is concerned with fitting in with
their peer group, but they are also interested in finding adult role models, men
to whom they can look for a model of how to become a man, and what kind of
man to become. In terns of class and race, the search for male role models is
a search to find out whether they can continue their education without having to radically shift their sense of self. They are suspicious of white and/or
middle-class masculinity because it is different, perhaps even unrecognizable
as masculinity to them, and certainly to those around them. Villanueva and
Rose were able, at various points, to find these role models within the school
system, easing the division between the pull of the third world and the middleclass world of school, while Gilyard was not so lucky. That Rodriguez does not
appear to partake of these strategies is perhaps a measure of the removal from
the world of home he remembers feeling from a relatively early age. Of these
four writers, he is the one who seems to have most completely identified with
the world of school. His fascination with (and idealization of) los braceros, and
the fact that he compares his body to theirs, are virtually the only residues of
his identification with his working-class background. Even these residues do
not survive his dramatically staged and recounted encounter with los braceros.
Resolving the Conflict
I would like now to turn my attention from how these writers “manage” the
conflicts between the versions of masculinity valued or presented in school
and their “third” worlds, to whether and how they resolve these conflicts by
the end of their narratives. I see a connection between how this conflict over
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masculinity is resolved and these writers’ political perspectives on language
and literacy. This realization leads me once again to single out Rodriguez from
the pack: his book preceded the other three chronologically, and it contains
the arguments to which the other three are responding, and, for the most part,
arguing against. Rodriguez’s resolution to his crisis is consistent with and
embedded in his views about literacy and class mobility.
Rodriguez resolves his “crisis” in masculinity at the moment that he becomes a participant in his “third world,” the world of los braceros. For Rodriguez,
joining their world, through taking a summer job on a construction site, seems
to be the way to overcome his fears that his schooling has emasculated him.
He offers this experience as a turning point in his life, a pivotal moment after
which, he says, “a great deal—and not very much really—changed in my life”
(136). He initially decides to take the job, he says, so that he could announce to
his father that “after all, I did know what ‘real work’ is like” (131). He arrives at
the worksite “expectant,” thinking, “I would take off my shirt to the sun. And
at last grasp desired sensation. No longer afraid. At last become like a bracero”
(131). He quickly realizes, however, that “I was fooling myself if I expected a
few weeks of labor to gain me admission to the world of the laborer. I would
not learn in three months what my father had meant by ‘real work’” (133). This
realization seems to be a sound one. Rodriguez realizes that his life is already
too different from the lives of his father, his uncle, and the rest of the laborers:
at the conclusion of the summer, he knows that he will be going on to graduate school, and that he will probably never need to rely on this type of work to
support himself.
At the end of the day, Rodriguez overhears the boss paying the Mexican
workers. He remembers, “I can still hear the loudly confident voice he used with
the Mexicans. It was the sound of the gringo I had heard as a very young boy.
And I can still hear the quiet, indistinct sounds of the Mexican, the oldest, who
replied” (135). This episode links back to an earlier passage where Rodriguez
vividly recalls what it was like, as a child who spoke little English, to be out in
public among fluent speakers of English. While this was certainly a disconcerting experience for him, what seems to have been even more disconcerting
was the experience of hearing his parents speak English in public. Rodriguez
remembers a particular experience he had with just his father. The paragraph
bears quoting in full:
There were many times like the night at a brightly lit gasoline station (a blaring
white memory) when I stood uneasily, hearing my father. He was talking to a
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teenaged attendant. I do not recall what they were saying, but I cannot forget the
sounds my father made as he spoke. At one point his words slid together to form
one word—sounds as confused as the threads of blue and green oil in the puddle
next to my shoes. His voice rushed through what he had left to say. And, toward
the end, reached falsetto notes, appealing to his listener’s understanding. I looked
away to the lights of passing automobiles. I tried not to hear anymore. But I heard
only too well the calm, easy tones in the attendant’s reply. Shortly afterward, walking toward home with my father, I shivered when he put his hand on my shoulder.
The very first chance that I got, I evaded his grasp and ran on ahead into the dark,
skipping with feigned boyish exuberance. (15)
The gasoline attendant is a menial worker and a teenager, much younger than
Rodriguez’s father, but his mastery of English gives him power over the father.
This power imbalance is also clearly gendered in Rodriguez’s retelling of it. In
his analysis of this scene, Henry Staten writes, “According to Lacan, the father
is able to play the role of symbolic father because of the authority of his speech.
The sound of language, to which Richard is extraordinarily sensitive, gives him
a peculiarly vivid, shattering intuition concerning Mr. Rodriguez’s lack of this
authority” (112). The attendant’s voice is “calm” and “easy,” while Rodriguez’s
father’s is “confused” and “rushed.” This sense is reinforced by Rodriguez’s use
of “falsetto” to describe his father’s tone, as well as his memory of his father’s
voice as being pleading.
Rodriguez’s reaction to his father’s embrace after this incident seems to
show that he was embarrassed and distressed by his father’s inability to speak
clearly and authoritatively in English. He reacts against this witnessing of his
father’s emasculation and powerlessness; he sees, in this incident, that power
lies in mastery of English. Rodriguez sees the same dynamic happening with
los braceros on the worksite, a dynamic that Rodriguez recoiled from both then
and in this instance. He recounts his reaction: “At hearing that voice I was sad
for the Mexicans. Depressed by their vulnerability. Angry at myself ” (135–36).
Any identification, based on shared skin color, has now vanished.
What he draws from this encounter is an affirmation of the belief that a
public, middle-class identity defines masculinity. This encounter seems to have
allowed him to work through his insecurities about masculinity, his feeling that
“education was making me effeminate” (127). The chapter closes with a return
to the encounter with los braceros. What Rodriguez emphasizes in the retelling of this encounter is the silence of the men. He writes, “Their silence stays
with me now. The wages those Mexicans received for their labor were only a
measure of their disadvantaged condition. Their silence is more telling. They
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lack a public identity” (138). In the final paragraph, he even comes close to
asserting that their silence signals their compliance with their oppression. He
concludes, “As I heard their truck rumbling away, I shuddered, my face mirrored
with sweat. I had finally come face to face with los pobres” (139). Like the shiver
he felt when his father touched his arm on the way home from the gas station,
Rodriguez’s shudder is a distancing reaction, a shaking off of his connection.
Overall, the conclusions he draws from this experience with los braceros
confirm the broader themes of his book: the inevitability of his separation
from his family and culture of origin, the benefits of his education, and the
desirability and necessity of assimilation. Put another way, the manner in
which Rodriguez resolves his conflict over masculinity is consistent with his
perspective on language and literacy. Rodriguez advocates assimilation and
believes that the severing of ties to his working-class background is necessary
and inevitable. It seems that one of the only things about that working-class
background that he truly does not want to leave behind is the physical ideal
represented by los braceros. To have the best of both worlds, therefore, Rodriguez reverses the equation between working-class men and masculinity and
middle-class men and effeminacy.
Rose’s manner of resolving the conflict is in some ways similar to Rodriguez’s. Like Rodriguez, Rose comes to reject the equation between working-class
and masculinity on the one hand and middle-class and effeminacy on the other:
he, too, reverses the terms. While they share this way of resolving their conflict
around masculinity, though, their narratives resonate differently because of the
way that Rose’s resolution is embedded in a different kind of argument about
language and literacy. Rose also believes in assimilation, to a certain extent,
but believes that the educational system is responsible for starting where the
students are at, rather than expecting them to figure out the conventions and
values of the institution, sink-or-swim style.
Unlike Rodriguez, Rose does not effect a reversal of value through a
particular physical encounter with working-class masculinity; rather, it is the
working-class world of his youth more generally that comes to be associated
with impotence and passivity, while the middle-class world of ideas, of which
he is a part, is infused with activity, life, and power. Rose’s reversal is diffused
throughout the latter portion of his book; this reversal begins with Rose’s
memories of his undergraduate years. When remembering his professors, he
describes at length the many things he learned from them and sums it up by
saying, “And it was all alive. It transpired in backyards and on doorsteps and
inside offices as well as in the classroom. I could smell their tobacco and see the
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nicks left by their razors” (58). There are several things I’d like to tease out of
this quote. The first is that Rose makes clear that what he admires about these
men is their willingness not just to enrich his mind but also to take a personal
interest in him. From them he has not only learned the specifics taught in their
courses, but he has also observed their lives and learned how he might live his
life. The gendered nature of this learning is most clear by Rose’s reference to
their tobacco and their razor-nicked faces. There is also a more complicated
gendered and classed association here between the world they represent and
the world of South Vermont, the street in Rose’s working-class neighborhood
where he grew up.
Rose writes that what these men taught him was “alive.” The aliveness of
this learning stands in contrast to Rose’s characterization of his working-class
neighborhood and the life he led there as being “dead.” His father is literally
dead, as is Lou Minton.10 But aside from these literal deaths, Rose comes to feel
as though the neighborhood is dead and his life there is a sort of death. He describes these differences using a variety of language, some of which is explicitly
gendered and sexualized. The words and phrases associated with school are
“awake,” “present, there,” “involved,” “empowering,” “freed, as if I were untying
fetters,” “a lightness to my body, an ease in breathing,” and “competence.” By
contrast, words and phrases associated with home are “asleep,” “detached,”
“isolated,” “alone,” “escape,” “sadness and dead time,” “oppressiveness,” and,
most significantly, “impotence” (44).
Rose’s persistent association between his working-class background and
the remembered weakness of the men who populated it is extended outward,
so that by the text’s conclusion, Rose also comes to reject the working-class
masculinity that he so admired as a youth. As the text progresses, he twice
uses the language of potency to describe this working-class masculinity. In his
memories of college, Rose remembers the scorn he initially felt for the middleclass world of the academy, an attitude the adult Rose dismisses as a kind of
“false potency” (45). Later, when Rose is working in the Teacher Corps, he writes
of a student named Terry, who “had broken another boy’s jaw, and was generally
viewed by his peers as wild and explosive: they still talked about the time he
chased off a gang of boys with a tire chain” (112). Rose reflects, “When I was
growing up, I saw this kind of rebellion and assault as potency. Terry was the
kind of kid I sidestepped on South Vermont,” but then goes on to say that as an
adult, he sees this behavior as revealing “desperation” and “loneliness” (112). In
both instances, Rose reconsiders and rejects working-class masculinity from
his adult perspective. He seems to suggest that both versions of working-class
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masculinity described here have psychological origins, and that they mask
psychological problems. As such, working-class masculinity is aligned with
impotence, and for Rose to keep the feelings of impotence at bay, he must also
reject its physical and psychological markers.
In addition to associating working-class masculinity with impotence, Rose
also thinks of the neighborhood in general in these terms. His post-college work
in the National Teacher Corps takes him to the streets and schools of East Los
Angeles, to neighborhoods that are at least as tough if not tougher than the
ones he grew up in. After working in these neighborhoods for a time, Rose is
overtaken by a feeling he describes as “the powerlessness of South Vermont,
an impotence as warm and safe as a narcotic. It wasn’t clear despair—it wasn’t
that articulate—it was more a soft regress to childhood, to hot and quiet afternoons in an empty lot” (104). While Rose indicates that he understands the
ways that he is working through personal issues through his professional work,
he does not reflect on his use of the language of potency and its relation to his
internalized class conflict.
Rose’s “resolution” has a different valence from Rodriguez’s. While Rodriguez’s encounter with los braceros leaves the reader with the sense that he has
“conquered” the one remaining tie to and appeal of his working-class background, in Rose’s resolution we see an acknowledgment of the persistence of
the effects of his background on his present. Rose acknowledges how growing
up on South Vermont shaped his psyche in ways that he cannot change. His
narrative focuses on those teachers who believed in his abilities and facilitated
his learning. As a teacher and administrator, Rose is interested in helping young
people overcome the crippling effects of their backgrounds insofar as the effects of those backgrounds get in the way of their success in the educational
system. He is also invested in getting teachers and administrators to change
their thinking about underprepared students, to see their potential rather than
imagining them incapable of learning and academic success. Yet like Rodriguez’s story, Rose’s narrative about moving out of the working class and into
the middle class via education is marked by gender in striking ways. He rejects
the model of working-class masculinity that he valued as a boy and young man,
but in his role as an adult educator works to change the institution to accommodate students’ needs as much as he might also believe that working-class
male students’ masculinity has to be modified to succeed in school. I say that
he might believe this because he offers no explicit reflections on this in his text.
Gilyard and Villanueva share a rejection of Rodriguez’s assertion that
assimilation is necessary and inevitable. At the same time, both identify with
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his narrative, seeing many parallels between his experiences and their own.
It is the conclusions Rodriguez draws from his experience with which they
disagree. Gilyard’s work is motivated by his disagreement with Rodriguez over
the question of cultural and linguistic assimilation: “[T]he eradication of one
tongue is not prerequisite to the learning of a second. Rodriguez participated
in such self-annihilation for as long as he did because he thought it benefited
him personally. It would be tragic, however, to translate his own appraisal of
his pain into pedagogy” (160–61; emphasis in original). Similarly, Villanueva
writes, “Like many a Latino, I was upset by Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography,
Hunger of Memory, but I did understand. . . . It wasn’t the story that upset me.
There were too many parallels to my own. It was the melancholy, the ideological resignation, the way he seemed not to see that biculturalism is as imposed
as assimilation” (39). Both Villanueva and Gilyard are invested in telling their
stories as cautionary tales, as tales used to bolster their arguments for how and
why the educational system needs to change.
Their resolution of the conflict between working-class masculinity and
obtaining class mobility via education is different as well. Just as they argue
against assimilation, their narratives reveal that they believe it possible and
desirable to maintain aspects of working-class masculinity while obtaining an
education. In this sense, the way they resolve their conflicts over masculinity is
consistent with their political perspectives on language and literacy.
Using a roughly chronological approach, Villanueva’s narrative moves
forward through his decision to go to community college, then to the university,
first as an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student, where he decides to
pursue the field of rhetoric. At this point in his narrative, however, he seems
to run out of male role models. He mentions in passing that his first rhetoric
course in graduate school was taken from a female professor, Anne Ruggles
Gere, but there is no further discussion of her role in introducing Villanueva
to rhetoric. Instead of viewing a woman as a role model, Villanueva seems to
move beyond the need for role models and becomes his own authority.
This is not to say that Villanueva offers no acknowledgment of the
female professionals who have influenced his career. Looking back through
Villanueva’s acknowledgments, the rhetorician Sharon Crowley is mentioned
at length. But even this extended acknowledgment of her influence on him
is caught up in the same gendered system displayed throughout the book. In
the acknowledgments, he remembers that she has served as “co-worker, critic,
and friend” (viii) and then goes on to explain that it was through her interven-
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tion that he decided not to quit the academic profession. He continues, “We
have fun together. And even a two-minute talk in the halls is often the seed
for hours of fruitful thought. Yet she is less a mentor than my academic Papo.
Papo was something of my protector on the block back in Bed-Stuy, the badass that no one messed with. Sharon protects me from institutional politics, a
discourse I will likely never break into” (viii). I am fascinated by the fact that
Villanueva likens her to his high school friend Papo, revealing that the way that
Villanueva pays his respects is still caught up in his system of masculinity. In
likening Crowley to Papo “the bad-ass,” Villanueva reinforces his valorization
of working-class masculinity. It also shows that he continues to equate power
and status with masculinity. Villanueva’s understanding of gender roles and
masculinity in particular influence his encounter with the academy in ways
that are unreflected on in his text.
Two male figures are instrumental in the resolution of Gilyard’s crisis,
though he, like Villanueva, ends on an individualist note. The climax of Gilyard’s narrative is the kicking of his heroin habit once and for all. His decision
to do so is greatly influenced by a black cop Gilyard meets, who explains his
heroin use to him in terms of “being controlled by others,” or, to use another
set of Gilyard’s terms, being the played instead of being the player (152). The
cop offers Gilyard a politicized, structural analysis of the use of drugs in black
communities, which appeals to the politically aware side of him.
Like Villanueva, Gilyard is attracted to and greatly affected by images of
black militancy, and it is reading about the actions of Jonathan Jackson that
seals Gilyard’s decision to get out of the drug life once and for all. Gilyard sees
idealism in Jackson’s decision to attempt to free his brother from a California
courtroom: “Here was a kid younger than I who put his very life on the line
because he still believed in dreams. Had to believe in them, that is, if he really thought he could pull off such a stunt. I understood dreams, idealism. I
understood living in the future. But the trick is to know when the future has
arrived. Almost as soon as I finished reading the story I knew I was out of the
drug life” (157). Jackson offers Gilyard a perspective that is both outside the
value system of school, but also outside the value system of his peers. Like
Bracy for Villanueva, Jackson offers Gilyard an image of black manhood that
is politically radical, intellectual, and ultra-masculine.
Though these figures are instrumental in helping Gilyard get out of the
drug life, his narrative ends with him alone in his father’s apartment on the
night he “invited that often feared jones to come on down” (157). As he is going
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through withdrawal, Gilyard remembers, “I welcomed it all, the sight, the roar.
Keith was going to college” (158). Keith, not Raymond, the name Gilyard went
by throughout his school years among white classmates, is the one going to
college, a choice of names that is clearly intentional and significant. His use of
the name Keith here seems to signal that he has been able to effect some sort
of integration of the worlds. It also seems that this integration, if that is what
it is, has come out of kicking the heroin habit. Deliverance from the drug life
seems, in his narrative, to signal his release from Sidewalk U., or at least his
ability to keep Sidewalk U. from interfering with his educational attainment.
In his analysis of the final portion of his narrative, Gilyard writes, “I
tried to be a hip schoolboy, but it was impossible to achieve that persona. In
the group I most loved, to be fully hip meant to repudiate a school system in
which African-American consciousness was undervalued or ignored; in which,
in spite of the many nightmares around us, I was urged to keep my mind on
the Dream, to play the fortunate token, to keep my head straight down in my
books and ‘make it’” (160). Gilyard reflects that the pressure of trying to negotiate between the worlds of home, Sidewalk U., and school was too much, and
that his drug problem came about, at least in part, as a response to trying to
manage the contradictions between those worlds. I would add that Gilyard’s
conflicts with the school system were compounded by his allegiance to a form
of working-class masculinity valued by his black peers.
While Gilyard clearly wants to change the educational system to try to
prevent other black students from having to manage the split between the
worlds of home and school, he is less clear about the ways that class and gender
complicated and exacerbated the split he experienced. The “hip schoolboy”
persona is gendered as well as racialized. Gilyard’s drug habit, and the fact that
it nearly kept him from graduating high school, indicates that Gilyard perhaps
could not pull off being a “hip schoolboy,” but neither, in the end, does it appear that he has to be a lame or a square. While taking drugs was a part of the
masculine persona he cultivated as a part of Sidewalk U., the kicking of the
drug habit is itself presented as an act of heroic masculinity, one which involves
physical hardship. Heroin becomes the opponent to be conquered, and Gilyard
is man enough to do it.
What I hope to have done here is make clear the extent to which these
four literacy narratives by male authors are gendered; in general, I believe that
an understanding of gender is crucial to analyses of literacy narratives and
literary narratives of the working-class encounter with the academy,11 whether
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when we use them in our writing classrooms or when we strive to further our
understanding of U.S. multicultural and working-class literature. I think these
are hardly controversial assertions to make, which raises the question of why
there is such a marked absence of self-reflection about the role of gender, and
more specifically working-class masculinities, in these four texts.
This absence of reflection is all the more marked when considered in
relation to a growing body of scholarly literature that explicitly investigates
working-class males’ resistance to schooling because of its incompatibility
with and perceived threat to working-class masculinity. For example, Louise
Archer, Simon D. Pratt, and David Phillips report that their respondents “constructed and negotiated HE [higher education] participation largely in terms
of discourses of class masculinity, in which HE was associated with Otherness,
and was positioned as incompatible with notions of working-class masculinity”
(435). They also found that “men argued against participation in HE because
this would entail ‘giving up’ strong working-class identities. University was
positioned as dominated by the middle classes, and therefore was an antithetical sphere to the maintenance and enactment of working-class masculinities
because men would lack ‘known’ resources and power” (443). Though based
on interviews of British men, the language of these findings clearly echoes the
anxieties that I find animating these four literacy narratives.
Returning to the question of why there is such an absence of self-awareness
about the gender dynamics of their encounters with the academy, one answer
returns us to the general notion that masculinities, even non-hegemonic masculinities, are often taken for granted and invisible as a source of male privilege.
Archer et al.’s research supports this analysis, and suggests that working-class
masculinity is a site of privilege within working-class communities. Of the
four writers, Gilyard and Villanueva were the most successful at performing
working-class masculinity and are the two whose narratives express a desire to
maintain it; by contrast, Rodriguez and Rose admired working-class masculinity as adolescents, but didn’t really fulfill its mandates, a fact which I believe
informs their rhetorical efforts to divest it of its power and potency.
Another answer emerges from the first; it is much more difficult to integrate a discussion of working-class masculinities into the political framework
of educational reform within which Rose, Villanueva, and Gilyard situate their
work. Might we want to glean these four narratives for suggestions about how to
make working-class males’ encounter with the academy less fraught? If so, what
would those suggestions be? More importantly, how do we do so without repli-
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cating the anti-feminist sentiment that schooling is feminizing so prominent in
recent news stories and “scholarship” about the crisis in schooling for boys and
young men? Is there room, too, for a critique of working-class masculinities?
All four of these writers cannot detach from the dominant culture’s dichotomous rendering of classed masculinity; where they differ is in how they
deal with that dichotomy as they recount the process of becoming educated in
the middle-class world of school. One suggestion for how to ease the transition
between the worlds of home and school for working-class boys and young men
can be gleaned from Gilyard, and it is the basis for the title of this article. He
recounts an episode from his childhood when one of his middle-class classmates
reports that his father says, “brains are better than brawn.” Gilyard responds
emphatically: “‘Brains are better than brawn’ I promptly retorted. It was an
old debate for us and I was ready to win it convincingly this time. ‘But that’s
only if you have to choose one over the other. Having brains and brawn is the
best you can do’” (86; emphasis in original). What I would like to emphasize
in this exchange is Gilyard’s rejection of an either/or model in favor of a both/
and one. In other words, if working-class and middle-class masculinity, or
brawn and brains, respectively, were not perceived as mutually exclusive, the
world of school might seem less alien and alienating to working-class boys
and young men.
A concrete way to break down that dichotomy is to find role models who
help bridge the divide between the masculine peer culture and the world of
school. Rose, Gilyard, and Villanueva employed this strategy, but in a haphazard
fashion and without formal help. Their narratives suggest that providing positive role models specifically within the educational context might ease some of
the conflicts experienced by working-class males.12 Lest we forget, however, the
first step toward easing this transition, for all first-generation students, male
or female, is understanding the myriad factors that make it fraught in the first
place; as my reading of these four literacy narratives makes clear, there is a lack
of awareness about and reflection on the role of gender in their encounters
with the academy (both at the time and in retrospect), a fact that limits their
usefulness in fully understanding the politics of literacy and the working-class
encounter with the academy.
Notes
1. For an update and overview of Graff ’s work on the literacy myth, see “Literacy’s
Myths and Legacies.”
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2. Other anthologies include Strangers in Paradise (1984), Working-Class Women in
the Academy (1993), Those Winter Sundays (2005), and Reflections from the Wrong
Side of the Tracks (2006).
3. A precedent for my reading comes from Martin A. Danahay’s “Richard Rodriguez’s Poetics of Manhood,” in which Danahay argues that Hunger of Memory “be
viewed as a meditation on being masculine in America” (291; emphasis in original).
4. See Kimmel and Messner’s Men’s Lives.
5. Curiously, one might also expect to find material about romance and sexuality in
these literacy narratives, but there is precious little of it. The focus is almost exclusively on relationships with male peers and mentors; the relative absence of women
in these narratives, I believe, has everything to do with these authors’ methods
for resolving their anxieties about the loss of masculinity as a result of education.
6. Gilyard offers Perkins’s definition of a “Regular”: “He is ‘one of the boys’ and
then again he is not. [He] is able to vacillate roles because he has never made a
full commitment to the Street Institution. Actually his primary values are closer
to white middle class values than those of his peers. He is usually a good student,
conforms to most conventional laws, has close family ties and rarely belongs to a
gang. Yet . . . he knows enough about the Street Institution to function within it
without undue stress” (111).
7. Danahay points out that Rodriguez’s preoccupation with los braceros also represents “a repressed sexual desire; the ‘attraction’ of those men is partly erotic” (299).
8. Gilyard refers to the linguistic research of William Labov when using these terms.
9. Among other roles he played, Robert Culp was Bill Cosby’s co-star in the popular
television show I Spy.
10. Lou Minton is the man who moved in with his family and helped care for
Rose’s father as his health declined. Minton remained after his father died and
committed suicide in the house during the summer between Rose’s freshman and
sophomore years.
11. Literacy narratives and other narratives of the working-class encounter with
the academy by women are also gendered. Working-class femininity in not a valued
category in the way that working-class masculinity is, and more often than not it is
rejected insofar as it is perceived as being incompatible with the desire to achieve
class mobility via education. See Launius, “The Three Rs: Reading, (W)riting, and
Romance in Class Mobility Narratives by Yezierska, Smedley, and Saxton.”
12. See, for example, Conchas and Noguera’s findings about the importance of role
models and mentors in the lives of African American male high school students.
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Christie Launius
Christie Launius is director of the Women’s Studies program at the University
of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She is interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
American class mobility narratives and is currently working on an article about
class straddlers in the U.S. women’s liberation movement. She is an active member
of the recently formed Working Class Studies Association.
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