Dude You’re a Fag tells stories of life in high school and how high school students develop sexual and gender identities. These identities are also impacted by the social class, gender and ethnicity of individuals. The main focus was to study how boys become masculine and how masculinity is defined. Using this book as a guide I will look at the physical, cognitive and social-emotional development of young adolescents as it relates to their gender identities. Physical development refers to the way bodies grow, change and develop throughout a person’s lifetime, especially in the area of motor development. Cognitive development involves the areas of the brain development that effect information processing, intelligence, reasoning, language development…show more content… When children are younger it is easy to cross these developmental lines. However, as you enter the adolescent stages females typically fall into a more submissive role, while males take on a more dominant role which often causes gender inequality. C.J. Pascoe documented many patterns of how society constructs adolescent masculinity through these gender roles. Male masculinity is physically perceived as strong, muscular, and heterosexual. As adolescents go through puberty and their body changes, girls develop breast and boys grow facial hair. School dress codes try to prevent males and females from revealing certain parts of their bodies as they develop. Females are typically not allowed to wear clothes that show off their midriff or thin strapped tank tops. Males’ pants must remain at the waist line so under clothes and skin are not exposed. There were other incidents where physical developmental differences were used as insults. For instance the phase “you hit like a girl” draws images of femininity. Adolescent boys often insult one another by comparing their physical abilities to a girl or even worse a homosexual. The way males and females use their bodies even for dancing displayed their physical…show more content… By adolescents, girls and boys start to define themselves by the gender stereotype rules that they learned in preschool. Girls are believed to demonstrate Gilligan’s ethic of care because they physically care for others and provide nurturing. While boys’ morals are based on a standard of justice and strength. Gender differences can also be seen in the way boys and girls interact with each other. Females share emotional closeness and support while boys share achievement, status and competition. At River High girls displayed a variety of gender strategies to deal with the boy’s masculinity process. Some girls were popular by confirming heterosexulized gender identities. In the process the girls traded their own subjectivity for boy’s point of view, laughing and giggling at boys offensive comments. These comments focused on their looks, their bodies and their sexuality. A few girls embodied masculinity themselves and dominated others by dressing, competing, fighting and dating girls, like boys did. The last group used feminism that labeled certain boys as jerks because of their compulsive heterosexuality. For the boys at River High they learned that the characteristics of a fag were to be avoided. Older boys impressed younger ones through homophobic rituals that helped to manage their anxiety and discomfort. They displayed a predatory behavior in which they try to get a girl through a sexual
