DIVESTING FROM THE PATRIARCHAL DIVIDEND: PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCES OF THE CREATING ALLYSHIP THROUGH GENDER EDUCATION AND DIALOGUE (CAGED) PROGRAM by ALLYSON SUSANNE DEAN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Education Studies and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2020 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Allyson Susanne Dean Title: Divesting from the Patriarchal Dividend: Participant Experience of the Creating Allyship Through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) Program This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Education Studies by: Dr. Joanna Goode Chair Dr. Audrey Lucero Core Member Dr. Lisa Mazzei Core Member Dr. C.J. Pascoe Institutional Representative and Dr. Kate Mondloch Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded December 2020. ii © 2020 Allyson Susanne Dean iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Allyson Susanne Dean Doctor of Philosophy Department of Education Studies December 2020 Title: Divesting from the Patriarchal Dividend: Participant Experiences of the Creating Allyship Through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) Program Perceptions and expectations of masculinity in the United States create difficult conditions for men to discuss the pressures they feel around performing masculinity practices. By remaining relatively silent about these pressures, men secure greater access to material and ideological benefits promised through the patriarchal dividend. The patriarchal dividend, however, does not always pay out and leaves men to grapple with gender difficulties in silence. The purpose of this study was to examine what is produced when individuals, primarily men, come together to dialogue about gender more explicitly through the Creating Allyship Through Gender Education and Dialogue Program, a dialogue program conducted within a prison. Program participants examine socio-cultural influences affecting their understanding of gender at structural and personal levels. The study uses Critical Participatory Action Research and collaborative ethnography as feminist methodologies, engaging incarcerated men in both designing and participating in the research focused on gender. The research results explore how expectations around gender influenced participants’ relationships, identities, and commitments. Further, it examines what is possible through dialogue as a way to develop critical literacies about gender. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Allyson Susanne Dean GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR City University of New York-Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY Colgate University, Hamilton, NY DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2020, University of Oregon Master of Science, 2012, Oregon State University Master of Arts, 2008, City University of New York-Brooklyn College Bachelor of Arts, 2006, Colgate University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Critical education studies Gender in education Teacher education Prison education Masculinities Critical participatory action research PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Communications, Research, and Policy Manager, Office of the Registrar, Oregon State University, 2014 Graduate Instructor, Education Studies, University of Oregon, 2014-2018 Head Advisor and Recruiting Specialist, College of Education, Oregon State University, 2013-2014 Project Manager, Academic Success and Engagement, Oregon State University, 2012-2013 Instructor, Women and Gender Studies, Oregon State University, 2012-2013 v Teaching Assistant, Academic Success and Engagement, Oregon State University, 2010-2012 Teaching Assistant, University Housing and Dining, Oregon State University, 2009-2010 Teacher, I.S. 119, New York City Department of Education, 2006-2009 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: College of Education Doctoral Research Fellowship, 2018-2019 Center for the Study of Women in Society Travel Grant recipient, 2018 Janette Gunther Drew Scholarship Recipient, 2015-2020 James R. McCallum Scholarship Recipient, 2017-2018 Center for the Study of Women in Society Travel Grant recipient, 2018 Professional Faculty Leadership Association “Our Hero” Award, 2016 American Educational Research Association Graduate Travel Grant, 2016 PUBLICATIONS: Glick, S. & Dean, A. (2020). Learning to be ‘good enough’: Hollywood’s role in standardizing knowledge and the myth of meritocracy. Post-colonial Directions in Education, 9(1), 43-87. Dean, A. (2020). Gender in prison-based education. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1332 Dean, A. (2018). “The Democratic Republic of Congo.” In S. M. Shaw, N. Barbour, P. Duncan, K. Freehling-Burton, and J. Nichols (Eds.). Women’s lives around the world: A global encyclopedia (a four-volume reference collection). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIP/Greenwood Press. Dean, A.S. (2017). Against “Whatever.” Qualitative Inquiry, 23(7), 513—514. vi Brooks, S.D., Dean, A.S., Franklin-Phipps, A., Mathis, E., Rath, C. L., Raza, N., Smithers, L., & Sundstrom, K. (2017). Becoming-academic in the neoliberal academy: A collective biography. Gender & Education. DOI:10.1080/09540253.2017.1332341 Dean, A.S. & Archer, W. (2017). Transgressing the father figure: Performing queer theology as an act of liberation. Theology & Sexuality, 23(1-2), 67— 92. DOI: 10.1080/13558358.2017.1341209 Dean, A. (2016). Book Review: "Youth, arts, and education: reassembling subjectivity through affect." Gender and Education, 28(7), 959–960. DOI:10.1080/09540253.2016.1150014 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I dedicate this work to all of the CAGED participants throughout the years, with a special dedication to the facilitation team. In times of great despair, the community we developed serves as a beacon of hope. CAGED has been a lifeline for me throughout the years and I am so proud of the work we have done together. To the research team--this has been a labor of love that I have felt so blessed to create and share with you all. Thank you Carina, Jeff S., Jimmy, Wayne, and Jeff K. I have learned so much from and with each one of you. To my committee—thank you for all of your support in numerous ways. Dr. Joanna Goode, you helped me see myself as a scholar. You saw me in ways I could not see myself and believed in me and this work every step of the way. Dr. Lisa Mazzei, thank you for challenging me to think in nuanced ways and for all of the fulfilling discussions in your backyard one summer. Dr. Audrey Lucero, thank you for encouraging my thinking about literacy. Dr. CJ Pascoe, I am grateful for your scholarship and how it propelled my thinking about gender. Thank you for being excited about my work from its early stages. Throughout this process, I found intellectual partnership with those who sat alongside my research process. Andrés Lopez, Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, and Berit Nelsen, the three of you helped me to look forward to writing each week, listening, laughing, and learning with each other. I love you babez. Spirit Brooks, from early in my time in Oregon, you have been my rock, encouraging me, thinking with me, and making sense of the world, including the often bizarre and disenchanting world of academia. viii Thank you for being my soulsister through all of this. Leilani Sabzalian, Asilia Franklin- Phipps, and Laura Smithers—you made my time in the doctoral program so much richer. Support through this process came in the form of deep, beautiful relationships with a number of people who cheered me on and believed in me. To my biggest cheerleader, my mom, Sue Dean--all I have ever accomplished in life is because of the endless love you have provided throughout these years. I love you forever. To my best friend, Katrina Dixon, thanks for helping me find my way back countless times. Sarah Whiteside, you helped me strike a fine balance in finishing this writing while savoring the rich morsels in life. Thank you to the following who offered love and support in so many ways: Shannon Harwood, Olivia Heath, Adam Schwartz, Susie Brubaker-Cole, and Emily Bowling. To my brother Chris—I came to this work in part because of you. I hope one day this work will resonate with you. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1 Background ......................................................................................................................3 Statement of the Problem .................................................................................................8 Significance of the Study .................................................................................................9 Research Questions.....................................................................................................10 Research Design .........................................................................................................11 Terms ..........................................................................................................................12 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW ......................................................................... 17 The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Carceral Futures by Design .........................................17 Historical Roots ..........................................................................................................17 Constructing the Deviant Adolescent .........................................................................21 Discipline in Schools ......................................................................................................23 Improving America’s Schools Act .............................................................................24 School Disturbance Laws ...........................................................................................26 School Resource Officers ...........................................................................................27 School Accountability and Discipline ........................................................................29 From School to Prison: The Effects ...............................................................................34 Gender Education and the School-to-Prison Pipeline ................................................35 Gender as a Social Institution ........................................................................................36 From Sex to Gender ....................................................................................................36 A Social Institution.........................................................................................................38 The Institution/The Individual ....................................................................................40 Patriarchy and Gender ................................................................................................42 Masculinity .................................................................................................................47 Masculinity and Prisons..............................................................................................57 Critical Pedagogies and Critical Literacies ....................................................................60 Neoliberal Logics in Institutions ................................................................................61 Against Neoliberalism: Critical Pedagogies ...............................................................70 Dimensions of Literacy ..................................................................................................72 x Chapter Page From Literacy to Critical Literacy ..............................................................................73 Literacy and Gender .......................................................................................................75 Formal Curriculum .....................................................................................................76 Informal Curriculum ...................................................................................................78 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................82 CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................. 83 The CAGED Curriculum ...............................................................................................85 Research Questions ........................................................................................................86 Action Research .............................................................................................................88 Research, Power, and Prisons .....................................................................................91 Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR).............................................................93 The Critical in CPAR .................................................................................................95 CPAR as Feminist Methodology ................................................................................97 Critical Bi-focality ....................................................................................................103 Collaborative Ethnography .......................................................................................106 Research Design ...........................................................................................................108 Inside and Outside Facilitators .................................................................................108 The Iterative Nature of CPAR ..................................................................................109 Research Site ............................................................................................................111 The Research Team ..................................................................................................114 Principal Investigator Positionality ..........................................................................115 Research Participants and Data Collection Methods ................................................116 Data Collection .........................................................................................................119 Data Security ............................................................................................................122 Data Analysis ............................................................................................................122 CHAPTER IV ................................................................................................................. 128 Dialogue as an Antidote to Toxic Masculinities ..........................................................128 Overcoming Fear ......................................................................................................129 The Leaky Boundaries of Dialogue ..........................................................................131 Dialogue as a Deep Exhale .......................................................................................134 Dialogue as a Disruption to Hegemonic Masculinity ...............................................137 xi Chapter Page Speaking Into Existence ...............................................................................................144 Becoming Literate ........................................................................................................145 Naming the Problem .................................................................................................146 Naming One’s Experience ........................................................................................151 Literacy as Resistance ..............................................................................................153 Queering the Path .........................................................................................................156 Examining Our Teachings ........................................................................................157 Finding a Queer Home .............................................................................................161 The Queer Path Ahead ..............................................................................................163 Queering Research .......................................................................................................165 Relationships as Methodology..................................................................................166 Vulnerability as Method ...........................................................................................168 CHAPTER V .................................................................................................................. 174 Toward Literacies of Gender........................................................................................175 Divesting from the Patriarchal Dividend .....................................................................176 Education and Schooling ..............................................................................................181 Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline .................................................................182 Queering the Curriculum ..............................................................................................186 Critical Literacy............................................................................................................191 Strategies ..................................................................................................................196 Reimagine School Discipline Practices........................................................................202 Expanding Alternatives to Incarceration for Youth. ................................................209 New Directions for Corrections ...................................................................................216 Restorative Justice as Rehabilitation ........................................................................218 Implications for Feminist Movements .........................................................................220 Gender Literate Research .............................................................................................222 Limitations of the Study ...............................................................................................227 Implications for Future Research .................................................................................229 The Conclusion Is Incomplete ..................................................................................232 APPENDIX A: PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH TEAM ....................................... 233 xii Chapter Page APPENDIX B: TIMELINE OF IRB INTERACTIONS ................................................ 234 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................... 236 xiii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “Love you.” Two pre-pubescent boys chest bump. “No homo.” This was a common scene in the halls of I.S. 119 in Queens where I taught seventh-grade English Language Arts. The immediate qualifier between two boys trying to show affection that affirmed their burgeoning masculinity by distancing from homosexuality. This scene, although disheartening, was far from uncommon among many school-aged boys catapulting into adolescence. The constant dance many of these boys did stemmed, undoubtedly, from watching the men in their lives connect through a variety of practices that positioned them as masculine and dominant. I watched these young boys awkwardly acknowledge each other or seek acknowledgement through behaviors that mirrored violence or involved touch shrouded in aggression, both playful and not. I thought frequently of my brother when observing the boys in the school at which I taught. My brother drops his voice to answer the phone when his best friend, a former fraternity brother and ROTC buddy, calls. My brother, known in elementary school by his teachers and my parents as a sweet, sensitive boy who cried at all the holiday films, refuses to seek mental health services because, as he once claimed, “Guys don’t do that.” When I challenged him and began to name a few men I know who have sought counseling, he quickly retorted, “Yeah, they’re gay,” as if to say real men don’t seek counseling and that gay men can’t be real men. These behaviors, coupled with sporadic denigrations of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and people of color, signal to me the shrouded fear and insecurity of the slipping dominance in a world built for and by men much like my brother--heterosexual, able-bodied, White men. This tenuous dance of masculinity I observe in my brother, that I observed in the boys I taught, extends to a variety of people--men, women, and non-binary folks--who get caught in the sticky web of hegemonic gender expectations, often organized around dominant masculine practices, the “paradigmatic” behaviors that do not prompt questioning because of how entrenched and accepted they often feel (Miedzian, 1991, p. 8). We learn these early in our social lives--through our parents, our teachers, our community leaders, and, perhaps most importantly, our peers who are in the same tumultuous learning process (Pascoe, 2007). As we fumble to make meaning of ourselves and the world around us, gender acts as a form of literacy. We learn quickly what is and is not normative and organize the way we read the world through an often- dichotomous lens of hegemonic, binary gender. In my life, I have seen this stronghold of gender norms play out in the lives of people I love dearly, as well as in my own life. I say stronghold because these norms seem to strangle possibility and coerce us into submission, conceding our will to thrive for a will to survive and be legible as socially acceptable. And when it comes to gender norms, safety and survival often prevail as a primary motivator for performing gendered practices in a recognizable fashion (Tannehill, 2018). In my personal sphere, my volunteer work with local queer and trans youth illustrates to me how their safety and security is volatile, despite the resilience I see in these kids as they navigate a world slowly warming to their unabashed expressions of gender. While some of them return home every school day to a family that can hear, see, and support them through the challenges they may experience at school, there are several for whom home represents further repression of their identities or worse, persecution. I see, firsthand, why statistics 2 about youth experiencing homelessness point to a significant correlation with queer and trans identities (Griffith, 2019). As someone who never felt I neatly performed the expected practices associated with my gender, I experience the unwieldy nature of many of these expectations. In the course of coming to terms with being a gender-confrontational, White, queer woman, I heard about the ways I failed my gender and how, in my push against what I felt were detrimental norms, I came across as intimidating. I thought often about whether these same character judgments would land if I were a man. Background Gender is a wicked game that structures human lives on macro and micro levels. As a social construct, it builds the significant foundation upon which multiple structures rely. On a macro level, gender structures dominant ideologies in everything from medicine (e.g. The Lancet, 2019) to political possibilities (e.g. “When Women Run,” 2020) to remuneration (e.g. Sheth et al., 2020). As these dominant ideologies pervade how one thinks about one’s self on the individual level, expectations of treatment and access to services and experiences often relate to one’s gender, among other mediating identities such as race, physical and cognitive ability, and socioeconomic class, to name a few. The passage below shows how anticipated access or treatment based in narrow conceptions of masculinity begets violence when that which is anticipated or expected fails to manifest (Garvey, 2014): Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. For the last eight years of my life… I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. ...I don’t know why you 3 girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime because I don’t know what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. ...I take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male. This harrowing promise of violence comes from the video made by Elliot Rodger before going on a killing rampage, ending in the death of six people, injuries to 14 more, and Rodger’s own suicide. Rodger’s manifesto, his calls for violence to those women who rejected his sexual advances, lamenting his virginity at age 22, spoke to a burgeoning online community self-described as “Incels,” or, those who claim to be “involuntarily celibate” (BBC News, 2018). What this community of men found in Rodger’s manifesto was affirmation of what they feel they deserve--the access to women’s bodies for their pleasure. And when denied this access, these men turn to the one thing they know in order to maintain a sense of power--degrading women through verbal and physical violence. Though accounts of this nature are far from novel, in the last decade, the correlation between White, heteropatriarchal privilege, failed expectations of receiving the benefits of performing hegemonic masculinities, and acts of mass violence became salient to a critical mass in the United States. In a country focused on disrupting terrorism, the United States need look no further than its own soil to address mass violence. The assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counterterrorism gave a statement in 2019 before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the “threats posed by domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” entitled “Confronting White Supremacy” (McGarrity & Shivers, 2019). In it, they talk about how “lone actors,” like Rodgers, have enacted “the most lethal 4 incidents among domestic terrorists” in recent history. Further, the FBI recognizes that many of these “lone actors” became self-radicalized through participation in online communities (Hines, 2019), similar to those fueled by Rodger’s mass murder. Of the multitude of domestic mass shooters in recent U.S. history, several of them have documented histories of misogynistic acts, often involving violence towards women (Bosman et al., 2019). This is a critical point in the history of the United States. In 2018, a record number of women and people of color won political positions through various state elections (Zhou, 2019). This success for marginalized communities stands in stark contrast to the misogynistic and bigoted policies of the Executive Office of the United States, where Donald Trump--notorious for suggesting he would like to “grab [a woman] by the pussy” (“Transcript: Donald Trump’s taped comments about women,” 2016), referring to various Mexicans as “rapists” (Phillips, 2017), and suggesting legal acceptability for terminating employment based on whether or not someone is queer or trans (Kendall, 2019)--buttresses White supremacy, homophobia, and sexism with a seemingly unending barrage of policy decisions, public statements (see e.g. Edelman, 2019; Graham et al., 2019), and cabinet and court nominations. Public discourse points to this significant contrast of a Trump presidency and an increasingly diverse Congress as a sign of a country divided. Some apt observations suggest, perhaps more appropriately, that these two disparate rises to power suggest the two realities of this country--the ‘last gasp’ of the normalization of White heteropatriarchal1 power versus the democratic, multicultural future this rapidly changing country requires. 1 Throughout this dissertation, I refer to “White heteropatriarchy:” and “White heteropatriarchal power.” This speaks to the co-constitutive power of three dominant ideologies: White supremacy, patriarchy, and 5 This chasm between ideologies often appears along differences in identities, with outliers standing on either side of the gap. Based on the 2016 Presidential election voting results, we see how whiteness works to insulate its ever-volatile power. While Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, he overwhelmingly won White votes, with 62% of White men and 52% of White women reporting their support for Trump in exit polling (Exit Polls, 2016). In the wake of the results, White women faced the consequences for this (see e.g. Anderson, 2016; Greene, 2016), with White men escaping from being held just as accountable. These arguments about White women’s complicity in the election signal not only how whiteness, or race, supersedes the rights of one’s gender, but also of what expectations and accountability exist for White men. In a sense, the expectation is that White men will invest in the debt of others for their own gain without much accountability for those investments. These investments in others’ debt are well worn in public education, as access to educational resources and opportunities have largely existed to benefit White boys. Gloria Ladson-Billings, in her 2006 American Educational Research Association Presidential Address, introduced the concept of educational debt. She writes, "People in moral panics attempt to describe other people, groups of individuals, or events that become defined as threats throughout a society. However, in such a panic the magnitude of the supposed threat overshadows the real threat posed" (p. 8). This type of moral panic enables support for limiting opportunities and freedoms for those who may disrupt heterosupremacy. Under this forceful front of three of the most domineering ideologies, particularly within Western cultures, people of color, genderqueer, trans, or non-binary people, and cis women experience various oppressions wherein they are not seen as equal and do not receive equal treatment or access to relevant services and opportunities. 6 normalized structures and expected outcomes; in her work, affording students of color the same learning opportunities as White students destabilizes White power structures and fears arise out of an austere understanding of opportunities to learn and excel. Because of this, one might understand White folks as investing in the educational debt of students of color as a means of securing power. Ladson-Billings’ apt description of moral panics speaks to a multitude of practices in U.S. policy, one of the most significant is identifying the threat of terrorism as something that comes from afar, from countries with brown people speaking languages such as Arabic or Spanish, rather than seeing the terrorism enacted by White men who speak English and may live in any one of our neighborhoods. This is precisely how these moral panics work--finding the “Other” and attaching the ills of the world to those who are already marginalized as a means of detracting from the hard truth of what is threatening the moral fabric of a place. What if, instead, we examined the hard truth? What if White supremacy, what if patriarchy, what if heterosexism actually limited everyone, including straight, White men? Considering an examination like this would upend years of an anemic foundation built upon the denigration of people of color, women, and queer and trans folks as weak, as those in need of White saviorhood and male chauvinism. And once that is gone, what remains for White men? Further, what role will U.S. schools play in helping students envision a future past the antiquated and decaying structures of White heteropatriarchy? Imagine if #NoSTPP was as recognizable as #NoDAPL. What are the investments made in maintaining the school-to-prison pipeline, and what is possible in divesting from it through processes that serve to renew rather than extricate? 7 Over the last two decades, many U.S. public schools have turned a significant focus towards developing curricula to reflect the changing demographics of the school- aged population.2 As a growing number of youth in the U.S. identify as queer (McNamara, 2017; Tsjeng, 2016), curricula actively discussing gender and sexuality lags behind, caught in political battles about political correctness and antiquated laws preventing LGBTQ curriculum (#DontEraseUs, 2018). These coupled with proposed state bills limiting LGBTQ rights, particularly for youth (see Moreau, 2020), creates an urgency for public education to better serve its dynamic student population through curricula that not only recognize, but also affirm, their identities. Statement of the Problem As outlined previously, U.S. society stands at a precipice of mass violence by domestics, exorbitant rates of hate-related crimes, and a preponderance of death-by- suicide; at the center of all of these factors lies a common denominator--men. Many gender-related studies and narratives that focus on gender situate the conversation on the non-dominant--women and non-binary folks (Pascoe, 2015). Because of this, conversations often miss the way dominant notions of gender affect those who are expected to most directly uphold them—men. While comprehensive research exists on the importance of culturally relevant curricula embracing diverse identities and perspectives (e.g. Gay, 2013), curricula often focus on narratives without deeper investigation of the complexity of gender practices. These curricula tend to celebrate identities, again, often from the perspective of those 2 In 2015, the majority of students in U.S. public schools shifted from being majority White students to majority students of color, a significant marker of the changing demographic landscape of the United States. 8 marginalized. While this is critical in providing much needed and long overdue representation, if we are to see an ideological shift in dominant paradigms, we must offer interrogation into how dominant paradigms often do not serve those expected to benefit from them. And that interrogation must engage those who are expected to benefit in order to disprove those dominant ideologies and envision alternate futures. Significance of the Study Considering what is produced as a result of creating space to discuss gender more broadly, and masculinities more specifically, is key to understanding how silence regarding gender expectations insulates patriarchy, White supremacy, and heterosexism. Further, what we learn from discussions about these expectations of performing one’s gender has implications on alternative approaches to discipline in K-12 schooling as a means of divesting from the school-to-prison pipeline. What began as one overview conversation about gender and sexuality with about eight interested inmates at a male correctional facility grew into a comprehensive, collaboratively developed, 14-week curriculum attended by over 300 incarcerated people over a seven-year span. This program, CAGED, stands for Creating Allyship through Gender Education and Dialogue, an acronym developed by two of the incarcerated facilitators. The program morphed throughout the years from focusing largely on differentiating gender from sexuality to examining gender and the ways, as a social construct, it shapes the institutions, ideologies, and personas with which we interact throughout our lives. Some participants point to the conversations in CAGED as playing a role in changes within the correctional institution. During the third year of its operation, the 9 incarcerated population saw the prison add products deemed more feminine to a special section of the commissary--lipstick, eyeshadow, sports bras, and deodorant marketed to women. Soon after this addition, these items moved from being listed in a special section of the commissary sheet to being incorporated as regular items, mixed among the other standard commissary goods. Inmates began to wear makeup. Pronouns other than “he” began to be used. At our group, some participants disclosed their process of coming out as a woman. The energy of change was palpable at points and CAGED, to its detriment at points I will discuss later, became known as “that trans group.” CAGED offered what could not be found with much ease in the prison, let alone in U.S. society in general--a place to ask questions about what it meant to be a man. As public dialogues arise regarding the futility of hegemonic, and often toxic, masculinities, the need to examine expectations of gender practices becomes critical. Those examinations occur in the space of CAGED and this research aims to relay what surfaced in the course of this inquiry community. Research Questions The primary research questions focused on participants’ direct perceptions about the role CAGED played in their lives, their perceptions, and their experiences within and outside the correctional institution. These questions were vetted and approved by our research team of incarcerated facilitators and facilitators from the outside and asked program participants, the research team, and previous participants who have since paroled, to reflect on their time in CAGED and what arose in their examination of their involvement in CAGED: 10 1. How do participants experience a prison education program focused on gender and masculinity? 2. How do participants experience gender education? 3. What is the perceived value of participation in the CAGED program more specifically? Research Design This study employs a collaborative research approach wherein those most affected by particular systems participate in the research development and as participants in the research study. Because CAGED began as a collaboration between incarcerated people3 and outside volunteers, developing the research as a collaborative process seemed imperative. We each experience gender in different ways, mediated by the institutions in which we spend much of our time. When an inside collaborator of mine stated, a year into the program, “Somebody needs to research this,” I replied, “We can.” The primary participants in this study were those who participated, either as a facilitator or as a participant, in CAGED. We used Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) as the primary methodology guiding the creation of the research. As Kemmis (2008) notes, ...action research must find a way to work not just on the self-realization of person or the realization of more rational and coherent organizations, but in the interstices between people and organizations, and across the boundaries between lifeworlds and systems. It must work in the conversations and communications of participants about crises and difficulties confronted by social systems and the lifeworlds in which people find meaning, solidarity, and significance. It must become a process of facilitating public discourse in public spheres [emphasis mine]. (p. 128) 3 Throughout this dissertation, I will use the following terms to describe the population of people who constitute a majority of the participants in this study: incarcerated individuals, incarcerated people, prisoners, adults in custody. 11 For the work of CAGED, these discourses transcended the weekly meeting space, trickling into our lives and relationships with people and the world around us. Because of the genesis of CAGED as a program and working with a population routinely marginalized by society, the research was best served by a collaborative approach rooted in critical theory and active participation. CPAR not only involves those most directly affected by institutions to engage in the study of them, it also examines the “dividing practices” Foucault (1982, p. 326) discussions that create incarcerated people as “criminal-social enem[ies]” (Foucault, 1973, 2013, p. 33). By working as a team of incarcerated and non-incarcerated researchers, we could further our inquiry into how these experiences of gender become mediated by those “dividing practices” of incarceration. Further, in this research with incarcerated co-researchers, a shift occurs in the construction of those incarcerated from criminals to those with acute insights of the systems that constitute their lived conditions. Centering the inquiry on desire for change averts settling into powerlessness and cultivates possibility for imagining alternative social realities where insiders’ knowledge creates power-in-knowledge and subsequent action for change. Terms It feels important to orient the reader to the terminology used in this study, just as we would do in the CAGED curriculum. Though I define these below, I recognize that the definition of each of these may vary dramatically depending on the sources one considers and where one finds themselves theoretically located. Further, I acknowledge, against my best intentions, that language has a slippery quality, and my critical literacy grows alongside the participants in this study. While I strive to call upon these 12 definitions, I wrestle with the tension between these definitions and those terms we commonly use in CAGED, those that are more tangible and accessible to the group. With that, the following terms will be used throughout the text and serve as primary concepts to frame this study: ● Critical literacies: Critical literacies consider how language mediates thought (Vygotsky, 1962) and how language constructs our social worlds. Critical literacy, however, pushes beyond language to multiple discourses and developing tools to comprehend hegemonic discourses (Morrell, 2008) as part of a larger emancipatory project of countering oppressive structures. Freire and Macedo (1987) consider critical literacies central to their advocacy of literacy as a form of liberation, stating, “For the notion of literacy to become meaningful it has to be situated within a theory of cultural production and viewed as an integral part of the way in which people produce, transform, and reproduce meaning” (p. 142). ● Dialogue: Though there are different epistemological foundations about dialogue, in this dissertation I call on Freire’s (2000) concept of dialogue as a means of liberatory education. In this model, learners draw upon life experiences and situated knowledges for “an act of creation” (p. 89). This act of creation is “mediated by the world, in order to name the world” (p. 88). ● School-to-prison pipeline: This term describes the compounding practices, attitudes, policies, curriculum, and disciplinary measures that lead to the eventual incarceration of youth in the United States. While this metaphor is used frequently to discuss the phenomenon of rapid incarceration of young people, 13 particularly young people of color (e.g. Ferguson, 2010; Morris, 2016; Simmons, 2010), I contend, while using it throughout this research, that the frequent use of this term runs the risk that Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, September 16) explains “deadens the very real violence that lurks behind the term.” While it is illustrative in showing that there is a very real connection between schools and prisons, it avoids delineating the complex history and detrimental policies that have dug the deep ditch and laid the pipe between the two. ● Gender: Gender is a complex, multifaceted social institution (Martin, 2004) interdependent with other social institutions. Individuals and institutions mutually constitute gender, with relations and norms that are reinforced through individuals and institutions. It appears as “a pattern in our social arrangements, and in the everyday activities or practices which those arrangements govern” (Connell, 2009, p. 10). It is often recognized because of how it distinguishes between people based on this pattern, where power and subordination manifest through perceived distinctions between genders (Acker, 1992). ● Masculinities: ○ Hegemonic masculinity: Pascoe and Bridges (2016, p. 18) refer to hegemonic masculinity as describing “the most culturally exalted forms of masculinity--configurations that justify dominance and inequality.” They caution the widespread use of this term, as it tends to refer to a “type” of a man instead of the “configuration of gendered practice within a system of gender relations that is internally contradictory and rife with conflict” (p. 20). 14 ○ Masculinity: This broad term describes a series of practices, behaviors, beliefs, and values (Whitehead & Barrett, 2001, p. 14) typically ascribed to biological males. However, in recognizing that this series of actions and ideas varies across other social structures and because masculinity is done relationally, Connell (1995) calls for understanding the multiplicities of masculinity as “masculinities,” or “the practices and relations that construct the main patterns of masculinity” (p. 77). In this framework, Connell examines how different masculinities are mutually constitutive, considering how masculinities situate around power and their intersections with other social institutions. This framework of masculinities attempts to make apparent the deep complexities of gender and dislocate masculinity as a trait possessed only by men. ○ Toxic masculinity: Kupers (2005, p. 714) considers toxic masculinity “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Kupers argues this can become exacerbated within the prison environment. This constellation comes through as practices that uphold those ideologies Kupers outlines. ● Patriarchy ○ Heteropatriarchy: This institution speaks to the combination and conflation (Valdes, 1996) of dominance in three social institutions--sex, gender, and sexuality. In this mutually constructed conflation of these three institutions, the dominant positions in these social institutions--male, 15 cisgender, and heterosexual-- “are perceived as normal and natural” (Arvin et al. , 2013, p. 13). ○ Patriarchal dividend: Connell (1995, p. 79) describes the patriarchal dividend as the “advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.” This extends not only to immaterial benefits such as belief in men’s leadership potential, conceptions of intelligence, and general deference, but also to material benefits such as compensation, positions of power, and physical safety. This study attempts to elicit insight into the role gender and its subsequent set of inexplicit expectations played into the experiences of participants and researcher- participants. It does so by examining participants and researcher-participants experiences in a dialogue program focused on gender, power, and violence. For those who are incarcerated participants or researcher-participants, this study aims to examine how those experiences played a role in their lives before, during, and after incarceration in a male correctional institution. For the outside researcher-participants, the exploration widens, looking at the role gender expectations played in their lives and the experiences and ideologies produced as a result of those expectations. 16 CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter introduces the three bodies of literature from which this study draws to provide relevant context. It examines the historical and contemporary developments in the school-to-prison pipeline. While this study does not directly address participants’ experiences with the school-to-prison pipeline, this context provides an important foregrounding for this study. Providing an overview of literature on the school-to-prison serves to show the collusion between schools and prisons. This is critical to better understanding how CAGED holds possibilities as a disruption to the pipeline. The chapter ends with an overview of critical pedagogies and critical literacy as responses to neo-liberal logics in education. These three strands of literature provide important guideposts for understanding the importance of this study. The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Carceral Futures by Design The school-to-prison pipeline stretches beyond a metaphor of the link between the practices of K-12 school practices and student interactions with juvenile and criminal justice systems. It presents as an historical and contemporary metonymy, the pipeline standing in as a very small part of a larger system of historical, sociological, and political implications of criminality and disposability for populations of often-voiceless, faceless young people who constitute a large portion of the highest prison population in the world (Institute for Criminal Policy Research, 2016). To better understand how this metaphor serves as a metonymy, we must examine the historical roots, sociological factors, and current indicators that created it. Historical Roots 17 Public schooling in the United States grew rapidly in the wake of an influx of immigrants. As cities began to teem with newly arrived communities from Europe and northern U.S. cities saw the migration of freed Blacks from the South, a system by which to socialize and assimilate these new city-dwellers arose. Riis (1890) details this project of assimilation as coming from a distinct social separation and othering of free Blacks and those immigrants deemed less-than the dominant Anglo-Saxons in power. Though separate, Anglos in political power asked the question, “[W]hat to do with the boy?” a question that drove an effort to develop compulsory public schooling rooted in a project to clear the streets of youth and divert youth from becoming “rough young savage[s],” a term colonizers commonly ascribed to indigenous peoples in the wake of colonization. As the institutionalization of youth through schooling took place in many of the nation’s urban centers, so, too, did the institutionalization of behavior--through the creation of public policing. Tyack (1974) writes, “The creation of efficient and uniformed police paralleled the movement to standardize schooling. Both were in part responses to the influx of the immigrant poor” (p. 33). This response to institutionalize and standardize behavior through the simultaneous rise of policing and schooling signals a critical point in the historical development of a school-to-prison pipeline. As schooling became compulsory in many cities, truancy officers roamed the streets, pushing youth either to schools or, for those who resisted, detention centers, drawing the earliest connections between schools and prisons (Riis, 1890). Compulsory schooling came as a means of social control, a foundational center in which to cultivate a social panopticism from an early age (Foucault, 1977). This type of panopticism was cultivated through intentional curricula that instructed youth on how to 18 behave and how to prepare for their future role in an industrialized society (Kliebard, 1995; Tyack, 1974). At the helm of creating policies and curricula for compulsory schools were power-mongering bureaucrats who advocated for separate schools for poor youth, including immigrant and free Black children, that would acculturate them into a dominant culture framework, seeing “public education [as] the most human form of social control” (Tyack, 1974, p. 74). As a result, free Blacks and immigrants “were rarely part of [the] design [of the common school]” (p. 110). This strategic development of social control through compulsory school curricula created a codified othering practice that situated conformity to Anglo social norms and knowledge as normal and all other forms of knowledge capital as unworthy and, often, deviant. The creation of the “one best system” presented a discourse of what thoughts and what bodies were considered the One and what thoughts and bodies were considered the Other (Said 1978, 2003). In the move toward the standardization of schools, discourses emerged “for purposes of hierarchy and subordination and also for purposes of exclusion” (Butler in Meijer & Prins, 1998, p. 280). The history of public education offers standardized public education as an assimilation tool for those seeking access into a heteropaternalistic society; the expectation was that all citizens should desire access and mobility within the dominant, heteropaternalistic society. Standardized school curricula and the systematic, uniform assessments of learning produced a domain of ontology wherein those who uniformly fit into these systematic approaches to education, those whose ideologies on which education was initially designed, became the center of the discourse. Those whose experiences the curriculum validated became those students whose bodies “count[ed] or qualif[ied] as real” (Butler in Meijer & Prins, 1998, p. 280). 19 What became of the students whose experiences and whose bodies did not adapt to the heteropaternalistic mold? They became the unspecific statistics of failure. They became the conglomerate face of deviance in a project deemed critical first to cultivating a so-called civilized society and later to “secur[ing] gainful employment ...to manage [one’s] own [life]” in order to serve “the progress of society itself” (A Nation at Risk, 1981). Those who did not fit threatened the economic prosperity of the United States. They posed a threat to capitalism. The standardization movement that pulled from the historical assimilation approach to curricula developed in the wake of the Reagan administration’s report A Nation at Risk (Ross, 1996). What became central to the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report was the need for greater standardization of curriculum. This push toward standardization became amplified under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, which attached significant funding to language of accountability through measures from standardized testing (Ravitch, 2014). As the push towards standardized testing gained momentum, a distinct binary of proficient and not proficient emerged. This produced discourses regarding “the achievement gap.” Those deemed proficient fulfilled the curricular project of White-settler futurity, while those deemed not proficient “live[d] in the shadowy regions of ontology,” as those “not proficient” bodies became bodies to regulate and remediate (Butler in Meijer & Prins, 1998, p. 277). Through the othering process found in the curriculum of public schools, students, particularly those commonly known as students of color (SoCs), became targets for school interventions. The legacy of these targeted interventions continued throughout the history of U.S. public schooling. Following the early establishment of compulsory 20 schooling, separate schooling persisted until the mid-1950s when schools were federally mandated to integrate White students and students of color. However, integration often means only desegregation of students going to separate buildings, and not the true integration of students in classes (Wells, et al., 2009). In these desegregated schools, White students often had access to classes and experiences that advanced their cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) while students of color attempted to keep academic pace with their White peers afforded different educational opportunities, among economic and political opportunities, for generations (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Ravitch, 2014). This unevenly distributed history of academic opportunities between White students and their peers of color created what is commonly known as the “achievement gap,” a term that continues to classify students of color as lagging behind. This notion of the achievement gap is important in understanding the historical context of the school-to-prison pipeline in that it established educational norms, rooted in middle class, White heteropatriarchal capital, to which students of color, LGBTQ+ students, students experiencing poverty, and female students were and continue to be held. This is a key point in understanding the role of bias in school discipline, a primary source of students entering the school-to-prison pipeline. Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera (2010) highlight the link between the achievement gap and the disproportionate discipline Black and Latino students experience, further exacerbated, as we will see later, by federal education reform. Constructing the Deviant Adolescent Critical to understanding the manifestation and maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline is recognizing how the social and cultural capital of White heteropatriarchy 21 morphs to evade integration of students from diverse identities (Tuck & Gaztámbide- Fernandez, 2013). A key part of this evasion is the casting as “at risk” students from diverse identities, namely students of color and students from lower socio-economic statuses. This “at-risk” identity emerged from early public school history, where the New York Free Schools society labeled poor, immigrant, and Black children as such (Hickey- Moody, 2013). This labeling of “at-risk” students rises out of the moral panic of what to do with youth who, compared to a White heteropatriarchal framework, appear as uncivilized and potentially dangerous. This manifests into the criminalization of these young people. Compounding this criminalization is the representation of youth deviance in mass media. Media coverage presents a disproportionate focus on juvenile crime, exacerbating the criminalization and at-risk labeling of youth, particularly young males of color (Schiraldi & Ziedenberg, 2001). The media misrepresentation of males of color traces to one of the first full-length feature films in the United States , The Birth of a Nation, wherein a Black man, played by a White man in blackface, was portrayed as a savage looking to rape White women. It prompted a moral panic around Black men, extending to men of color and, ultimately, people of color, that continues as a trope that plays out in the White imagination today (Dyer, 1997). In the 1990s, we saw the framing of boys of color, particularly Black boys, as “superpredators,” deviant young people intent on enacting violence and crime. These criminalizations of other-than-whiteness coupled with a teaching population composed of largely White females (Walker, 2018) continues the trope of the Black male, or male of color, needing to be disciplined in their interactions with White women. These deviant representations contribute to implicit biases among 22 teachers, which have a correlation with school suspensions and student achievement (Chin et al., 2020). These constructions of youth deviance build a sociological foundation on which the education debt of denying equitable and culturally appropriate opportunities to learn for all students rests. Constructions of deviant youth contribute to the deficit Ladson- Billings (2006) calls “education debt,” the accumulation of years of investing in White heteropatriarchy, upholding the narratives and knowledge standards of a capitalist society rooted in colonization and built upon the backs of people of color (PoC), many of whom were forcibly brought to the United States for White economic advancement (Zinn, 2003). Recognizing this foundation is imperative to understanding the current context of the school-to-prison pipeline, as a majority of those students subjected to carceral futures are students of color (Morris, 2016; Noguera, 2013; Skiba et al., 2011). Discipline in Schools Teacher preparation programs stress the importance of classroom management to ensure students remain on task and avoid deviant behaviors. This training often focuses on engaging students in a variety of learning processes and establishing classroom cultures regarding community conduct. Discipline in schools, however, no longer rests largely in the hands of teachers. Infractions common among adolescents--cursing, using cell phones when prohibited, and minor hallway altercations--that once resulted in detention, or worse, in- or out-of-school suspension, may lead to arrest in the heavily policed environments of many public schools. What was once an extreme measure of calling on law enforcement has become pervasive in public schools throughout much of 23 the United States. This is due in large part to federal and state laws and policies that increased the carceral state of youth attending public schools. Improving America’s Schools Act The enactment of the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, a part of the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) played a large role in the groundwork development of a school-to-prison pipeline, as antithetical as that may sound. This Act reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and added specific reform measures related to Title I, including a focus on helping marginalized students meet high academic standards (LeTendre, 1996). Paradoxically, it codified the use of “zero tolerance” policies, formerly seen in federal legislation regarding the War on Drugs, in school policy (Hanson, 2005). The establishment of zero tolerance policies in school discipline meant that schools pre-determined punishment sanctions, often involving in- and out-of-school suspensions, as part of their required reporting in order to receive federal funds. This legislation created and exacerbated factors that produced a school-to-prison pipeline. Zero Tolerance. At the heart of the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 stands the concept of “zero tolerance.” The American Psychological Association (2008, p. 852) explains that zero tolerance speaks to “a philosophy or policy that mandates the application of predetermined consequences, most often severe and punitive in nature, that are intended to be applied regardless of the gravity of behavior, mitigating circumstances, or situational context.” And without a distinct definition of over what actions or behaviors this absence of tolerance looms, these policies may be applied more broadly than what may be understood as developmentally appropriate for a particular age group. 24 Zero tolerance policies follow in the moral panic pathway of the mid-1990s from which the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 came. From what is typically known as the Clinton Crime Bill came the implementation of stringent approaches to criminal justice, a response to President Bill Clinton’s belief that "’Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools’" (Johnson, 2014). While the Improving America’s Schools Act came as separate legislation, it passed Congressional support less than a month after the passing of the Crime Bill, signaling a larger coalescence of the U.S. collective conscience regarding who commits crime, and where and how crime occurs. These bills helped to mutually constitute a carceral future for young people of color in largely urban areas, pumping significant government support for spending towards the development of more prisons, the investment in more targeted and frequent police patrols, and developed a viable capitalist market for punitive and carceral technologies (Alexander, 2011; Wang, 2018). With a zero tolerance approach in schools, students found a significant shift in what constituted punishable behavior, often only after experiencing punitive measures. For example, as cited by the APA (2008), one student found a small knife for cutting a piece of fruit in the lunch bag her mother packed and, upon handing it over to a school staff member, the school deemed the student in possession of a weapon and expelled her, even though she voluntarily relinquished the knife to school officials. Under this level of unpredictable and unforgiving surveillance and consequent punishment, students, in the midst of significant cognitive, physiological, and social development must regulate the entirety of their mercurial emotions and calculate the risk of any level of proffering information or contraband that may lead, ultimately, to their arrest. 25 These zero tolerance measures contend that in order to ensure student safety and foster an environment of learning, students must be subject to punitive treatment if perceived to pose any threat due to behavior or possession of an item; a whittling knife becomes an arrest for possession of a weapon. The punishment that comes with zero tolerance is meant to avert any future misbehavior, but instead often leads to students dropping out and/or a delay in graduation, factors that contribute to the building of the school-to-prison pipeline (Raffaele-Mendez, 2003). Scholars (Hanson 2005; Skiba et al., 2014) point to zero tolerance policies as the primary source of school suspensions and subsequent interactions with school or community law enforcement. School Disturbance Laws In some states, insubordination, like talking back to a teacher or wearing excessive perfume, can lead to a student’s arrest (Fields & Emshwiller, 2014). In a little over a third of the United States, school disturbance laws exist as state law or municipal ordinances. These laws allow arrests for behaviors that disturb the ability for a school to run smoothly and are often for disturbances that would not warrant a reasonable arrest outside the school environment (Rivera-Calderón, 2019). School disturbance laws resulted in several arrests of young people while on school grounds, as seen with the arrest and force used in the case of Niya Kenny, the young women who, after refusing to give up her cell phone to a school resource officer in her South Carolina school, was physically thrown by the school resource officer while a classmate caught the interaction on video (Blad, 2016; Ripley, 2016; Rivera-Calderón 2019). The interaction between Kenny and the resource officer went viral, calling national attention to the extreme policing present in many K-12 schools. Further, Kenny, an African American girl, 26 experienced the brutality from a White male resource officer, playing out an all-too- familiar scene of police brutality toward Black people. School disturbance laws stand at the center of some of the most outlandish arrests made of students on school grounds. In a comprehensive survey of multiple states’ school disturbance laws, Rivera-Calderón (2019) found that even a noise considered disturbing to the school environment could result in an arrest. With such a subjective way to determine what may be deemed disturbing, schools leave students subject to the whims of school personnel who may find a student to be annoying. In the case of Niya Kenny, South Carolina school disturbance laws state a crime can be “act[ing] in an obnoxious manner,” which may be subject to a 90-day jail sentence (Ripley, 2016), removing a student from their familiar learning environment and stripping them of access to any pre- existing support networks. School disturbance laws lie at the center of significant controversy (Keierleber, 2015; Simon, 2019) and while federal investigations consider the detriment of these laws and policies, they remain widely employed, particularly in tandem with zero tolerance approaches to school discipline (Ripley, 2016). These laws often evade specificity, leaving a wide-open window for interpretation on what may be considered a disturbance. What teacher has not experienced a pubescent youth acting obnoxiously while enduring some of the most dramatic physiological and socio-emotional shifts in their development? And what happens when the police get involved? School Resource Officers School resource officers (SROs) play a key role in the enforcement of zero tolerance and school disturbance policies. SROs are “sworn law enforcement officers 27 responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools” (Community Oriented Policing Services, 2020). SROs have become the primary form of handling disciplinary measures in many U.S. public schools. These positions proliferated in public schools following the passing of the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 as a means to enforce arrests for weapons and drug possession on school grounds. Nolan (2011) recounts numerous instances where students throughout the United States were arrested for seemingly adolescent activity like engaging in a food fight, having a tantrum, and cursing. In this, Nolan points to these as “they speak to the nation’s acquiescence to police intervention as a response to normal student behavior” (p. 20). This adherence to “order-maintenance policing” (p. 20) signals the move away from teacher-directed discipline strategies toward carceral schooling. Research (Juvonen, 2001) on the presence of SROs, however, shows their presence does not always facilitate a greater sense of security for students. SROs often don police uniforms and carry a firearm. In most instances, SROs are “commissioned, sworn law enforcement officer[s]” (National Association of School Resource Officers, 2020). These contribute to what Rios (2011) calls the “youth control complex.” Rios defines this as: [A] system in which schools, police, probation officers, families, community centers, the media, businesses, and other institutions systematically treat young people’s everyday behaviors as criminal activity. The youth control complex [is] fueled by the micro-power of repeated negative judgments and interactions in which [youth are] defined as criminal for almost any form of transgression or disrespect of authority (p. 16). Since SROs usually play the initial point of contact students have with law enforcement, their presence in schools may expedite students’ engagements with the criminal justice system, as more schools turn to SROs to handle minor disciplinary infractions under the 28 purview of school disturbance laws. Once students interact with the criminal justice system, the constellation of the youth control complex expands, heightening possibilities for future interaction with the system and, ultimately, increasing one’s chances of entering the school-to-prison pipeline. School Accountability and Discipline Beyond instances considered “disturbances” by school officials, schools turn to discipline to address issues produced by large-scale education reform. In the wake of the accountability frenzy set forward by a series of education reforms, most notably No Child Left Behind (NCLB), several urban neighborhood schools shut down after being deemed failing by not meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP) under NCLB (Rosales, 2015). When these schools shut down, students, often students of color, are forced to travel greater distances to attend school, sometimes without direct transportation provided, taking them further from the communities to which they belong (Martin, 2013). School closures present a greater barrier to students regularly attending school, resulting in attendance and truancy issues for students disproportionately affected by community school closures. In an examination of the closing of neighborhood schools in Chicago, de la Torre and Gwynne (2009) found that many students end up being placed in schools deemed low-performing and that have nearly double the average rate of truancy. Truancy is among a number of seemingly minor infractions that, with the presence of law officials in schools, becomes criminal. Truancy can occur for a multitude of reasons that speak not to the student’s deviance, but rather to their sense of safety and belonging at school. For LGBTQ+ students, victimization in school influences higher rates of truancy (Birkett, 29 Russell, & Corliss, 2014). Black students, subject to harsher disciplinary standards, may experience more school disengagement, which increases their chances of truancy (Toldson et al., 2015). Students’ truancy, which subjects students to disciplinary systems, including the criminal justice system, links with their experiences of school as a social institution that does not nurture or protect their social identities. I examine how school, as a social institution, organizes and disciplines students’ social identities. Racial Disciplining. School discipline measures do not fall evenly on the shoulders of all students. Instead, many communities of color see their young people targeted more directly by zero tolerance and school disturbance policies. The structural racism embedded in many U.S. public schools produces significant disparities in disciplinary measures employed based on students’ race. One example from 2016 is in St. Petersburg, Florida, where London Hall, upon entering Bay Point Middle School, saw a swift accumulation of disciplinary referrals, part of a larger pattern of biased disciplinary measures towards Black students in the Pinellas County School District (Tampa Bay Times, 2016). The prevalence of structural racism in the bedrock of American public schooling plays a significant role in who floods the school-to-prison pipeline—largely Black youth, particularly young men of color. Sociological research about the school-to-prison pipeline focuses largely on the incarceration of males, particularly males of color (Simmons, 2010; Skiba, 2000). In her work with Black schoolboys, Ferguson (2000, p. 10) notes, “The pressures… [they] faced around race and gender identities from adults and peers were always palpable forces working against their maintaining a commitment to the school.” These pressures to perform what Rios and Sarabia (2015, p. 166-67) call “synthesized masculinities,” are 30 often through overcoming subordinated race and class designations “through the process of criminalization,” that includes punishment for altercations with school officials, a survival strategy to “obtain respect and cope” with their marginality. This, coupled with the disproportionate presence of police officers in neighborhoods where many of these young folks live, creates conditions of near inevitability for youth of color, particularly males, to come into contact with the criminal justice system (Stoudt et al., 2012). Bias, both conscious and unconscious, plays a significant role in the development of a school-to-prison pipeline. With Whiteness proliferating much of the U.S. teaching force, and constructions of knowledge often being formed via White paradigms, attitudes towards cultural practices create harsher discipline for students of color. At a time when more racial minority students attend U.S. public schools than White students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018a), White teachers constitute approximately eighty percent of the teaching force (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018b). As well- intentioned as White teachers may be in their practice, the work of examining one’s bias takes significant time, energy, and support. Yale researchers (Gilliam et al., 2016) illuminate implicit bias as being a plausible reason for significantly more Black children, particularly Black boys, being subjected to a more hostile environment for students to learn. Without addressing teacher and school bias, students of color may be subject to higher rates of discipline, a greater likelihood of dropping out, and continued interactions with the criminal justice system (Gerlinger, 2020). Gender and Sexual Identity Disciplining. Understanding the role of gender in the school-to-prison pipeline is a key element of understanding the social forces at work in educational settings, though one that is often assumed and somewhat 31 under-studied in the context of futurities of youth incarceration. At the core of the issue is “conform[ing] to societal expectations and norms regarding typical male or female behavior,” an expectation that produces difference as deviance (Burdge et al., 2014, p. 7). Schools can represent a hostile and discipline-heavy environment in regards to gender and sexual identity. While boys receive the majority of disciplinary sanctions in school (United States Government Accountability Office, 2018), girls, particularly girls of color, are increasingly subjected to higher rates of discipline (Crenshaw, 2015). When it comes to gender non-conforming students, the data can be a bit harder to decipher due to institutional violence around recognizing students’ genders. While schools collect binary gender demographic information for federal reporting requirements, the experiences of gender nonconforming students remain relatively absent from national conversations about gender and the school-to-prison pipeline. The gender expressions of youth can inform the interaction they have with school officials, as seen with one youth participant who noted, “Some of [the] security guards are coaches, so when they do see a more feminine male, they do kind of tease them” (Burdge et al., 2014, p. 2). Burdge et al.’s work fills an important gap in educational research on gender, spotlighting the experiences of gender nonconforming students’ experiences with school discipline, as youth respondents noted that gender nonconformity was interpreted by teachers and other school officials “as a disruption or a challenge to authority” (p. 4). Students’ experienced their gender as being policed and subject to intense bullying, leading them into the school-to-prison pipeline due to zero tolerance policies. 32 LGBQ+ students, or those who are not heterosexual, experience similar disciplinary measures, in large part due to the prevalence of heterosexist bias from peers and teachers. In a national study (Himmelstein & Brückner, 2011), queer, or non- heterosexuality among students were at greater risk for disciplinary sanctions. Non- heterosexual girls were at a higher risk than their male peers. This coupled with high rates of unaddressed bullying creates a hostile climate for LGBTQ+ youth, leading to increased likelihood of truancy and dropping out of school altogether (Mitchum & Moodie-Mills, 2014). Intersecting Social Institutions and Discipline. Crenshaw (1991) discusses the compounding effects of structural oppression has on those at the intersection of multiple subordinated positions. In her work on intersectionality, Crenshaw discussed how the violence women of color experience looks different from the violence White women experience due to not only gender oppression, but also racial oppression. Morris (2016) highlights this with her study of Black girls and how their gender is policed differently than their White peers; their expressions of their gender and race are seen as defiant and inappropriate in the context of school, resulting in disciplinary measures for their expressions of identity. Morris provides a narrative behind the statistics showing Black girls being twice as likely to be suspended (Camera, 2017). The compiled research on gender and race within the school-to-prison pipeline points to the punitive measures on students of color across genders and LGBTQ+ students, suggesting the entanglement of schools with White, heteropatriarchal ideals. This examination of intersectionality is critical when discussing the school-to-prison pipeline, as previous sections illustrate the disparate effects of discipline on students with marginalized identities. 33 From School to Prison: The Effects In their study of the high schools in a large Mid-Atlantic city, Balfanz, Spiridakis, Neild, and Legters (2003) found that of those students who are incarcerated, most for nonviolent offenses that fall under such penal codes as school disturbance laws or truancy violations, less than fifteen percent graduate. As students are suspended, expelled, or even incarcerated for these minor offenses, their likelihood of successfully returning to and completing school declines. This is linked to a number of factors, including: difficulty with being readmitted to school (Casella, 2003); time gaps in education during disciplinary period which result in learning gaps (Bell 2001); lower grades due to assignments missed while expelled (Rossow & Parkinson, 1999); and difficulties adjusting to school following suspension (Skiba & Knesting, 2002). Once a student is punished through suspension or expulsion, the adverse effects of these disciplinary measures compounds their barriers to completing school successfully and increases their likelihood of dropping out (Raffaele-Mendez, 2003) and future encounters with law enforcement (Fabelo, et.al., 2011). If we are to think of the metaphor of the pipeline, school suspensions and expulsions serve as the nearly infallible insulation that ensures the transition of students to inmates. However, the metaphor of the school-to-prison pipeline itself is leaky. Though it has more recently entered into the public vernacular through political campaigns like those of Bernie Sanders, and even discussed by Congress in 2012 (“Ending the School- to-Prison Pipeline”, 2012), the conversation around the multiple forces that constitute the pipeline remains relatively absent. Coates (2015, September 16) discusses his hesitation regarding terms like “school-to-prison pipeline,” stating that a term like this “deadens the 34 very real violence that lurks behind the term.” While it is illustrative in showing that there is a very real connection between schools and prisons, it avoids delineating the complex history and detrimental policies that have dug the deep ditch and laid the pipe between the two. By resorting to the analogy of the pipeline, policymakers refuse to recognize the multitude of factors outside of contemporary schooling that contribute to the maintenance of a systemic futurity for students unable to conform to and be recognized as anyone or thing other than “Other” (Said, 1978,2003) in U.S. public schools. Gender Education and the School-to-Prison Pipeline The research on gender education and its intersection with the school-to-prison pipeline is scant; it is a field I hope to grow with the research in which I intend to engage. Where some of this education exists, the dissemination of what curricula focused on discussing gender implies for a school-to-prison pipeline is largely nonexistent. Though curricula exist, particularly targeted toward young men of color (Williams, 2014; A Call to Men, 2016), these occur outside traditional K-12 curricula, placing the onus on community educators and keeping these conversations out of the place where they seem most needed--our public schools. In the next section, I turn to examining gender as a social institution. Just as school functions as a larger structure that organizes individuals’ daily lives, so, too does gender. Because this study examines how participants experience an education program focused on gender, I present a foundation for understanding gender as a social institution; this foundation informs much of the CAGED curriculum. 35 Gender as a Social Institution Gender, much like dialogue, is an iterative act. As we perform gender through a series of practices associated with gender expression, we seek external affirmation that we complete those acts in legible ways. When someone gets read as illegible in their gender performance, they may be subject to ridicule, social distancing, and physical and emotional violence. For some, as we see in countless news reports of the brutal murders of trans women, particularly Black trans women (Kaur, 2019), how one’s gender is read and received can mean life or death. Gender plays a large, yet often undetected or unnamed, role in the structuring of every aspect of civic life in most of the world (Connell, 2009). In the United States, gender, when acting with other social institutions like race, class, and sexuality, directs legal rights and protections, affects wage earning potential, determines access to myriad resources, and mediates one’s perceived and real sense of safety, among several other realities (Crenshaw, 1991). In this section, I attempt to capture the contemporary contributions to how we understand gender in the U.S. context. Following that, I explore masculinity more deeply, interrogating its formations and formulations, its multiplicities, and its configurations within schools and prisons, as relevant to this study. From Sex to Gender For much of history, Western societies understood a division between sexes. Social and civic life was organized based on biological differences perceived to determine one’s abilities and, consequently, appropriate social roles. These seemingly immutable biological differences between men and women served as a scientific reasoning for the differences in both physiological and behavioral characteristics between 36 two sexes. Risman and Davis (2013, p. 734) chart the medical developments through the early 20th Century that illuminate differences expressed due to sex hormone discoveries in brain activity, noting that these hormones “not only affected reproduction and sex but also other aspects of the body.” Early medical research focuses on the genetic and biological expressions of difference on social and behavioral between male and female bodies, largely undermining the effect cultural, socio-political, and familial contexts play in social and behavioral developments in girls and boys. More recent biological science research aims to complicate research that presented rationale for why people differed due to often fixed biological attributes.4 Fausto-Sterling’s (2012) work on neuroplasticity bridges the biological and social scientific worlds with a focus on the concept of neural or neuroplasticity, an understanding of the dynamism of neurons in the body, shifting as a result of the environment around you. In part due to this early emphasis on biological differences, many people continue to conflate gender and biological sex. This is overwhelmingly apparent in the largely United States phenomenon of a “gender reveal party,” a gathering hosted for soon-to-be parents where party attendees learn of the perceived5 biological sex of the fetus. This is significant--before one even enters the world, much of society confers a series of expectations, benefits, and restrictions on an individual; this essentially strips one of 4 See Risman & Davis’ (2013) comprehensive overview of biological research on sex differences. 5 These perceive biological sex again through a binary lens based on the anatomy observed via an ultrasound. This dichotomy of two biological sexes eliminates any genetic or sex characteristic variations, when in reality, biological sex determination processes involve at least 25 different genes. Intersex people are those with variations from the normative genetic expression (Ainsworth, 2015). 37 agency and creates significant challenges to charting a course different from the prescribed norm. A process like this speaks to the sociological forces of gender. A Social Institution Contemporary theories about gender often describe gender as a social institution. While gender continues to be used as a means of describing an identity connected to a biological sex (e.g. a woman who is biologically female), social science, particularly the field of sociology, contends that gender encompasses more than individual traits aligning with one’s biological sex. Connell (2009, p. 11) notes that while there may be biological factors that play a role in gender, “the squeezing of biological complexity and adaptability into a stark dichotomy and the idea that cultural patterns simply ‘express’ bodily difference” presents complications in understanding gender in similar, yet inaccurate, ways we conceptualize biological sex--as a dichotomy. This dichotomous approach proved problematic (Acker, 1992), as the similarities and differences between men and women vary to such great extent that “tracing behavior to biological differences” fails to capture the complexity of gender (p. 565). Even tracing behavior to biological differences presents issues, as distinct biological variations exist between people of the same sex. And while gender depends on individuals participating in it, as I will explore later, it transcends biology and the individual. In understanding gender, we often associate gender in a person with the degree to which one embodies masculinity or femininity. Doing so often boils gender down to an essence in an individual rather than understanding the institutions and interactions that play into how we do gender, an active, never-ending process of navigating the material- discursive world around us. The shift to examining gender as a social institution opened 38 possibilities for understanding how individuals shape and are shaped by gender (Acker, 1997; Martin, 2004). Martin (2004) outlines the features of social institutions as a way to demonstrate how gender serves as one itself. The twelve indices Martin presents allow analysis at the individual and institutional level, centering the mutually constitutive relationship between the two. Martin highlights a key function of social institutions--they endure across time and space. This does not mean that gender looks the same in every cultural context, as “[c]onflicts, inconsistency, and change are… endemic to the gender institution” just as with any other social institution (p. 1263). The “legitimating ideology” of gender rests with those practices and relations legitimized by those in power who benefit from the dominant practices and relations, creating particular rules for legible engagement within power structures. As a social institution, gender “is built into the major social organizations of society” (Martin, 2004, p. 1261). Because of this, it is often difficult to see and without being able to see and name it, we have little leverage or knowledge how to change it. When compounded with other social institutions, disentangling gender from its collusion with other institutions of power becomes increasingly difficult. Gender both shapes and is shaped by multiple social institutions, creating and complying with dimensions of dominance. In a capitalist culture like the United States, gender may be obfuscated for the sake of masking its influence. Literature (see e.g. Himmelweit, 2002; Hochschild, 1997) on economic gender inequities, often disadvantaging women, speaks to the hidden costs of patriarchal collusion with capitalism. Acker (2004) states that “the gendered 39 understructure of capitalist production...relegate[s] reproduction to the unpaid work of women or the low paid work of women in the for-profit economy” (p. 27). This is just one example of the pervasive influence of gender working in concert with other social institutions to consolidate power. The Institution/The Individual Critical bifocality asks researchers to dedicate “attention to structures and lives” (Weis & Fine, 2012, p. 174). Examining gender as a social institution requires us to heed Martin’s (2004) call to evade dividing gender between the macro and micro levels. Instead, we must understand that as a social institution, gender relies on participation from individuals. Connell (1987) stresses the need to think about gender not in terms of differences, rather relations. In these relations are patterns, which help to illustrate gender as a social structure, a compilation of patterns that create dynamic structure. Connell (2009, p. 11) provides a working definition of gender that both attends to the biological link to reproduction while centering the implications the social world has on gender: “Gender is the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social practices.” Those reproductive distinctions play out in the social world, as traditional understandings of reproductive roles serve as dominant definitions for normative gender, as we will explore throughout this chapter. Though Connell (p. 11) offers a definition of gender in relation to the reproductive arena, they reinforce the importance of the “multi-dimensional” nature of gender, stating how it shifts across cultural contexts. In the United States, for example, society commonly understands gender through a binary lens, assuming two genders. In 40 recent years, however, people challenged this concept through the legal system, resulting in an institutional change to offices like the Department of Motor Vehicles in many states that recognize a third gender on driver’s licenses (Silverman, 2019). This example reinforces gender as a social institution because in being legally recognized, it relies upon and is, in some ways, affirmed by the state (Martin, 2004). West and Zimmerman, in their influential article “Doing Gender” (1987), explain that even though gender structures our social worlds, our own gender does not simply happen to us. As individuals, we make sense of the multitude of forces to do our gender and, they state, “Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures’” (p. 125). That is, we parse through the multitude of messages we receive, the affirmations or negations we experience as we do our gender, and we make sense of our future interactions based on this iterative feedback loop. A key component of that feedback loop is how we regularly engage in our gender beyond how others perceive our physical appearance or dress. The practices in which we engage further define our gender in cultural contexts. In Butler’s reading of Beauvoir’s claim that one becomes a woman rather than a fixed notion of being born one, Butler (1990, p. 33) points to gender as performativity, or “an ongoing discursive practice… open to intervention and resignification.” This notion of gender as a discursive practice, malleable by how we attach meaning and what we allow to intervene, suggests that even though these structures enact upon us in sometimes overt, sometimes subversive ways, individuals still maintain agency to create anew and push against structures, when they are apparent (Connell, 2009). Because gender relies upon relations and practices to 41 structure it, when an individual deviates from those structures and their exalted practices, their relations change. As individuals collectively divest from contemporary rules of gender, the institutional rules shift. The dynamism of these relations influences the ultimate structure, something Connell (1987) refers to as the cyclical practices of gender, pointing to how “[p]ractice responds to a situation and transforms that situation” (p. 95). Practices refer to the things we actually do that constitute our gender. In U.S. culture, we often understand gender in relation to masculinity and femininity. While historically these terms related to one’s biology and gender relies on the material body (Connell, 1987), scholars like Pascoe (2007) push against these biological associations, claiming that “masculinity is produced and manifested in relation to a multiplicity of bodies, spaces, and objects” (p. 9). In this, the “masculinizing processes” (p. 12) occurs, orienting individuals to the social practices expected to institutionalize (Connell, 1987) those practices as masculine. What continues to be a limiting agent in the cyclical practice of gender is its biological association. As Connell (2009) points to gender occurring as a response to or in concert with the reproductive arena, we must understand that the movement from understanding gender as a biological construction to a social construction does not eliminate the ways in which ideologies of biological determinism continue to shape pervasive ideologies, practices, and policies (Connell, 1987; Lorber, 1994). This, arguably, is a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy and Gender Cultural capital in the United States draws upon patriarchy, a series of beliefs regarding men’s abilities situating them to wield power over women. Patriarchy does not 42 operate without strong supports of White supremacy, heterosexism, nationalism, and classism. It is structural, infiltrating myriad social, economic, and political systems as a prevailing, and often unnamed, ideology. This pervasive ideology shapes our social worlds and does so largely by outlining a set of beliefs and norms regarding gender. Patriarchy, however, does not exclude men from being subjected to harsh, unfair treatment under patriarchal rule. In fact, as this chapter will later attend to, patriarchy plays a profoundly powerful role in defining acceptable and expected practices among men, particularly when one’s identity as a man is coupled with other subordinated identities (Tarrant, 2009). The recognizability of these practices among men as affirming one's gender as “man” manifests into what we recognize as masculinity, which I expound upon in sections that follow. Though patriarchy directs evaluations of whether one may be deemed masculine, patriarchy structures more than individual action. If we consider the multitude of ways women and non-binary folks in the United States receive unequal treatment when compared to their peer men, patriarchal structure becomes evident. A clear case of this is the picture of the Alabama state senate voting to criminalize abortion even in instances of rape or incest (Stracqualursi, 2019). In this case, of the thirty-five senators in the state, only four are women, all of whom did not vote in favor of this law. Twenty-five senators, all White men (Flynn, 2019), voted on a bill that mandates what a female-bodied person6 can do about their own body. This sparked outrage as it seemed to be yet another legal decision men made about female bodies. Patriarchy, however, does not only influence the 6 While pregnancy is typically assigned as something women’s bodies may do, there are a number of non- binary and trans individuals who have become pregnant and their narratives are often made invisible in the fight for reproductive rights. 43 thinking of men, as we saw the Alabama governor, a White woman named Kay Ivey, sign the bill into law, a bill that strips away her legal right to make decisions regarding her body. This legal example shows a multitude of patriarchy’s iterations--a predominantly male senate, voting in favor of a law that has no benefit to them, rather only a detriment to female-bodied folks, only to be signed by a woman who supports the suppression of her own rights. Ivey’s support for this demonstrates the dominance of patriarchal ideologies, even over those whom it disadvantages. Patriarchy rears a brutal, yet often hard to identify, force that divides coalition and undermines rights. The Patriarchal Dividend. Patriarchy’s sustainability relies on the promises it makes. Participating in hegemonically masculine practices bestows material and ideological benefits that Connell (1995) refers to as the patriarchal dividend. These benefits range from positions of political power to superior wages for equal work (United States Congress Joint Economic Committee, 2016) to feelings of physical safety. This dividend pays out more to those who perform more closely or subscribe to the hegemonic standard, framed through a middle-class, White, heteropatriarchal lens. This standard, however, changes constantly, as “[m]asculinity has a slippery quality to defining and understanding it” (Pascoe & Bridges, 2016, p.4). Therefore, investing in it is a risky practice. At one moment, one may practice it exceedingly well. Shortly thereafter, one may quickly be cast aside as out of bounds of hegemonically masculine, subject to social criticism and, potentially, isolation. However, investments in hegemonically patriarchal practices may afford one a piece of the patriarchal dividend, helping to insulate one’s material and/or discursive power. These investments and returns are further mediated by other social institutions, such as race. 44 Race and Gender. Patriarchy does not act equally on all people and all cultures. In the United States, patriarchy receives strong support from White supremacy, as the colonization and subsequent “founding” of the United States as a country stemming from beliefs in white dominance, viewing indigenous people as savage and able to be exploited, or worse, exterminated for the purposes of colonial rule (Zinn, 2003). In centuries following the near extermination of indigenous people, colonists built an entire economy on the sale of human lives through the enslavement of African people abducted from their continent. At the heart of these two formative and enduring events lies white supremacy. Jensen (2012) describes white supremacy as an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites, an ideology that… has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group, and is used to this day to rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of wealth and well-being in this society. (p. 127) Critical in Jensen’s definition is reminding us that this continues to the present day, although some people wish to relegate racism to being a relic of the past. Jensen’s definition also focuses on how exploitation of those deemed non-White stands as the central organizing principle for White supremacy. We see this in modern society in a multitude of ways. Where White men carrying their concealed weapons are just exercising their Second Amendment rights, Black or Latinx men carrying concealed weapons represent a threat of violence. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill (2013) remind us that White heteropatriarchy relies on settler colonialism, and the belief that degrading systems of racism and misogyny are “to-be-expected characteristics of human nature,” keeping analyses from challenging the effects of colonization on all people (p. 9). This is in itself a display of the entanglement of patriarchy and whiteness. 45 The intersection of gender and race often plays out in stereotypes that serve to buttress White heteropatriarchy. Bederman (2016) offers a stark example of this, describing how a 1910 boxing match between Jack Johnson, a Black boxer, and Jim Wattsries, a White boxer, was framed “as a contest to demonstrate which race could produce the superior specimen of virile manhood” (p. 51). Following Johnson’s win, when Johnson and his White girlfriend consensually crossed state lines together, authorities arrested Johnson for violating the Mann Act, which sought to stop “white slavery” over state border lines. This dominant image of a violent man, coupled with early comparisons to White men labeling Black men as intellectually inferior, persists today, as evidenced by the prevalence of Black men getting shot for walking down the street, later to be called “thugs” or felons by mass media.7 Bederman contends that this type of framing explained who and what behaviors were considered civilized through the “discourse interwove[n with] middle-class beliefs about race, gender, and millennialism” by “harnessing male supremacy to White supremacy and celebrating both as essential to human perfection” (p. 61). This supremacy constituted notions of what was civilized, casting those who did not exhibit practices and behaviors legible to White heteropatriarchy as savage. This concept of civilization is critical to understanding the lineage of race and gender. In this framework, the belief is that in order to access power, one must comply with the standards of White heteropatriarchy. Rey Chow’s (as cited in Puar, 2007) concept called “ascendancy of whiteness” describes how bodies that do not meet these 7 During a television appearance, former presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said Michael Brown, a young man shot and killed in Ferguson, MO, was shot because he acted like a thug (Jaffe, 2014). 46 classifications (White, male) but comply with these standards at the expense of their own recognition strive for recognition through their complicity with whiteness; this also plays a role in creating a “model minority,” a person who belongs to an ethnic or racial minority group who successfully performs whiteness. And because of the reliance upon social institutions to be mutually constitutive, whiteness relies upon patriarchy to maintain its social dominance. Because of this, the ascendancy of whiteness can require those who are not men, White, nor heterosexual to eschew those parts of themselves as much as possible to climb towards the pinnacle of power--White heteropatriarchy. This climb, no matter how well one complies, leaves those outside of a White heteropatriarchal framework from fully accessing the tangible and ideological benefits of systems designed to benefit White, heterosexual men. This results in myriad effects such as wage gaps, incarceration rates, and political underrepresentation, all compounded by gender and race. Critical to understanding the varying levels of different discriminations within this framework is an acknowledgement of the intersections (Crenshaw, 1991) of identities and how larger structures fail to serve, and often further marginalize, those with multiple marginalized identities. In the sections that follow, I examine how within dominant structures, masculinity takes multiple shapes in relation to other social institutions and in relation to different forms of masculinity itself. Masculinity Masculinity serves as a central concept in this study. Connell (1995) writes that “[m]asculinity is not a coherent object,” rather it is “an aspect of a larger culture” (p. 67). Decontextualizing it from a larger culture, and the social institutions upon which it relies and with which it colludes, misses its dynamism and how it adapts to the changing 47 landscape of the culture in which it exists. Discussing masculinity within the context of gender plays an important role in understanding its role. As part of the larger social institution of gender, “‘[m]asculinity’ does not exist except in contrast with ‘femininity’” (Connell, 1995, p. 68). This contrast creates a common understanding of masculinity “as a social category based on an assumed biological difference that in itself is constituted by the very social category it purports to underlie” (Pascoe, 2012,2007, p. 9). This framing around a biological difference perpetuates a paradigm of biological determinism, where masculinity becomes understood as a manifestation of one’s degree of physiological maleness. However, without its relationship to femininity, particularly those that “are practiced in a complementary, compliant, and accommodating subordinate relationship” (Messerschmidt, 2019, p. 86), masculinity would lose its dominance. Though physiological differences abound, this relationship often situates masculinity with (a) men and (b) those men who appear to be physically dominating. This type of masculinity often referred to as hegemonic masculinity, establishes social dominance, imbuing power into narrow expressions of gender that “express something about a male body” (Connell, 1995, p. 45). But in order to express that dominance, one must be read as such within the social world. Masculinity as a Social Practice. Maintaining this power comes not as a role, but as a social practice (Pascoe & Bridges, 2016). Pascoe and Bridges (2016) identify masculinity as an active engagement in practices that reinforce dominant paradigms of the superiority of maleness. The degree to which one practices these successfully, or is deemed legible (Butler, 2004), codifies one’s access to power. Accordingly, to upkeep 48 assumptions of power, one must continue to seek to perform behaviors that reinforce dominance. Masculinity “is produced and manifested in relation to a multiplicity of bodies, spaces, and objects,” and we must understand it as “a variety of practices and discourses that can be mobilized by and applied to [all genders]” (Pascoe, 2012, 2007, p. 9). As such, masculinity does not sustain a central, easy-to-identify point. Rather, as Pascoe (2012, p. 17) notes, masculinity, as an expression of gender, is a “relational process.” In this relational process, these behaviors and discourses must be witnessed by peers who can affirm these as an acceptable part of the social practice of masculinity. As these social practices become codified as normal practices in dominant society, certain paradigms emerge. In the emergence of these paradigms comes a recognizable, yet unstable, way of being perceived as “normal.” But, as Connell (1995) asks, “What is ‘normative’ about a norm hardly anyone meets” (p. 70)? Therefore, masculinity requires us to think more deeply about the way in which people practice their gender. In the section that follows, I explore the plurality of masculinity that helps provide a greater understanding of how masculinity creates power inequities in relationship to its multiple forms. From Masculinity to Masculinities. As a means of moving away from understanding masculinity as “a stable, transhistorical, cross-cultural, objective thing” (Pascoe & Bridges, 2016, p. 27), we must understand that what we are really speaking of is different gender expressions through organizing practices that shift across temporal and cultural structures. And while no two people express gender through gendered practices in quite the same way, some classifying terms lend well to identifying 49 patterns in these practices located in specific cultures and specific time periods. In contemporary U.S. society, multiple sociologists of gender (e.g. Connell, 1995; Pascoe & Bridges, 2016; Petersen, 2003; Rios & Sarabia, 2016) refer to the multiplicities of masculinity as “masculinities”. Connell (2009) outlines the complications of understanding gender as a binary, stating, “Our images of gender are often dichotomous, but the reality is not” (p.9). The same notion applies to masculinities--we must look beyond “healthy” and “toxic” masculinity, though they are important, to better understand how masculinities, too, are relational. Because of this, the study of masculinities requires scholars to consider the different masculinities that materialize in relation to each other. Hegemonic Masculinities. In his prison writings, Gramsci (Gramsci & Lawner, 1973) presents a formative understanding of hegemony from a Marxist perspective. He explains hegemony as the cultural exaltation and leadership over other subordinated groups. Connell (1995) builds on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, stating, Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women. (p. 77) This is central to understanding that masculinity in its most prevalent, dominant form vacillates across cultures and times. Hegemonic masculinities develop in relation to other, less accepted or legible forms of masculinity, relying on other configurations of masculinity to amplify their cultural status and access to power. This relationship forms the “pattern of hegemony,” (Messerschmidt, 2019), creating practices that “legitimat[e] unequal gender relations” (p. 88). 50 Connell (1995) cautions that those who hold significant political power or material wealth may not need align with those hegemonic constructions. Arguably, one who holds significant power does not need to adhere strictly to hegemonic constructions, as compliance will not necessarily bestow additional power or wealth upon someone who does not need to practice it. Instead, hegemonic masculinity becomes a barometer for how to do gender in a way that is “‘currently accepted’” and supposes a “successful claim to authority” (Connell, 1995, p. 77). This barometer changes over and across contexts and is open to contestation (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). However, hegemonic masculinity is also rarely fully attainable, as it shifts constantly as social institutions and cultural norms change. The hegemonic configurations of masculinity afford individuals collective recognition and, for those without pre-existing power, an in-road to cultural dominance, even if it is never completely achievable. Subordinated Masculinities. Due to its relational composition, hegemonic masculinities depend on a less dominant, or subordinate, configuration of practices to maintain its superiority. In a heteropatriarchal culture, masculinities that eschew heterosexual practices often become subject to cultural denigration. Practices perceived as homosexual or practices associated with femininity are often “symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity,” (Connell, 1995, p. 78), casting those engaging in practices deemed less masculine or more distinctly feminine as unequal or less-than. This results in subordinated masculinities, those culturally shunned and denied similar power within a hegemonic schema. However, engaging in homosexual practices does not necessarily constitute subordinated masculinity, as evidenced in Pascoe’s (2012) study with high school boys. 51 In this study, these adolescent boys police each other’s masculinity through the “fag discourse,” using homophobic epithets to “reduc[e] a boy to nothing” (p. 54). The fag discourse reinforces the notion of compulsory heterosexuality and the heterosexual practices that exhibit an accepted configuration of masculinity. Those who do not practice this accepted configuration become subject to subordination in the gender order (Connell, 1987). Complicit Masculinities. As one might expect, complicit masculinities speaks to a level of compliance with those normalized, hegemonic practices of masculinity. And while they do not fully comply with hegemonic practices in immediately recognizable ways, “through practice [they] realize some of the benefits of unequal gender relations and consequently when practiced help sustain hegemonic masculinity” (Messerschmidt, 2019, p. 86). Complicit masculinities act as an important foundation on which hegemonic masculinities rely to bolster their prominence. These masculinities stand to gain from the patriarchal dividend, though in less substantial ways than hegemonic masculinities. Marginalized Masculinities. As discussed previously, patriarchy and whiteness mutually constitute each other and, within U.S. culture, present as the apex of authority and power. Masculinities often organize around the intersection around multiple dominant positions within social institutions, such as race, socio-economics, and ability level, among other identity markers within social institutions. Within those social institutions, however, arises a hierarchy of masculinities in terms of access to power and cultural acceptance. Marginalized masculinities rely on the “relation of marginalization and authorization” of “the hegemonic masculinity of the dominant group” (Connell, 1995, p. 81). In a prison setting, as relevant to this study, incarcerated people are all 52 marginalized, however those with access to money, prison job resources, or those protected by group affiliation, such as gang leaders, appear to be in a more powerful position than others who experience similar marginalization. Protest Masculinities. Perhaps most relevant to the discussion of the school-to- prison pipeline is protest masculinity, what Connell (1995, p. 111) refers to as “a response to powerlessness, a claim to the gendered position of power, a pressured exaggeration...of masculine conventions” (p. 111). This configuration of practices is a “collective practice,” often a result of oppression from multiple social institutions. Protest masculinity often involves practices deemed hyper masculine, including physical violence, destruction, and crime (Broude, 1990). Protest masculinities tend to appear in response to marginalization from multiple social institutions; in demonstrating hyper masculine, and sometimes intimidating, practices, men attempt to leverage the power available to them. This often involves employing violent practices. Masculinity and Violence. Violence serves as a tool of maintaining masculine supremacy. The two become deeply intertwined, almost synonymous, within a capitalist society like the United States. Arendt (1970, p. 11) describes this, stating, “[Violence] was defined by the role the ruling class played in society, or, more exactly, by its role in the process of production.” In a capitalist society like the United States, it serves a key role in class maintenance and reproduction. In order to maintain economic prowess, individuals and communities often resort to the use of violence or force, carrying forward colonial logics. Acts and threats of real or perceived violence--physical, emotional, and sexual violence--seep into nearly every social institution in the United States. From workplace 53 sexual harassment to domestic abuse to virtual blackmailing, violence takes many forms and produces an array of potential damages as a means of exerting dominance. But not all violence stems from the same conditions. As discussed previously, those who have been subjected to the violence of oppressive systems may leverage violence as a means to gain power. This, in part, is because it is the conduit to power they have both experienced and that is available to them. In his reflections on growing up with urban violence in his hometown of Oakland and the experiences of the boys in his study, Rios (2011) considers how through the state created “a powerful culture of punishment, which shaped the ways in which young people organized themselves and created meanings of their social world” (p. 15). He points to how this culture of punishment “left these marginalized young people [in Oakland] very few choices, crime and violence being some of the few resources for feeling dignity and empowerment” (p. 17). For young people routinely subjected to systemic oppression, violence may be one of few options to exert power. Sadly, as examined in the previous section on the school-to-prison pipeline, this becomes the totalizing story of many Black and Latino boys, casting them as deviant and violent, taking their masculinity out of a context of structural violence towards their communities. When violence appears in White masculinity, it usually operates quite differently. While the framing around Black and Latino boys often portrays their daily, typical adolescent behaviors as violent and criminal, White boys’ violence is often seen as adolescent ritual, as seen with hazing rituals (Stoudt, 2006). Alternatively, White boys who engage with mass violence8 often become understood as psychologically 8 A majority of youth who committed mass school shootings in the last thirty years are White boys. (Everytown, 2020; Kimmel & Mahler, 2003). 54 traumatized and distressed (Peterson & Densely, 2019). The same applies to White men engaging in mass violence, who are often portrayed as a “lone wolf” in news media, instead of “terrorist,” the label often applied to men of color enacting the same type of violence. While considering the role trauma plays in someone enacting violence is critical, the consideration rarely extends to the structural traumas boys and men of color experience that create conditions for violence. Violence is coded racially for men, where White men benefit from individualism, isolating violence to particular individuals who were separate from much of the rest of their White communities. Men of color, however, are subject to an enduring trope of the violent male based on the communities from which they come, communities routinely subjected to state violence. Masculinity and Schools. Schools play a critical role in constructions of masculinity, often serving as one of the earliest sites to affirm or ridicule gender practices. While the earlier section of this chapter discussed gender more broadly in schools, and there is significant research (see e.g. Morris, 2016; Sadker & Zittleman, 2009; Thorne, 1993) examining gender beyond masculinity in school, for the purposes of this study, I turn the focus to masculinities. In schooling, White heteropatriarchy pervades, situating narratives and perspectives of “dead White men” as the “canon”. This notion of the canon establishes these narratives as those with which students ought to be well-versed and able to refer to with ease. And as noted previously, this signals those voices worth hearing, studying, and remembering. In Stoudt’s (2006) study at an all-male, predominantly White prep school, a student commented on how the all-male setting likely affected the curriculum, with a 55 focus on “dead White guys” (p. 276). The centering of White, male voices as constituting much of what is commonly known as the “literary canon” sends messages to students about which voices and perspectives matter, and how silence is strategically enacted to privilege White male voices ( Lauter, 1983; Mazzei, 2011). When these voices dictate authority in classroom content, they often dictate authority in classroom comportment. Stoudt (2006) sees this with his prep school boys, wherein the boys feel empowered to practice White hegemonically masculine practices through interactions with their teachers. The students observed that in the absence of girls attending the school, teachers “‘don’t really need to cater to political correctness,’” and practice “‘chauvinism...in joking with teachers’” (p. 276). Without any immediately apparent responsibility to female students, and a disregard for the different experiences of boys of color, this school, “implicitly and explicitly teaches and reinforces hegemonic values and in doing so helps reproduce the cultural advantages given to economically privileged white males” (p. 275). And when these behaviors are reinforced through the curriculum and the staff, they are disproportionately cast aside as “boys being boys,” providing rationale for this as acceptable behavior. Contrary to White boys’ experiences, these types of behaviors become read very differently when boys of color participate. Ferguson (2000) discusses this in her examination of sixth-grade Black boys’ experiences. While their White peers misbehaved in ways that became part of the ritual practices of their masculinity, staff assumed malicious intent when Black boys exhibited similar behaviors, a similar phenomenon Morris (2016) saw in her research with the in-school criminalization of Black girls. While schools validate White boys’ behaviors as a normal part of their socio-emotional 56 development, they criminalize similar behaviors in boys of color. This is a critical difference that plays a significant role in boys’ encounters with the school-to-prison pipeline. Masculinity and Prisons Masculinity configures differently depending on context. In prisons, power, though present, circulates in different ways due to the constraints and surveillance of incarceration. Messerschmidt (2004) writes that gendered knowledge occurs through continued interaction involving gender practices and ideologies and that “[t]hrough this interaction, masculinity is institutionalized, permitting men to draw on such existing, but previously formed, masculine ways of thinking and acting to construct a masculinity for specific settings” (p. 197). Because of this, masculinity within the prison context considers the power structures within carceral states and “how context is vital to configurations of, and theories about, masculinities” (Messerschmidt, 2001, p. 71). Scholarship on masculinity in prisons often incorporates discussions of violence as a means of control in the prison setting (see e.g. Haney, 2011; Kupers, 2005; Nandi, 2002). Violence is a common occurrence within correctional institutions. But centering discussions largely on prison violence as the most powerful aspect constituting prison masculinities runs the risk of reductionist understandings of power structures within the prison environment. Messerschmidt (2001) discusses how power relations between not only incarcerated people, but also between those who are incarcerated and correctional officers and other prison staff play a key role in configurations of masculinity. In interpersonal relationships within the prison, violence, both physical and sexual, can be used as a way to exert power and relay messages about the hierarchy of power among 57 inmates and between officers and inmates. What informs this may be anything from one’s physical size to one’s crime. Messerschmidt (2001, p. 86) calls the latter one’s “gender accomplishment,” or how certain crimes provide salience around one’s masculinity (Messerschmidt, 2004). This, as with other configurations of masculinity, involves embodiment and other social institutions, such as race and class. The gender accomplishment of a physically intimidating Latino man will vary differently from a scrawny White man with ample financial resources in the prison environment. This complicates notions of hegemonic masculinity within a prison environment, as the distinct identities within communities within a larger prison community fall entirely under the control of the state. Ricciardelli, et al. (2015) offer a more nuanced approach to understanding how hegemonic prison masculinities configure in relation to perceived risk in the carceral context. They consider “how prison masculinities are formed in relation to prisoners’ fluid characterizations of risk or ‘vulnerabilities’ (physical and emotional), and how vulnerability and uncertainty can simultaneously reproduce and destabilize masculine ideals that are, in any social context, often unachievable” (p. 493). This examination highlights how the complex navigation of emotional vulnerability within a context where emotional vulnerability can subject one to risks creates an ever-fluid configuration of masculinity that “chang[es] with prisoners’ risk experiences and forms of management...over time and space” (p. 506). Reich’s (2010) research with incarcerated young people offers insights into youth navigating prison masculinities. He examined the varying levels to which the young men in the study participated in dominant practices of masculinity. Reich contends that young 58 men, while aware they are in competition with each other, are unaware that what is at stake is masculinity itself. They “construct masculinity through a competitive struggle for distinction...which tends to reproduce young men’s marginality” (p. 14). Reich defines different masculinity roles or types he witnesses among the incarcerated young men. What Reich calls “outsider masculinity” is that which “represents an adaptation to institutional powerlessness,” (p. 38) where masculinity manifests into physical domination and defiance as critical to achieving power. “Insider masculinity” describes how power comes from those with authority and compliance toward and recognition from that authority. Reich (p. 14) explains, “(y)oung men construct masculinity through a competitive struggle for distinction, but I observe two radically different forms of this competition, each of which tends to reproduce young men’s marginality.” In participating in these competitions, young men secure for themselves a precarious positioning of their masculinity that requires constant one- upmanship and comparison to stay in the game. Reich, however, discusses that some of the young men in his study recognize “masculinity itself as a barrier to the pursuit of conscious goals of one’s own making” (p. 24) and offers a framework of critical practice, “a movement toward degendered practice, in that the categories of masculinity and femininity lose some of their importance” (p. 180). I examine critical practice more deeply in the following section on critical pedagogies and critical literacies. The research on prison masculinities demonstrates how social institutions mutually constitute each other. Gender is malleable, shifting in different contexts, like schools and prisons, and with other social institutions, like race. This is critical in understanding how totalizing narratives about masculinity, those that equate it to 59 individual, inherent traits, complicate our ability to understand gender, itself, as a social institution. In the next section I present literature about critical pedagogies and critical literacies, approaches CAGED employs as an avenue to more acutely understand social institutions like gender. Critical Pedagogies and Critical Literacies We learn to experience and make sense of the world through an array of pedagogical experiences and perspectives to which we have exposure. Over time, this exposure cultivates attitudes about language, communities, and large-scale ideologies. In this process, we become both in and of the world, regularly participating in as a product of the world as we know it. How we come to read the world and our place in and of it may be understood as literacy. This section explores the foundations of critical pedagogy and critical literacy. As outlined in the section on the school-to-prison pipeline, the absence of curricula that affirm students’ identities plays a role in funneling students into the pipeline. I see critical pedagogies and critical literacies as key to equity-oriented curricula, moving marginalized voices to the center as a way of interrogating the myriad systems and oppressive ideologies that create marginalization. In doing so, students may learn to read the power imbued in White heteropatriarchal dominance to disrupt those ideologies that situate them as superior or subordinate. Critical pedagogy draws on critical theory to interrogate the way in which systems produce different realities for communities. Education and culture mutually constitute each other, reflecting and constructing in response to contemporary needs, values, and attitudes (Quantz, 2015). As the United States continues to experience massive reductions to public education budgets (Leachman 60 et al., 2017) and a devaluing of public schools through policy advocacy for voucher programs (Lipman, 2011; Kumashiro, 2012), support for critical pedagogies at the federal level, and at many state9 levels, becomes precarious. What seemingly stands in the way of critical pedagogies in many public education environments are the logics and broad acceptance of neoliberal ideologies. Neoliberal Logics in Institutions Capitalist economies depend on a never-ending surge of economic growth to maintain a sense of economic security. With the United States in what many call “late capitalism,” signaling, perhaps hopefully, a shift away from capitalist ideologies, the imperative for the ruling class to embed a reliance on capitalism into the everyday fibers of existing grows. This embedding looks like instilling in most, if not all, of our social institutions logics that become normalized and largely unquestioned. These logics build significance and purpose around financial markets largely unavailable to a majority of the population, yet they affect nearly every facet of daily life in the United States. Neoliberalism speaks not solely to an economic philosophy or a political ideology. Rather, it becomes a “mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social” (Brown, 2003). In this, it becomes what Brown calls a rationality, and in this rationality those subjects, both human and nonhuman, who uphold 9 Some states passed legislation to attend to the growing concern over culturally unresponsive curricula. In Oregon, where this research occurs, the state Senate passed Senate Bill 13, a law that requires place-based curriculum for indigenous tribes in the state and in indigenous curriculum for all K-12 schools (Oregon Department of Education, 2020). However, in the state of Texas, recent curriculum changes deny the systemic racism of slavery, calling slaves “workers” (see e.g. Isensee, 2015). This curriculum adoption in Texas mirrors the problematic telling of American history endemic in the history of U.S. public schools (Greenlee, 2019). 61 and reinforce the logics of market-based value reap rewards and may be deemed relevant. Because of this, Brown calls neoliberalism, a “constructivist project,” as the larger project of neoliberalism “takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality.” This serves as a reinforcement of market rules, wherein performance, as measured against market goals rooted in competition and growth, constitutes worth. This deep collusion of unbridled corporate desires for growth with government consent creates veiled systems of benefits for the continued privatization of public goods and divestment from democratic ideals. In more tangible ways, neoliberalism destabilizes public services, institutions, and civic life through facilitating the saturation of private industry in public spheres, as we see with the privatization of prisons and prison industries. This saturation of public life by private industry is made possible through a myriad of political decisions often disregarding what would improve the lives of a majority of constituents. Political alliances with corporations, exacerbated through the 2010 Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,10 permit the voice of citizens to be overrun by corporate interests. This is central to the proliferation of neoliberal ideologies--the rule of the market becomes the loudest voice directing governance. 10 This Supreme Court case ruled that the government was unable to intervene in corporate financial support for political campaigns. Upon its ruling, experts signaled a significant change to come in elections, wherein corporate support for political candidates or ballot measures would undoubtedly permit greater corporate influence in campaigning (Liptak, 2010). Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (2012, p.1) explained that the decision “authorize[d] unlimited election-related expenditures by America’s most powerful interests,” including foreign entities interested in throwing American elections in candidates that may parlay their favor. 62 Neoliberalism as a Social Institution. The logics of neoliberalism constitute both the structuring of social institutions and how social institutions structure individuals. In this, we see Brown’s (2003) concept of neoliberalism as a rationality; it serves as a way of organizing social life through multiple institutions. For the sake of understanding its role in this research, I provide a cursory exploration of the influence of neoliberal logics on prisons and schools, as well as the developed pipeline between them. Neoliberalism and Prisons. In tracing the origins of the American prison system, Meskell (1999) suggests the population increase of colonial America gave rise to the creation of institutions to house those convicted of criminal activity. Prior to this system, public humiliation and punishment created a system of deterrents, and at times, executions, to enforce acceptable, yet undefined, individual behavior within communities. Following European criminology and social contract theories, American colonies looked to define penal codes with accompanying punishments and prison sentences, moving eventually to the individual housing in prison cells most common in today’s correctional institutions. After warring ideologies about the harshness of punitive measures once imprisoned, the 1820s saw a focus on providing prison as a separation from “corrupting influences… by inculcating [convicts] in healthy habits,” (Meskell, 1999, p. 852). This curriculum of separation and reformation eventually morphed to one of separation and production. A rise in incarceration during the mid-1990s (Alexander, 2010) led to a capitalist boom in prison construction and a steady stream of “insecure and vulnerable workers” subject to “hyper-exploitation” (Wacquant, 2013, p. 29) that persists today (McDowell & Mason, 2020). Cheap prison labor, creating goods for companies 63 like Victoria’s Secret and Walmart, fuels the U.S. economy (Garcia, 2020). With a steady flow of income from captive labor, the neoliberal state depends on a reliable source of labor, creating an economic demand for incarceration. This demand is fed through the “Right hand, the masculine side” (Wacquant, 2013) of the state where “courts and the prison [are] score constituents” to the “colonisation of the welfare sector by the panoptic and punitive logic” of neoliberalism (p. 68). In this, the demands of the economy shift investments from social development to penal developments11, something we can see in the divestment from public education funding and proposed moves away from critical pedagogies (The White House, 2020). Within prison education, this takes the shape of removing opportunities to pursue higher education, as seen with the repeal of inmate Pell-eligibility (Tewksberry et al., 2000). Instead, the shift towards investments in penal developments like school resource officers (SROs), particularly in schools serving communities of color (Justice Policy Institute, 2020), lays the groundwork for developing the neoliberal punitive logic that fuels a school-to-prison pipeline. 11 Following the 2016 election results declaring Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, the two largest private prison companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, saw dramatic increases in their stock value, the former rising 98% and the latter rising 140% (Long, 2017). 64 Neoliberalism and Schooling. To understand an example of how neoliberalism manifests at a local school level, look no further than massive corporate tax loopholes afforded by venture philanthropy (Kumashiro, 2012), where corporations establish philanthropic organizations connected to the corporation to shelter revenue from taxation while often pushing their brand into public institutions. A key example of this is the many schools that receive technology grants through industry giants like Apple or Microsoft. When these corporations donate their products to schools, this creates a tax write-off for the corporation while creating early brand loyalty and fluency in their proprietary systems among youth. And while this occurs, the public school that relies on financial support generated through tax revenue loses important financial support from the same corporation granting the technology to the school. Further, neoliberalism advances mythologies about individual success as relying solely on hard work and tenacity. As neoliberalism centers individual action as responsible for individual livelihood, it denies any consideration of structural oppressions as affecting individual outcomes (Brown, 2003). This strategic casting of individual responsibility bolsters arguments surrounding the defunding of public, social services through fallacious claims of individual liberties and rights to choice. The push for “school choice” in the form of voucher programs illustrates this concept clearly; where students may be zoned for a school they or their parents find less desirable for whatever reason, be it test scores or demographics of the student body, in voucher states the student may choose to take their allocated per-pupil-spending dollars to another school (Kumashiro, 2012; Ravitch, 2013; Roda & Wells, 2013). This other school may be another public school or, in many instances, a private school, pumping state and federal dollars into 65 private education, further destabilizing the foundations of public schooling. Additionally, these private schools often organize around belief systems, potentially limiting students’ exposure to diverse perspectives. This plays a role in understanding the challenge neoliberalism presents to critical pedagogy, as I explore in greater detail in sections that follow. A Nation at Risk: Neoliberal Foundations in Education. Education scholars (Lipman, 2011; Ravitch, 2013) look to A Nation at Risk (ANR) (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), the fear-based speech calling for education to serve as “the foundation for a satisfying life, an enlightened and civil society, a strong economy, and a secure Nation” as a turning point in public education towards neoliberalism. The report, delivered in the midst of a space race with Russia and the massive public de- funding and market deregulation of the Reagan administration, looked at education as responsible for the blight of jobs in multiple industries, manufacturing in particular. Under Reagan’s era of “Reaganomics,” corporations took advantage of a free-market economy and loosened trade restrictions, many moving manufacturing to countries with significantly cheaper labor and little to no regulations or laws regarding labor practices and wages. ANR failed to consider how these corporate migrations of industry and the privileging of a free-market economy with limited regulations played a role in the decline of American working-class and middle-class economies. Instead, ANR (1983) pointed to the “rising tide of mediocrity” in educational achievement as not only one of the causes of economic competition from around the world, but as “the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility.” Shortly following that, the report claims that U.S. society “lost sight of the basic purposes 66 of schooling.” This report, which spurred federal education reform, portended to write on behalf of “[t]he citizen” who “is dismayed at a steady 15-year decline in industrial productivity,” connecting that sentiment with why education must be a top priority to a 1982 Gallup poll of Americans who contended that “education [is] more important than developing the best industrial system or the strongest military force,” immediately suggesting that those polled likely understand education to be “the cornerstone for both.” The foreword of ANR reads as follows: All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance and to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit to the utmost. This promise means that all children by virtue of their own efforts, competently guided, can hope to attain the mature and informed judgement needed to secure gainful employment, and to manage their own lives, thereby serving not only their own interests but also the progress of society itself. This, indeed, set the tone of individual responsibility for whether or not one’s fair chance in education materialized, reinforcing Brown’s (2003) claim that neoliberal logics evade placing responsibility in inequities in structures and institutions, instead focusing on the individual’s moral abilities to care for themselves in a stratified society. Further, ANR not only placed the onus of success on one’s individual merits and ability to create their own success regardless of marginalization, it also lambasted the efforts of American educators, refusing to acknowledge the administration’s defunding of public education through tax cuts (Verstegen & Clark, 1988), educational precarity as a result of Reagan’s desire to demolish the Department of Education (Hechinger, 1982), and degradation of the teaching profession (Smith, 2018). The logics of neoliberalism present in A Nation at Risk and bolstered through Reagan administration policies created schools as a site in need of economic intervention for economic prosperity. 67 The Legacy of Neoliberalism in Public Education After A Nation at Risk. In a country such as the United States, where individual liberties hold court as a foundational right, neoliberal ideologies insulate dominant groups from learning from, and often with, those from marginalized communities. The following section explores further neoliberalism’s influence in public education, followed by how critical pedagogical practices stand to challenge neoliberalism. ANR advanced the logics of neoliberalism through a series of comparisons of United States standardized test scores, namely the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Diane Ravitch (2013), a former board member on its governing board, explains the NAEP as dynamic and a reflection of trends, not a formidable assessment of achievement of U.S. students. This focus on testing, however, catapulted the United States into multiple decades of focusing on standardized testing as an indication of student success. With the passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) during the George W. Bush administration, this focus increased dramatically, determining whether or not schools could continue to stay open based on Annual Yearly Progress (AYP); AYP depends almost entirely on student scores on state standardized tests12. One sanction for these schools before a forced closure was to contract out learning services (Bracey, 2005), often to for-profit companies (Olson, 2004), creating public education as a new, multi-billion-dollar business venture. Aligning with the permeation of corporate ideologies into public education is the era of managerial instruction and administration. Training academies like the Eli Broad 12 These standardized tests are different from the NAEP and may vary by state. 68 Foundation churned out administrators inclined to turn to external, often corporate, contractors for a variety of educational services instead of pumping that money back into the schools they oversee (Fine, 2016). Fine notes that along with external investments occurring in her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, the school district saw incredible surveillance of dissenters and intimidation, directed at those seeking change like the teachers’ union president, an African American woman. Similarly, Teach for America, a teacher preparation program, recruits new college graduates, most often without teacher certification or education coursework, and places them in low-performing districts, often replacing more veteran teachers through the strategic contracting the organization does with these school districts (Baltodano, 2012; Hootnick, 2014). These two organizations collude: the Broad Foundation, along with the Walton13 Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation14 provide funding for Teach for America (Kumashiro, 2010); Northrop Grummon, the largest weapons manufacturer in the United States, is also a corporate partner (Teach for America, n.d.). At the helm of decision making about educational reforms and initiatives stands multinational corporations interested in seeing a return on their investment into so-called public education. This corporate influence in public education initiatives resulted in changes to curricula and approaches to teaching, away from the social justice-oriented strategies generated during the Civil Rights Era (Baltodano, 2012; Kumashiro, 2012). Instead, we saw a turn toward narrowing the curriculum (Ravitch, 2013) in schools to meet the market demands of testing successes to show a school’s effectiveness. This coupled with 13 The Walton Foundation is the philanthropic organization run by the Walton family, owners of WalMart. 14 Bill Gates is the Founder and CEO of Microsoft. 69 alternate routes to teaching certification that often boil down teacher preparation to a few weeks of training in lieu what can often take four years of coursework to complete jettisons curricula not easily quantified under state and federal standards to the margins. Instead, vague nods towards a multicultural pedagogy that promotes inclusion without critical examination becomes a meager metonymy for critical, socio-cultural pedagogies. Against Neoliberalism: Critical Pedagogies Critical pedagogies present a significant challenge to the continuation and preservation of neoliberal ideals. In part, this is because these pedagogies turn critically to examine schools not only as sites of learning, but also as sites of suffering (Dumas, 2014). In this section, I provide an overview of the trajectory of critical pedagogies. The foundations of critical pedagogy lie in critical theory. A core tenet of critical theory is that the theory seeks liberation for the subject and that emancipation is a central goal (Bohman, 2019). Theorists often turn to critical theory to discuss structures that play integral roles in the development of democratic societies. While critical theory extends to multiple facets of society, this section will focus on its application to education in the form of critical pedagogies and critical literacies. In a society with neoliberalism deeply embedded in social institutions, including schools, as we saw in a previous section, critical pedagogies contest seeing schooling as a neutral process (Freire, 2000). Instead, critical pedagogies seek to excavate how schools play a role in reproducing inequities and neoliberal logics (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). Critical pedagogies call for engaging students in examinations of their world and how multiple institutions and structures shape their understanding of the world around them as well as how the world around them sees them as an individual. In educational 70 settings in prison, those same approaches apply, interrogating how the structures within prisons influence individual perceptions and experiences. Kincheloe (2005) offers a comprehensive explanation of critical pedagogy rooted in critical constructivism. In Kincheloe’s model, the sociocultural world shapes everything in education--teaching, learning, research, and meaning-making. It eschews positivistic notions of research and knowledge production. Instead of understanding a correct way of teaching or reading or even a correct interpretation, knowledge production is literally production instead of transmission (Freire, 2000). Learning and research environments cannot evade the realities of the sociocultural context in which they exist. Instead of interpretation, critical pedagogy looks to meaning making, rooted in histories and experiences, and affected by power relations. Critical pedagogy presents challenges to neoliberalism as it is a project of interrogating and withstanding “discourses of privatization, consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the new disciplinary techniques of surveillance” (Giroux & Giroux, 2006, p.3). Teaching students, including those who are incarcerated, how to read these discourses offers opportunities to resist the carceral logics these discourses produce. This type of pedagogy may take the shape of engaging students in participatory action research to investigate policing practices in their neighborhood (Stoudt et al., 2012), working with incarcerated students to develop literacy through a zine (Reich, 2010), or students organizing against standardized testing (McKenna, 2015). Committing to critical pedagogy is committing to a continued, daily praxis in a constant state of evolution, more nimble than the subtle and overt infiltration of neoliberal logics in education. For the sake of this study, I look to the possibilities of 71 critical pedagogical praxis in teaching liberatory literacies. These literacies play an important role in the goals of the CAGED program and offer possibilities for learners to disrupt institutional, often neoliberal, logics that influence individual perspectives and practices. Dimensions of Literacy In this section, I draw on Kucer’s (2009) dimensions of literacy as a framework to understand literacy development and, more specifically, examine the socio-cultural and developmental dimensions of literacy and how gender informs and is produced within those dimensions. Kucer (2009) conceptualizes literacy as being composed of four primary dimensions, synthesizing literacy fields that formerly committed fairly stringently to their particular discipline of literacy. Kucer makes the case for looking more holistically at literacy through the relationships of cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and developmental dimensions, stating, “If literacy education is to be effective, it is important that literacy be conceived as dynamic and multidimensional in nature” (p. 5). Each literacy event passes through each of these dimensions, shifting the meaning-making process and how the event is perceived. The cognitive dimension stands at the core of a literacy act where the individual language user seeks to construct meaning through a process of exploration and discovery. That construction of meaning is dependent on the linguistic dimension, which provides the structure of how meaning is expressed through a coalescing of multiple systems that inform written and/or spoken language. Constructions of meaning pass through various social contexts, such as the individual’s understanding of their own social identities and the context in which they are using the language; this provides the framework for the 72 sociocultural dimension. Finally, in the developmental dimension, the literacy act consistently presents a demonstration of the ways in which one can employ their literacy skills and what more one can learn through each employment, situating the language user in a constant state of “[b]ecoming literate” (Kucer, p. 6). Though each dimension is mutually dependent on the others, I will focus my analysis primarily on the sociocultural dimension and secondarily on the developmental dimension for the sake of examining literacies about gender through a critical literacy framework. From Literacy to Critical Literacy While a general population may understand literacy as the ability to read text, critical literacy theorists (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Giroux, 1988; Kincheloe, 2005) discuss the important role literacy plays in understanding, and ultimately challenging, dominant structures. In order to challenge these structures, one must learn to read how these structures normalize conforming to larger structural desires, such as neoliberalism, and produce constraints to one’s liberation. Critical literacy engages students in reading the structures and institutions that produce oppressive conditions within education towards a goal of challenging those ideologies and practices considered “standard” or “normal” by those in power (Wallowitz, 2008). In synthesizing Gramsci’s writings regarding language, Giroux (1988) discusses two primary functions of literacy--to wield power over others through the development of a hegemonic concept of language and as a means of empowerment for marginalized individuals and communities. In this “double-edged sword” (p. 147), literacy becomes essential to both domination and escaping subordination. Giroux advocates that engaging 73 in critical literacy development is to resist the reduction of literacy to logics of domination. United States education policy often reinscribes logics of domination and, in turn, neoliberal logics, but focusing on literacy and language acquisition as integral to economic success. While this may be true, identifying literacy as a measure of “career readiness” reduces the rich nature of language acquisition and use to one’s earning potential and relevance to an economic structure. These measures, reinforced by organizations like the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), produce language arts curricula, such as America’s Choice(r), wherein students learn to write executive summaries, a part of the non-profit organization’s curricular emphasis on the “choice between high skills and low wages” (National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990, p. 67). In teaching literacy with these economic goals in mind, literacies of economic power set agendas for students to engage in what Anyon (1981, p. 3) calls the “hidden curriculum of work.” This hidden curriculum, according to Anyon, serves as a force of social reproduction, often keeping students literate in the skills and attitudes necessary to continue in the same social class as their parents’ generation. Bourdieu (1974) explains this as a key part of keeping a stratified society--reproduce the cultural capital of a class and the symbolic relationships between classes remain. In keeping these relationships intact, stratification regarding access to cultural relevance and cultural capital continues, keeping those in power securely in power as the generators of culture. In doing so, dominant culture and beliefs become encoded as the standard to which those with less power should strive to achieve. 74 In critical literacy frameworks, power becomes the center of analysis. Critical literacy offers not only an excavation of power systems to better understand the world, but how one might play a role in shaping an alternate future and caring for one’s self in a world that marginalizes some for the sake of others’ power (Morrell, 2008). In this, critical literacy offers the opportunity for students to seek emancipation from the constrictive roles and expectations placed upon them as a means of maintaining power structures and social order. In the sections that follow, I trace how literacies about gender surface. Literacy and Gender Studies examine literacy and gender through literacy rates by gender. Though these are important to determine literacy interventions, these are often situating a comparison of literacy level between girls and boys, looking at the “gap” between binary genders in terms of ability (Ma, 2008), motivation (Marianak & Gambrell, 2010; Taylor, 2004), and frequency of engagement (Logan & Johnson, 2010). While these are important examinations to consider, I propose it is paramount to teach what I suggest are literacies of gender, examinations of how writing structure, characterization, plot development, representation, intended audiences, and other literacy aspects construct gender in particular ways to language users. Additionally, I consider how policies and practices, or what Pascoe (2007) calls “the unofficial gender and sexuality curriculum,” reinforce normative and exclusionary conceptions about gender that play a role in the school-to-prison pipeline (p. 27). Gender is taught through formal and informal curricular and disciplinary practices in mainstream public schools; literacies of gender prompts the examination of how gender is taught, reinforced, and challenged. 75 Formal Curriculum Formal curricular design plays a large role in cultivating students’ knowledge of the historical, political, and social contexts that shape gender. How curricula indicate what knowledge is considered valuable directly impacts students’ self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) and consequent development. Further, how students see their identities and experiences reflected in the curricula, particularly the stories they read, potentially affects how students acquire literacy skills (Rich, 2012). These reflections are undoubtedly shaped by the representation of gender teachers receive during teacher education programs. Zittleman and Sadker (2003) studied popular teacher education texts and found discussions of literacies about gender to be fairly scant in the majority of texts. This is a critical starting point for understanding formal curricular decisions that evade acknowledging differences across genders and examining expressions within genders. Sadker and Zittleman (2005) explain that the discussion about gender and academic performance in United States’ schools often falls short, as there’s no perceived gender issue since female students score higher than males. While female students in the United States continue to outperform male students on literacy measures like the NAEP, female and gender nonconforming (GNC) students are often exposed to limited representations of gender expression in school curricula (Sadker & Zittleman, 2009). For GNC students, gender fluidity and/or non-binary representations remain nearly absent in much of the public school curricula. Miller (2016, p. 4) calls this the “recognition gap,” speaking of “gender identities [that] fall outside of the binary [and] tend to be misrecognized and misunderstood.” When these recognition gaps--of the myriad possibilities of gender expression for female and non-binary students--persist, students 76 fail to dive into the “more subtle and nuanced messages, positions and stances that [a] discourse presents or assumes,” a part of what Kucer (2009, p. 252) suggests is critical to students cultivating a stronger sociocultural literacy framework. In order for students to expand their sociocultural literacy, they must be exposed to more diverse representations of identities that will allow students of varying gender expressions to be intelligible (Butler, 2004) to their discourse community. When students fail to “engage the linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural dimensions of literacy in an ever widening range of contexts” (Kucer, 2009, p. 265), they fail to fully cultivate the developmental dimension of literacy, which signals how well a learner can adapt to understanding a new context. If students are to see their peers who are different from them as intelligible members of their learning community, they must have the tools to adapt their frameworks of what is normative. However, education reforms to address literacy issues complicate this as evidenced in Barrs’ (2000, p. 288) research; as girls surpassed boys in literacy rates in the United Kingdom, some reforms focused on implementing changes to curricular assessments that appeared be “more boy-friendly” rather than cultivating stronger literacy skills. These reforms, that came in the form of more focus on grammatical structure, an emphasis on informational texts, and implementing standardized testing, reforms that are mirrored in the United States’ adoption of the Common Core State Standards (2010), wherein gender fails to be mentioned even once. While literacy rates for males lag behind females’ in several countries (OECD, 2016), the representations of gender in literature continue to skew towards the hegemonic and fairly limited, especially when it comes to representations of women (Peterson & 77 Lach, 1990); representations of non-binary people remain nearly absent until recently (Cramer & Adams, 2016). Barrs (2000, p. 291) claims, “Girls are far readier to read books about boys than boys are to read books about girls, and girls are far freer to act out male roles than boys are to act out female roles.” This is a lasting legacy of centuries of privileging the narratives written by men, valorizing males in heroic, often hegemonically masculine roles with “a wide range of life possibilities for themselves” while females have, up until recently, a small range of possibilities, often in a domestic setting (Peterson & Lach, 1990, p. 190). Though formal curriculum carries responsibility for teaching students gender, much literacy about gender is cultivated through the informal school curricula. Informal Curriculum The informal curriculum plays a significant role in constructing understandings and expectations of gender to students. It plays out in a variety of ways--from the way students are grouped for activities to the way teachers interact with students in ways that reinforce gender norms to the rules that govern students’ gender expressions within the space of school. In nearly every aspect of schooling, students develop literacies about gender. Thorne’s (1993) study of elementary school youth calls attention to the myriad places gender is reinforced to students, establishing a hidden curriculum (Anyon, 1981) of learning to be gendered. Thorne (p. 34-5) notes the “verbal marking of gender” as a dominant organizational strategy, wherein students learn to fall in line with students of the same gender, as teachers address students as “boys and girls,” ensuring a binary view of gender that “provides a continuously available line of difference that can be drawn on 78 at any time in the ongoing life of schools.” This line was and continues to be utilized to organize students for classroom activities and for using particular spaces, such as locker rooms and bathrooms. In this use of the “line of difference,” students learn to emulate those in their assigned social group, creating a social distance (Triandis & Triandis, 1962) between the two social groups and, in the case of GNC students, exacerbating the alienation of those students who may not feel like they are able to join the group that best fits their identity. This separation manifests in single-gender social groupings among students (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987), as is often apparent on the schoolyard or playground. Davies (1997) explains the effect of categorizations on exacerbating gendered relations and masculine domination in young children. She observes students in a play yard who challenge gendered norms, often in the form of their gender expression. When Davies (p. 12) observes a boy rip off a skirt he’s wearing before punching another boy, she addresses the child about it, reinforcing her gendered assumptions and imposing “the habitual links between one binary and another” on the boy, who immediately denies he took it off to punch the boy. Davies’ informal interaction with him is a snapshot of the interactions adults in school have with youth that reinforce norms of gender performance to youth. Disrupting these assumptions is difficult, yet necessary in cultivating students’ developmental literacy of gender. Silence and non-responses by school officials further codify gender expectations. Mazzei (2011) writes of the productive nature of teacher silence in maintaining White supremacy in a classroom. This productive silence operates as an informal part of curricula, not only in the maintenance of White supremacy, but also in the maintenance 79 of patriarchy. Davies’s (1997) discussion of Derek, a young boy who appears illiterate until he writes a tale of gendered violence, illustrates the multiple forces of silence in maintaining patriarchy in the classroom. Derek wrote in protest for not being able to write what he wanted, employing a plot line of a man, Ken, who hacks up a woman, Barbie, and disposes of her with the help of a crew of pirates. The teacher, “totally unnerved by this story,” was not able to discuss this with Derek because “[h]e had totally silenced her” (p. 12). In this, Derek exerted masculine violence over the assignment, one that was supposed to build off a feminist pirate tale the class read previously. It silenced the female teacher’s attempts for a more “feminist discourse” and re-inscribed binary power relations of male domination/female subordination. At the same time, the teacher, unable to address it, further codified his use of patriarchal strategies and failed to “extend [him] beyond this kind of hegemonic masculine literacy” (p. 13) and offer ways to engage sociocultural critical literacy to examine the privileging of certain performances of gender (Young, 2001). The informal curricula of gender extends to classroom spaces. Locally, we saw how classroom space and what appears informs students about gender through the complaints about a genderbread person poster in a teacher’s room in Meadow View High School (Roemeling, 2015). When parents complained that it was not “the school’s place to be talking to [children] about this,” the poster was removed; what stood as a way to broach conversation about gender was quickly silenced because it offered too much information to disrupt binary notions of gender, halting the sociocultural conversation about gender that helps students in the process of becoming literate (Kucer, 2009). 80 Students receive messages constantly through school policies and structuring of spaces, enforcing the social act of understanding the meaning and surveillance of gender. When these enforcements of gender appear in informal social curricula, like school dress policies and prom date policies, students are subjected to the sociocultural dimension of literacy, which ultimately affects the implicit knowledge of rules around gender (Kucer, 2009). Silence (Mazzei, 2009) regarding how gender operates in these contexts serves to keep patriarchal, heteronormative power unquestioned. Revealing the Hidden Curriculum of Gender. In order to cultivate students’ “becoming literate” (Kucer, p. 266) in gender, educators must engage students in formal and informal examinations of curricular practices that “make gender ideology visible so that it may be questioned, challenged, and resisted” (Kamler, 1993, p. 102). Examining the multitude of possibilities for gender expression through literary forms presents an opportunity to dismantle hegemonic beliefs about gender “essences” and engage students in the process of deconstructing what texts say about or do to gender. At the center of this is cultivating a critical literacy in the classroom, opening “the possibility of students and teachers becoming reflexively aware of the way in which speaking-as-usual constructs themselves and others” (Davies, 1997, p. 21). Davies connects this to a post-structural practice of inquiring into regimes of truth (Foucault, 1977), the dominant “coloni[z]ing discourses” (Davies, 1997, p. 21) of what is valued, true, and remains unquestioned. This provokes an examination of positionality, employing an acute awareness of the socio- cultural dimension of literacy wherein texts can be analyzed from different positions and readers can “tease out the gaps and silences that are a hidden feature of the texts” (Lemon, 1995, as cited in Davies, 1997). For teachers, this means engaging students in 81 the critical act of thinking through their own thinking and analysis process and how “culture(s) and discourse(s) shape the body, desire and deeply felt personal knowledges” (Davies, 1997, p. 23). Davies calls for these reflexive strategies, for students and for teachers, engaging moral reasoning, inquiring about how one derives pleasure from discourses. Beyond pleasure, exposing how gender structures the way we read the world allows for inquiry about how power continues to circulate through intentional silences, encoded messages, and lack of representation. Conclusion This chapter aimed to show how these three bodies of literature offer a deeper context for this study, examining how a school-to-prison pipeline develops and amplifies through rejections of critical pedagogies and heteropatriarchal dominance. It began with an examination of the historical developments that led to the contemporary institution of the school-to-prison pipeline. Following this, I offered a discussion about how masculinities develop and act in relation to gender as a larger institution. The chapter ended with a discussion of how neo-liberal logics influence education and what critical pedagogies and literacies offer to contest neoliberalism in education. The next chapter describes the research methodology and design built upon these three bodies of literature. 82 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY This chapter discusses the research design for this study, including a discussion of the research questions and the research methodologies upon which this study draws. The research study examines participant experiences of the Creating Allyship through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) program conducted in the Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI), a medium-security male-serving prison. The program’s curriculum investigates perceptions of gender as and within institutions, with a more specific focus on masculinity. In it, we examine the importance of considering individual experiences within and between institutional experiences. This directs the methodological considerations of the study, as institutions persist or shift as a result of individual compliance or resistance. In order to examine the multiple forces informing gendered practices, the study considers the constitutive play between structures, institutions, and individual experiences through qualitative research. As Chapter II expounds, White heteropatriarchy in the United States survives on notions of rugged individualism as strength and power, jettisoning collaboration and coalition building to the realm of the feminine. This adherence to individualism buttresses capitalist notions of success attributed to self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency presents as the independence upon which American ideals rest. The myth of meritocracy, popularized through Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories, focuses on the hard work of the individual to persist through difficult times toward a life of success. This myth persists as a primary driver of the trope of the American dream, one often relegated to the realm of the masculine. In order to interrogate the roles these intersecting, compounding 83 structures (Crenshaw, 1991)--whiteness, heterosexism, and patriarchy--play in and on the conditions of one’s incarceration, the inquiry must push against the norm. This study seeks to push against the norm by using methodological approaches that queer research norms situated within White hetero-patriarchal paradigms (Sprague, 2005). Gender structures the communities in which we exist. Regardless of how we conceptualize attitudes of our environment toward gender, gender enacts upon us through a series of socially constructed expectations, limitations, challenges, and boundaries. Gender, as a prevailing structure in U.S. culture, creates divisions and preconceived notions of what a body can do based on limitations of social constructs that rely upon biological attributes. This serves as a primary starting point for the inquiry in the CAGED program, as the program begins by interrogating the difference between biological sex and gender. At the center of this interrogation stand the questions posed by participants throughout the years of the program’s operation--points of confusion or interest or discomfort or excitement about gender, with a more specific focus on the complexity of masculinities. These points of inquiry over the years of the program drove the development of the curriculum and, thus, direct the intention of this research. In this chapter, first I discuss three primary theories informing the research design before addressing the details and logistics of designing and conducting this research project. As this research project employs Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), I elaborate on how this serves as a driving epistemology for conducting feminist-oriented research. In doing so, I situate CPAR within feminist epistemological frameworks. Further, because CPAR aims to trace the circuits of dispossession (Weis & Fine, 2012) enacted by marginalizing machines, I attempt to untangle some of the mutually 84 constitutive, tangled, colluding systems that produce particular realities for those involved in this research. This study engages three populations as participants. The first population is those who serve on the facilitation team, comprised of four incarcerated facilitators and four facilitators from the outside. I elaborate on the structure of the facilitation team as the research team in a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) framework later in this chapter. The second population is incarcerated people who participated in the CAGED program in 2018-2019. The third population is former participants who have since been released from custody. The CAGED Curriculum To better situate what drove the lines of inquiry for this study, I will provide a brief overview of the CAGED curriculum. What began as a one-time session to discuss sexuality and gender with inmates became a comprehensive socio-critical curriculum on gender and how it intersects with power, violence, and other identities. The curriculum consists of four main units, which we call clusters, focused on the following guiding questions: How do I relate to others? How do I want to relate to others? What does it mean to be a man/woman/nonbinary person? How can we lead change? Within each of these guiding questions, we have goals of: ● Recognizing gender as an individual and group experience. ● Examining the tensions between one’s gender identity, gender expression, and one’s social and cultural contexts. ● Exploring foundational concepts of gender and sexuality. 85 ● Examining multiple forces of socialization in our lives and in society at large, and how we navigate those forces, with a focused interrogation on: homophobia, transphobia, gendered power. ● Introducing the concept of allyship and how it manifests at individual, community, and structural levels. ● Examining the tensions between gender norms and our physical/emotional need for connection and community, and ● Considering our individual and collective power and potential to influence change. Most sessions of the curriculum include video media relevant to our discussion of the day, as well as a particular concept the facilitation introduces which we then explore in small and large group discussion circles. Additionally, we incorporate opportunities for artistic expression and each session includes an individual writing portion. Foregrounding much of our curriculum is a focus on interrogating oppressions and dominance on individual, community/institutional, and structural levels. We introduce this as a practice we will return to throughout the curriculum as we ask the questions of each week. This practice, we find, offers opportunities for varied engagement based on comfort levels with the concept at hand and one’s individual story; for some people, it feels safer to discuss these concepts at a structural or institutional level before delving into how they see these in their personal lives. Research Questions The primary research question informing this study interrogates gender education generally, and the CAGED program impact specifically: 86 1. How do participants experience a prison education program focused on gender and masculinity? 2. More broadly, how do participants experience gender education? ● How does discussing gender shift participants’ understanding of their own gender and gender as a construct more broadly? ● How does discussing gender, masculinity, and institutions affect one’s perception of one’s identity? ● What experiences with gender and expectations of gender practices did participants have in their youth? ● How (if at all) do participants believe those experiences played a role in their incarceration? 3. What is the perceived value of participation in the CAGED program more specifically? ● How does the curriculum and/or classroom space affect participants’ perceptions of their own and others’ gender? ● How does participating in CAGED shift their experience in the correctional institution? ● What, if anything, does this education space make possible (as perceived by the participants)? ● What role does the involvement in CAGED play in one’s transition from prison? 87 These research questions, refined and approved by the CAGED research team, represent the points of inquiry from which the CAGED program arose and developed as a collaboration between inside and outside15 facilitators. This research presented a unique contribution to research on prison life and gender through the use of Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), which I will discuss further in the following section. Because of the intersections of these research foci, I consider analytic approaches that highlight the intersecting nature of these topics while also acknowledging the schools of thought that inform my inquiry. I call on critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012), an analytical concept drawing from action research scholarship, feminist methodologies, and the often-sordid histories of research within prisons and on prisoners. In this context of CPAR research, in a prison context, and studying gender, I consider how gender and incarceration both speak to systems and the individual, examining their mutually constitutive forces. Action research offers an opportunity for individuals to examine those structures that influence their daily lives. Action Research For the research design, I look to the foundational literature on social action research, comprehensively introduced by Lewin (1946). The first side of Lewin’s social research triangle involves training, or what Hawkins (2015, p. 465) calls the “orientation phase.” This orientation is central to cultivating a shared starting point for the inquiry. Fine (2016, p. 7) discusses how in her work, each project begins with a “‘research camp,’ where those who most intimately carry the stories of injustice in their souls engage in 15 I use the term “inside” when talking about facilitators or a place to describe being inside the prison. “Outside” refers to the world outside the prison. Outside facilitators are those of us who are not incarcerated. 88 critical dialogue with community-based practitioners, researchers, activists, youth, educators…,” establishing a place where they discuss: what knowledges they bring to the project, what differences exist between each of them due to their positionalities, what “fault lines of power” exist in the group, and how privilege works for some within the group as a means of setting the groundwork for continued difficult conversations. This orientation phase establishes not only shared understandings and responsibilities, but also identifies, addresses, and consistently revisits power differentials imposed by a variety of systems constituting each researcher’s positionality differently than their co-researchers’, “interrogat[ing] the dominant story being circulated, unravel[ing] the discursive framing of the problem” and examining the historicity of policy’s “heavy footprints” on marginalized communities (Fine, p. 7). This orientation remains central to the on-going curriculum design and revision process of the CAGED dialogue program, as inside and outside facilitators continue to provide critical context for understanding the questions and talking points that drive the curriculum development. The second side of the methodological triangle about which Lewin (1946) writes is research. In their work in a women’s correctional institution, Fine et al. (2004) detail the methodological decisions they made to ensure a democratic process and shared leadership among all researchers involved in the process, from whether or not to remain anonymous, how to decide upon a research sample, what methodologies to employ to generate data, and how to approach the writing and/or presentation of the data. The decision-making process for how to conduct the research relies upon the norms and developing an “open communicative space” which aims to “serve and transcend the self- interests of individual participants” (Kemmis, 2008, p. 127). The research practices must 89 be understood from individual perspectives as well as the collective understanding in order for the research to move towards a collectively defined appropriate action. In the CAGED program, the facilitation group strives to uphold a feminist, non-hierarchical structure, understanding that each team member contributes a unique set of skills and perspectives to the facilitation team and to the larger dialogue group. Action is the third component of Lewin’s (1946) triangle of social action research. In this, the research team must engage in “facilitating public discourse in public spheres” (Kemmis, 2008, p. 123), moving beyond the confines of the research team to the social systems that shape the lives of those in social worlds. This action may take a multitude of shapes, though when employed critically, often it enters into shaping public policy, whether in the form of a legal scholarship used for amicus briefs (Stoudt, Fine, & Fox, 2011), recommendations to institutions for services (Fine et al. 2004), or for public presentations to provide counter-narratives to dominant lies (Johnson & Guzmán, 2013). As Lewin (1946, p. 203) warns, “Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.” These three components are key to producing participatory action research. What brings it beyond participatory to critical participatory action research is a commitment to interrogate the veils of dominant structures that often prevent individuals from seeing larger material and discursive forces enacting upon our lives. As this research seeks to interrogate the structures intertwined with gender, it does so with a critical eye towards how these structures create limitations and produce marginalization. Further, working at the “activist-scholar hyphen” (Sandwick et al., 2018, p. 474), this research considers how to turn the knowledge produced throughout the research into activity and action that can 90 change the conditions of those marginalized. Considering the circulation of power within prisons and prison-based research became critical in the conception of this project. Research, Power, and Prisons Prisons present one of the most regulated environments of social control. Beyond the physical containment of bodies is the discursive construction of criminality and the rationalization of inhumane material conditions for the sake of so-called rehabilitation (Foucault, 1977, 1983). Foucault (1980) discusses the immediate failure of imprisonment as rehabilitation as something quickly turned strategic; prisons became the site to manufacture “docile bodies,” bodies subject to constant coercion, complicity, and made useful to a capitalistic machine. Foucault calls on the panopticon, an architectural model Bentham designed for early prisons, as a tool turned metaphor for surveillance in society, wherein one surveils oneself for compliance in the context of normative social order out of fear of punitive action. These corps of docile bodies produce a false sense of security and reinforce social norms for those outside the prisons, deluding outside communities into believing that in captivity, prisoners are powerless in shifting a social reality. Though he expounds on prisons as a structure of harnessing power, Foucault (1977, p. 27), writes, “Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended…” He continues on to discuss the constitutive relationship of knowledge and power; knowledge comes out of power and knowledge constitutes a particular kind of power itself. In this assertion lies the call to engage those subjected to controlling forces of power in examining those forces. 91 In his research with incarcerated men, Toch (1967) explains that engaging those who know incarceration intimately, through their lived experiences, in conducting the research builds a stronger data story, as the typical constraints and expectations to please an outsider researcher diminish. Further, Toch (1967) asserts that engaging incarcerated co-researchers shifts data analysis as the incarcerated co-researcher “can often be in a position to correct naive inferences by less experienced [with incarceration] professionals” (p. 73). These assertions from Toch stress the importance of conducting research in and about prisons with prisoners helping to drive the inquiry. Arguably, nobody understands the multitude of power dynamics within prisons as well as someone who is incarcerated, living with those dynamics daily. Organizing research with those who maintain outsider within (Collins, 1986) status provides deeper insights into the structures at the center of analysis. Gaventa and Cornwall (2015) explain that in Participatory Action Research (PAR), power is structural; power extends beyond individuals to how those structures bestow, maintain, and deny power. This calls for working within those structures, in this case, the institutional structure of the prison, to cultivate the knowledge/power that is not situated or stable. And the knowledge/power produced from within prisons undoubtedly emanates to the world outside the confines of a correctional institution, as prison in the United States remains “an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives” (Davis, 2003, p. 9). In working to cultivate knowledge within and about particular structures, research must dig beyond the normalized knowledge sources of those structures, which are often those who benefit from them, to determine what the structure presses against or shuts out. 92 Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) This study centers Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) as its primary influence in both design and methodology. As one of the primary goals of the Creating Allyship through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) program is to develop allyship and coalition, conducting this research as a participatory project seemed imperative. In attempts to dismantle oppressive structures, such as the prison industrial complex or heteropatriarchy, individuals must cultivate community coalitions through engaged, critical, “bone-deep” (Tuck, 2013) participation. Doing research on gender and its functions within prisons and within prisoners requires methodological approaches that evade trite “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) narratives produced from the perspective of someone outside the experiences of those featured in the research (p. 423). CPAR centers the experiences of those experiencing institutions as key stewards of insider knowledge, dislocating knowledge from assumed positional authority from formal educational training; rather, experiences of the institutions situate one to examine them more critically. The impetus for many PAR projects is the desire to see action towards change. It begins “with concerns for power and powerlessness” (Reason, 1994, p. 328), pursuing knowledge to counter the dominant lies told to a culture about a particular population (Fine, 2016). This pursuit seeks to inquire into the possibilities of action towards change as a means of liberation. This is a desire “involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore” (Tuck, 2009, p. 417) of material and discursive constructions of a population, countering the predicted futures and sedimented pasts of dominant lies told about, to, and for a marginalized population. This desire is integral to developing a participatory 93 research project, as it acts as an opting-in of researchers instead of a recruitment of subjects. This type of research calls on critical orientations that queer research away from understanding research qualifications as what comes with degrees. Toch’s (1967) assertions that the incarcerated research members’ criminal experiences are “qualifications” for their role as researchers (p. 72). Kunzel (2008) examines years of sociological research on gender and sexuality of incarcerated populations, however, this research rarely considers incarcerated people as knowledgeable in the inquiry process. I believe, however, that the insiders are truly insiders; they have a unique standpoint that only those who are or have been incarcerated can possess. In their participatory research project within the Bedford Women’s prison, (Fine et al., 2001) turned to the inmate-researchers on the project to conduct the interviews about the personal and social effects of the college program at Bedford on the students as well as their children. In this, they sought out the “why” of college-in-prison programs beyond the statistics easily produced around recidivism rates. In reflecting on this project, Fine (2013, p. 688) writes that participatory epistemology “appreciat[es] that knowledge and expertise are widely distributed even if legitimacy is not.” In the development of the project, the team regularly called on the expertise of those on the team who were incarcerated to make strategic decisions on how best to sample the multiple populations they interviewed. The success of this project relied largely on the “insider wisdom” (p. 693) of the incarcerated team members who asked questions of the information the team received from the state and explained a number of ways in which the law could be interpreted and land one in prison. These researchers knew the structures the team studied 94 more intimately than the outside team members could ever know. The involvement of those who were incarcerated deepened the team’s ability to turn a critical eye toward the research in an environment so often disregarded by much of society, making a key case for policy changes to reinstate college programs in prison. The Critical in CPAR What differentiates PAR from CPAR is the influence of critical theoretical approaches on the research. It deepens interrogations to “make visible and interrogate histories and structures of injustice and resistance” (Sandwick et al., 2018, p. 475). A primary goal of CPAR research is to engage “democratic participation” that leads the research toward inclusion of voices previously excluded by the subjectivities thrust upon them and to “contest how ‘science’ has been recruited to legitimate dominant policies and practices” (Torre et al., 2012, p. 171). This moves science from the realm of the privileged in the academy to the communities engaged in better understanding and, hopefully, changing the conditions of their lived realities in positive, productive ways. It responds to Denzin’s (2017) call to “unsettle traditional concepts of what counts as research, as evidence, as legitimate inquiry,” engaging those relegated to the margins of society, like incarcerated people, and academia to take part in the inquiry of examining their lives as influencing and influenced by larger structures (p. 8). CPAR aims to produce “public science for the public good,” (Fine & Torre, 2019, p. 435), with specific aims of putting the knowledge produced from the research into tangible action. CPAR draws from a number of streams of literature rooted in critical community liberation projects (e.g. Combahee River Collective, 1977; Freire, 2000; Martín-Baró, 1994) to inform its core principles, the primary commitment being, “No research on us 95 without us” (Fine & Torre, 2019, p. 435). CPAR stands as an epistemology to challenge the long history of anthropological studies on communities, not for communities, those that serve to amplify the voice of the researcher over the voices of the communities into which the researcher inserted himself. Engaging those who have been delegitimized by structural oppression in the study of those oppressions offers an opportunity to bring voices most affected to the forefront in asking the questions those for whom the structures work well would rarely think to ask. CPAR heeds Harding’s (2004, p. 136) claim that, “a maximally critical study of scientists and their communities can be done only from the perspective of those whose lives have been marginalized by such communities.” Because of its critical commitments, CPAR wrestles with multiple tensions, particularly when tied in with university researchers and marginalized communities. These tensions require research navigation beyond following protocols or even institutional norms, particularly when working at what Sandwick et al. (2018, p. 474) call the “activist-scholar hyphen,” a place where the drive to disrupt and transform systems can come into direct conflict with a system that legitimizes our ability to do this work within an institution. Torre and Ayala (2009) call this place of conflicting thoughts, perspectives, and priorities common in participatory action research projects the “participatory contact zone.” One such tension in this research of CAGED was the reconciliation of the march of time, a pressure pervasive in academia often reproductive of colonial logics (Patel, 2014). Where those of us on the outside scrambled to find regular time for research activity beyond our weekly offering of the program, our inside collaborators reminded us often, “We’ll be here,” a statement that, though seemingly 96 simple, would quickly pivot our thoughts away from the stresses of scheduling to gratitude that we were not subjected to the same scheduling constraints of being incarcerated. The participatory contact zone (Sandwick et al., 2018) of our work reminded each of us of the advantages and disadvantages we employed while doing this work and how they, ultimately, created a much richer form of research. CPAR as Feminist Methodology In a study regarding the expectations one experiences regarding practicing gender, it seemed imperative to employ a feminist methodological approach. At the center of the CAGED curriculum stands a commitment to availing men to the structures in which they freely, perhaps unconsciously, participate that not only play a role in the subjugation of women and non-binary folks, but also in costs to their own liberation from oppressive forces. Harding and Norberg (2005, p. 2011) explain that the methodological and epistemological issues in feminist social science research “include concerns about how to understand the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and other structural forces of societies; about inappropriate essentializing of women and men…”. These interrogations propel the CAGED curriculum, and this research aims to uncover how the curriculum affected participants’ understandings and commitments towards a more just, equitable world. It is our team’s belief that this work plays a role in the improvement of the lives of not only those who participate, but of the women and non-binary folks with whom they interact or will interact. We believe as the participants become more able to read the messages they received about performing masculinity in particular ways, they will be able to more critically assess situations before them and draw from a range of possible 97 practices, instead of those ingrained as dominant, potentially leading to a healthy psychological and social existence (Wong et al., 2017). Feminist epistemologies (Harding, 1998) start from a position of rejecting the proposed neutrality of White, male-centric scientific traditions of positivism. Where positivism “offers assurance of unambiguous and accurate knowledge of the world” (Crotty, 1998, p. 18), the notion of what is accurate in scientific discovery tends to limit any understanding of context and nuance. In social science, positivist claims can easily leave multiple perspectives and contexts out of considering how and why something came to exist, leading to “suspicious gaps” (Harding, 1998, p. 147) in knowledge production. What may be presented as objective fails to consider how the social worlds in which we orbit, and which produce our realities vacillate dramatically based on a constellation of structures, institutions, values, and access to productions of meaning. Complicating the notion of ‘objectivity’ is central for folks who have been subjected to systems of violence, such as the violence of what Davis (2003, p. 88) calls the “punishment system.” Feminist epistemologies offer a place to challenge conventional notions of objectivity towards a “strong objectivity,” what Harding (2004, p. 136) explains “requires that the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane as the objects of knowledge,” requiring “strong reflexivity” of those engaged in the inquiry to understand their role and positionality. In this research within the prison, we not only interrogate our gendered identities, but also how our multitudinous identities and statuses produce our gendered practices and expressions and that if we are to engage in this research as a liberatory project, we must understand we are interrogating our entire collective as subjects of knowledge, including 98 all the ways we align and differ (Harding, 2004). Further, Harding stresses that this onus to interrogate from feminist standpoints does not fall solely as a labor of women or as something only women can do, stating, Women cannot claim [the ability to generate feminist knowledge] to be uniquely theirs, and men must not be permitted to claim that because they are not women, they are not obligated to produce fully feminist analyses. Men, too, must contribute distinctive forms of specifically feminist knowledge from their particular social situation… begin[ning] first from women’s lives in all the ways that feminist theory, with its rich and contradictory tendencies, has helped us all-- women as well as men--to understand how to do. (p. 135) The content of the CAGED curriculum and the research on the program compels those of us on the research team to not only consider the place from which we, individually, enter the inquiry. Rather, we must consider how this work extends through the histories of social positions deeply affected by and affecting the conditions of our inquiry. CPAR evades a clean categorization of stemming from one particular tradition or falling within a particular epistemological orientation, challenging the maleness of categorization (Crotty, 1998). While there may be a primary investigator on paper, the locus of expertise morphs as inquiry continues. Because CPAR attempts to excavate power structures insulated by supremacies and threats of structural violence, it excavates the very notion of power, queering categorizations of how power looks, sounds, and feels away from binary notions. CPAR recognizes how power circulates (Foucault, 1982). At the center of CPAR stands a commitment to those relegated to the margins that in the margins lies the possibility of critical resistance (hooks, 2004). hooks (p. 157), in reflecting on the ways in which marginal spaces often become associated with places of despair, calls succumbing to this framework of marginalization as a space where “one’s mind is fully colonized,” a place where resistance forfeits to repression at the expense of 99 calling on the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) those living in the margins access to survive dominant structures like whiteness and patriarchy. The margin space is both a space where one exists as a result of oppressions and, if one chooses, a “location of radical openness and possibility” (hooks, 2004, p. 159). Living in marginal space may create opportunity in a world where opportunity seems to be an illusion offered to keep those marginalized participating in their own deficit-framed marginalization. CPAR offers a resistant research structure in an academy structure that privileges independent scholarship, lead authors, and institutionally codified expertise. Instead of situating expertise with those who attained terminal degrees or institutional recognition, CPAR turns to the experiential expertise of those subject to institutional forces and pressures, while reconciling with the multiple tensions of researching as a team of university researchers and community members (Sandwick et al., 2018). Further, CPAR acts in a collaborative approach, wherein those at the center of the inquiry play a significant role in the creation and execution of the inquiry, an approach to destabilizing the researcher/researched power dichotomy that pervades much of social science research. Instead, CPAR calls on the intimate, lived knowledges of those directly experiencing the oppressive productions of structural inequality. Because of this, of the various feminist epistemologies that resonate most with this study, standpoint theory (Collins, 1986, 1997; Harding, 2004; Hekman, 1997) provides a key queering of knowledge construction against the institutional norms of academia. Those with histories and present-day realities of incarceration understand incarceration much more intimately than those for whom incarceration remains a conceptual-- rather than lived--reality. To better understand the importance of this, I turn 100 to standpoint theory as offered by Collins. In Collin’s (1997) explanation, she argues past Hekman’s (1997) contention of standpoint as centering the individual as the unit of analysis, “Arriving at the dead end of the impossibility of systemic analysis that leads to systemic change appear[ing] as the result” (p. 376). Collins implores feminist researchers to consider how systems create subjectivities and oppressions and that even though within collectivities there are individuals with unique experiences, challenges, and needs, it remains critical to investigate the power relations that maintain unequal social structures. And in her explicit focus on discussions of African American women in academia, Collins (1986, p. S14) stresses that those in marginal positions in these structures--in this case, Black women working in academia, a structure laden with White patriarchy--maintain an “outsider within” status. This status, Collins notes, brings with it some potential benefits, including “the ability of the ‘stranger’ to see patterns that may be more difficult for those immersed in the situation to see” (p. S15). In researching structures and their impact on individuals, researching as a collective with team members with “outsider within” statuses helps to illuminate that which may be intentionally obfuscated from and by insiders. Crotty (1998, p. 173) warns against locating standpoint as an insight that cannot be seen by others, but that we should understand it as being rooted in “a specifically feminist standpoint.” By that, he calls on Assiter (1996, p. 88) describing this not as something simply rooted in being a woman, rather this standpoint stemming from a “collective commitment to the undermining of oppressive gender-based power relations.” Those of us on the research team who are not incarcerated cannot know the realities of daily prison life and how doing the work involved in CAGED may create tensions, opportunities, or obstacles because of the 101 hyper-surveilled state of incarceration. For our inside research team members, they often discuss certain ways they do not see the same sort of antagonisms or microaggressions that appear on the outside; for the two of us on the research team who identify as women, we see the experience of sitting in a room full of primarily men16 very differently than our co-facilitators who are men. And through the multiple identities of our team--Black, White, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, straight, partnered, single, poor, middle-class, men, women, femme, masc, parents--we draw on numerous outsider within statuses in various contexts to lend to a rich inquiry of the way gender affects our daily lives, both inside and outside the correctional institution. And while we each interact with the curriculum and the research differently, it is through our collective experience--sharing how we each encounter the conversations, the things we learn, our interactions with each other and the other participants in CAGED--that we engage in a meaning-making process together, listening to each other’s’ experiences and perspectives to open up our inquiry. Harding (2004) highlights how dominant groups face significant challenges in recognizing the oppressive traits of their own belief systems. In a group of largely men engaging in conversations about the harmful expectations of hegemonic masculinity, those of us on the research team who identify as women/femmes lend important insights and the ability to push against the places where our co-researchers may wish to avoid facing their own role in reproducing inequalities. With over half of our research team identifying as White, our co-researchers of color offer critical perspectives against the 16 Since the beginning of the CAGED program, we have regularly had participants who do not identify as a man participate and identify before the group. One of our long-time facilitators, before she was released, came out as a woman during the course of her participation as a facilitator. In the writing of this, in our facilitation, “language is also a place of struggle” (hooks, 2004, p. 153). 102 pervasive normalization whiteness does to insulate settler colonialism as sovereign and all-knowing (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). As a collective, we bring to each other and to the research a multi-dimensional approach to inquiry, engaging our constellation of varied experiences and diverse perspectives and identities to attempt to counter the dominant narratives pervasive in much of curriculum and research. We recognize that our project is richer because of our varied levels of formal education, our outsider within intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991) statuses with multiple structures and institutions, and our interactions with the world as gendered/raced/classed individuals influenced and affected by our communities. Researching within a prison requires seeking opportunities to lift back the veil of carceral ideologies. Beneath this veil lies histories of everyday degradations--sexual abuse (Haag, 2018), gender-based violence (Ellenbogen, 2019), officer-facilitated inmate-to-inmate violence (Associated Press, 2019), and larceny (Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office, 2019), to name a few. Many of these degradations go unreported due to power imbalances and abuses (Denvir, 2016). In order to understand the power structures at play in prisons, it is crucial to involve those who most directly experience these structures and who have outsider within status. Critical Bi-focality In order to produce participatory research that may translate into action to effect socio-political changes, participatory researchers must not focus solely on lived experiences or on structures of power and governance; they must employ their “bifocals-- dedicated theoretical and empirical attention to structures and lives” (Weis & Fine, 2012, p. 174). Critical bifocality directs participatory research towards understanding the 103 multitude of systems at play that create the conditions--material, discursive, and material- discursive--in which experiences manifest. Within systems of power, multiple agents work simultaneously to produce the experiences of those subject to these systems through everyday life. Critical bifocality provides a useful methodological framework for interrogating the deeply entrenched connections between systems and how those connections create particular conditions that become reinforced through a series of intersecting political, socio-cultural, and economic interests. Employing critical bifocality means “trac[ing] how circuits of dispossession and privilege travel across zip codes and institutions, rerouting resources, opportunities, and human rights upward as if deserved,” leaving some communities continually disenfranchised and eluding those community members from seeing the sources of disenfranchisement by creating complex systems posturing as just or ‘equal’ (Weis & Fine, 2012, p. 174). This tracing of circuits of dispossession and privilege is critical to incarcerated people, a population surveilled intensely through a variety of sources of disenfranchisement like limited access to media sources, to name one. This tracing of circuits examines the “dividing practices” Foucault (1982, p. 326) discusses that create incarcerated people as “criminal-social enem[ies]” (Foucault, 1973,2013, p. 33) Foucault (1973,2013) elaborates on the discursive construction of the criminal as the social enemy in Rousseau’s Social Contract and later as an argument in the presentation of the 1791 Penal Code in France, noting the rise of incarceration as punishment with the burgeoning of the criminal-social enemy public discourse. While Foucault (p. 70) posits that these were not solely mutually constitutive, in that there are multiple forces that saw these two emerge nearly simultaneously, he notes that the prison 104 “is an abstract, monotonous, rigid punitive system that came to be imposed not only in reality, in the passage to realization, but in discourse.” In the “criminal-social enemy” rests the discursive construction of imprisonment by society, one that carries with in both discursive and material consequences, including the dehumanization of incarcerated people by the outside. He advocates that caring for the self, a key part to his ethics framework, is “equip[ping] oneself with these truths [of acceptable societal principles]” (Foucault, 1984, p. 285). PAR work examines these societal principles and the material- discursive constructions and conditions through and from which these emerge, producing for researchers the power/knowledge of the systems that attempt to contain them. While this examination of the constructions of gender is central to producing power/knowledge, a team must focus on the possibilities and not dwell in the damage. Tuck’s (2009, p. 409) work on averting what she calls “damage-centered research” speaks to the ever-typical research conducted on and often with/for marginalized communities. This type of research, she writes, “is a pathologizing approach in which oppression singularly defines a community... establish[ing] harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (p. 413). While often well-intentioned, such research reinscribes the same discourses that cast marginalized communities to the margins. In order for participatory research to result in productive action, it must come from a place of desire for change where the actions taken speak to the possibilities for change. In this research, we employed critical bifocality to examine how gender and our perceived expectations around particular gendered practices created and limited possibilities. We did not examine gender, along with other social institutions like race, incarceration, and schooling, with the intention of provoking pain, rather as a way of 105 “turning our own backs on narratives that insist that we are ruined, that we are broken” (Tuck, 2009, p. 424). Instead, we looked to CPAR and critical bifocality as a way to explore the pressures and hurts as a product of larger social structures and the pressures to comply we perceived as a means of social and physical survival. Engaging in the tracing of those circuits of dispossession, engaging in “bone-deep participation” (Tuck, 2013) presents an opportunity to imagine alternate means of survival through collective action (p. 13). Collaborative Ethnography This research employs collaborative ethnography in combination with CPAR as a methodological approach to establishing and conducting the research. Collaborative ethnography offers the opportunity to develop relationships across hierarchies and privileged identities toward shared meanings. Lassiter (2005) explains how collaborative ethnography directs the intention around inquiry to the locus of focus--the primary stakeholders of the research. He writes, Doing a more deliberate and explicit collaborative ethnography revolves first and foremost around an ethical and moral responsibility to consultants--who are engaged not as ‘informants,’ but as co-intellectuals and collaborators who help to shape our ethnographic understandings, our ethnographic texts, and our larger responsibility to others as researchers, citizens, and activists. Constructed in this way, collaborative ethnography is first and foremost an ethical and moral enterprise, and subsequently a political one; it is not an enterprise in search of knowledge alone. (p. 79) This orientation toward research presents both a flattening of intellectual hierarchies and a departure from a researcher/subject dichotomy. This disruption of stark division presents a metaphorical queering of the research, moving away from the “bourgeois ideology of ‘separate spheres’” that Connell (1995, p. 68) explains as a primary driver of the division between the masculine and feminine. 106 While the writing about the research as presented in this dissertation was not done collaboratively, due to institutional requirements regarding authorship of doctoral theses, this study called on collaborative ethnography to guide the narration of this research. The research involved a “multilayered process” whereby our research team “remain[ed] open to the differing visions, agendas, and interpretations that complicate, and accordingly enrich, the dynamics of collaboration” (Lassiter, 2005, p. 137). As I explain in the data analysis section, our coding and analysis process regularly involved navigating personal experiences that influenced interpretations of the data. We asked each other about why we read data in the ways we did and what else we might be bringing to our reading beyond what appeared in transcripts. We shared personal experiences that the data brought up for us, considering how it was making us to re-think not only the data analysis, but also the content of the CAGED program. Our insights in those data analysis sessions became part of our overall data for this study. Though collaborative ethnography plays a role in this research, this dissertation is not a collaborative ethnography. It cannot be because of institutional requirements for a degree. Beyond that, though, the time during which I intended to generate more in-depth feedback on the writing as it occurred, particularly regarding the data presented in Chapter IV and the implications presented in Chapter V, I was not allowed in the institution. Our final group gathering occurred on March 8, 2020. Due to state regulations around COVID-19, I have not re-entered the institution. Because of these circumstances, this project did not result in collaboratively writing quite as Lassiter describes: We might sum up collaborative ethnography as an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it--from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and especially, through the writing process. Collaborative ethnography 107 invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops (p.16). This research study does, however, embrace collective ethnography as a goal. Further, as I outline in discussing the research design, this investigation invited commentary from all members of the research team; as a research team, we not only served as investigators, but also as participants, as stakeholders in the program. Collectively, our commentary shapes the text presented in Chapter IV. Research Design While this research will satisfy the requirements of a dissertation, I designed it with the co-researchers in a way that serves potential policy directions for inmate services in the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC), following Lewin’s warning for research to move beyond the bubble of scholarly circles. During the tenure of the program, ODOC and the Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force have engaged the CAGED group in a multitude of ways: to learn about what role this group plays in affirming its burgeoning trans population; what this model might mean for community corrections, attempting to halt individuals’ interactions with the criminal justice system from surpassing the community level; and ultimately what this work might mean towards the goal of reducing recidivism. The research team considers these interests in developing the research project so as to serve the needs and culture of the institution while looking more broadly at what effects this program may have in divesting from industries of mass incarceration, including the school-to-prison pipeline. Inside and Outside Facilitators In a research project like this one, four outside facilitators, all engaged in or having completed doctoral-level academic work, worked alongside four incarcerated 108 facilitators, all who completed various levels of undergraduate-level coursework, to develop, facilitate, and research curriculum taught to incarcerated people with varying levels of access to and completion of formal education (see Appendix A for facilitator names and statuses). Because of this, in each revision of the curriculum and meetings in between CAGED sessions, we wrestled with what was considered expertise; some of the inside facilitators and participants focused on the college teaching experience of each outside facilitator; for some of the inside facilitators, it became a primary talking point for recruiting new participants. In this regular deference to our (outside facilitators’) access to and levels of completion of formal education, we grappled with how to avert reproducing hegemonic constructions of expertise and knowledge (Sandwick et al., 2018). While the inside facilitators emphasized the formal degrees and formal teaching experience of the outside facilitators, the outside facilitators foregrounded the standpoint (Collins, 1986) of incarceration, something with which some of us had peripheral experience through familial ties, but with which none of us had direct experience. The Iterative Nature of CPAR This study underwent multiple iterations to accommodate the changing nature of research needs of the team (see Appendix B for a timeline of revisions). Once initially approved, the team reviewed research questions I proposed from years of conversations we had about this group and decided how we wanted to collect data that would illustrate the effect of the CAGED program in participants’ reflection on and understanding of their identity; this required revisions to refine and submit questions for approval in both the writing prompts and the focus group questions. As we began to discuss the research more, one of the inside team members expressed a desire to gain data analysis skills. 109 Because CPAR strives to center the needs of those affected by the structures examined in the study, attending to the inside team members’ development as researchers meant submitting a revision for full board review to allow the research team to analyze de- identified data. When a new facilitator from the outside joined the team, we ensured she went through the proper ethics training through her institution and added her as an independent investigator to the project to allow her to participate in the data analysis. Each of these iterations of the project honored the nature of CPAR as an emergent methodology that strives to center the experiences of those directly affected by structures while building capacity for those at the center of inquiry to drive the inquiry through the development of their research skills. What struck me in this process was how these iterations caused shifts to our research. We came to know more about ourselves as a facilitation and research team as we changed our protocol. A small revision, such as allowing the CAGED alumni to consent verbally on our call, instead of sending in a consent form with a postage paid envelope, created a more personal way to engage with alumni about the consent process and any questions they had before we began. Adding the ability for all co-researchers to analyze the identifiable data led us to more intimate conversations about not only our experiences with gender, but how we experienced a greater closeness and understanding of each other. Additionally, it lent our analysis sessions to providing deeper insights into each other’s lives, as I elaborate on in Chapter IV. Because CPAR aims to situate the experiences and knowledges of the community/ies most affected by policies, practices, and overarching oppressions, researcher subjectivities become a site of constant interrogation. In my role as the 110 primary investigator, or, as I called it, coordinating investigator, I wrestled, seemingly endlessly, with challenging the deeply embedded institutionality of academia. When my co-researcher Watts S. processed his learning history throughout much of our consensus coding process, I caught myself feeling somewhat impatient and tempted, if not actualizing the temptation, to redirect him to the task at hand, losing sight of how the conversations arising during the coding process contribute profoundly to the methodology. This discourse and collaborative reflection are the methodology, just as much as, if not more than, the coding. Research Site This research occurred primarily within a medium-security correctional institution, OSCI, (Oregon Department of Corrections, 2019) in the State of Oregon. Corrections in Oregon differs from most other states in the United States in that no private companies operate the Oregon State prisons (Mason, 2012). This facility is one that serves as a primary funnel for youth transitioning out of the Oregon Youth Authority and into the adult facilities. Further, during the course of the history of the CAGED program, the institution shifted to dedicating a majority of the prison beds to those serving the final months of their sentences. Anecdotally, participants in the research note this as being a desirable facility due to more comprehensive volunteer programs available and generally a lower risk of violence than some of the other medium- or maximum- security prisons in the state. Further, its location, only a few miles from the State capitol and very close to the main interstate highway in Oregon, makes it much more accessible for visitors and volunteers, allowing more likelihood for those incarcerated to interact with people from outside. 111 Ethics and Researching with Prisoners. A long, sordid history of coercive medical research conducted upon incarcerated individuals (Hornblum, 1998; Hornblum, 1997) ultimately led to the termination of such research within U.S. prisons in 1976 (Gostin et al., 2007). Prior to this termination, prisoners were subjects of coerced medical experiments that led to prisoner fatalities and, often, big pharmaceutical company profits (Rugaber, 1969). This resulted in a decision by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to develop an ethical framework and provide rationale to change the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) regarding human subjects, outlining prisoners as a vulnerable population. In 45 CFR 46, Subpart C, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) outlines additional safeguards for research involving prisoners. Among these safeguards are rules that the research poses no more than a minimum risk or “inconvenience” to participants (§46.306(a)(2)(ii-iv)). In recent years, national conversation surfaced on re-thinking prisoner involvement in research (Christopher et al., 2016). The call to reconsider prisoner involvement grapples with the exploitative history of research on prisoners for research and industry profit while considering what research may bring of benefit to those incarcerated, particularly in prisons where access to routine and advanced medical care can be paltry at best. Much of the consideration around prisoners’ consent calls into question if the state of incarceration changes one’s willingness to consent to a study and if there is any undue influence the prisoner experiences around consenting. This is further complicated by the decision by state agencies on whether or not the research serves the prisoners’ best interests (Christopher et al., 2016). In systems with abuses of power by 112 state agents, as outlined previously, this determination by state officials on behalf of prisoners may not represent prisoners’ best interests. Navigating some of the prison personnel suspicions of an approved project in which incarcerated individuals serve as research team members can further complicate the research process (Roberts & Indermaur, 2008; Sparks et al., 1996). To conduct research in prison is to rely on those managing direct contact with inmates to assist in research tasks such as making call-outs for inmates to appear for research activities, unlocking rooms, and allowing approved materials through the gatehouse. Roberts and Indermaur (2008, p. 314) comment that prison officers tend to be the “ultimate gatekeepers” to whether or not prison research may successfully occur. Our team encountered this for one of our data analysis sessions. After arriving seven minutes past our scheduled time on a night of inclement weather, the officer-in-charge informed the gatehouse officer to turn us away, as we were late. Our inside team members felt strongly that this was an exercise of power by an officer who did not support programs that were not a part of academics. This research posed interesting considerations regarding data security. In one regard, human subjects research boards consider prisoners a vulnerable population, requiring a full institutional research board (IRB) review and extensive examination of how researchers will navigate power dynamics, ability to consent, and safety for participants. This is meant to attend to the histories of prisoner exploitation discussed previously. In another regard stands a concern over prisoners exploiting their power and the researchers involved to advocate for their own self-interest. What became paramount 113 was reinforcing that no part of participation in the study could play a role in shifts in their parole or sentencing. The Research Team Our research team involved all the facilitators of CAGED. The CAGED facilitation team is composed of four incarcerated, or inside, facilitators along with four facilitators, myself included, who come into the institution from the outside. Each of the inside facilitators has completed some higher education, with one facilitator, Devon, completing his baccalaureate degree in the year of our data collection with CAGED participants. The struggle to access classes following a severe reduction in course availability in recent years within the institution has created a barrier for some of the other facilitators to complete their degrees. The outside facilitators have all completed doctoral-level coursework and one of the outside facilitators, Dave, has completed his doctorate degree. Each member of the team has taken some coursework in social sciences, which helped immensely in understanding our research orientation and our curriculum creation. As a facilitation team, we draw on our multiple experiences, our extensive formal and informal education, and our interpersonal strengths to develop and deliver the curriculum. As a research team, we worked collaboratively to develop the research questions and all of the writing prompts we used throughout the curriculum that served as part of our research data. I served as the Principal Investigator as recognized by the Institutional Review Boards of the University of Oregon and the Department of Corrections. In this role, my primary leadership was to keep our research data organized, communicate with the institution staff about group research activities that required us to 114 secure spaces and permissions around recording devices, and file the relevant paperwork allowing us to endeavor into this research. Though I did this level of coordination, I encouraged our team to think of me as providing the organizational labor and for us all to consider ourselves equal collaborators without hierarchy around knowledge or titles. Principal Investigator Positionality As the principal investigator on the study, or, as I called it, the coordinating investigator, I had the responsibility of ensuring we treated the data and each other with care. During this time, I wrestled with my positionality, one of privilege, for at the end of each session, I was able to drive away from the institution and move about the world freely. I reflected on my access to resources to do this work and how, while this research was centrally important to me and my degree requirements, my incarcerated co- researchers may not hold the same reverence for the study, not out of a lack of interest or commitment, rather due to a more precarious set of living circumstances within the prison. Further, I considered the dueling intentions for my involvement in this study. As someone involved in the development of CAGED, I was not able to be neutral regarding the effectiveness of the program, as nearly eight years of involvement not only shaped my belief in this work, but it also shaped me and the personal and social beliefs I hold. My personal experiences as a queer woman/gender-fluid person, as well as my involvement in queer community organizing, at times affected my involvement in the research. This was particularly evident at moments when, in the process of their own development around understanding gender at a conceptual and personal level, my collaborators--who, with the exception of one woman, all identified as men--made 115 remarks that felt to me paternalistic or condescending about women and queer people. Sitting in that tension was not always easy and at times I felt conflicted about my commitments to this research and my commitments to feminism, struggling to determine constructive responses amidst navigating my own emotional interior. Further, during the course of this research, I began to examine my own complicity with masculinity, recognizing that masculine practices are performed by more than just men (Pascoe, 2007) and to think otherwise reduces gender to a biological marker. Research Participants and Data Collection Methods As the CAGED curriculum developed through a collective of inside facilitators and outside volunteers, the research began with the facilitation team. The design of this CPAR study situated the facilitation team as the research team and the first research population. Typically, research organizes around one primary investigator (PI), situating one person as the director of the research program. In this CPAR study, though done with the intent of producing research for this dissertation, I served as the facilitating PI, coordinating the logistics and research components necessary for approval through both the University of Oregon and Oregon Department of Corrections research review boards. In employing this method, I attempted to remove myself as the locus of expertise for research and, instead, call on the varied expertise of the research team to inform the data collection tools and data analysis. The second research population drew from those inmates participating in the CAGED program; of those who participated in the program, nineteen participated in this study. The study lasted the duration of one cycle of the curriculum, which lasted roughly nine months. In the course of this curriculum, participants of the program commit to 116 coming to at least one cluster; there are four clusters, each one composed of three or four sessions. Throughout each cluster, participants interrogated topics at three levels of influence: structural, institutional, and personal. The dialogue groups in which individuals participated centered conversations on the interplay between these levels of influence. The third research population consisted of three people who were formerly incarcerated and participated in the CAGED program since its beginning in 2012. These are individuals who had been released from the institution and were in good standing with their parole officer(s) or who had been discontinued from DOC supervision. With this population, I conducted one-on-one interviews, via phone or Skype, about their experience participating in the program and if and how it provided a role in their transition out of the prison. Research Camps. A result of the 1994 Violent Crime Bill was the termination of Pell funding eligibility for incarcerated people, wherein inmates’ access to educational opportunities dwindled (Tewskberry et al., 2000). Many prison higher education programs rely on independent donors to programs and the familial financial resources of inmates to fund the continuing education of those who are incarcerated. At OSCI, some participants accessed college courses through a local community college program funded by a donor until that program ended, reportedly because of a conflict in administration. One of the inside researchers took a research methods class in the completion of his undergraduate degree, cobbled together through community college and Inside Out17 17 Inside Out Prison Exchange Program, based out of Temple University, is a program that offers college courses in correctional institutions, bringing enrolled, on-campus college students into the correctional institutions to learn with their incarcerated peers. 117 courses; the rest of the inside researchers were largely unfamiliar with research practices. In order to create shared understanding around research approaches and to prepare the team to research together, we held a few orientation camps for the research team to direct ourselves towards the research and working together in a new capacity. An additional benefit of these camps was that they availed the inside team members additional skill- building opportunities that often become a part of the educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) of marginalized communities, particularly of those experiencing incarceration. The initial research camp focused on discussing approaching research, research question design, and ethical approaches to research. We read about participatory action research (Torre & Ayala, 2009) and discussed how we could envision our research as liberatory and illustrating the borderlands of prisons, society, and gender. We reviewed the core concepts of the Belmont Report and discussed harm reduction, creating guidelines for how we would go about the research--from recruitment to data collection and analysis. I brought proposed research questions to the team based on years of conversations about the work and what we, as a team, felt people gained from it. We analyzed the research questions against the objectives of our program and the anecdotal recollections gathered throughout the years of the program’s tenure. We refined our final research questions after looking at our curricular objectives and discussed roles in the research process. We conducted another research camp in preparation for our focus groups. In that session, we discussed how to begin the focus group with program participants in a way that affirmed participants and provided space for rich discussion. For the outside team members, we asked questions on countering the damage-centered approach to research 118 where these spaces become fantasies (Tuck, 2009). We also discussed how we might be able to reorder questions to facilitate a better flow to the focus group. And, because we all participated in the focus group, we discussed the dual role of serving as both facilitators and participants and how our experiences in the group may influence our perceptions in the data collection. Data Collection Throughout the course of the research, we collected data where possible and approved. Since the facilitation team was also the research team and all participants in the study, we treated all of our sessions together, whether planning curriculum, developing our facilitation skills, or participating in research camps, as points to collect data. Additionally, the 45- minute drive for the outside facilitators to and from the institution presented rich discussions about the sessions and the research; we audio recorded many of those to use as data about the project. Our recruitment built off the recruitment for participants into the CAGED program for the 2018-2019 session. Inside facilitators recruited program participants through the use of the institution’s information channel available on personal and institutional televisions. They also recruited through word-of-mouth channels, through their work settings within the institution, and through their other group involvements. From the population of those who committed to participating in the CAGED program for any portion of the year, we recruited participants for the study. While there was one larger recruitment at the very beginning of our first cluster, as others joined later in the course of the program, I met one-on-one with newcomers and read the recruitment letter, provided them a consent form, and instructed them to hand in the form, if they decided to 119 participate, in an envelope next to the folder where participants could submit their writing reflections for the week; I elaborate on those writing reflections as data below. As each cluster of the curriculum maintained a particular content focus, each session centered a simple question as a departure point of inquiry for the dialogue session. Throughout the course of the CAGED curriculum sessions, participants, including those members of the research team, responded to writing prompts embedded in each of the sessions. These prompts asked participants to examine their beliefs, experiences, and ideologies surrounding gender and other aspects of identity. Participants made the decision each session on whether or not they wished to submit their writing as part of the research. We also generated a couple of large group lists around content for the week; this data did not include participant names. In addition to these writing prompts that the participants and the research team completed, the research team also wrote during a few of our facilitation development sessions. As a means of capturing the spirit of dialogue, including the interrelational meaning-making we see so often in the course of CAGED, we held two focus groups within the same room where we met on a weekly basis for the CAGED program. The first focus group involved CAGED participants during the 2018-2019 curriculum year. There were 15 total participants, 10 of whom were participants not on the research team. The second focus group engaged CAGED facilitators, who also comprise the research team; all seven of us participated. The last form of data collection for the study occurred with those identified as the third population for the study--former participants of the program who had since paroled. To contact this population, I worked with Department of Corrections (DOC) personnel to 120 obtain a list of all former participants of the program. From this list, I limited my outreach based on their parole status and their dates of participation in the program. I refined the list to only those CAGED program alumni with a current status of on parole and under parole supervision or discharged, meaning finished with parole and no longer under supervision. I limited the dates of participation to January 2014 and beyond, as our first full, finished curriculum iteration occurred starting in 2014. And I only considered those who met the prior to criteria and who attended a minimum of six sessions, as that assured they had attended at least half of our four cluster curriculum; each cluster contains three sessions. Much of the recruitment for this population relied on parole officers in various counties relaying the recruitment message and consent form to parolees. I contacted sixteen parole officers via phone or email and requested their assistance in distributing the information as per DOC instructions, I was unable to contact those in continued supervision directly. I heard back from one of the program alumni I attempted to contact via their parole officer. In one phone call with a parole officer, I learned that the day I contacted the parole officer, the alumnus had been arrested. For formerly incarcerated program alumni discharged from state or county supervision, I could contact them directly if I was able to retrieve their contact information. Because of presenting on our work with one program alumnus before a state task force, I knew their contact information and reached out to them directly via their work email. For another interview, one of our inside team members provided a phone number. I contacted that alumnus, requested his school email address, and sent the recruitment and consent form. With this population, I conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews via phone. These 121 interviews focused on their experiences of how the program played a role in their transition out of prison and back into society at large. Data Security Because this research involved incarcerated people discussing experiences in their life that may have played a role in their incarceration, questions about events leading to their incarceration needed to be worded in a way that would not implicate them in further criminal charges or implicate them as guilty. This is because participants may have been engaged in legal processes to challenge one or multiple of their criminal charges. This was advised during the IRB full board review. Data collected included weekly writing reflections, field notes, audio recordings of focus groups and interviews, and transcripts of those recordings. No demographic data was explicitly collected. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of the data collected, research data involving participants could not be stored at the institution. We removed data from the institution at the completion of each session. I secured data in compliance with the University of Oregon IRB-approved standards using Box, a cloud-based storage system accessible only through dual-layered authentication through Duo. Data Analysis Previously, I explained that while this study aims to employ the tenets of collaborative ethnography, it is solely authored to attend to the pragmatic concerns (Boellstorff et al., 2012) of institutional requirements regarding dissertations. However, this study drew from collaborative ethnography to inform both the methods and the presentation of the data. Collaboration guided this research project, as the genesis of the 122 CAGED program began through an alliance of incarcerated people and volunteers from the outside coming together to examine pressing questions and concerns about gender. Below I elaborate on our approach to data analysis, employing collaborative practices to the best of our abilities within the constraints of a correctional institution. The intent of this approach is to “se[t] the individuals’ stories within the context of their culture and culture-sharing group” (Creswell & Poth, 2018, p.103). In the structuring of data analysis, we aimed to “us[e] inquiry to reveal sites for change and activism” (Denzin, 2017, p. 9). In the first round of this study’s approval, my collaborators were a part of the research team, participating in the development of research questions and research activities; this followed our initial discussions about team members’ desired levels of involvement in the research. However, as we began the data collection portion of the research, one of my incarcerated collaborators, Devon, indicated he wanted to help in some other way, suggesting he could transcribe our focus group sessions as a way to practice skills he learned in a research methods class. Transcribing would require an adjustment to the roles on our human subjects application, so we discussed team members’ interest in the data analysis process. As I noted previously, the educational offerings for my incarcerated team members dwindled in recent years, and this offered an opportunity to more deeply engage in the research process, more closely aligning with the collaborative ideologies of CPAR. I submitted a project revision to the IRB, adding my collaborators as independent investigators to ensure they could participate in the analysis process. Once approved, we revisited our ethical commitments from our earlier research camps and turned our focus 123 to analysis. During our introductory coding camp, we discussed paradigms of research, primarily focused on a distinction between positivist approaches, wherein researchers test a theory, and emergent or discovery approaches, where the researchers let the data guide them toward discovering concepts and theories (Creswell & Puth, 2018; Crotty, 1998). In this conversation, we outlined three primary roles in research--the researcher, the participant, and the reader--and how, as a CPAR research team, we occupy both researcher and participant roles. Following outlining these roles, we explored the coding process more in depth. We began first with some pre-coding (Layder, 1998) with a Prince song, “Sometimes it Snows in April.” This was critical to learning what a code is, as we explored what felt relevant and important to understanding the meaning of the song. Following the pre-coding process, we discussed what codes are and can be--ways for us to make meaning of the words before us--and practiced two cycles of coding with the song. Following our two coding cycles, we came together for a discussion on how and what we read in the song lyrics, working through a “participatory contact zone” (Torre & Ayala, 2009), where we examined what role our experiences and differing viewpoints played into our interpretation (Fine, 2016). After practicing, we moved to an excerpt from one of the large group writing exercises we collected as data to practice open descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2009). We followed the same process used to analyze the song, as a way to refine our open coding and further our understanding. In our first data analysis session, we practiced a round of coding together using data from the focus groups, revisiting our discussions about coding from the introductory session. Following a review of our coding camp discussions, we turned to the transcript of the focus group with all CAGED participants. The research team began coding using 124 an open coding (Saldaña, 2009) approach, sitting with the data and looking for the data to tell us what codes seemed appropriate. It helped us to “remain open to all possible theoretical directions indicated by [our] readings of the data” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 46 as cited in Saldaña, 2009). In the first round, each research team member individually read the transcript of the participant focus group and developed open, descriptive codes. Because of security risks inherent in living in prison, the inside members were unable to open code when one of the outside members could not come in with the transcripts, as we had to remove them from the institution at the conclusion of each coding session to mitigate loss or theft of data. When we came together as a team, we reviewed the codes we assigned to each chunk of text and determined what codes felt most directly aligned with the question and resonated most with the team, engaging in a consensus (Harry et al., 2005 as cited in Saldaña, 2009) coding process. From the first focus group transcript, we developed our code book together, collaboratively working to develop definitions around the codes that arose from our consensus coding process. For the second transcript, documenting the facilitator focus group, we turned to a priori coding (Saldaña, 2009), using our code book to direct the codes we assigned to the focus group we conducted as a facilitation team. Because the questions varied from the first focus group, we found we needed to add relevant codes to the code book. Since “coding is a cyclical act” (Saldaña, 2009, p. 8), we returned to previous codes and text portions and reconsidered our previously assigned codes to determine if we had developed more relevant codes since our first round of coding. Throughout the course of our second coding process, done together in sections as a team, we engaged in regular member checking “as a way of validating the findings thus far” (p. 28). Following several 125 of these coding sessions, I wrote research memos to capture our conversations about the data and questions that arose to “serv[e] as an additional code- and category-generating method” (p. 41). Following the completion of consensus coding for the second transcript, I transcribed our codes into NVivo, conducting a round of a priori coding on the first transcript, adding codes our team developed during our coding sessions with the second transcript. In my second cycle of coding and in some of the research team’s first and second pass at coding, much of the coding process centered “Affective Methods” that “investigate participant emotions, values, and other subjective qualities of human experience” (Saldaña, 2009, p. 52). Since this project investigated participants perceptions and feelings about participating in the program and their perceptions of how this program affected their understanding of their own gender and gender as a whole, as well as their experiences in different environments and institutions. This involved employing both Emotion Coding, like “fear,” which “explore[d] intrapersonal and interpersonal participant experiences and actions” (Saldaña, 2009, p. 86) and Values Coding, exploring participants’ personal meanings and attitudes. Values Coding allowed deeper employment of critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012), examining how structures and individuals inform worldviews and individual ideologies. Using critical bifocality as a guiding framework, I organized the data with a theoretical narrative, “retelling the participant’s story in terms of the theoretical constructs” (Auerbach & Silverstein, 2003) informing not only the study, but the CAGED curriculum as well (p. 46). I refer to these theoretical concepts regarding gender as a social institution, masculinities, and critical literacy in Chapter II. Because of the sheer 126 volume of data collected through this study, I made strategic decisions around which data to include based on the theoretical narrative constructed during data analysis. While all data seemed to tell a story of the participants and their experiences in the program, presenting it all was untenable. Further, I wanted to present the data in a way that told the story not of despair or damage, rather towards the desire for social change, “documenting not only the painful elements of social realities but also the wisdom and hope” (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). While most of the participants were incarcerated and typical deficit models exist in research on inmates, this research sought to tell the story of what happens when people come together to ask questions, open dialogic space, and employ vulnerability with goals of examining gender within our social and cultural contexts. We consider our individual and collective power and potential to influence change through developing skills to build coalition and community. The data that appears in the next chapter is just a fragment of that which was spoken or written during this research. What I do not capture are the non-verbals--the sighs, the jittery legs, the tears, and the profound silence--that appeared throughout the course of this research. I struggle with the omission of those while acknowledging the limitations of capturing them in this story. Needless to say, they play a key role in the collective experience of CAGED. The next chapter does, however, provide a data story of participants’ experiences, examining the social institution of gender through their standpoints and what developing critical literacies about gender afforded them in their lives. 127 CHAPTER IV This chapter tells stories of change. Of struggle and reconciliation. Of coming into identities and leaving others behind. The data herein strives to answer the primary study questions: 1. How do participants experience a prison education program focused on gender and masculinity? 2. How do participants experience gender education? 3. What is the perceived value of participation in the CAGED program more specifically? Within these questions arose the thematic offerings, outlined in the pages that follow, generated from the written and verbal responses participants provided through field notes or research reflections, writings, focus groups, and interviews. At the beginning of each section appears a poem--a pastiche of words and phrases proffered by different participants that offers a meditation on the theme. Please take a few moments to sit with the poem before reading on to the data story that follows each meditation, outlining the ways the thematic offering showed up for participants. Dialogue as an Antidote to Toxic Masculinities Giving people their space To sit in this space Challenge our beliefs and Our thoughts and then We have to explore. 128 Participants commented on what dialogue offered them in their exploration of masculinities, of their identities, and the tools they would take from the dialogue space into their lives post-parole. In the prison, which some of the participants referred to as their “gated community,” the dialogue space brought about a place to explore more deeply one’s own experiences through hearing the experiences of others. In it, the facilitators and CAGED participants saw how “dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious” (Freire, 1993, p.92). For many, CAGED represented a space of hope in a place many on the outside deem a space of hopelessness. Overcoming Fear Facing one another in what became very socio-critical and often deeply personal dialogue initially elicited fear and apprehension for a number of participants. Devon talked about how due to culturally entrenched mindsets, particularly around masculinity and gender identity, “there’s a little bit of fear” in discussing the topics we cover in CAGED. Dave saw CAGED as a place where “[w]e are helping people build culture by creating spaces where they can chew on big ideas that are ambitious and scary and intimidating.” Both Devon’s and Dave’s observations speak to the way actually discussing and dissecting these social forces that have been so encoded, so normalized, creates an upheaval of a base of unquestioned ideals and comforts previously afforded by not critically examining these forces. This upheaval can mean participants face the ways in which their unexamined privilege around gender paved a much easier path for them than their woman and femme peers. For other participants, this dialogue dredged up 129 sudden awareness about how past events that had them questioning why something happened to them were actually a result of larger systems, particularly patriarchy and racism. This reckoning with privilege and dominance can be fear-inducing, as it comes with responsibility to intervene in unjust situations. Another fear that arose in CAGED is that of identification by association. In our facilitator focus group, I reflected on how early in CAGED’s history, when someone said the word “transgender”, people turned away from the dialogue at first. For some time, our group was referred to in the institution as “that trans group.” Watts reinforced this fear, noting that saying transgender in the institution, or interacting with trans folks in the institution was something many avoided, partially due to others’ judgments and assumptions. He recalled a time working in the clothing room and nobody wanted to deliver a sports bra to one of the people who requested it. One of his coworkers said, “I’m not going to take it. Somebody going to see me walking down the corridor with it.” Watts’s comment speaks to this identification by association fear, one created out of the fear of being read as queer or trans by others in the institution. Erving made a similar comment about what this association meant for some in the institution. He talked about encouraging folks to come in and join for a CAGED session to check it out and see if they got something out of it. He said he does this, “[b]ecause I just find that a lot of men are just so afraid to talk about these things that it’s almost like it’s a contagious disease that they’re afraid to even think or even talk about.” Erving’s comment about the “contagious disease” can be interpreted in a couple different ways. The first interpretation calls upon Watts’s observations regarding association--that if I am seen around gay or trans people, I, too, might be seen as gay or trans. The second 130 interpretation speaks to the insidious and deleterious pressures of performing masculinity. In this, just discussing these pressures felt scary or uncomfortable that instead of facing them, one could sit in the comfortable place of normalizing that which, ultimately, fails them from a full spectrum of possible ways to live and be. Erving later commented, And if you start talking about, ‘Hey we’re talking about gender and sexual identity and some of the other things,’ it’s almost like sometimes the wall instantly goes up and their eyes cloud over. And it’s kind of like the end of the discussion. This observation signals the discomfort or fear of engaging with these conversations that may call something into question--identity, ideologies, or even perceived reality. For those who came to the group, they sat in the initial discomfort of these situations and, as a result, derived benefits from engaging in the challenging work of questioning that which may have been ingrained deeply in their belief systems and their identities. Bernie’s comment resonates with this discomfort: “[M]en feel like just having a conversation is going to expose something about us that’s so guarded, I can’t even get past the initial conversation because it means my identity is in question.” The Leaky Boundaries of Dialogue The discussions in CAGED often seeped outside the group’s space, a code our research team identified as a “leaky boundary.” This leaky boundary of our dialogues took the shape of discussions with family, supporting loved ones going through difficult challenges with marginalization, and engaging fellow incarcerated folks in shifting cultural norms in parts of the institution. Most participants spoke to how the dialogues in CAGED continued with them for the week following each session, in part because we often gave an ending question for participants to consider throughout the course of their week. 131 Dialogues in CAGED opened up space for some participants to attend to their relationships in new and meaningful ways. We saw one of the main objectives of CAGED--to cultivate a sense of allyship with those who are marginalized while doing our own personal work to get there--manifest in the ways CAGED concepts and conversations trickled out of the CAGED space. Devon brought the CAGED dialogues to conversations with his sister’s child, who struggled with coming out as queer. The ability to talk openly about sexuality with his niece helped strengthen his relationship with her. For Monique, serving as a facilitator from the outside created an opportunity to challenge her family’s notion of the “inherent violence” they perceive about prisons because of the experiences of incarcerated family members and those from the community in which she grew up. The space of CAGED allows for a new narrative about prison life to surface, one where a community comes together to learn with and care for each other. In my time in CAGED, I found my parents’ and other family members’ ideas about both prisoners and prisons as an institution shift. As they hear about my experience with the folks on the inside, they soften their once-rigid ideas about who constitutes a prisoner. With my friends who know how I spend every Sunday, I hear their interest in and awareness of incarceration and criminal justice reform piqued. The leaky boundaries of CAGED created opportunities to exercise allyship and advocacy in ways participants, including myself and the research team, felt we could not do previously. With the population of participants who paroled, they spoke about the way the dialogues permeated the boundaries of not only the space of CAGED but extended beyond their time in the institution as well. Calla talked about how in her time post- release, she hoped we “can bring more of this dialogue outside because it’s definitely 132 needed out here [beyond the prison].” She called on the conversation and dialogue skills she developed during CAGED to handle the variety of divergent perspectives in her job on the outside. Bowie discussed how his experiences in CAGED shaped his pursuit of his first class in Women and Gender Studies, which would later become his major in university. Bryant also pursued university study following his release and saw his experiences in CAGED show up in his coursework. He said, “Like I’m at [his university] and a lot of things that we talked about in CAGED are things I talk about in my Sociology classes all the time.” The experiences in CAGED stayed with Bryant and facilitated part of his transition into university study. Each paroled participant saw their CAGED experience affect their life post-parole. The facilitation team observed how the facilitation experience and the dialogues we facilitated affected our commitments outside the group, in particular in our jobs. For those of us from the outside, where we all work in institutions of higher education, we found our dialogues eclipsed many of the educational experiences and critical work experiences on the outside. In each of our roles, both past and present, we serve in some capacity where we engage in critical dialogues with others within our higher education institutions. But those dialogues in higher education often felt like they stayed in a space of lofty ideals instead of real vulnerability. Dave has held multiple roles wherein he led dialogue programs on different college campuses. He reflected on how much of his work involves spending time facilitating with “folks who are, to some extent, committed to social justice conversations” and how being in a “space with folks who might just be curious or folks who have different ins, different reasons for wanting to hang out” offered an interesting 133 and more varied experience for him. He said that his involvement with the group “upended where [he] think[s] learning happens and what learning is and who’s responsible for it,” adding that his time in CAGED is “usually the most meaningful learning experience [he has] every week.” Dave’s experience in CAGED queered his understanding of learning in a way that opened him to see that learning outside of an educational institution was, perhaps, the most meaningful of any learning of which he has been a part. For Dave, though his years of experience facilitating dialogue created a familiar foundation from which to draw, the dialogue space of CAGED offered Dave a place to find new places to reach in thinking about what constitutes learning. In this new place, Dave found that CAGED “creat[ed] a space where people can just say their honest thoughts,” helping him to “see the distinctions between dialogue and ideological education.” Devon saw that his skill in facilitating dialogue helped him become “adept at reading groups,” explaining how his experiences facilitating CAGED helped him feel equipped to “not only engage a group but guide a conversation with those who get uncomfortable still navigating those waters.” He stated that in his facilitation process, “I get to be helpful in changing things I believe that are wrong in our world,” namely how gender norms affect those in the institution, many of whom will one day parole and enter back into outside society. Dialogue as a Deep Exhale The ability to talk about and explore the topics in CAGED came as a sort of relief to some participants. Though a number of participants discussed feeling fearful towards the beginning of their participation, several noted that once they became comfortable, 134 CAGED became a place of anticipation each week. It offered hope and community in a place that regularly restricts pro-social behaviors. Calla noted the role perspectives from the outside facilitators played in disrupting some of the dominant culture of the prison, stating, “[T]here was the external input from community volunteers and members that brought in a unique, that brought in a different perspective than the pervasive culture of the prison system, which [is] man violence crazy.” The ability to discuss our lives across our different states of existence illuminated the different possibilities for living a life in our varied spaces. Ahmed (2006, pp. 7-8) supports Calla’s notion, stating, The work of inhabiting space involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, such that it is still possible for the world to create new impressions, depending on which way we turn, which affects what is within reach. As participants began to find home and inhabitation in the CAGED space, we engaged in that dynamic negotiation of the familiar and unfamiliar, looking towards new places to turn, such as towards a community-centered approach rather than the familiar existence of looking out solely for one’s self. CAGED offered reprieve from the intense surveillance of the prison environment. While the room in which we meet has at least one visible camera and officers regularly patrol the hallway outside the room, CAGED allowed a momentary departure from not only the surveillance of the prison staff, but also the social surveillance of their incarcerated peers. Bryant recalled that feeling, particularly in the context of masculinity in prison. He said, Having the ability to go to CAGED, and to sit down and to not feeling like you have to act or respond in a certain way because you’re being watched or because you know the things you say or do are going to have certain consequences.” 135 Bryant speaks to this deep exhale—the ability to escape the expectations others in the institution have about how one shows up and the results if one does not perform masculinity in a way that is expected and recognized. The double surveillance in the prison--that of the institution and that of the power structure among those who are incarcerated--created for Bryant a clear understanding of “certain consequences” for deviating from that which is expected of him in the multiple discourses and institutions of power operating inside. For Bryant, CAGED offered a space to loosen those constraints, if only momentarily. In the dialogue space, participants found a space to talk about and work through shame. Mikel, in talking about how his involvement in CAGED changed his commitments, reflected on the ways he faced shame about past harms. As he reconnected with a former romantic partner, he said, “it just made me realize how much of an emotionally abusive piece of shit I was,” expressing how CAGED helped him to “open [his] eyes” and think about violence beyond just being a physical act. He both recalled a series of actions that felt shameful and turned that shame towards increasing his awareness of how violence appears beyond the physical realm, causing deleterious effects not only to others, but to himself as well. For Devon, the dialogue space provided him a place to release the shame that mounted through the years. He observed that through dialogue “a lot of shame dropped away from just having the conversations.” Devon’s comment points to how shame often relies upon silence to continue. By naming those things causing shame in the course of a supportive dialogue group, Devon was able to free himself from an unspoken masculinity rule that vulnerability is weakness in men, something that often keeps men from being 136 able to seek help for and help ameliorate their depression (Shepherd & Rabinowitz, 2013). He divested from the expectations around maintaining access to the patriarchal dividend towards a sense of community and belonging through vulnerability in the dialogue space. CAGED became a place of solace and hope for some participants. Watts, an inside facilitator, explained how when he felt depressed, he would turn to “all these little voices in the back of your head” that had him asking what others on the facilitation team would do in a stressful or sad time. In the midst of the year of data collection, my relationship of seven years dissolved and CAGED offered to me the reminders of the fragility, the beauty, and the interconnectedness of people. When I felt sad or depressed, I thought about the work we were doing together and the kinds of distinct changes we saw from week to week, not only in our participants, but in our dialogue facilitation and, ultimately, the depth of our relationships on the team. Dialogue as a Disruption to Hegemonic Masculinity The dialogue space of CAGED afforded an opportunity to divest from betting on the patriarchal dividend. As the patriarchal dividend thrives amidst silence about inequities and injustices, CAGED served as a place to squarely address those through dialogue, collaboration, learning, and naming the systems at play in upholding injustice. Participants reflected on the investments into the White heteropatriarchal dividend they made previously and what CAGED offered as a counter to those practices and norms. One of the most salient counter-hegemonic masculinity practices that the dialogue space offered was a chance to be in community and lean on their CAGED community. While men may find community in hegemonically masculine ways, rugged, White 137 individualism fuels U.S. ideologies about what it means to be a man. In our discussions within CAGED, we often ask at the beginning of each curriculum cycle for participants to talk about what messages they learn about what it means to be a man. At the core of this is a self-reliance, an almost distrust of relying on anyone else. The idea of being able to rely on others is novel to those deeply influenced by and complicit with hegemonic masculine ideals. The community and feelings of belonging spurred by CAGED created a counter narrative to what it means to be masculine. In the patriarchal dividend (Connell, 1995), the payout does not come by how well one works with others, rather how well one works for himself. Participants discussed how CAGED provided a sense of belonging and community in an environment where pro-social connections do not thrive as gender dynamics like individualism and toxic masculinity “are intensified in the prison setting” (Kupers, 2005, p. 714). In reflecting on their time in CAGED, participants found a space to come together rather than uphold individualistic perspectives. Bryant said that he saw that the group “helped to bring people together for a common goal and a positive common goal versus something negative.” A coalition of incarcerated people threatens some of the makings of a docile body (Foucault, 1977, 1995) in prison, where the division and reinforcement of anti-social existence in the prison allows for greater malleability of the individual subject. Instead of needing to surveil one individual, the collective creates a more difficult circuit to trace and, further, control. Roscoe, one of the more vocal participants in the group, discussed how CAGED changed the way he engages with and sees his peers. He reflected how the dialogue space 138 helped him to “look at different people differently and to be more open to what they have to say.” Throughout his time in the group, though often outspoken about his opinions, he opened up to perspectives that, he said, ultimately, “helped [him] in a lot of ways to even understand [him]self, how [he] feel[s] about different things.” In hearing and seeing the vulnerabilities others presented, he said, [T]o get some things out that I usually don’t talk about, and I don’t like to talk about, and I feel really uncomfortable...I had to become, I had to feel a little pain so I can maybe deal with it a little bit. Roscoe’s acknowledgement of needing to feel pain to deal with becoming someone more open to others and, ultimately, to himself speaks to the isolation and solitude, the bottling up of emotions endemic in maintaining masculine dominance. In exposing his vulnerabilities, after seeing others’, he was able to not only share himself but see his peers more clearly. His pain became reachable (Ahmed, 2017), allowing him to orient himself away from suppressing his emotion towards opening himself to others’ pain and opening his pain to others. This is risky business in a prison environment, where sharing one’s pain can be used to obtain power over others (Shepard & Rabinowitz, 2013) as a way of achieving status in the prison (Umamaheswar, 2020). Roscoe’s comments illuminated what being able to share and accept others’ sharing can do to counter that sense of isolation. Dion wrote that a place where he feels he does not have power or privilege is “[w]hen [he’s] outnumbered and alone.” This sense of being alone or on one’s own, though central to the rugged individualism heralded in White heteropatriarchy, largely serves as posturing in masculinity. Ultimately, that individualism creates one to be “almost obsessionally competitive and concerned with dominance” making it “more likely that they will eventually use violent 139 or other antisocial means to achieve dominance” (Miedzian, 1991, p.44). When one uses violence in prison, the consequences often result in being put in segregation or solitary confinement, further exacerbating any sense of disconnection from the larger community. Instead, an anti-social behavior receives consequences that serve only to amplify the anti- social attitudes or inclinations that brought one to violence initially. In examining the promises of the patriarchal dividend, participants examined how whiteness plays a role in constructing and insulating patriarchal norms. After writing about how CAGED affected one’s viewing of the Super Bowl or another piece of media of choice, Micah wrote that CAGED helped him identify “underlying political messages that are directed at particular genders, races, or ethnicities, and to also to question what something is saying, why it’s being said, and what or who it’s trying to influence.” Micah’s ability to engage in this identification required him to pull back the curtains that White heteropatriarchy creates, revealing how dominance creates an often-unquestioned narrative. For Calla, she saw the support the community of CAGED played in processing what was going on for her as she navigated coming out as a woman in the prison. She said about CAGED, [T]hat was the space where when I entered in the room, I said, ‘Hey I’m going through this.’ There was people that could help me with that. And so because of that support, I was probably able to better tackle the hurdles that were in front of me. It provided a space of reprieve where she could discuss her challenges safely and find support to endure in an environment that, otherwise, did not provide support or understanding for what she was going through. Further, many of those who provided support were those who would not understand her challenges, as many of them were 140 cisgender men. But the commitments to allyship from many CAGED participants served Calla in her process. As a facilitator, her perspective helped direct significant conversations that challenged perceptions of gender and cultivated a greater awareness of the needs for allyship. Prison is not an easy place to be in community, to trust. Erving, one of the inside research team members and facilitators, discussed in a research session how the environment of the prison makes pro-social behaviors difficult. Erving recalled a time when one of the corrections officers reprimanded him for attempting to share a snack he purchased from the canteen with another inmate. The officer threatened to submit a behavioral infraction if Erving continued to share. In discussing Devon’s preparation for parole, we talked about how he could not leave his television to one of his friends, as any sharing in the prison was strictly prohibited as a way to be able to identify stealing more readily. Even though the records would show that he was released and a record could be made that he gifted his possessions to a particular inmate, the administration opted, instead, to allow the television, which Devon purchased with wages earned from his prison job, to go to waste or to be re-sold for prison profits. Though seemingly small, in this, we begin to understand the insidious narratives the prison administration upholds about criminality--that sharing or providing for each other will only be used in exploitative ways, ending in further criminal activity. Surveillance enacts anti-social behaviors in much of the institution, as Erving’s and Devon’s anecdotes illustrate. CAGED provided a space that allowed pro-social behavioral development, like the allyship and belonging expressed by Calla in the previous section. 141 CAGED also provided a space of belonging that those of us from the outside found relatively unparalleled in much of our lives on the outside. Dave described how “it feels really sincere to be here [in the CAGED space].” He went on to explain how he believed “the intensity of being in a prison...gives us permission to let go of all these finicky pretexts” he saw in his work in higher education. He commented that in CAGED he felt a “deep sense of sincerity.” Monique spoke to how one of the things she “so appreciate[d]” about CAGED was that “when people come to CAGED, they come because they really want to be in community with each other and they want to do this thing together.” In a country where loneliness is considered an epidemic (Chatterjee, 2018; Health Resources and Services Administration, 2019), CAGED fostered a sense of belonging and purpose for many participants, including those of us from the outside whose pro-social movements do not receive the same level of surveillance as our incarcerated peers. Bernie’s comments about what CAGED allowed for in his life painted a particularly poignant picture of the openness afforded by the space. He explained that in other places, like the higher education institution at which he works and studies, “I think I do have walls up...I know energetically I’m cool if we don’t talk.” At CAGED, though, he said, “[I]t’s the opposite. Like I want to connect, I want to feel like I’m making a difference.” He perceived the CAGED space as a place where he felt he could be generous with his energy; it felt like a space where he found he was, “softening [him]self.” Bernie’s explanation of CAGED being a place where he feels himself softening speaks to how it created a space of vulnerability and a departure from the hegemonic expectations of masculine performance as being tough or hard, where softness 142 is seen as a sign of weakness. This space of departure from those pressures to perform hegemonic masculine practices or expressions created a shift in interaction and commitment to the process for Bernie, a place where he wished to connect, perhaps more than other spaces on the outside. He reflected that “[M]en feel like just having a conversation is going to expose something about us that’s so guarded, I can’t even get past the initial conversation because it means my identity is in question…” But CAGED, he said, “gives me the confidence.” He attested to CAGED as cultivating the ability to practice vulnerability and engaging in conversations that could cause a threat to one’s identity without having these experiences. Dave echoed Bernie’s sentiments around confidence. He stated, “I might not know it all and I know people know a lot more about gender than I do, but I have a certain knowledge because of this that I can’t get anywhere else.” His comment about the knowledge he can’t get anywhere else suggests what was made possible in the CAGED space. It afforded a space where he could engage, openly, about that which is often kept in silence--the pressures and expectations of performing masculinity. By disrupting the silence, Dave felt he could take his experiences in CAGED and “almost speak with authority” about what he has learned in the process. Throughout the interactions in CAGED, participants found that being a part of the CAGED program and inhabiting the space of CAGED allowed reprieve from the pressures of hegemonic masculine norms. The loosening of these pressures paved the way for more authentic engagement, as seen with Bernie’s responses, and cultivating a sense of community that may not otherwise exist, as seen with responses from Bryant and my own reflections. In CAGED, by bearing witness to each other’s vulnerability, we 143 were able to interrogate those pressures we all feel in performing hegemonic practices of gender. Speaking Into Existence You’re not allowed To say. I never discussed Gender at all. You were born this way. My entire life… I never spoke About gender. Other participants talked about how CAGED created a place where they could finally come into or express their identities in ways that felt like a release. This was particularly poignant for Calla, navigating the coming out process as a woman in a male facility. She explained CAGED provided “a safe place where [she could] be [herself],” noting, “it was the first place that helped [her] start the journey that [she is] currently on today.” Bowie explained how the dialogues that “dissolv[ed]” certain concepts of gender “had a huge impact on [his] life and a huge impact on [his] identity.” He reflected on how he always felt he walked through life with “queerness inherently,” but that until CAGED, he “had never really felt comfortable expressing it or being.” For Bowie, CAGED opened the space for him to explore what it meant to express his queerness, to be in his queerness. 144 The experience in CAGED played a role in cultivating identity anew as well. Devon described his time facilitating CAGED as “a whittling process of giving away stuff that [he] didn’t need.” Part of this was a cultivated certainty about who he is and “what’s true for [him].” In this, Devon indicates what we saw previously--a departure from the expectations around being a certain type of man. In the “giving away stuff,” Devon examined what no longer served him to distill what really mattered to him. As a result, he noted, “I feel much happier… now I carry that into my certainty and how I project myself in these spaces [in the prison].” In this, Devon speaks to the confidence of knowing who he is after extended time interrogating the ways in which social pressures created a portfolio of expected behaviors that left him feeling uncertain for years. Becoming Literate A new lens Language to describe Messages. To question what something Is saying, why it’s being Said. Things I wouldn’t Have thought to see. We are creating The rules To undo all of this stuff. 145 bell hooks (2004), in discussing choices we make about whether to stay with colonizing logics or create transformative space shaping the way we speak, writes, “Language is also a place of struggle” (p. 153). This struggle became a core focus of our dialogue group, as we sought to unveil those colonizing logics so deeply encoded in many of our experiences with gender. Language became critical in speaking experiences or social institutions into existence. To name the thing that is happening is to acknowledge that it is tangible. Naming the Problem As the CAGED curriculum centers on dialogue, we often find that in order for our dialogues to progress, we must first name what occurs or exists that creates conditions of inequity, patriarchal control, and personal obstacles. With this often comes a particular attention to language. This attention, coupled with varying degrees of educational access and attainment for our participants, creates opportunities for new pathways via language. More specifically, we see that as participants learn particular terms, along with the importance of naming those terms, their fluency increases, as they further understand socio-cultural issues and employ the critical bifocals (Weis & Fine, 2012) in understanding how socialization and social conditions affect their own personal lives. This often begins by naming the social issue(s) at hand. Two participants who are men of color, Amaru and Bernie, wrote about the racialized discourses that informed how others see their gender. In response to a writing prompt asking them to reflect on the story people tell them about their gender, they each spoke to the very limited narratives projected to them about their gender as men of color. Amaru wrote, 146 That I’m young, black and dangerous and more than likely have a criminal record and have kids and don’t take care of them. Also let’s throw in that I’m a womanizer and a woman beater. And I sell crack. Amaru’s writing signals the narrow range of practices and behaviors of masculinity often ascribed to Black men in White supremacist culture. Here, Amaru recognized that, to others, his gender appears through a White racial frame (Feagin, 2014) that distills blackness into something to be feared. Bernie also noted how the White racial frame constructs his perceived masculinity as a Native or indigenous man. In listing the narratives told about his gender, he wrote, “Native men are aggressive, are drunks, are lazy, are abusive, are stoic.” He said, “I am misunderstood/misinterpreted every day,” adding “if I don’t put folks at ease with a smile, then I can be ‘scary.’” These constructions again signal how White supremacy limits how his masculinity is perceived and how he must do labor to set others at ease with his existence in a space. These offerings from Amaru and Bernie illustrate the power of whiteness in constructing masculinity for men of color; where White men constitute the majority of actors of domestic terrorism in the United States, the story told about their gender is often considered nonracial or a “sovereign individuality” where “white men achieve a sense of individuality or feeling nonracial in the context of white racial privilege” (Farough, 2004, p. 244). For Amaru and Bernie, living as men of color in a White heteropatriarchal society, sovereign individuality is not possible. In naming how race limited how they were perceived as men, they examined the intersections of their identities and the dominant structures that create discourses around their identities, naming the problem of their existence in White heteropatriarchy. 147 In one of our group sessions, after watching Jackson Katz’s (2012) TED talk, we posed a series of questions related to the concepts discussed in his talk on large poster papers. Participants walked around the room and did a silent discussion on each poster paper, answering the question and/or responding to someone else’s comment, all without verbally talking to one another. One of the questions asked participants about the message of the film and one participant wrote, “Change happens at the individual level.” Another person responded to that comment with, “But who is going to teach the change to the individual? What comes first, chicken or egg?” This interaction, albeit small and silent, amplifies the importance of critical bifocality in this work--in order to understand one’s own personal growth and development, one must have access to the knowledge and resources to do the critical self-reflection and critical sociological examination necessary to understand both what insidious social pressures enact upon the individual and to what extent does the individual comply with those pressures. Learning particular terms helped heighten awareness for some participants. Micah discussed what it meant to learn the term “toxic masculinity.” He recalled discussing the term with a contact of his living on the outside. Micah said, “We had a deeper conversation about it and her understanding of it, [and] she’s like, ‘Oh yes, I know all about this.’” In bringing the term up in a relationship with a woman on the outside, Micah learned about her regular experience with masculinity as a woman and it raised his awareness about prison culture, the “ideas and perceptions about what men do, what men don’t do,” and he said, “now I’m receptive to [them], I hear all these things.” Both in Micah’s interaction with his contact on the outside and in his daily life in the prison, 148 Micah began to see the way ideas around gender practices, particularly around masculinity, get expressed or exhibited. Bob recognized that for him, CAGED provided a space to interrogate what conceptions he had about gender. He said, “[T]he first time coming here I was kind of blown away. I was unpacking a lot of misunderstanding I did have about gender, and in the class as a whole.” The notion of “unpacking” requires a re-direction, one towards critical inquiry that illuminates systems of dominance and hegemonic thought. Ahmed (2006) writes, “We are reminded that what we can see in the first place depends on which way we are facing. What gets our attention depends too on which direction we are facing” (p. 29). Both Bob and Micah spoke to that dependence on the direction one faces. In CAGED, the larger goal of allyship and undoing harmful patriarchal norms requires participants to face what may be a new direction--one that requires closer examination to the social structures deeply embedded in our individual and collective socialization. Bob and Micah were both able to recognize gender practices differently, as their orientation shifted toward a critical examination instead of unquestioned acceptance. Disrupting these practices is an ongoing challenge, particularly when one has been conditioned to reproduce them through a powerful social institution like gender. Lester examined the crime that led him to prison and how, through the CAGED dialogues, he came to realizations about his internalized misogyny and felt consequential shame. He claimed that though the incident that brought him to prison involved sexually assaulting his girlfriend, he “thought [he] respected women.” He explained his realization: 149 But, over the last 11 years, I feel like all the respect that I had was for [women] as a second class citizen. I didn’t think in those terms until recently, but that’s what it was. Big me, little you. ...It’s tough for me to say that subconsciously I believe that any woman I was with, I own[ed] her. But that’s the truth. Even to today when I think, I still don’t want to think those thoughts, and I know that’s wrong to think, so for me to apply what I know today to how I was, that’s a difficult thing. It’s a hard pill to swallow, embarrassment. As Lester began to learn about patriarchy, he saw it illustrated in his own life, his own thinking. Reflecting that he cast women as second- class citizens, Lester identified how patriarchy influenced his thinking. He saw how he subjugated women, recognizing it was both “wrong to think” and indicating that he may still struggle with those thoughts. Freire (1993) writes, “To exist, humanly, is to name the world” (p. 88). In articulating his misogyny, Lester named his orbit in patriarchy, recognizing its influence on him. This type of exploration of social forces is not always easy. It creates discomfort and discord at times. Monique discussed how the dialogue space both challenged some of the language that upheld patriarchal ideals and that she still experienced the use of problematic language. She said this became a place where she felt difficulty in navigating “the line between educating and facilitating dialogue. Because sometimes some folks might just not know how they’re holding a stereotype, but they want to be in this place and they want to engage.” This wrestling between helping to facilitate dialogue and educating on why something someone said upholds gender-based violence requires the facilitation team and participants to remain open to the dialogic process as a form of cultivating literacy. Freire (2000) notes: [D]ialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming--between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. (p. 88) 150 In Monique’s comment, we see this struggle. She sees that desire for participants to be in the space and engage, “where I have heard people wanting to commit to, say, interrupting gender violent language or something. And then in the next sentence, they kind of say something that upholds those things.” In this instance, we see that those who want to name the world also can be those who, perhaps unconsciously, “deny others to speak their word” through the worn pathways of dominant, violent language. Further, incarceration presents a place where many have been denied the right to speak, both inside the institution and in society at-large. CAGED requires participants to employ critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012) to interrogate the interplay between systems of power and how those systems enact upon their own reproduction of power inequities. As participants engaged in the CAGED curriculum, they developed a sense of literacy around the larger social issues that may have previously been invisible to them, particularly because of their dominant identities. This critical literacy enabled them to be better able to read the world around them. Naming One’s Experience Ahmed (2017) writes, “Words can then allow us to get closer to our experiences; words can allow us to comprehend what we experience after the event. We become retrospective witnesses of our becoming” (p. 32). In CAGED, we saw participants become those witnesses of their becoming, reflecting back on their experiences with newfound language to capture what was happening in certain situations or in their broader lives. For Watts, naming became a way of understanding the places he realized he had privilege as an incarcerated Black man in America. During one group session, I asked 151 him about what his privilege was. He said, “[W]hen you said that, I actually starting thinking about myself immediately. So, I’m thinking, ‘Man, I do have some privileges.’” He explained that in examining that question, he began to understand how he may have privileges he previously did not see. Watts’s reflection allowed him to understand he had responsibility, saying, “So I have to be able to take my personal privilege and utilize it and in a humane way that’s going to help others.” In his realization of his privileges, he realized the power he had to effect change in a situation. Dave discussed how his ability to speak to his own circumstances changed through his involvement in CAGED. He explained, I have a reference point now. It’s like yeah, my literacy, my ability to filter the messages that come to me about prisons and the folks who are in them is much different. I have something to hold on to that can help me push back on sometimes the BS, whether it's from the media or from family or from friends, I can stay convicted in what I know to be true in a space like this one. Dave’s comments point to how his increased literacy and awareness created a filter, a way to critically examine what biases from his external environment may be creating his worldview of what is true. Through CAGED, he cultivated deeper conviction in his beliefs, to the point where he can instead challenge damaging messages about his collaborators and prisons in general instead of remaining complicit in silence and acceptance of these external messages. Bernie’s increased literacy shifted some of his relationship dynamics, much like Dave reported in his life. Bernie experienced an opening with some of his relationships as he engaged close people in his life in discussing what he does in facilitating CAGED. One poignant example for him is his connection with his mother around his brother. He said, 152 Probably in terms of family, I had the coolest conversations with my mom because she had an incarcerated son and she’s like, “Oh that would’ve worked so good with Tommy. He needed something like that.” It was part of my motivation going in. Just my mom gets it. Bernie elaborated that he does not disclose his involvement in CAGED to many people in his life, though, as he said, “[I]f it’s too much work talking [with] people about CAGED. I don’t touch it. You don’t deserve this part of my life.” He explained that the people who he does not have to explain some of the concepts, and with whom he can have deeper conversations are his Native friends, saying, “Masculinity with my Native friends--we talk about [it] in terms of colonization. Yeah man, we’ve been sold some shit that don’t work for us.” In this, we see how Bernie’s comments about the work of talking with people about the program extends only to those who have some baseline understanding of why one would engage in this type of conversation. In the naming and reading of their experiences, these participants were able to cultivate a sense of confidence and a deeper recognition of their boundaries. Dave found the courage to push back against the narratives from his family. Bernie found a place to draw boundaries with where he would spend his psychic energy. Watts realized the places he had privilege which he had previously overlooked. Their burgeoning literacy gave them pathways forward. Literacy as Resistance As participants cultivated a greater sense of literacy around gender, they were able to counter hegemonic language practices that were familiar and previously uncontested. In their work on critical literacy, Freire and Macedo (1987) write, Educators must develop an emancipatory literacy program informed by a radical pedagogy so that the students’ language will cease to provide its speakers the 153 experience of subordination and, moreover, may be brandished as a weapon of resistance to the dominance of the standard language (p. 154). In examining their language uses that both subordinated others and themselves, CAGED participants found ways to stand up to “the dominance of the standard language.” This resistance often came in a form of divesting from hegemonic masculinity norms, those where previously they may have been complicit. Bob speaks to this shift from complicity. In answering what CAGED changed for him and his experience in the institution, he reflected on how he takes greater care in the ways in which he reinforces others’ use of language. He explained, “[If] somebody says [or] makes a hateful comment towards somebody, and I laugh at it, I’m giving them the okay to continue that kind of behavior. So, I’m kind of more conscious of my reaction.” Bob’s reflection on what it means to laugh at another’s degradation of someone and his consciousness around his reaction speaks to a greater sense of literacy around the dominance of standard language Freire and Macedo name. Men experiencing precarious beliefs about their own manhood use humor as a way to protect their masculinity (O’Connor et al., 2017). As Bob became more conscious of his reaction by not laughing along, he divested from the normative masculine response of engaging in humor that denigrates. Micah considered his involvement in this sort of denigration while in high school. He recalled, “I was in high school. Two students that [were] presumed gay [were] relentlessly tormented by everybody. One of them in particular. I participated right along with everybody else.” When he described this, he added that he wished he had access to a group like CAGED earlier in life, stating, “[I]f I had known that later on, that that significantly impacted them...I think it would have been critical in changing the course in 154 my life.” As Micah’s literacy grew, he saw the way in which men participate in these practices as a way of demonstrating masculinity in precarious times. He believes having this literacy would have changed his life. In this comment, Micah speaks to the failures of investing in the patriarchal dividend. Devon shared some of Micah’s reflections on how this literacy earlier in his life may have resulted in a different trajectory in life. He stated, I really think that if I would’ve started at an early age with some of the understandings and messages that I’ve been developing through CAGED, first of all I would’ve been much better at being and living in relationships with everyone else in my life… And, I would really be surprised that I would’ve ended up in prison, because I would’ve been able to maintain those supporting relationships that would’ve given me the strength to find other options. A place where there isn’t shame and silence controlling my life. Devon’s comment offers insight into how cultivating this literacy holds promise for disrupting a school-to-prison pipeline. He signals the type of isolation and lack of social connection that accompanies the “independent guy” (McKenzie et al., 2018) pattern, where the need for and engagement in social relationships is undermined, often reinforced by dominant ideologies like rugged individualism and defaulting to hegemonically masculine narratives. This pattern severed him from support he felt would have kept him out of prison. As he cultivated it, he moved away from the control of shame and silence to a place where, as previously noted, “a lot of shame dropped away from just having the conversations.” Developing these literacies of gender provided a place for participants to resist the patterns and narratives that shaped their behaviors in the past. Beyond learning terms to explain the socially coded behaviors that caused harm to themselves and others, they spoke to the power of the dialogue space to explore these. Dialogue serves as a critical 155 part of developing literacies of gender, serving as “an act of creation” that eschews “domination of one person by another” (Freire, 2000, p. 89). Dialogue opens up a space for the social connection that pushes against hegemonically masculine norms of domination and consequential forms of social isolation, offering an opportunity to become literate in other ways of doing gender. Queering the Path So many things Are different. Their language Their policies Helping people see Being willing to sit and listen Now feeling like they can be heard. A path can be well-defined or newly trodden. Sometimes the path we know well is the path we never chose intentionally, rather, it is one we are directed toward--through our relationships, through our identities, through the systems and the personal experiences that constitute the complexities of our existences. Ahmed (2006, p. 21) writes about a queer life as being one that fails to “return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good.” One might argue that incarceration queers one’s life, as incarceration rarely resembles a social good. However, I caution that this may overlook the multiple systems working to create carceral states for others’ so-called “social good”--those profiteering from incarceration and captive labor of inmates. Further, I hesitate that this may imply significant choice in terms of incarceration, and, as 156 outlined in previous chapters, multiple social systems enact incarceration upon particular bodies more than others. However, the unveiling of these social systems and the insidious ways they direct multiple aspects of our lives and social expectations can shift one’s orientation away from the dominant ideologies that often go unquestioned. In the work of CAGED, the discussions around these systems and the often unquestioned norms for our multiple identities led us astray from implicit complicity with these systems and, as Ahmed (p. 79) writes, “What is astray does not lead us back to the straight line, but shows us what is lost by following that line.” CAGED created a space to explore what was lost by the straight line of promised social goods and what new, queer directions might be possible. Examining Our Teachings Considering the messages from our childhoods played a key part of revealing the dominant narratives structuring the “straight line.” As a part of this research considers what experiences with gender and expectations of gender practices participants had in their youth, we examined the explicit and implicit teachings about gender we received in our youth. At times, these explorations felt nostalgic; at times, they felt painful and full of trauma. Those of us who lived most of our lives as women recalled very different possibilities for being than those of us who lived most of our lives as men18. For many of us, those experiences in our youth forged the straight line that ultimately led us astray. One of the writing prompts during the first few weeks of CAGED asks participants to think of a time when they were taught about what defines gender. This 18 In the course of the research in CAGED, participants had self-identified during conversation; no participant self-identified as non-binary during the course of the inside research. 157 prompt elicited a number of reflections on how the messages from one’s childhood gave distinct gender instructions. For Micah, this meant “shov[ing] any emotions down that might trigger crying for any reason.” He recalled how this came after years of being called “too sens[i]tive” or “a sissy” when he cried. After years of being degraded for showing emotions, he began to suppress his own until he eventually saw crying as a sign of weakness in other men. As Micah’s emoting seemed to veer off the path of hegemonic masculinity, those around him pushed him back onto it to the point where he came to see those taking a different path as weak, that “a man’s greatest strength was to be able to hold emotions in and not show emotional vulnerability.” Andrés, too, learned early on from his father that “men don’t cry and that we don’t show emotions.” Over the years of CAGED, including before and after the year we collected data, the suppression of emotions comes up as a childhood lesson around masculinity and manhood. The suppression of emotions does not extend to every emotion, however. One emotion that some participants learned was allowable to express was anger, manifesting in forms of violence. As Watts reflected on some of the conversations he had in his time with CAGED, he said, “I didn’t get taught these tools [around dialogue]. The only tool I had was fight or flight. And most of the time, I fought.” He connected his time spent in juvenile hall in Central Los Angeles to the “hundred fights” he got into where he says he “lost three hundred of them,” seeing how the violence was the winning, getting into the fight was the winning that ultimately meant he lost so much more. Watts’s reflection here illustrates his failed investment in the patriarchal dividend; what was hegemonic to the masculinity in his context ended up failing him. Instead, that investment turned out to result in loss--the loss of a metaphorical “three hundred” fights, where, Watts explained, 158 “Every fight I got into I got beat up like three different times, but I thought that I was winning because I got into the fight. I fought back.” Devon echoed Watts’s comments about the limited options once available to him to express himself. He recalled being eighteen years old when he first came to prison and the limitations he felt around being able to express his feelings. He said, [I] couldn’t tell you [my crime] was because of gender specifically, but I do remember that I had [the] total inability to talk about anything related to feelings. I had only one way to solve problems, either get angry and punch someone over it, or you keep it inside and just sit there and seething. ...So to me it’s not surprising that I’d end up in prison for a violent crime. Because it was the only tool that I had. Devon and Watts both attest to the emotional limitations of hegemonic masculinity. A continued practice of externalizing emotions through violence may have upheld hegemonic norms, but ultimately failed them both, especially with Devon who linked this to his incarceration. Both Micah and Watts fought back in different ways, both upholding some investment in a patriarchal dividend. They learned these lessons distinctly in their youth. Watts explained, “It was the way I got taught, what I got told.” For Micah, hardening himself to his emotions bought him the opportunity to evade peer criticism and effeminization. It brought him to a point of judging others who showed the expression he once expressed, creating judgment and scorn for the person he was once, someone who emoted freely. Violence in participants’ youth played a large role in their understanding of gender. Watts came to see the violence as part of his identity. He explained that “domestic violence...played a major part of my upbringing.” He saw his regular exposure to violence, and the practice of ignoring domestic violence situations he witnessed in later 159 years as being a key part of why he was eventually incarcerated, stating, “It made it much easier for me to sit back and say, ‘Hum, it’s not none of my business. I don’t have to do anything. It’s just a female.” In his prolonged exposure to domestic violence, Watts came to understand that as a normal part of relationships between men and women and did not intervene when he saw it later in his life. The early exposure normalized the degradation of women and he upheld his investment in the patriarchal dividend by staying silent. Exposure to violence at a young age shaped a set of expectations for some of the participants. Family members played influential roles in using violence to construct participants’ sense of gender. In writing about a time he was taught about what defines gender, Erving wrote about sitting down to learn to knit with his mother. His father quickly halted this with violence, as Erving wrote, Several minutes later, my dad came by, slapped me on the back of the head and yelled at me to get outside because knitting was for girls. For additional emphasis he noted that he was not raising a “sissy.” The combination of physical violence and an emasculating word like “sissy” outlined for Erving a strict rule of what was not considered an acceptable expression of his gender. Further, in this, his father separated Erving from learning with his mother, establishing an opportunity to cultivate further relationship with her as an affront to his gender. This was an example of the “household where racism and homophobia and misogyny was commonplace...and everyday occurrence” for Erving. He expressed that it was not until the space of CAGED where he was “allowed...an opportunity to re-examine all that stuff and...see that the world is genuinely not the way that [he] was taught.” Micah also wrote about a violent time when he was taught about what defined gender. He contrasted the words his dad told him about “a man is willing to do anything 160 for his family,” but then turned around and did drugs and physically harmed everyone in his immediate family. He learned, at a young age, that violence was what men did by being subjected to violence from his father. In the active construction or becoming (Connell, 2009) of a man, Micah called on the lessons from his father around upholding violence as a tool to assert dominance and power. Jack, too, wrote about the violence in his family as a lesson in defining gender. He explained that he was “shown more than [he] was told,” noting that his data “ruled [the] home with an iron fist.” He wrote, He called us dumb, pull our head out of our asses. If you said ‘I don’t know’ he’d slam us & slap us. I was shown what my dad thought it was to be a man & I knew at an early age that I didn’t want to be a man then. Jack’s father used not only physical violence, but also emotional violence, degrading Jack and his sister through coupled assaults in their youth. These assaults led Jack to feeling a total rejection of manhood, wishing to not be one. In that same reflection, Jack discussed how, as a father, he operated in a wildly different fashion than his father, trying to mitigate his children’s exposure to anger and fighting, and opening a space for them to “feel free to talk to [him] about anything.” Ahmed (2006) writes, “To make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things” (p. 161). In Jack’s refusal to reproduce his childhood in fathering his children, we see him disturbing the order of masculinity inculcated in his youth. Finding a Queer Home The homes from which many participants came did not permit explorations of gender. As a result, possibilities foreclosed and, for some, isolation shaded their 161 experiences. In the course of the involvement in CAGED, participants found alternatives to their previous homes. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) writes, If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how ‘finding our way’ involves what we would call ‘homing devices.’ In a way, we learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home (p. 9). For some participants, CAGED became a homing device. As they left the homes of their past lives, those where they were oriented towards the patriarchal dividend and reproducing hegemonic ideals about masculinity, they found their way to new homes where they could feel a sense of belonging and purpose in a correctional institution, one of the less likely places one would consider finding a home. As a facilitator, Devon found a place where he could offer himself to his community and cultivate care. Through his experiences in CAGED, teaching yoga, and facilitating a restorative justice group, Devon said, “I see myself as an [sic] caretaker of the trust and safety of those I live with.” In embracing a sense of care, Devon oriented towards a queer path of masculinity, one unafraid of expressing care and concern for others, one that stood in opposition to the rugged individualism that fuels hegemonic American masculinity. He added, “I believe people rehabilitate themselves in the context of relationships, so I work to provide space where people feel brave enough to be vulnerable.” To do so requires Devon to be the same, opening himself to others and exposing his vulnerability as an invitation for others to do the same. In reflecting on his involvement, Bernie saw CAGED as a place of possibility, of departing from the dominant expectations of gender. He explained that CAGED went beyond the texts “and theories and stuff about masculinity or gender,” to a place where we “[are] actually doing [the work of exploring masculinity or gender].” He found that 162 CAGED “[is] like giving ourselves permission to be something different in a space intentionally.” Leaving home is the permission to be something different. As CAGED offered those permissions, participants’ orientations shifted towards new homing devices—the promises of departure from that which did not serve them. The Queer Path Ahead With the United States being a society economically dependent on incarceration, a focus on reducing recidivism poses a significant economic threat--from rural economies (Alexander, 2010) to multi-national corporations (Herivel & Wright, 2007). However, recidivism often represents the measure of whether or not someone exits prison “rehabilitated.” Rehabilitation, however, is often left up to interpretation… and to the incarcerated. Without robust programming, educational opportunities, and job placement assistance following parole, rehabilitation rests on the shoulders of those who are incarcerated to make meaning of their incarceration and the lives that led them there before their release. Some participants made meaning of their time in CAGED as an influence on the possibilities of a life after parole. Watts noted this, stating that when he re-enters society, he hopes he can have healthy habits. He hopes that for his younger peers, too, stating, I just hope that going through this curriculum that we go through, that some of the young men that pick up them things of being open and emotional and vulnerable, that when the re-enter the community, that they still keep them tricks. I hope that the seed that we plant there, we nourished it enough that it grows to the point where somebody else can't come and cut the tree down. And if they do cut it down, it grows back real quick. Watts made the comment about the seeds of emotion and vulnerability regenerating even after someone tries to re-orient a participant back to the homes they departed. This 163 comment speaks to the hope of a queer path ahead, one that eschews the well-plotted path of toxic masculine practices that play a role in incarceration. A life after parole presents its own challenges. Depending on one’s criminal conviction, the identity of felon or prisoner can persist beyond one’s served sentence. Bowie explained, “I think one of the hardest parts that people struggle with releasing [from prison] is identity and how to hold what is a marginalized and at-risk identity of being somebody coming out of prison.” In Bowie’s comment, I think of Ahmed (2006) stating, “Inhabiting a body that is not extended by the skin of the social means the world acquires a new shape and makes new impressions” (20). What CAGED offered is a place to examine the new shape and new impressions possible. As a result of his involvement in CAGED, Bowie said, “I didn’t feel as distanced or like a stranger in a strange land as I may have [without participating in CAGED].” His involvement in CAGED created new impressions that equipped Bowie to re-enter a world that may cast judgments on him with a compass of hope and confidence that keeps him from feeling estranged from society. Hope and possibility extend beyond those who are incarcerated or were previously incarcerated. For those of us from the outside, the hope offered by CAGED kept us steadfast in our involvement in the group. Dave described his experience facilitating CAGED has been “a really humanizing experience for me, compassion building exercise,” adding, “it makes me hopeful and optimistic. And it’s taught me to crank some of my expectations back up for some of the people in my life.” In Dave’s explanation, we see how CAGED shaped his empathy, not only for those participating in the program, but also for those in his life who are struggling in the constrictive confines of gender expectations. He said, “[B]ecause things are possible here, it lets me feel 164 convicted that things are possible elsewhere, too.” This sense of possibility, of a different path, one queer from the norm, resonates with my experience in CAGED. In the introduction to this study, I presented a snapshot of my brother, someone who I would love to see participate in CAGED. In our facilitator focus group, I said about CAGED, “I think part of my involvement in this group is to believe that there’s a possible different path or different future for somebody like my brother who verbalizes very violent thoughts.” I explain to my collaborators often how the energy of the group, the changes I witness in others during the course of a year’s curriculum, helps keep me compassionate towards my brother, along with other men in my life. I explained, “[W]hen I come in here and we have these conversations, I’m a believer again. And I think that’s really important to me in terms of my belief...that things will turn towards justice and hope and love.” Queering Research Pay attention Discuss how men are able To express care and affection. Should we read? Read what we want? The pressure of the clock Those tensions Conversations we should be able to have. In this project, the facilitation team also served as the research team. In doing so, we studied ourselves, our responses to the curriculum and our responses to the responses to the curriculum. During our process of open coding together, we discussed more about 165 how the program affected us in ways we could not understand before doing the research. We examined, both individually and collaboratively, what it meant to be a part of CAGED, to organize it, and to feel its effects alongside the participants. Relationships as Methodology Central to CPAR, particularly with marginalized populations such as incarcerated people, is the development of familiarity, investment, and trust. The extended involvement each of us had with CAGED--from the initial creation of the group, to the development of the curriculum, to the recruitment and mentoring of multiple participants throughout the years--cultivated our commitment not only to the group, but to each other. We care about each other. We think about each other when we are in our personal spheres, separated by jobs, obligations, and electric barbed-wire fences. Without this community we developed, this project would not be possible. The relationships within our facilitation community became critical to our methodology. In the research process, we learned together about each other. We realized things we previously buried deep in our mental catacombs. As we finished our open coding process together, we discussed the importance of doing this data analysis together, reflecting on how deeply we learned in this endeavor together. In that reflection of our learning, Watts noted he felt like “the baby of the group,” explaining that he feels like he has learned so much, yet has much more to learn from the rest of the facilitation team. Then, he turned to his history of learning. In reflecting on his history of learning, and the education he brought into prison, Watts talked about the limited experiences of positive social development in his learning in the past. He said, “They brought me in [to prison] as an adult, but really was I an 166 adult? I had a third-grade education.” Watts said this after reflecting on how his departure from school was informed by early trauma of being hit on the head with a frying pan by his mom’s boyfriend when he was trying to learn the alphabet. Watts’s statement here, coupled with his recollection of trauma around learning, is a profound insight into the connection between educational attainment and incarceration. For someone like Watts, who fell without having completed primary school, prison became the institution responsible for providing some sort of education and civic acclimation. The ability to learn to engage in positive social ways relies upon pro-social environments, something Watts pointed out as antithetical to his experience in prison, where he felt the institution tried to keep those who are incarcerated from having any collaborative connections out of fear of reprised deviance. Countering the dominant perceptions and divisive practices of the institution, the CAGED research team allowed us to deepen our connections as facilitators, learning more deeply about each other and the experiences we brought into the work. In one coding reflection, Bernie wrote, “We (collectively) may not have book learning, but we have expertise.” The four of us from the outside, each having completed doctoral coursework, could not have understood the relevance of this research without our relationship not only to the program, but more importantly, to those who motivated and, ultimately, spurred the creation of the program. For the inside facilitators, who may have barriers to access higher education due to cost and availability19 inside the institution. We 19 In the institution where this research occurred, incarcerated people do not have access to online education programs and rely upon a local community college’s programs as well as a few Inside-Out courses offered by a local four-year institution. The partnership with the local community college endured challenges in recent years, causing a reduction in available courses offered for those who are incarcerated. 167 drew from the well of our collective knowledge--learning from and with each other constantly--to inform our methodology. This interchange of ideas as a research team, with academic and experiential expertise, deepened our mutual learning about gendered expectations, navigating institutions, and cultivating empathy. Vulnerability as Method Vulnerability is core to our research dynamic and to considering relationships as methodology. Vulnerability, in a space where many feel they have to watch their backs or maintain a hard exterior, can be scary. And, in the same oppressive space, it can feel liberatory. Without vulnerability, much of the research project could not occur. In dialogue, to fully engage, one must share themselves with another, remaining open to hearing each other and being heard. Freire (2000) writes, “Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself” (p. 89). Immersing in dialogue means immersing oneself in the possibilities of love. Risking being wrong plays a significant role in creating a rich dialogue. To do so requires incredible vulnerability. Monique spoke about this importance in reflecting on her experience facilitating in different environments and what made the facilitation in CAGED different from her other experiences in dialogue groups. She acknowledged the challenge she felt around showing “the right way” to do dialogue or to name a particular identity or concept. She said that with CAGED, she felt, [T]his can actually get somewhere deeper without my intervention of “the right way.” Maybe we can actually start talking about other things instead. And so, as a facilitator, really leaning into, “I’m just facilitating dialogue for folks to come and share and not necessarily get it right.” In academic social justice dialogue circles, this can be difficult, as people can posture to appear to be “woke” or remain quiet to avoid saying “the wrong thing” and any 168 anticipated judgment that may come of it. We hear this in Monique’s statement and how CAGED cultivated a greater sense of openness for her to hear others in their vulnerability without needing to correct them. Erving echoed Monique’s sentiments. He noted that he tells himself frequently, “It’s okay for people to be wrong.” He explained that instead of pointing out that someone is wrong, it’s important to “show them and lead by example,” adding, “a lot of times people, they have the ability to see that example and hopefully model their behavior in a like fashion.” But in order to do so, they must, as Devon said, “get past their walls of defensiveness.” To do so requires one to accept hearing critical feedback. To get past walls of defensiveness, participants must also commit to a critically reflexive practice of asking why they are defensive. This extends to our facilitation and research team as well. In one facilitation and research team meeting, we debriefed an encounter where a CAGED participant20 made a sexually inappropriate comment in front of the group to Monique. Immediately following this comment, Monique explained why the comment was inappropriate and how it made her feel. The participant doubled down on the comment, passing it off as no big deal. Other participants later came to his defense, stating he was a good guy and did not mean to harm. In our meeting, our team examined the incident and our individual and collective involvement--or non-involvement--in standing up for Monique’s safety and for the commitments of the group. In a writing reflection we did following our conversation about the interaction and the places we 20 This participant was only a program participant and not a participant of the research study. They were not able to continue attending following this incident to ensure Monique’s safety and due to regulations in the institution around the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). 169 failed to provide the care Monique needed in that moment, our team expressed vulnerability in a number of ways. Watts wrote, “This isn’t the first time that I was in a position to make a difference in this type of trauma.” This followed Watts writing that, in not speaking up, he “let down all the females in [his] life.” He got teary in our conversation. He said he was proud of Monique for speaking up, to which Monique responded that she did not want him to feel proud, but that she felt disappointed. As Watts heard her and thought about how a domestic violence program with which he is involved often ends up re-victimizing survivors, Watts said he felt like he did that to Monique in saying that. This level of vulnerability, this emotional processing, played a key role in doing deeply emotional research that relied on vulnerability to illuminate the power of dialogue and the ways in which expectations of gender both serve and fail us. As we analyzed the data through our coding processes, we found omissions and opportunities, largely due to our commitment to be vulnerable with each other. In the process of analyzing, Watts made the aforementioned comments about the years of having a negative view of schooling after the violence around learning the alphabet. He explained how through his involvement in CAGED and being a member of the research team, while he still felt like “the baby of the group” in terms of his educational attainment, he claimed he was “getting a lot out of [coding].” Throughout the coding process, Watts sprinkled anecdotes about what different codes reminded him of in his life. He engaged in meaning-making of the coding process by thinking through how the codes we assigned showed up not only in CAGED sessions, but also in various aspects throughout his life, focusing specifically on the literacy code. In his vulnerability about 170 his limited exposure to literacy, Watts was able to make meaning of the experiences that silenced him from developing it stemming from violent associations with learning. Watts’s involvement in the coding process allowed our research team a more robust consideration of the data. Not only did Watts’s perspectives as a middle-aged Black man--our only Black research team member--play a critical role in our coding and team reflection process, but Watts illuminated our need to consider affect in our process. One of my research memos wrestled with Watts’s processing of the data as we did our collaborative coding process. After hearing him call himself the baby of the group, he elaborated that the future he imagined for himself when he was young was a pathway to prison, particularly after seeing uncles and cousins in juvenile detention or prison. His processing of this came as a result of something rather minor in the data, but it provoked meaning-making for Watts wherein he began to share how the data was making him feel. While some on the research team, myself included, felt a need to keep progressing through our coding process with a bit more speed than Watts’s affective reflections permitted, this was key to Watts’s process and to his belief in learning. For the rest of the team, it illuminated to us a key omission in our codes--affect. Watts’s vulnerability throughout the process of coding helped our research team examine how, even with our best intentions, we failed to engage with hegemonic masculinity as thoroughly as we would have liked. During the de-brief following the sexually violent comments a participant made towards Monique, the team opened up to the affective space, listening first to the feelings Monique had both in the moment of the violation and in the minutes and days to follow. Watts told her he felt proud of Monique for standing up to the participant and after he finished, Monique said, “I don’t want you 171 to feel proud. I want you to feel angry. I want you to feel upset.” She explained that she did not feel proud, rather she felt disgusted and disappointed that she not only experienced that in a group with goals of allyship and feminism, but also that her co- facilitators who are men did not take on an advocacy role and do the labor of interrupting another man’s misogyny. As we discussed this more, the team opened up to affect through exercising vulnerability. After Monique expressed her feelings and her disappointment, team members explained feelings of failure, of anger, of fear that the work we felt we had been doing all of these years failed Monique in that moment. Bernie wrote, “Tonight’s conversation has me feeling confronted with the enactment of the knowledge [versus] practice.” Our efforts to educate about systems of oppression did not protect us from individual harm (Monique) and individual complicity (the team members present at the session where the violation occurred). Our knowledge failed our collective praxis in the moment of Monique’s need. Bernie spoke to this further, writing, A worldview took center stage and attempted to become reality for all of us. It was imposed uninvited. Elephant = male violence. I call it an elephant in the corner because we have talked about it. Last night we experienced it. This session provided us with a critical path forward. In reflections we wrote at the end of the de-brief, we each wrote about the places we needed to go to ensure we could move our commitments into greater action. The vulnerability in this session, though difficult, turned pain into possibility and accountability, as we looked to those places where we, even with best intentions, fell short in our curriculum. This session reminded us that the work is never done; we are always becoming. 172 In my years of involvement with CAGED, I rarely know, unless someone explicitly discusses it, why program participants and facilitators are incarcerated. I show up to do the work with the people who are there as they are, less interested in the reasons they are incarcerated than in the path on which they wish to forge ahead. I wish for them to do the same for me--see me for the ways I reflect on my past and ways I wish to move forward. Immediately following the last team coding session, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the swift closing of the state’s correctional institutions from anyone not employed by the institutions. Following weeks, and then months, of this closure, I looked up names of some of our program participants. In doing so, I learned about their charges and what led them to become incarcerated. Sitting with the reality of how and why some of them were in the institution was difficult and I struggled to understand how and why some of them were in the group. But I thought of the work that it took to be in the space, to be in relationship with each other. I had come to rely on those relationships as a driver of hope in my life, knowing that through sordid and complicated pasts could come resilient and healing futures. The loss of connection through the course of this pandemic has created a disruption in our process, in large part due to the atrophy of our relationships that served as a critical means through which we researched. At a personal level, in the midst of civil unrest and wide-scale police brutality, the relationships with my collaborators inside the prison reminded me every week of what was possible when a group of people dedicated themselves to being in dialogue and in community with one another. 173 CHAPTER V This study sought to investigate the experiences of the participants in the Creating Allyship through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) program. This research occurred over the course of two years within a male, medium-security correctional facility in Oregon. In this study, a research team of eight people, consisting of four incarcerated and four non-incarcerated members, conducted a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) study wherein the research team also served as one population of participants in the study. Additional participant populations included incarcerated participants in the CAGED program during our 2018-2019 curriculum cycle as well as previously incarcerated participants in the CAGED program who have since paroled. In this study design, we collected from participants in the program weekly writings centered on a content-related question. Additionally, we took ethnographic notes throughout the delivery of the curriculum and in our planning sessions. We also conducted two focus groups--one with CAGED participants and one with the facilitation team. And with paroled program alumni, I conducted one-on-one interviews via phone. While this research centered on participant experiences in CAGED, it asked larger questions about gender, as the CAGED curriculum engages this inquiry. In this, we considered what was presented, afforded, and cultivated in and through a gender education program informed by dialogic practices. For many participants, this presented the first opportunity in their histories to actively learn about and discuss gender, breaking a silent code about gender. Participants articulated a growing sense of literacy around gender, feeling more comfortable with talking about it and interrupting interactions that reinforce harmful beliefs about gender. Others found community through a gender 174 dialogue group in a correctional institution where community is sparse. Those who paroled explained how CAGED played a significant role in their transition to a post- prison life. As some participants noted that they felt a program like CAGED could have been meaningful in disrupting their path to incarceration, I seek to find fissures in a school-to-prison pipeline by employing restorative dialogue programming centered on developing literacy around gender. In this chapter, I consider how the thematic findings illuminated in this research present theoretical implications to critical pedagogy, masculinity studies, and research practices. I frame these implications as part of a larger framework of literacies of gender. Throughout this chapter, I outline how this research informs potential implications for practice, directions, and investments. The end goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with considerations that deal with the interplay of systemic and individual actions, employing critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012) in examining how systems affect individuals and how individuals reproduce those systems with a close focus on gender. From this research, I present a framework to do so through considering how we cultivate literacy about gender. Toward Literacies of Gender A primary finding from this research surrounds the ways in which men learned unquestioned expectations of what it means to do manhood. These lessons and messages, rarely made explicit, became insidious standard operating procedures for most of the participants and, ultimately, they looked to those as playing a role in what led to their incarceration. For those of us who do not identify as men, we learned messages that were informed by the dominance of White heteropatriarchy and how they created us as 175 different, as less worthy. If we, as a society, wish to decrease the number of people in prison and reduce interpersonal violence, we must pull back the veil on the institutional messages we receive and perpetuate about expectations of gender. Much of this research data reveals a hidden curriculum of gender. In Anyon’s (1981) discussion of the hidden curriculum of social class, she discussed how schools often reproduce the expectations of students’ parents’ social class through the curriculum. In the six schools she studied, she found that the type of projects students completed often replicated the type of work anticipated for their adult lives. This study provides a meaningful foundation for asking questions about how a hidden curriculum of gender informs our expectations of our students based on our perceptions about their gender. In order to begin asking these questions, first we must examine what, if anything, we have to lose in this examination. In the CAGED research, participants reflected on certain notions of what it means to be a man, and what expectations about masculinity, and gender more broadly, inform the gender practices we maintain. As well, we examined what expectations came with performing those practices. Those expectations that came as a result of performing certain practices often reified the patriarchal dividend (Connell, 1995). From this research, and from contemporary conversations about the futility and dangers of toxic masculinity, I see centering literacies of gender as a means to divest from the patriarchal dividend. Divesting from the Patriarchal Dividend Connell’s (1995) concept of the patriarchal dividend is what keeps many men investing in hegemonic masculine practices that, ultimately, do not manifest in the kind 176 of return they may expect. In Connell’s concept, men receive, or anticipate receiving, material and discursive benefits through practices and displays of masculinity deemed legible (Butler, 2004) as affirming their masculinity to society as a whole, or, contextually, to a particular community. On a broader scale, this looks like a continued fight by largely men in public office to make a woman’s right to control her own body illegal. It also looks like continual denial of sexism--in the workplace (see e.g. Tankersley 2018), in religion21 (see e.g., Haggard et al., 2019), in health care practices (see e.g. Doyal, 2001), and in political representation (see e.g., Brechenmacher, 2018), among other realms. The patriarchal dividend thrives as a social economy only as long as those intended to benefit invest in it. If we consider the patriarchal dividend similar to how we would view a dividend from stock in a publicly traded company, the payouts correlate with how successfully the company dominated its share of the market. In this instance, we think about the “company” as hegemonic masculinity. Its dominance often takes the form of White heteropatriarchal prowess in economic, political, and social realms. White heteropatriarchy defines the market; those falling outside of its power become capital to its realization. These investments often center on White heteropatriarchy, the apex of structural power. And the investors extend beyond White men. Look no further than the number of White women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, an election where Hillary Clinton, a white woman advocating for women’s autonomy over their body, lost 21 Women continue to not be allowed to serve as clergy in multiple religions, including Catholicism and some sects of Islam, among others. 177 the election to an administration that has taken multiple steps (Millhiser, 2020) to undermine Roe v. Wade, led by a figure who regularly degrades women in his public rhetoric22 and who appointed a Supreme Court justice who multiple women have accused of sexual assault (Hauser, 2018). In White heteropatriarchy, the standard of straight, White, and masculine has become so normalized in our institutions--from political institutions to schools to the family--that it shapes the way those who will never fit its confines into participating in it in the hopes that they, too, will benefit in some way, even if it means denying the way these systems reinforce their own oppression. White heteropatriarchy skillfully dictates a dominant narrative, one rampant with ideologies about what is endlessly possible through individual perseverance and routine denial of systemic oppressions. In doing so, it sells a myth of meritocracy, one that removes the realities of systemic inequities from the equation. This myth of meritocracy, coupled with fervent notions of rugged individualism, creates a society of austerity or scarcity (Brown, 2012). In order to secure one’s place, one must look out for only one’s self. Additionally, to bolster one’s power in this schematic, one must invest in the debt of others. The 2008 financial crisis in the United States saw millions of Americans lose their jobs, their homes, and investments. While this crisis rocked national and global economies, a select few investing groups saw tremendous financial gains. These investors invested in the debt speculation market, betting on the failures of subprime mortgages, predatory lending, and corporate banks’ investments in the debt market (Lewis, 2010). The debt speculation market caused ripples throughout global financial markets, sending 22 The more common insult Donald Trump hurls at women is calling them “nasty.” Some women he has called nasty are: Danish Prime Minister Mett Fredericksen, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vice Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris (Cho, 2020). 178 countries’ economies into a tailspin and leaving individuals with the burden of bailing out the larger economic institutions through taxes. I bring this into this discussion about the patriarchal dividend because I see parallels between the global economic failures caused by investing in others’ debt and the debts into which White heteropatriarchal systems invest in order to maintain power. These White heteropatriarchal investments in debt affect nearly every aspect of life in the United States. These investments look like: ● Strategic defunding of schools serving primarily communities of color. ● Investing in militarizing police, particularly within neighborhoods with high populations of people of color. ● Inequities in pay for women, particularly women of color, completing the same work as men, particularly White men. ● Rolling back or opposing environmental regulations intended to protect the health of those living within certain areas where clean air and water is at stake; this is particularly problematic for a number of indigenous communities. ● Re-districting of communities to limit representation of low-income communities and communities of color in local and state politics. These are just a handful of the types of debt investments we see White heteropatriarchy support as a way to insulate power. These investments rely on undermining the rights and power of communities of color, women and non-binary folks, and low-income communities. However, these investments do not pay off for a majority of White men, even when they present as lucrative on the surface. Even when standing at the apex of 179 social power, middle-aged White men in the United States represent the highest rate of suicide, with White men accounting for nearly 70% of all deaths by suicide in 2018 (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 2020). I argue that this investment in White heteropatriarchy and the consequent investment in debt of communities of color and women and non-binary folk results in wealth for only a select group of those investing in the patriarchal dividend. The speculation of investing in this debt not only robs those left outside of the framework of White heteropatriarchal power, but also many of those seemingly within its framework. In order to sustain a healthy, stable society, we must collectively divest from the White heteropatriarchal dividend. Just as numerous institutions have committed to divesting from fossil fuel investments for the sake of the sustainability of life on this planet, so, too, must we divest from the patriarchal dividend that routinely degrades much of humanity. Instead, investing in explicit conversations and policies that destabilize and divest from the insular power of White heteropatriarchy opens possibilities for greater sustainability of life and prosperity for all people, including White men. This idea, aided by data from this research, informs this framework and advocacy for literacies of gender as an opportunity to divest from the patriarchal dividend. In the discussions in CAGED, we examined the hegemonic beliefs about masculinity and the ways in which participants’ investments in that dominant system, and the expectations of a social dividend, did not always manifest as expected. Instead, as participants we found ourselves faced with decisions on whether or not to maintain the “walls” of which Erving, Bernie, and Devon spoke, wherein men refrained from vulnerability and authentic community with others. In CAGED, participants could talk 180 through the pressures of gender we felt through different situations in our lives, finding community and support in doing so. Collaboratively, we discussed gender while forming a greater sense of community and allyship. Throughout this research, participants engaged critical questions and examinations with critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012), considering how structures and institutions played out in their individual experiences and how and where their individual actions and beliefs reified particular structural and institutional ideologies and practices. These implications aim to operate through critical bifocals, looking at the interplay between structures, institutions, and individuals. This involves considering multiple aspects of the school-to-prison pipeline and those various investments that fuel the development and sustainability of it. The structure of implications that mirrors the levels of interrogation we employ in the CAGED program, considering implications on structural, institutional-level implications, and individual levels. Education and Schooling Schooling plays a significant role in early exposure to ideologies that fuel White heteropatriarchal power. Some of these ideologies and messages became apparent in this research. CAGED participants commented about their youth and what messages about gender became cemented during their younger years. These types of messages persist today, as recent studies, including this one, illuminate. I argue that these messages collude with the development of a school-to-prison pipeline, where insidious beliefs about which students do certain actions and how those define them and their futurities. I propose interventions, informed by this research project and others, that offer opportunities to crumble the school-to-prison pipeline. 181 Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline A striking observation came from Watts’s comments on what he envisioned for his future. He claimed that, in his youth, after seeing family members incarcerated at both the youth and adult levels, he knew he would go to prison. This predetermined future for Watts also came from his interactions with a police officer on career day in his school, where the officer planted the seed that he would, ultimately, be put in the back of a police car one day. Watts’s recollection signals the predetermined futurities of students of color, particularly Black children, that can manifest into students’ realities. This investment in a narrative around students of color is agential; it robs students of possibilities afforded to White students because of the prevalence of White supremacy in schooling. The school-to-prison pipeline also adversely affects queer youth. In a nationally representative U.S. study, Himmelstein and Bruckner (2011) found that queer adolescents, were 1.25 to 3 times more likely to receive punishment than their heterosexual peers for similar misbehaviors. Of those students surveyed, queer girls experienced higher risk of receiving such sanctions as expulsion and/or arrest and conviction. A more recent study found that queer girls are 95% more likely to experience exclusionary discipline than their heterosexual counterparts (Mittleman, 2018). This makes evident the compounding effects of heterosexism and patriarchy on disciplinary action. Examining these narratives, as well as investments in insulating White heteropatriarchy in schools, is critical to the disruption of a school-to-prison pipeline. For a young person like Watts, the projections about a future of crime can manifest for the child shown nothing more. In many schools, the prevalence of school resource officers 182 (SROs) creates an environment that reinforces the need to be policed, provoking feelings of criminalization in the school environment (Rios, 2011). The massive influx of SROs over the last thirty years, as outlined in Chapter II, demonstrates the schooling systems’ investments in these criminalizing narratives, adding to the educational debt (Ladson- Billings, 2006) of students of color. The hyper-surveillance, coupled with implicit and explicit biases towards students of color in schooling systems, creates a push-out culture (Morris, 2016), whereby students of color are in a constant state of anticipation--a system anticipating their deviance, and, as seen in Watts’s testimony, anticipating following the prescribed narratives of those in power. This is, perhaps, the greatest educational debt of all to students--denying them their full existence and right to an education, unfettered by presumed criminality. In the next few sections, I review what contributing factors lead to the creation of a school-to-prison pipeline. I draw from insights gained from this research study to present recommendations to disrupt that pipeline, considering what systemic and institutional changes hold promise in severing the close relationship between schools and prisons. Throughout these recommendations, I aim to demonstrate how each of these play into a larger framework of literacies of gender. Education Debt Affects All. A robust chronicle of some students receiving ample educational resources, opportunities, and validation is what Ladson- Billings (2006) calls education debt. This history of denying historically marginalized students the access to opportunities to learn afforded to their dominant-identity peers— particularly White, heterosexual, cisgender men—not only affects those marginalized students, but also those privileged-identity students. Developmentally, exposure to 183 diverse narratives, both through representation in curricula and through interpersonal interaction, engages one’s ability to engage in perspective-taking, display empathy, and form coalition. This became clear in the research on CAGED, as each of these actions played out for cisgender men participating in the program. While someone like Calla found solace in a space that allowed her to process the changes she was enduring in coming out, Bob found that CAGED helped him to unpack harmful ideals of masculinity towards a place of recognizing how he could disrupt patriarchal dominance, such as jokes hurled at those whose masculinity was not legible in the prison environment. Countering educational debt involves examining how the strategic, desiring silence (Mazzei, 2011) of White heteropatriarchal dominance in curricula robs not only those from marginalized communities of learning affirmative narratives of their existence. It also fails to demonstrate to those with multiple markers of dominant identities, particularly White cis-men, the range of possibilities in doing one’s identity. This became particularly salient when hearing White men in the group express frustration, sadness, and remorse for the previous ways in which they understood how they could be a man, what expressions were permitted and what sorts of expressions they presumed would cost them social capital and a fleeting, often empty, sense of power. This desiring silence around White, heteromasculinity, though it may serve some as a way to insulate power, ultimately damages White, hetero-masculine folks by creating a narrow concept of acceptable behavior. We saw this illustrated in Micah’s comment about how he learned at an early age that showing his emotions, particularly through crying, resulted in him spending much of his life suppressing healthy expressions of emotion. Micah, a heterosexual White man, seemingly stands at the apex of power, but 184 complying with those implicit expectations created restrictions on Micah realizing, or at least expressing, his full range of emotions. This emotional suppression represents an investment in debt as well--in order to maintain power among others betting on the patriarchal dividend, Micah and others must invest in the speculation that their own debts will yield great returns on their investments. Much like the conversations we see fueling the divestments from the fossil fuel industry, divesting from the patriarchal dividend ultimately yields a greater investment in the long term, one where both those in dominant and in subordinate positions can experience a full range of their humanity. In order to do so, we must invest in creating the conditions to examine those beliefs fueling dominant ideologies that, ultimately, do not serve the greater good. When considering the “social return” (Lochner & Moretti, 2004, p. 155) of education, we must not only think about the overall benefit to the individual, but the “large social costs of crime.” As the United States has built an economic foundation on debt--colonizing a people through mass genocide and land grabs and selling people abducted from Africa--the social contract in the United States has failed a majority of its people. By investing in the debt of others, we see inequality expand. And the expansion of inequality creates a more volatile “market” in which to live. This became increasingly evident during the course of the novel coronavirus pandemic, as massive unemployment and disparate access to healthcare and other social welfare programs created an overall strain on massive systems, from healthcare to education. In the sections to follow, I outline those investments I see as sustainability investments. Much like the divestment movement moves away from stocks focused on the limited reserves in fossil fuels towards investments in renewable resources that alleviate pollution and slow climate 185 change, investing in equitable practices and policies looks toward sustainability of the opportunities and livelihoods of a much greater swath of society. Although this seems to be a perpetual ask in education research, it bears repeating. With the United States’ defense spending budget for 2020 hitting the $750b mark, as a way of “ensuring our competitive advantage to compete, deter, and win in an era of great power competition” (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, 2019), state and federal budgets for public education continually face precarity (Leachman et al., 2017). Public education, I argue, presents one of the greatest investment opportunities for a nation. Beyond having a negative correlation with mortality rates (Hummer & Hernandez, 2013), higher levels of educational attainment have a negative correlation with incarceration rates (Lochner & Moretti, 2004). With a projected annual cost of over $80 billion that state and federal governments spend on incarceration (Wagner & Rabuy, 2017), it is an imperative for the United States to consider which investments result in greater sustainability of its citizens contributing to civic life. I present below approaches and strategies that I believe help to keep students out of the school-to-prison pipeline and prepare them to enter a civic life. Queering the Curriculum What we learn at an early age affects our adult ideologies; we saw this in reflections from CAGED participants about the messages about gender they received in their youth. Plan International USA (2018) conducted research on perceptions of gender equality among U.S. adolescents23. While most of the adolescents they surveyed believed 23 The researchers noted that in this survey, they asked adolescents, “Which best describes you: male, female, neither/something else” (p. 1) and that 1001 out of 1006 identified as male or female. They included questions following, asking about if youth identified as transgender; they included those who identified as trans girls in the girls results and filtered trans boys into the boys category. This is important to 186 that gender inequality and sexism existed in society, 44% of the boys they surveyed believed there was equality among sexes, compared to 21% of girls who believed this. Conversely, only 19% of boys ages 14-19 surveyed felt that sexism was a big problem, compared to 51% of their peers who are girls. Of those surveyed, they found that youth of color were more likely to perceive gender inequality than their White peers. This skewed vision of sexism suggests that unless one directly experiences structural oppression, one is less likely to believe it exists, understandably so. When the research group studied correlations between multiple beliefs or experiences of respondents, they found that boys were less likely to view sexism as a problem in part because they did not have someone talk with them in the past year about gender equality and, more specially, the #MeToo movement24. These correlations suggest the power of naming how inequality works for some and not for others. For this reason, educators and curriculum developers must consider structuring curriculum around revealing these structures producing oppressions and the insidious ways they manifest. This includes investigating what structures, institutions, policies, and practices serve to insulate power within particular structures and communities. To be able to read power is to become literate and able to analyze how power works and what ways to subvert dominant power structures. In an unequal society like the United States, we note as this conflates sex and gender for adolescents, which may have complicated results, particularly regarding genderqueer and trans youth. 24 The #MeToo movement, started by Tarana Burke, began as a way to engage low-income Black communities in discussions of sexual violence prevention and survivor support (Me Too, 2018). The expanded use of the hashtag in social media became widely known in multiple communities internationally, as survivors of sexual violence shared their survivor status via social media outlets. 187 need to cultivate in students a critical eye towards disrupting inequalities. In order to do so, we must provide students with knowledge about these structures. Relying on higher education to be the bastion of education about structural inequality, as often occurs, means missing critical opportunities to reach students when they are in the midst of significant social development. In a country where higher education continues to see a decline in support via public funding (Mitchell et al., 2019), we rely far too much on higher education to be the primary site of engaging students in learning about and interrogating systems of oppression. We must see young students as capable of partaking in these conversations in their earliest stages of learning, guiding them in thinking critically about how and why the world functions as it does. Similar to approaches in engaging White students in reading multicultural texts, we can think of how to engage students in perspective-taking (Thien et al., 2007) around gender. Thien, Beach, and Parks recall a White male student reading about a poor White woman in one of their course texts and over the course of a discussion, the student encountered tensions in his original beliefs, holding tight at first to a myth of meritocracy, that a poor, sexually abused woman living in poverty could become rich if she “work[ed] hard at it” (p. 57). As a female classmate asked him more questions, the student began to question his beliefs, backtracking from his hard stance to thinking about what resources the character might need to be able to be successful considering her childhood. We saw this type of reconsideration in CAGED, where as we began to discuss the distinctly different way those of different genders and races experienced the world, those with dominant positionalities began to question previously held beliefs about those with subordinate positionalities. 188 Uncovering the implicit messages and making them explicit cultivates a greater understanding of the countless, and often damaging, ways these messages affect our lives. Orenstein (2020, p. 125), in discussing the need for adults to engage boys--and all youth--of all sexualities about sex, she writes, “[A]dult denial [around youth sexuality] puts them at risk of physical and emotional trauma.” By engaging young people sooner, particularly when self-concept is in significant formation, we can open the possibilities for them to fully realize their emotional selves, hopefully reducing that risk of trauma. This involves a movement away from implicitly narrow understandings of gender towards explicitly open conversations. What became apparent in many of our CAGED discussions was the absence of explicit conversations about gender for most participants. This, we found, was in part to the fear that participants felt around engaging in these conversations. In order to engage, participants needed to counter what Erving called the “contagious disease” of fearing these conversations. It meant challenging misconceptions that talking about gender equated to being gay or trans, as Watts found in his attempts to recruit people to join the program throughout the years. Engaging in these discussions meant tearing down “the wall [that] instantly goes up” (Watts) when hearing about the content of our dialogue program. But once participants engaged in the program, they reflected on CAGED providing the first opportunity to ask questions about gender, and more specifically, about masculinity. Bob addressed this directly, stating that he was “blown away” the first time he came to the class because he began to “unpack a lot of misunderstanding” he had about gender. He had never discussed gender prior to his involvement in CAGED. 189 Andrés echoed this sentiment, saying he had never spoken about gender prior to his involvement in CAGED. For Bernie, CAGED provided a space where he could let down those walls and allow him to yearn for that space to connect. Mikel directly commented that prior to CAGED, he did not discuss gender. In both our research population and past participants in the years of CAGED’s tenure, participants come to the space, engaging in these concepts for the first time through a structured dialogue group focused on the topic. Gender, in many schools, is the absent presence (Derrida, 1997) in the curriculum--it is always a presence in curriculum and content, yet often goes explicitly unspoken and unexamined. Often this occurs as a lack of representation or acknowledgement of the contributions of women and non-binary folks. Sadker, Sadker, and Zittleman (2009) speak to how this affects students, saying, “When children do not see girls and women in the pages of textbooks and teachers do not point out or confront the omissions, our daughters and our sons learn that to be female is to be an absent partner in the development of our nation” (p. 18). This sort of omission imbues power in those whose narratives are represented--namely White men--while undermining the contributions and, ultimately, existence of White women and people of color. Further, these omissions often create an “unofficial gender and sexuality curriculum” (Pascoe, 2007, p. 31), one where limitations on gender expression and sexual expression can affect the range of possibilities for those with dominant identities. This silence about gender is strategic, keeping dominant ideologies central, yet hard to pinpoint, constantly moving and never fully explicit. Because of this, critical literacy development plays a critical role in creating classrooms with the ultimate goal of liberation from the narrow, yet often unspoken, confines of systemic oppressions. 190 Critical Literacy Just as dialogue must consider critical approaches to address community concerns and development, so, too, should the larger curricula taught in schools. While teachers hold agency over what pedagogical practices they employ in their classrooms, often they must follow particular curricular mandates set forward by their ESD. As a former teacher in an America’s Choice school, I saw how purchased curricula with little training can deny students critical conversations relevant to their community context. Further, the curricula school districts choose often translates into particular publishers from which districts purchase materials. These materials can differ based on the state to which the publishing company markets, as seen in Goldstein’s (2020) comprehensive review of the differences between history textbooks in California and in Texas. In order to prepare students for the realities of a diverse society, schools must commit to engaging students in developing critical literacy at an early age. Giroux (1988, p.148), in explaining Gramsci’s concepts of literacy, states, “literacy had to be viewed as a social construction that is always implicated in organizing one’s view of the past, the present, and the future,” adding that it relies on “a spirit of critique” to make it a “project of possibility that enable[s] people to participate in the understanding and transformation of their society.” Giroux states that this is critical to civic participation. In the midst of the decline of robust civics education in the United States. (Hansen, et al., 2018; Kumashiro, 2012), finding opportunities to cultivate critical literacy skills helps better prepare students to be civically engaged adults. One central means of doing so is engaging students in critical media literacy. Abundant in most students’ lives, mass media serves as a primary producer of stereotypes 191 and, consequently, expectations around identity expression (Wille et al., 2018). This includes engaging students in active questioning about the production of a piece of media, such as who controls the production, who is able to access the meanings produced, and whose interests are represented (Giroux & Pollock, 2010)? Asking students to ask these questions of the media they consume creates multiple points of intentional, critical reflection that help young people become more aware of how they make meaning of images, messages, and representations. Puchner, Markowitz, and Hedley (2015) studied a middle school curricular unit focused on using critical media literacy to examine stereotypes around gender and professions. They found that those students engaged in this curricular unit believed media shaped perceptions about men and women significantly more so than those students who did not have this curricular intervention, with their seventh grade group expressing greater awareness of workplace discrimination following this curricular unit. This study presents a snapshot of the effect of critical media literacy education on students’ perceptions of gender discrimination. In CAGED, we considered the multiple messages media sent about gender. A common film we watch as a way of gauging interest in the program is Tough Guise 2, a film that examines the hyperbolic representations of masculinity prevalent in popular media. This film serves as a foundation upon which we build many conversations, including our examination of the messages surrounding what some consider the largest masculine sporting event of the year--the Super Bowl. In examining these messages, participants found insidious ways they learned that certain behaviors constituted manliness while others would threaten their legibility as a man. Investigating, with a 192 critical literacy lens, how media shapes the social world prepared participants like Bowie to re-enter society with a greater awareness of how concepts he previously held about gender would no longer serve him in living a full life post-release. As students learn to ask critical questions about the social messages sent in the media they consume, whether via books or Instagram, the hope is that they cultivate a greater sense of awareness of the way dominant narratives remain dominant, often by keeping particular accounts and experiences marginalized through stereotyping. Providing students with curricular content and experiences that expose them to a multitude of perspectives prepares them for the realities of the world around them. Queering Content. In order to destabilize normative understandings of gender, teachers, curriculum developers, and teacher education programs must interrogate how the content taught supports, refutes, challenges, and subverts dominant paradigms that serve to marginalize some and privilege others. Diverse, realistic representation matters. When students cannot see themselves in the narratives they consume through schooling, it has the potential to create adverse growth in literacy (Rich, 2012). In response to Sara Ahmed’s (2013) explanation that citation practices reproduce “the world around certain bodies,” often those considered dominant in a culture, Eve Tuck, K. Erving Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) issued a challenge to scholars to interrogate more critically whose voices we privilege in scholarship, a place often bountiful in privileged voices and scant in those from marginalized identities and communities. Taking this same challenge to one’s teaching is just as critical. When I consider my exposure to diverse racial perspectives prior to college, it almost entirely came from literature and music. At school, I found rare encounters with 193 blackness through August Wilson’s plays or signing out Toni Morrison books from the library. For a majority of my schooling, however, I learned from the voices of dead White men. Growing up on Iroquois land (Oneida tribe), we learned about the foundation of our hometown as an experiment in building a utopian society. Years after graduating from Oneida High School, I learned about the critical role eugenics played in the creation of the Oneida Community (Richards, 2004), what is often considered the founding of my hometown. I did not learn about eugenics until I was in my Masters of Teaching program in Brooklyn. The racial diversity with which I grew up consisted of my indigenous peers, some of whom grew up on the Oneida Reservation, all of whom were poorly represented or erased from the curriculum. While I can look back on my public school education with appreciation, I see how profoundly the curriculum insulated my whiteness. White people, particularly men, appeared complexly in my schooling. History class told the stories of my ancestors, with a distance to their role in injustice; instead of learning about the mass genocide of much of the Iroquois nation, we learned about the valiant efforts of White people in the abolition movement in New York State. This is because the texts I encountered were “the product of power relationships” (Kucer, 2009, p. 239) around me, where the written word, narrated from the point of those in power, “carried more authority than [the] oral text” (p. 240) of the indigenous tribes decimated by colonizers’ violence. Representation is one of, if not the most crucial component of critical literacy development. Without considering myriad perspectives with sincere credence, students’ exposure to different ideologies and experiences will likely be limited, as parents play a dominant role in shaping young people’s acceptance of gender norms (Kågesten et al., 194 2016). In CAGED, we watch a video of a person’s journey of going through hormonal therapy. For over a year, we see Sky go through significant changes as testosterone in his body increases and certain masculine traits become more pronounced for him. Each time we watch this video together, program participants recall going through puberty and the rapid changes to their bodies and their emotions during that time. Watching Sky’s transition allows many CAGED participants a point of personal connection and reflection, cultivating a greater sense of empathy for the changes he endures. It also presents an opportunity to see how this change affects Sky, a transman, someone whose gender identity seems foreign, perhaps even suspect or scary, to participants. The video addresses the “recognition gap” (Miller, 2016), where “those [with] gender identities [that] fall outside of the binary tend to be misrecognized and misunderstood” (p. 4). Turning to texts representing multiple identities and perspectives provides students opportunities to investigate cultural norms. As we saw in CAGED, as we began to critically examine gender norms, participants began to question the utility of particular norms. In the investigation, some, like Micah, saw the ways in which the gender norms to which they subscribed were harmful to not only others, but to themselves. Texts that engage students in this questioning of gender assumptions within the text paves an opening to use these same skills to the texts of their daily worlds. Instead of being influenced by the texts of the powerful, exposure to a variety of texts presents “[t]he opposite of manipulation” where students may engage in the “critical and creative participation in the process of reinventing their society” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 65). 195 Strategies Teaching Structures. As reported by the Plan International USA (2018) survey, a correlation surfaced between both boys and girls who did not have a parent or teacher who talked about #MeToo and low belief or disagreement in wanting to see equality between the sexes in the social realm. Further, most of these youth expressing low belief or disagreement did not see sexism as a problem; however, more youth of color of both genders expressed awareness about this inequality, suggesting that experience with oppressive structures like racism cultivates greater awareness of other oppressive structures. But what about the cis, heterosexual White boys? If they do not have influential people in their lives, such as their teachers, who ask them to engage in this type of questioning, is it reasonable to expect they will do it independently? At points during this study, participants, some of whom identified as straight White cis-men, talked about not having thought about different aspects of gender or asked any questions about how gender expectations affected themselves or others prior to their involvement in CAGED. This silence around hegemonic norms created unchecked pressure and expectation that, for some, led to detrimental consequences. In teaching students to read the structures that organize the world around them, they become more able to understand how to navigate, identify, and reconfigure or reconstruct those that do not serve the greater goal of liberation. In order to realize a schooling system where marginalized people’s experiences can be validated and centered and dominant students can understand the responsibility of their history, a literacy that dives into the structures and their failures to produce sustainable emotional health for all 196 folks, including those supposed to benefit from these structures. Reading structures and systems is a form of literacy that applies in virtually all sectors of life--schooling, work life, the economy, family life, personal health, and community involvement. Further, this type of investigation mitigates “an anxiety that emerges from the unknown and which can produce and reproduce systemic forms of violence” (Miller, 2016, p. 12). Dialogue. Lochner & Moretti (2004, p. 158) find that “more impatient individuals put less weight on future punishments,” suggesting they will be more likely to engage in more crime. In teaching and practicing dialogue, one of the key components is an extended commitment to process, which requires increased patience. Lochner and Moretti find a correlation between less investment in school and a greater investment in crime, as those individuals committing crime see less of a reason to invest in schooling. Key to investing in school is a sense of belonging and community in one’s school. As this study showed, the dialogue space afforded participants the opportunity to feel a sense of belonging in an environment designed to segregate. A sense of belonging and purpose is critical for students’ persistence in schools (Knesting, 2008). For young people, particularly those who return home to precarious environments, school may be the refuge they seek--but only if school offers that place to belong. In our study, CAGED became a place where participants felt they belonged, even in the prison environment where many did not feel at ease. In this, we saw that creating that sense of belonging created participants’ persistence in the program--they came back week after week, finding a purpose in their place in the group. For young people, this may present a key reason to continue returning to school. 197 The Dialogic, Participatory, and Experiential (DPE) Approach (Chow et al., 2003), a critical feminist pedagogical approach, aims to engage students in learning processes that interrogate power relationships and upend hegemonies. In this approach, learning occurs through these three primary dimensions. Dialogue moves learners beyond merely speaking to each other to opening up to multiple perspectives through meaningful interaction, often sitting with and acknowledging the validity of viewpoints different from one’s own. Within CAGED, the challenge of hearing different perspectives and taking them seriously or having one’s own taken seriously elicited feelings of validation for participants. The participatory dimension asks students to drive the learning process, calling on their own life experiences and knowledge to devise meaningful learning experiences. As this is, in large part, how CAGED was created, we saw how the investment in this type of learning lends to much deeper, more meaningful dialogue spaces. The experiential dimension of Chow et al.’s (2003) framework calls on socially constructed knowledge that includes one’s experiences. It calls for drawing on the learning from one’s personal experiences to play a key role in one’s academic experiences and knowledge. Much of CAGED drew from the experiential dimension, as participants called on moments from their personal lives to make sense of larger social theories we discussed. Through an approach like DPE, learners see the importance of their contributions in their own and others’ learning while subverting traditional academic hierarchies that center the instructor as the pinnacle of knowledge. An approach like DPE contributes to students’ ability to cultivate relationships. As a number of CAGED research participants indicated, the safety of the dialogue space allowed them to consider their gender more deeply, to allow for an opening of their 198 emotions, to feel a sense of trust. And, for many, this presented them with the first place where they felt they could engage in this kind of emotional work. In this, I am reminded of teaching advisory with my homeroom class of seventh graders in Queens. Once we moved from a stale curriculum that did not allow our class to engage authentically, we dove into dialogue with each other--about the difficulties of going through puberty, the challenges with cliques in school, and the different ethnic traditions and cultural expectations students experienced at home. As the class engaged in these, they began to hear and learn from each other more fully in the English Language Arts class I taught. Homeroom procedures became much smoother. There was a tangible feeling of greater appreciation for each other. Dialogue offers a way to connect more deeply with one another. This comes with increased vulnerability and trust, something that young people need to understand is valued and possible in order for them to thrive in their learning environments. Learning new things is difficult and, without a sense of support, can cause one to shut down. In the CAGED research, we saw participants articulate initial fears about having conversations about gender. However, as they continued to come back, they grew more trustworthy in each other, leading to greater vulnerability, and, ultimately, the program had a greater impression on their lives. Finally, dialogue spaces offer opportunities to hone critical interpersonal skills. These skills--namely active listening, perspective-taking, and addressing conflict-- translate across one’s personal, professional, and academic life. In this research, we saw Devon speak to how the dialogues in CAGED helped him in cultivating his relationships with his family. My involvement with CAGED has increased my capacity for allyship 199 and advocacy, hearing multiple perspectives and aiming to find common ground. We heard Calla and Watts express how they draw on their experience in CAGED to help hear and redirect colleagues who articulated certain prejudices or ignorances. Dave and Monique noted that the dialogues in CAGED differed from those in academic spaces, where they felt a certain kind of social justice performativity; they found that CAGED allowed for a much more raw, vulnerable place to discuss critical issues. Encouraging a trusting, space for students to try out and cultivate these interpersonal skills serves them in their learning process and years following their time in school. Performance. If we are to understand gender as a sort of performativity (Butler, 1990), we must consider the implications of engaging learners in performing gender. This may mean performing a gender other than their own or performing aspects of their gender that seem to be repressed or foreign. And while Butler does not equate performance and performativity, the repetition in one’s acts that aid in constituting and producing a gendered subjectivity create how one is read in and across different social contexts. When thinking about the art of performance, excelling at the art relies on how aptly one repeats those acts and consistently displays characteristics understood as the essence of the character. Butler (2004, p. 218) writes, “If gender is performative, then it follows that the reality of gender is itself produced as an effect of the performance…” where norms are “called into question and reiterated at the moment in which performativity begins its citational practice.” Considering Butler’s concept, we can consider performance as a critical tool to engage young people in interrogating those gender practices considered “normal.” 200 Though the research does not directly address this, we use performance throughout the CAGED curriculum. In one curriculum cluster, we examine toxic masculine practices through role play, giving participants common conflict situations they encounter in the prison. During this role play, participants often exaggerate particular masculine practices, in essence demonstrating the futility or harmfulness of some of those practices to which masculine people default in conflict. Following the role play, we walk through a variety of options for how to resolve the conflict in a just and dignified way. This practice provides opportunities for participants to see alternatives on which they can draw when faced with a similar situation. For young people, new conflicts arise regularly. Equipping students with tools through simulations provides them with facilitated experiences from which to draw in order to handle myriad conflicts. In elementary school, high school, and college, I performed in a number of different productions and with different troupes, from The Penguins Who Saved Christmas to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying to a series 30 plays packed into 60 minutes based on the work of the Neo-Futurists. In each one of these experiences, I learned how to be nimble in my expressions and perspectives. In order to delve into performing a character, one must dig into the psyche, the motivations, the desires of that character in order to be believable. In the process of studying a character and trying to get to the core of what makes that character important, I found myself developing empathy for the quirks and idiosyncrasies I saw in not only my character, but also in those around me who exhibited those same characteristics. I observed the pain of the characters and I could no longer be insensitive to the fragility of humanity--how we all wish just to belong, feel safe, and be loved, with all of our flaws and shortcomings. 201 Often, I tell people about how my involvement in theater cultivated within me a strong commitment to justice. While I did not grow up in an area with much racial, religious, or sexual identity diversity, through literature and theater arts, I was able to access accounts of the experiences of marginalized people, finding my own voice as a queer person as I read and performed these accounts. Theater arts require that students put themselves in another’s circumstances. This, like dialogue, asks students to engage in perspective-taking, seeing the world through a character’s eyes. Not only does involvement in the arts positively affect academic gains for students, including those affected by poverty, it also increases both empathy and tolerance (Catterall, Chapleau, & Iwanaga, 1999). The arts, particularly theater arts, engages students in working together to create a story that is relatable and personal, asking performers to examine interpersonal dynamics, an invaluable life skill. Reimagine School Discipline Practices Extensive research (Lochner & Moretti, 2001; Losen & Martinez, 2013; Skiba et al., 2014) suggests the multitudinously adverse effects of primary discipline policies and practices utilized in U.S. public schools. The two most adverse policies, school disturbance laws and zero tolerance, contribute to the criminalization of youth and serve as the primary drivers in the construction of the school-to-prison pipeline (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Noguera, 2003; Rivera- Calderón, 2019). And while this implication suggests school districts play a role in what exists as state law in a number of places, school districts have leverage to make commitments around how they will implement--or fail to implement--these harsh disciplinary practices. 202 School districts throughout the United States seek ways to mitigate the adverse impacts of school discipline on students and their retention in school. This comes in large part as a response to community calls to revisit discipline practices and sanctions that “produc[e] public enemies” (Meiners, 2007, p. 10) instead of viewing youth as fallible, malleable, and possessing a right to continual schooling. As communities continue to see a disproportionate number of their young people enter into the carceral state, schools look to alternate ways to create safe school communities without removing students from the learning environment. One disciplinary direction that a number of school districts across the United States are turning to is restorative justice (Karp & Breslin, 2001). Restorative justice refers to “a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offense and to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible” (Zehr, 2002, p. 37). While there is no one way to enact restorative justice, Zehr (p. 37) outlines the goals as: “put key decisions into the hands of those most affected by [the offense], make justice more healing and, ideally, more transformative, and reduce the likelihood of future offenses.” With these goals, the person who experienced the offense directs the justice process, in some fashion, by asking for what they would like to occur to provide some semblance of satisfaction or justice for the harms they endured. Another key goal of restorative justice is the offender cultivating understanding and accountability for the impact of their actions. The practices that stem from restorative justice strive to honor the humanity of both the victim/survivor and the perpetrator, recognizing that shaming arrests one from developing a sense of belonging and worthiness as a community member. 203 In schools, restorative justice frameworks offer the opportunity to help students learn more pro-social behaviors and a sense of responsibility for and to the communities to which they belong. Rather than focusing solely on individual actions and harms, restorative justice in schools involves the community, defining harm “by the effects on other members of the community,” considering how harms shift the security and belief in one’s community (Karp & Breslin, 2001, p. 252). The focus on the community helps to contextualize behaviors in relation to others; a harm, therefore, moves from being individualized to disrupting or disturbing the community. As many antisocial behaviors stem from a lack of a sense of belonging (Newman et al., 2007), emphasizing the importance of one’s role in upholding community standards and care. Gregory et al. (2018) examined the association between out-of-school suspensions (OSS), student racial identity, and restorative interventions in the Denver Public School (DPS) system after DPS implemented these interventions in their discipline policy. Some of the restorative interventions DPS employed were mediation sessions and group conference sessions akin to the dialogue sessions of CAGED. While this team found that racial disparities continued to exist in OSS rates, with Black students bearing a larger percentage of the exclusionary practices of OSS than their White counterparts in the study, the study found that the use of restorative interventions significantly reduced the use of OSS as a disciplinary practice, keeping more students from losing valuable in- school time. When students receive out-of-school suspensions, they are denied the same level and quality of education offered by attending school and they are severed from an important web of social connection and support. By resorting to OSS without employing any restorative justice practices, students learn quickly that they cannot be a part of the 204 community for some time; this opens up the student who has been excluded from the school community to negative perceptions of the school, which, in turn, can result in lower engagement and higher likelihood of behavioral issues (Mattison & Aber, 2007). Furthermore, as disciplinary measures reinforce racial disparities, with students of color, particularly Black students, comprising a majority of suspensions in U.S. schools (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2018), dialogue must be leveraged in a way that addresses disparities while addressing community hurts and needs. Wadhwa (2016, p. 146) calls on the critical in implementing restorative justice practices in schools, moving beyond an examination of one’s individual actions and harms to also examine “the larger structures and institutions that shape behaviors,” a core component of our work in CAGED. To learn about the structures and institutions that compel and rely upon particular behaviors helps one cultivate awareness of how to disrupt behaviors that do not serve them or others, rather are manifestations of systemic oppressions. From our research in CAGED, we saw participants reflect on the social conditions and oppressions that played into how they saw themselves and how that image of themselves or the image others held of them, affected their behavior that ultimately led them to prison. As the participants learned more about the structures previously made invisible to them through hegemonic power, they found greater clarity in how and why they engaged with the world as they did, particularly prior to their incarceration. In the following sections, I consider what this research suggests in terms of education and corrections investments. The ultimate goal in these sections is to advocate for divesting from those structures and practices in these institutions that ultimately cause 205 more harm. In turn, I proffer opportunities to invest in practices and policies that seek to disrupt some of the deleterious effects of the school-to-prison pipeline. Implications for Education School Districts. School districts have great power in determining the priorities of schools and, ultimately, how schools reflect and affect the communities they serve. In employing critical bifocality to analyze the school-to-prison pipeline, education school districts (ESD) prevail as a more localized institutional force that may be more malleable to changes directly affecting individual schools. In considering how the school-to-prison pipeline develops in part through the policies and pedagogical decisions ESDs establish for schools, we must consider what ESDs can do to mitigate the growth of the school-to-prison pipeline. Dialogue as Learning. With sweeping education reforms focused on STEM education and whittling resources for arts and humanities-based curricula, critical skills imbued in civics education become lost. This poses a particularly challenging obstacle to societal progress in the wake of digital technologies that, whether intentionally-designed or not, strip young people of the extensive practice of engaging in in-person spaces of divergent perspectives and allowing affective implications while holding space with those holding divergent perspectives. Dialogue presents significant opportunities for learning content and process. Chow et al. (2003) explain that dialogue “may require being open to uncomfortable ideas and opposing viewpoints” (p. 261), exposure that plays a key role in advancing students’ critical literacy skills. In being open to divergent viewpoints, dialogue helps “to make the teaching and learning processes more constructive, active, and reflexive.” 206 To prepare students with effective and practical skills to employ beyond the moderated environments of school, educators must consider dialogue as a central mode of learning. In CAGED, all inside facilitators participated in a full cycle of the CAGED curriculum before stepping into a facilitation role. This offered an opportunity for them to move through initial feelings of discomfort and to prepare to facilitate those going through similar, though unique, struggles. Additionally, dialogue affords participants an opportunity to teach “by sharing [one’s] personal knowledge and experience, adding greater breadth and depth” (Chow et al., 2003, p. 262) to the conversation. The coupling of opportunities for both discomfort in encountering new ideas and confidence in adding one’s experiences to help illustrate a concept has invaluable potential for learners of all ages. Dialogue as Discipline. Considering the learning opportunities afforded by dialogue, turning to dialogue as a disciplinary tool allows for restoration and reflection in a way that exclusionary practices, such as suspensions and expulsions, cannot permit. Further, it allows those affected to face each other and hear each other. Instead of simply ending conflict by removal, it allows young people to process through conflict. Dialogue is not a panacea for all conflict. In instances of threat to immediate physical and emotional safety, separation may be necessary. When physical violence ensues, dialogic practices may allow an initial de-escalation of conflict to hear out what prompted the violence and swiftly redirect the situation. For emotionally volatile conflict, separation allows parties involved to decompress from a flooded emotional state and regain the ability to self-regulate. 207 However, it can be an antidote, applied immediately or with time, to the accumulation of unresolved emotions and potential for further conflict by suppressing discussion about the conflict. Freire (2000) writes, “Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself” (p. 89). In public education, we fear discussing learning as a process of loving. While the desire may be to cultivate a love of learning, we must consider how we cultivate a learning of love. Dialogue offers a “sensitizing, reciprocal process that acknowledges the significance of others in interaction” (Chow et al., 2003, p. 261). It engages students in a process of resisting neoliberal logics intent on competition and individual achievement, instead immersing students in community-building through active listening and personal sharing. The CAGED program offers a model for a dialogue program that can engage young folks--particularly young men--who have come into contact with disciplinary systems in examining how social forces played a role in their deviance. Where exclusionary disciplinary measures like detention and suspension rarely engage students in considering why or how they got to a point of committing an unsanctioned act, dialogue circles focused on restorative justice (RJ) aim for accountability and reintegration for the offending student. A program like CAGED offers a bit of a different approach than many RJ programs, as survivors of the specific offense are not in the dialogue group. Instead, the group asks participants to examine the ideologies and actions that played a role in the act(s) that led them to prison. In a school setting, this may look like an alternative to detention or suspension by engaging students in a similar process. Dialogue circles focused on repairing the harm to the survivor aids in the offender’s accountability for the offense. But, I argue, just as important are dialogue circles that 208 examine what other systems played a role in the offending act. As we saw in our research and has been confirmed by past research (see e.g., Reich, 2010), social structures influence youth deviant behavior. Participating in a voluntary dialogue group that employs critical bifocality, examining the interplay between systemic oppression and individual action, as a diversion or alternative sanction to incarceration equips young people with the tools to engage in critical practice (Reich, 2010), a way of “reimagining the social world that restricts them” (p. 179). To engage in discussion is to face others in a vulnerable space, opening up one’s self and others to possibility afforded by talking with each other. Dialogue spaces offer opportunities for people to communicate relationally, exploring how even in instances of diverging viewpoints, we hear each other and express our sentiments as related to what we have heard presented. Creating this type of space--one that is relational and not reactive--takes time and practice, but offers students tools to work through conflict, instead of reacting to it. Further, it opens possibilities for critically examining the structures that have limited or directed them to a life of deviance. Considering this, dialogue as an alternative to exclusionary disciplinary measures holds promise in diverting students from the school-to-prison pipeline. Expanding Alternatives to Incarceration for Youth. In addition to implementing dialogue programs as a restorative justice approach, early intervention programs strive to divert students from the school-to-prison pipeline. In Albuquerque, La Plazita Institute offers culturally relevant programming and services like meditation classes and Native American healing workshops to youth in an effort to divert them from incarceration or serve them after parole (Pilnik & Mistrett, 2019). A 209 Seattle program involving outdoor service engages students in environmental conservation and provides insights into possible career pathways while diverting some youth from entering prison (McCluskey, 2017). Preventative programs aim to provide services before one encounters the criminal justice system. Critical services, like early access to mental health and drug abuse counselors, aim to reduce student interactions with the criminal justice system by providing support for personal struggles. Since a majority of youth are incarcerated for non-violent offenses (Wagner & Rabuy, 2017), including drug-related crimes, investing in services that help youth address the issue early, before youth interact with the criminal justice system. Research suggests that youth incarceration can increase the possibility of recidivism (Baglivio, 2009). Implementing prevention programs before youth enter the penal system and rehabilitative programs within the penal system signals an investment in imaging a society beyond prisons, where youth can learn the skills to reduce the likelihood of future incarceration. These programs, coupled with implications I outline below, offer opportunities to disrupt a school-to-prison pipeline. Implications for Teacher Education. As reflected by the participants of this study, coupled with relevant literature, school serves as a primary site where young people learn how to do their gender. In the CAGED program, we turned to investigate the histories that led us to our present understandings of our genders and gender more broadly through a dialogic community. In my time as a teacher educator, I saw gaps in the curriculum for pre-service teachers preparing to teach the next generation of students, even in a teacher education program that promotes its recruiting of “undergraduates who 210 are committed to social change” in a program that “will enable [students] to be change agents in economically, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse communities” (Educational Foundations Program, n.d.). Eighth grade presents a critical year in determining incarceration rates (Lochner & Moretti, 2004). Even more so, high school graduation serves as a larger indicator on whether or not one will engage in crime. Key to student persistence to graduation are teachers dedicated to understanding their students and their acceptance of their students. Knesting (2008) found that this was more important than academic support among students at risk of dropping out, but who continued to attend school. To ensure those who enter the teaching force can adequately educate and support the persistence of their students, we must focus on the preparation of pre-service teachers to serve in this demanding capacity. Examining Preservice Teacher Bias. The school-aged population in the United States presents teachers with an increasingly diverse set of identities and experiences. In 2014, the percentage of students of color in U.S. public schools eclipsed that of White students (Hussar & Bailey, 2014). Further, research in the past decade shows an increasing number of young people identifying as queer, both in terms of sexual identity and gender identity (The Trevor Project, 2019; Tsjeng, 2016). Though we see this increasing diversity with our student population, we do not see the teaching population proportionately reflecting these changes. And even though the millennial age bracket reflects the most diverse generation in recorded U.S. history, the influx of new teachers from that generation remains overwhelmingly White (Hansen & Quintero, 2019). In fact, the new teaching force is proportionately whiter than previous generations. Data on 211 LGBTQ K-12 teachers is non-existent, but a number of bullying and/or punitive measures school districts lobbed against LGBTQ teachers, particularly from their colleagues and/or administration (Graves, 2009; Kamenetz, 2018) suggests the overall teaching force lacks adequate acceptance and, likely, adequate representation of LGBTQ people in the teaching population. Because of these disparities in identities between the teaching and student populations in the United States, teacher education programs must engage pre-service teachers in extensively examining their own implicit and explicit biases. For those pre- service teachers who grew up in fairly homogeneous communities, as I did, exposure to those with diverse identities and perspectives may be limited. And for teacher education programs churning out high numbers of White, female teachers, those programs likely will not offer much greater exposure. This presents a significant challenge, and it places an additional onus on those of us who are White to engage our White pre-service teaching students in critically examining biases. As someone who grew up in the era of U.S. policies fueled by the War on Drugs and, consequently, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, I received multiple messages throughout my youth, living in a largely White community, about the fear I should have about people of color, particularly Black folks. Popular media images manifested much of this fear, as proclamations of “superpredators” (Boghani, 2017) became synonymous with communities of color and more explicitly, Black communities. Films like Dangerous Minds (Bruckheimer & Smith, 1995) reified sensational news reports of communities of color as sites of danger and desperation. As I began to interact with, and ultimately develop relationships with people of color, I started to question why 212 I held these fears for some time. These biases I held went largely unquestioned for many years until I developed these personal relationships in my late teens. When I started to take media studies courses in college, I began to understand what helped cement these fears for so long. One way for teacher educators to engage students in examining their own biases is to engage students in critical media studies as an educational tool. I taught a core class to the Education Studies major at the University of Oregon, and examined how the media portrays teachers, students, and schools and asked questions about what kind of representation exists in these media. Often, these media depictions presented limited portrayals of urban students (Emdin, 2016; Johnson, 2007). In this class, we asked questions about what constitutes “urban” to the media and how these portrayals potentially reinscribed stereotypical and harmful depictions of students of color, asking questions about how power is read through a White racial frame (Feagin, 2014). Further, we examined how women--both teachers and students, White and those of color--were portrayed. Students learned some feminist film theory, namely Mulvey’s (1975) theorizing on the male gaze in cinema. Throughout the three years I taught this class, I saw students actively questioning the messages they received about particular districts, student populations, and what the role of the teacher truly was. They learned about structures at play in these representations and examined what beliefs they held that reified these structures. Through developing a stronger critical media literacy in examining representations of schooling, my students were better able to reflect upon and critically read the messages that informed their beliefs which, in turn, would ultimately play a role in their teaching practice. 213 Gender Literate Educators. With the development of critical media literacy, pre-service teachers learn to read the bombarding messages that may inform their beliefs about what constitutes a “good teacher” (Beyerbach, 2005; Dalton, 2010). These messages often highlight a particular type of teacher that makes a deep, meaningful impact on students. In Beyerbach’s (2005) study of fifty-nine films about teachers, she examines the gendered dynamics of these portrayals, where the lead teachers played by men are often portrayed as “misunderstood heroes” and women teachers become subject to various forms of sexist representations, such as needing a male colleague to rescue them (p. 279). Engaging pre-service teachers in these types of critical media examinations cultivates a strong foundation in reading gender. As educators embrace multicultural and critical literacy, we must pay close attention to how representation reproduces or challenges narrow conceptions of gender. To cultivate what I call a literacy of gender, first we must be able to talk, explicitly, about gender, disrupting the silence that allows dominant ideologies to thrive. This involves creating intentional spaces to begin an appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987) into the ways gender plays into our histories, our present day, and our futures. In CAGED, we took time to consider what messages we learned about our gender from an early age to better understand how we arrived at our current engagements with and understandings of gender. This process allowed for appreciative inquiry into one’s privilege and one’s oppression. In Chapter 4, Erving explained that part of the challenge is getting through the fear of talking about gender. We saw that this fear surfaces due to factors such as shame, insecurity, and past threats or incidences of violence. Normalizing fear and the emotions behind fear creates space where one can 214 open up, show vulnerability, and examine what informed their beliefs and actions in their past and present. If we expect people to engage with critical bifocals (Weis & Fine, 2012) on, they must be able to interrogate the interplays between systems of power and privilege with their own experiences. Following her extensive interviews with boys and young men in the United States, Orenstein (2020, p. 34) notes, “Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t--or won’t, or can’t [sic]--even when they wish they could.” This resonates with the research with the CAGED program. When the research team discussed the sexually inappropriate comments a participant made towards Monique, Watts reflected that the incident made him think about the times he failed women in the past by not speaking up to other men. Other research participants, like Dave, explained that having the opportunities, through CAGED, to articulate his convictions and “push back on...the BS.” Affording learners a space to explore gender-- and the expectations, norms, pressures, and punishments that come with it--cultivates a greater sense of confidence in being able to interrupt unjust situations and edify one’s convictions. In research I conducted (Dean, forthcoming) with a class of largely White female pre-service teachers on a class about patriarchy in education, what repeatedly came up for my students was how they had not thought much about their gender journey; it was something that a number of them accepted without questioning or wondering until they were asked to examine more closely. Though most of them self-identified as cis-women, several noted that it was not until college--perhaps a sociology or gender studies course, or the course I taught in which they were enrolled--that they began to question the 215 messages they received about gender. This illustrates clearly the insidious nature of how socialization regarding gender occurs; as my students began to reflect on their gendered histories, they uncovered the multitude of messages that either affirmed or challenged their practices of gender. In my students’ examination of their own gender journey, they became increasingly more observant of their own interactions with students in their field placement, the interactions of the lead teacher with the students and with themselves, and the interactions between the students. Engaging them in this critical inquiry raised their awareness around practices that did and did not affirm students in a range of expressions of gender. These examinations further cultivated their literacies about gender. As we move to the next section, I consider what this research offers in terms of implications for correctional systems. Disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline involves finding multiple fissure points. Further, I attempt to show how cultivating literacies of gender within corrections helps institutions better serve their populations, both in and out of prisons. New Directions for Corrections These implications require corrections systems leaders to see their roles not as gatekeepers for exclusion, but as leaders in rehabilitation and reintegration. The challenge to this is the compounding economic pressures for the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) to provide substantial economic contributions to areas devastated by the movement of blue- collar, manufacturing jobs to other countries with lower labor costs. When a significant part of a state or a country’s economy stems from keeping prison beds occupied, the 216 economy becomes more important than allowing those living within its structure to live full, dignified lives. In Oregon, where this research occurred, the Department of Corrections director, Colette Peters, strives to move the corrections system towards one of restoration. In an interview with a Portland-based publication, she points to the importance of rehabilitation, stating, “‘Ninety-five percent of those in prison now are one day going to be our neighbors’” (Stevens, 2019). The director’s comment signals the importance of preparing incarcerated people to effectively re-enter society outside the prison. In order for those who parole to re-enter successfully, they must have access to resources that prepare them for a post-prison life. The CAGED program presented participants with opportunities to cultivate critical skills necessary for pro-social functioning. Bi-partisan support for criminal justice reform is not an anomaly. In 2018, senators from both Republican and Democratic parties came together to approve The First Step Act, legislation that focuses on ways to reduce recidivism, including revisions to mandatory minimum sentences and expansions of early-release programs (Fandos, 2018). Key to this legislation is a reduction of sentence time for “three strikes25” incidences, which led to an increase of life sentences following its implementation in the mid-1990s (Kovandzic et al., 2004). The support for an act like this in an increasingly 25 The “three strikes” law refers to a provision under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 whereby someone receives a mandatory life sentence if convicted of a serious violent felony after two prior convictions, one of which is for a serious violent felony (Department of Justice Archives, 2020). The interpretation of this law in different states has led to people serving life sentences for crimes wherein no actual violence occurred in any of the three crimes for which one was convicted (see Hannaford, 2016, for an account of Larry Dayries’ life sentence following stealing a sandwich from Whole Foods). 217 ideologically divided Congress reflects a larger public belief in the need to reduce harsh sentencing and, ultimately, public spending on incarceration. In Oregon, however, the passage of Ballot Measure 11 in 1994 created even harsher sentences for convictions, eliminating the possibility of a sentence reduction for positive behavior. Measure 11, when voted into legislation, also mandated juveniles who are at least 15 years old to be tried as an adult if charged with one of the felonies outlined in the legislation (Multnomah County, 2020). With harsh laws such as this, we cannot expect to see any true course of “correction,” as positive behavior and personal growth do not merit reconsidering one’s sentence time. While personal change requires significant intrinsic motivation, extrinsic factors rule much of the prison environment; without the extrinsic reward of earlier release due to positive behavior in the institution, can we expect incarcerated people to create a safer prison environment? Restorative Justice as Rehabilitation I join years of advocacy from scholars and activists (Hagemann, 2012; Maruna, 2016; Toews, 2006) who stress the importance of restorative justice programming in prisons. If our expectations around incarceration are to see someone take accountability for the harm they caused and to re-enter society with an orientation away from crime, we must consider restorative justice programming as a key intervention. This type of programming offers potential directions for desistance (Maruna, 2016). In the RAND Corporation’s (Augustine et al., 2018) study of Pittsburg Public School’s (PPS) implementation of a restorative justice curriculum in its schools, they found that after a year, all those trained in the program expressed understanding of restorative practices and that a majority of staff employed restorative justice tools 218 throughout the first year of the program. In the second year, the use of these practices increased as familiarity and comfort with the practices developed further. Additionally, staff members who employed these practices perceived a stronger relationship with students through the use of these tools. This study, while evaluating this program in public schools, offers significant possibilities for corrections departments, particularly juvenile institutions, to consider in correctional officer training. On the whole, the teachers in the PPS schools using this program saw an overall improvement in school climate, including an increased sense of safety. While a prison population varies from a school population--though we understand the flow of students out of schools and into prisons as outlined in previous chapters--this provides a potential direction for creating stronger partnerships and a safer environment within a controlled institution like a prison. While traditional restorative justice concepts, wherein the survivor and offender engage in dialogue together, may not be possible or desirable in some instances, other core concepts of restorative justice may offer opportunities to help incarcerated people better prepare for life after parole. The American Bar Association (Wexler & Robbennolt, 2019), in examining the #MeToo movement, offered that restoration for offenders must be considered. They highlight key concepts like acknowledgement of wrongful behavior, taking responsibility for one’s offense, repairing harm, avoiding offense repetition, and redemption and reintegration back into one’s community. Each of these aspects considers the humanity of not only the survivor, but also that of the offender. The CAGED program cultivated literacies of gender through dialogue and content that drew from these principles. And in interviews with program participants and alumni, we saw how through these discussions, participants were able to acknowledge past 219 wrongs, taking responsibility for the ways in which they caused harm to others. While the data did not involve detailed acknowledgment of one’s offense, participants articulated how their participation in CAGED made them inclined to depart from past behaviors. For those who had paroled, cultivating these literacies aided, in myriad ways, in their reintegration to society; for Bryant and Bowie, it helped them to find purpose in their academic pursuits. Programming like CAGED employs restorative justice approaches while discussing key sociological factors, like the effects of gendered pressures on acts of violence. It offers an opportunity for offenders, particularly those involved in gendered violence, to examine their own healing from patriarchal pressures. Implications for Feminist Movements Though radical feminism plays a critical role in feminist conversations, we must ask what is lost when we fail to realize gender taxes all of us, in various ways. This is not to suggest that women and femmes should carry the labor of educating men and masculine folks. Rather, we must ask how we can expect a shift--or more--in patriarchal rule if we leave men out of the conversations on how to transform our paradigms away from patriarchy. CAGED developed from the desire for men to discuss gender. Primarily men drove our inquiry from the start of the program, asking questions about what stopped men from expressing their full selves and what fears drove men to violence. Through CAGED, we saw cisgender men finding a voice to express that which previously remained shrouded in silence--the pressures they felt around performing masculine practices deemed legible through the lenses of hegemonic masculinities. 220 The CAGED research highlighted the importance of feminist movements supporting initiatives where men can engage in conversations about gender with other men. Men must play a key role in feminist movements. Just as White people must engage other White people in conversations about race, so, too, must men engage other men in conversations about gender. With a burgeoning interest in developing spaces for men to explore their masculinity, it seems particularly relevant to offer learnings from a space that has done just that. This research comes at a critical point in contemporary U.S. society, a point where news coverage discusses the “crisis of masculinity” (Myers, 2016) or the role particular expressions of masculinity play in transformative, often detrimental, events in the country (see e.g. Reese, 2019). As men come to a place of wanting to address this within their peer communities, this research offers considerations for how men can engage around the pressures of masculinity. As a part of this pressured process of cultivating masculinity, men invest in practices and the creation of a particular public image of oneself, often at the expense of their own emotional well-being, as seen with Micah’s experience withholding emotion after degradation from his father and fear of being treated like his gay classmates. Opening up spaces for men to open up about these pressures and find community with each other offers a place to re-humanize those parts of self tamped down by the often dehumanizing, toxic experiences with masculinity. When men begin to see how patriarchal structures affect them, they are more apt to see it affect women and non- binary folks as well. 221 Gender Literate Research In developing this project as a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) study, it departs from that which may be more immediately recognizable to academia. Throughout much of the research tradition, projects stem from the curiosity of a principal investigator (PI). That PI, often seen as the fount of knowledge, draws upon what he26 knows and what he wishes to know, and proceeds to locate his research site and population. In this framework, knowledge production occurs from a privileged perspective, one with ready access to resources. Further, it risks a sort of cultural voyeurism (Appiah, 2018), wherein the researcher looks at a culture to which they do not belong, often missing important steps toward developing trust with the community at the center of the inquiry. This type of research produces what I would argue is an academic patriarchal dividend, wherein the locus of knowledge is flattened; contributions from the multiple perspectives and educational experiences of a group of researchers compel the research. CPAR offers a queering of traditional research. As I outlined in Chapter III, CPAR draws from multiple critical traditions that strive to disrupt oppressive power structures. At its core is drawing on the knowledge and experiences of the research population to inform the research process. The CAGED program, and this research project on the program, stems from the questions and curiosities of those inside the prison who initially requested these dialogue sessions. Eventually, with volunteers from the outside, those who requested these dialogues created the curriculum this research 26 I use the masculine pronoun here, as men’s research projects have historically been funded (see Oliveira, Ma, Woodruff, & Uzzi, 2019; Witteman, Hendricks, Straus, & Tannenbaum, 2019) and published (see Wilson, 2012; Dion, Sumner, & Mitchell, 2018) at a much higher rate than women and non-binary scholars, due in part to disparities in emotional and domestic labor (Erickson 2005). 222 explores. In the research inquiry, the facilitation team, a combination of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people, formulated the critical questions and activities that constituted much of the research. This research came to fruition because of the central inquiry, experience, and knowledge of those who constitute a majority of the research population, subverting a hegemonic research paradigm. Research that studies and names systems that shape people’s lives stems from critical epistemological traditions, where examining these systems offers possibilities for emancipation from them. These traditions present a threat to dominant ideologies, looking to remove the convenient insulation of understanding these dominant beliefs as unquestionable truths by exposing how they became dominant, how they remain as the standard or norm, and who bears the consequences of these norms. Feminist methodologies rely on critical traditions to examine how gender constructs constrain us and how de-constructing them offers opportunities to create new understandings and possibilities. CPAR draws from critical theories “through a lens of democratic participation” to afford possibilities for direct social action and liberation (Torre et al., 2012, p. 171). This deconstruction of multiple social systems occurred in the research with CAGED. Participants found a place to examine the narrow definitions of masculinity imposed on us and often perpetuated by us, and how those definitions are mediated through multiple social lenses like race, class, and sexuality. As a research team, experiencing the project as both participants and researchers, we encountered places where we needed to engage more deeply to better understand our own unchecked complicity in systems that harm us. Bernie’s reflection on how the facilitation team 223 handled--or failed to do so--the sexual harassment directed at Monique demonstrates the messiness of this type of research. Following this incident, our team examined how “[g]ender is an effect of how bodies take up objects, which involves how they occupy space by being occupied in one way or another” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 59). Our team had to interrogate the ways in which our being occupied by gender norms halted the interruption of gendered violence directed at Monique. Throughout the research process, these types of interrogations, like that which occurred following the harm done to Monique, furthered our relationships as a facilitation team. Our process was not neatly linear and dichotomous, rather, it unfolded with each experience, circumstance, and hiccup. With CPAR, our research was a constant learning process, one that continued to unfold from developing the research questions to analyzing the data. Central to this was the history of our relationships. Because CPAR relies heavily on relationships involving trust and vulnerability, it queers traditional research paradigms that often see the researcher as distant, an arguably “objective” observer of the research subject. That distance and objectivity is virtually impossible in CPAR, where relationships in the research team drive the ability to ask questions of how structural and institutional power affect our lived experiences. Instead, we sought to investigate the way in which our collective liberation was an entanglement of our individual complicity with systems teeming with temporary, or even empty, promises. In researching as a collaborative, one where we learned from and with one another, we pushed against those dividing forces of rugged individualism fueling contemporary hegemonic masculinities. And in doing so, we found a sense of belonging 224 and care. We found the ways in which we all struggled in these systems, even if we were the intended beneficiaries. Those relationships serve as the core of the methodology of this research with CAGED. As we saw in our research, and as we see in society more broadly, investing in a belief that success looks like individual perseverance and a competitive attitude creates larger social and emotional debts. The CAGED research allowed our team multiple perspectives from which to draw. This was particularly critical in our data analysis process, as we questioned how our individual interpretations of a piece of data lined up with the analyses of our other team members, and asked questions about what influenced each other’s reading of data through particular lenses. With every code, we discussed what we each understood it to mean before collaboratively defining the code. Our relationships served as a critical source of reflexivity, asking questions of each other and ourselves and feeling safe to do so. Those relationships--the lens through which we created our questions, assembled our research activity, and analyzed our data--required engaging vulnerability as a primary method. Vulnerability plays a critical role not only in the CAGED curriculum, but in research that seeks to understand how systems directly and indirectly affect everyday lives. In a society where dominant cultures pin deficiencies and obstacles on individual failures instead of looking towards how those deficiencies and obstacles are manifestations of agential systems, we need for each other to express what and why we feel a particular way. We need testimony, our personal narratives to make real to others what may seem foreign or an exaggeration. 225 We realized this research project through the products of our vulnerability. As a team sharing in a process of examining what contributed to our socialization as gendered people, we came up against the narratives that told us we were not good enough, the narratives that told us we could only be a certain type of man or woman. I believe that in the process of sharing greater vulnerability, our research became richer, and more meaningful to each of us involved. And for the participants in CAGED, those who are not on the research/facilitation team, many of whom articulated fear around having these types of conversations, our vulnerabilities made us accessible. Sharing our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, and pain, opened a door for the participants to join us in doing so. Feminism requires acknowledging not only the material, but also the affective impact of oppressive, dividing structures. Patriarchal institutions too often negatively cast aside feminist work as “emotional” in order to de-legitimize the effects of policies, practices, and ideologies on women and femmes. What has recently arisen in the social and biological sciences is clarity about how those patriarchal institutions, in undermining the value of emotional well-being strategies, harms men. Men’s coping strategies of isolation and substance abuse have deleterious effects on men’s health and ultimate lifespan (Williams, 2003). Men need community, just as we all do. Men need feminism to depart from the patriarchal structures that harm them, too. CPAR mirrors an ultimate goal of feminism. Though a research project may come to some form of a conclusion, the work does not stop until the achievement of liberation for all. This takes incredible emotional labor, labor that has often fallen on women and femmes. For some participants, emotional labor like that which CAGED required seemed 226 scary. Once they opened to it, they began to see that through the difficulty came clarity and understanding. As the coordinating researcher, I experienced similar feelings. The first time I entered the prison, I heard the required statement from the Department of Corrections about the ways in which I could be harmed in the institution. I feared the men in the group would treat me differently because I was queer. I hesitated to share much about myself. But as I continued with the group, working collaboratively on the curriculum, I gained clarity and, ultimately, empathy for men I previously felt did not deserve my empathy. This research, to me, presented one of the most invaluable opportunities to engage my feminism--to dialogue with men about why not only I, but also they, needed feminism. I am reminded of this each time I enter the prison. Gender literate research considers that in order to push against dominance, we must engage those in dominant positions. Because they must be a part of the push. And because they, too, feel that pressure that dominance imposes upon them. CPAR is made richer by a multitude of positionalities coming together with the goal of liberation. This research is a testament to that. Limitations of the Study This study is limited in terms of generalizability and sample population size. As the research occurred only with one program in one institution in the state of Oregon, the insights in this research may not represent a national, or even state-level, sample of incarcerated people. Further, as this research occurred as a snapshot of one year of this program within a male institution, the sample population largely excluded women and non-binary folk, though the program has included representation from those identities in 227 years past. Generalizability, however, is not a pinnacle goal of this study. Rather, this research aims to illuminate deeper insights into the pressures people, particularly self- identified cisgender men, experience with the expectations regarding their gender expression and explore how those pressures to perform gendered practices played a role in their incarceration. This study did not involve collecting distinct demographic information, which limits some more nuanced analysis, particularly regarding race and class. Those areas where I analyze how race played a role in participants’ experiences and reflections stemmed from participants self-identifying racially or ethnically. Had demographic collection occurred, analyses through a more intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991) lens could have provided a richer analysis of how multiple social institutions organize participant perceptions about this program. I believe this is a significant limitation, particularly considering the degree to which we discuss race as a part of the curriculum. Because this research followed six years of development of this program, this study may also be heavily influenced by the extended relationships between the co- researchers. In many ways, these relationships are what made the research possible within this correctional institution. Though prisoners are marginalized by much of dominant society through a variety of practices and policies that limit standard interaction with civic life, following the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo et al., 1972), skepticism arose regarding research on incarcerated individuals with good reason. Because adults in custody have a restricted amount of power in decision-making, concerns over exploitation of adults in custody are understandable. Additionally, prisoners may be wary of the way in which information about them may be used as evidence to exacerbate or 228 add to a sentence. What seems pervasive in a number of correctional institutions is a distrust of people from the outside who have no standing relationship with those inside. What was critical to developing this study was developing these relationships with my co-researchers which may, consequently, influence their interest in the success of this research. Human relationships rarely flourish objectively. Implications for Future Research In addition to the implications offered throughout this chapter, this research provokes further questions and possible directions for future research. This study involved qualitative methods, asking participants to reflect on their perceptions in and influenced by their involvement in CAGED. What this research has the potential to inform are questions about if and how involvement in this program played a role in behavioral sanctions within the institution and following release. I believe the next step in this research is to examine quantitative data from the Department of Corrections to determine if involvement in the program reduced behavioral infractions compared to the general population within the institution and if this program has any correlation with a reduction in recidivism. Further, this study raises questions about what a program like this might look like as a preventative intervention to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. While this attempted to show its possibilities for doing so, the research population did not involve youth. Future research would include involving youth who have received disciplinary sanctions in school in a program like this to determine its effectiveness at diverting students from the criminal justice system; in the implications previously outlined, I stress the importance of considering programs such as CAGED as a way to disrupt the school- 229 to-prison pipeline. While CAGED engages primarily men in the inquiry, it has led to lots of learning and development in my own gender journey, leading me to ask questions about what a program like this would mean for not only boys involved in the disciplinary system, but also what it would mean for girls and non-binary students involved in the disciplinary system. Additionally, I believe a program like this holds possibilities for those young people who are already involved in the criminal justice system, particularly those who have been involved at a community corrections level. Directing resources like this one at those youth who have not been escalated to incarceration may provide an opportunity to reduce their likelihood of incarceration in the future, particularly for those who have been involved in gender-based violence. Because students often engage with penal systems as a result of their interactions with teachers, I advocate for conducting research on what a professional development program employing the fundamentals of CAGED, might do to curtail student disciplinary referrals. As Morris (2016), Ferguson (2000), and Rios (2011) observed, teachers play a significant role in students’ interactions with the school-to-prison pipeline, in part due to racial and gender bias. In my experience conducting trainings with teachers about working with gender-creative children, I found that teachers wanted a space to explore their questions, fears, and considerations more deeply, understanding the space as one where they could falter but not negatively affect their students. We need these spaces to be vulnerable, imperfect, and affirmed. Beyond programming like CAGED offering a possible disruption to the school- to-prison pipeline, I believe this has implications for affecting health education and community wellness in schools. As previous research highlighted in Chapter II outlines, 230 pedagogies that fail to engage students in critically examining the social institutions structuring their lives have dire consequences for student success and persistence. Though research shows girls persist in secondary school at a higher rate than boys, a curriculum that introduces gender as a social institution, including an examination of the effects of patriarchy on multiple facets of daily life, may provide opportunities to disrupt patriarchal forces often veiled as “normal.” Additionally, a space to discuss gender as an organizing social institution affords gender non-binary students a place to seek affirmation in their identities, examining the adverse effects of that “normalization” of gender through binary lenses. Researching whether programming like CAGED increases a sense of community and belonging for girls and non-binary students would help provide direction on this as a curricular direction, further employing a framework of literacies of gender within multiple subjects. Further, as seen with instances of mass violence enacted by young men on their peers, this type of programming offers an opportunity to interrogate those pressures young men, in particular, experience around performing masculinity as a means of diverting one from violence. Lastly, and informed by the urging of those participants who have paroled, further research should examine translating a program like this to the outside. Devon, one of the inside facilitators who paroled towards the very end of our data analysis, spoke with me a few months after his release. He, like Bryant and Calla, said he wished something like this was available outside the institution. With dominant ideologies suggesting the individualism required of men, coupled with the isolation men experience, programs like these offer a place for men to come together and disrupt those ideologies that, ultimately, harm them more than help them. 231 The Conclusion Is Incomplete Much like feminist movements where the work never feels done, this research is incomplete. It is a snapshot in time. It revolves around a year of a program that has been offered for over seven years. It looks at the experiences and perceptions of only a select few of the many participants we have seen throughout the tenure of the program. It does not feel complete as we all evolve in our identities, ideologies, and commitments to the work. Teachings from CAGED hit me at different moments, sometimes years later. The research cannot capture the years, they multiple ways we have all learned from and with each other, the intensity of the labor and the quiet moments of sincere reflection and empathy-building. The work is not done. Research like this is not comfortable. It is not easy, nor safe. And neither is this world. But doing this work together, taking on the discomfort in unity, offers reprieve from the isolation that patriarchy and rugged individualism desires. To sit across from each other and bear witness to each other’s learning, to each other’s pain is an antidote to the festering wound of isolation in a society rife with division. 232 APPENDIX A: PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH TEAM Population 1: Inside Participants in CAGED • Amaru • Dante • Manny • Micah • Dion • Lester • Mikel • Bob • Andrés • Roscoe • Jack • Mitchell • Percy • Trudell • Rafael • Isaac • Zack • Christian • Moses Population 2: CAGED Facilitators/Research Team • Allyson, outside facilitator • Bernie, outside facilitator • Dave, outside facilitator • Devon, inside facilitator; paroled • Erving, inside facilitator • Monique, outside facilitator • Watts, inside facilitator • Will, inside facilitator Population 3: CAGED Alumni Who Have Paroled • Calla • Bryant • Bowie 233 APPENDIX B: TIMELINE OF IRB INTERACTIONS The nature of CPAR is iterative. Further, as CPAR engages those implicated in the research. As a way to display this, I present a timeline of interactions with Research Compliance Services (RCS), the University of Oregon office that coordinates the Institutional Review Board (IRB). June 28, 2017: Meeting with Research Compliance Services (RCS) personnel to discuss initial submission. September 4, 2017: Initial application to RCS. September 29, 2017: Request from RCS to meet with an IRB board member and me in person to discuss the research. October 17, 2017: Meeting with RCS personnel and prisoner representative board member of the IRB. October 20, 2017: Notice of Changes Required from RCS; request for approval through Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) before forward movement. November 27, 2017: Submitted materials to ODOC research review board. November 30, 2017: Submitted revised materials to RCS. January 16, 2018: Notice of Changes Required from RCS after board review. February 20, 2018: Notice of approved research from ODOC pending UO RCS approval. February 26, 2018: Submitted revised materials and ODOC approval to RCS. February 27, 2018: Notice of minor revisions from RCS. February 28, 2018: Submitted minor revisions to RCS. March 5, 2018: Submitted minor revisions to RCS. March 21, 2018: Full board interview with IRB. March 23, 2018: Notice of minor revisions from RCS. April 10, 2018: Approval from RCS to conduct research. April 16, 2018: Approval from ODOC Research Committee to conduct research. October 2, 2018: Submitted amendment to RCS to finalize journal prompts. 234 November 9, 2018: Submitted amendment to RCS to finalize interview questions, amend recruitment script for interviews with paroled participants to allow verbal consent, revise language regarding writing prompts, add rolling recruitment, add a focus group and questions for research team, increase data analysis permissions to allow research team to analyze de-identified transcripts. December 5, 2018: Submitted amendment to RCS to outline new consent process for people who wish to participate in focus groups--accounted for those who did not consent to the research for their writing samples, but wished to participate in the focus groups. January 9, 2019: RCS reminder of study expiration date and directions for requesting continued approval. February 12, 2019: Notice of approved amendment to add independent investigators. Required continued approval from ODOC IRB. February 13, 2019: Received continued approval from ODOC IRB. Forwarded to UO RCS. March 8, 2019: Received continued approval for one year from RCS. June 10, 2019: Submitted RCS amendment to add additional independent investigator (new facilitator) and clause regarding outsourcing transcription. July 31, 2019: Received amendment approval to add independent investigator and to use a transcription vendor. 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