Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in ... · Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in Literacy Narratives by Rose, Rodriguez, Villanueva, and

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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 conse-quences 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.

As a longtime teacher of first-year writing courses whose research is focused on twentieth-century U.S. working-class literature, my interest in literacy nar-ratives 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 con-flict. 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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Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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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 writ-ers 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 con-structed 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 eco-nomic 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 fore-ground 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 narra-tives 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 de-grees, 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 working-class masculinity as a result of middle-class schooling.

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A Third World: The Conflict BeginsAll 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 preoc-cupation 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 third-person), “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 orienta-tion 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 ex-plains 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 physi-cal 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 opposi-tion 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 writ-ers. 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 ConflictWith 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 Ro-driguez 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 dif-ference 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 be-ing “young and powerful and very handsome . . . . No one gave him any trouble” (29). Rose also provides physical descriptions of several of his college profes-sors, 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, imme-diately 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 none-theless 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, keep-ing 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 specifi-cally 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 confronta-tions 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 main-tain 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 emas-culation. 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 hav-ing 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 middle-class 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 ConflictI 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 be-comes 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 gradu-ate 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 discon-certing 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, walk-ing 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 retell-ing 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, Rodri-guez 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 Rodri-guez’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 de-scribes 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 middle-class 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 af-ternoons 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 Rodri-guez’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 back-ground, 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 ef-fects 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 Rodri-guez’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 accom-modate 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 ideologi-cal 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 bad-ass 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 Gil-yard’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 re-ally 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 nego-tiate 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 ap-pear 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 “con-structed 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 antitheti-cal 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 mas-culinities, 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 masculin-ity 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 inte-grate 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 di-chotomous 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 posi-tive 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 Rodri-guez’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 exclu-sively 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 repre-sents “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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Works Cited

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Childers, Mary. “The Parrot or the Pit Bull: Trying to Explain Working Class Life.” Signs 28 (2002): 201–20.

Christopher, Renny. “Rags to Riches to Suicide: Unhappy Narratives of Upward Mobility: Martin Eden, Bread Givers, Delia’s Song, and Hunger of Memory.” College Literature 29 (2002): 79–108.

Conchas, Gilberto Q., and Pedro A. Noguera. “Understanding the Exceptions: How Small Schools Support the Achievement of Academically Successful Black Boys.” Adolescent Boys: Exploring Diverse Cul-tures of Boyhood. Ed. Niobe Way and Judy Chu. New York: NYU P, 2004. 317–37.

Danahay, Martin A. “Richard Rodriguez’s Poetics of Manhood.” Fictions of Mas-culinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. Ed. Peter F. Murphy. New York: NYUP, 1994. 290–307.

Dews, C.L. Barney, and Carolyn Leste Law. This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995.

Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. “Reading Literacy Narratives.” College English 54 (1992): 512–39.

Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991.

Graff, Harvey J. “Literacy’s Myths and Legacies: Lessons from the History of Literacy, to the Question of Critical Literacy.” Difference, Silence, and Textual Practice: Studies in Critical Literacy. Ed.

Peter Freebody, Sandy Muspratt, and Bronwyn Dwyer. Cresskill: Hampton, 2001. 1–29.

Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

Kimmel, Michael S., and Michael A. Mess-ner, eds. Men’s Lives. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2007.

Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972.

Launius, Christie. “The Three Rs: Reading, (W)riting, and Romance in Class Mobil-ity Narratives by Yezierska, Smedley, and Saxton.” College Literature 34 (2007): 125–47.

Morgan, David. “Class and Masculin-ity.” Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. Ed. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. 165–77.

Muzzatti, Stephen L., and C. Vincent Samarco. Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Class, Identity, and the Working Class Experience in Academe. Lanham: Rowman, 2006.

Perkins, Eugene. Home Is a Dirty Street: The Social Oppression of Black Children. Chicago: Third World, 1975.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Ryan, Jake, and Charles Sackrey, eds. Strang-ers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class. Boston: South End, 1984. Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 1996.

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Staten, Henry. “Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory.” PMLA 113 (1998): 103–16.

Tokarczyk, Michelle, and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds. Working-Class Women in the Acad-emy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana:

National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Welsh, Kathleen A. Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents. Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 2005.

Zandy, Janet. “Traveling Working Class.” What We Hold in Common: An Introduc-tion to Working-Class Studies. Ed. Janet Zandy. New York: Feminist, 2001. 241–52.

Christie LauniusChristie 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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Documents

Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in ... · Brains versus Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in Literacy Narratives by Rose, Rodriguez, Villanueva, and