Social analysis of high school.

I have often thought about how the élite at my high school was rather atypical for US public high schools. This has led me to think about just what is a typical social order of a US public high school (assuming there is any sort of typical-ness to high schools in the first place)? Let’s see what you think about this initial formulation (which, I admit, has much more work to be done)…

Let’s define a HS élite as a configuration of social-political relations among four major sub-cultures of the student population: Jocks, Beautiful-People-who-aren’t-jocks, Artists (e.g., band, choir, and drama), and Nerds. Perhaps better, we can distinguish two broad sub-cultural aggregations:
(In the following, my use of girl and guy is a reflection of how these are the normative identities of HS discourse – NOT an endorsement of them.)

- Jocks/Beautiful People, whose social currency is a dividend mainly from the capital of bodily attractiveness, whether expressed in athletic pursuit or desirability: note that this is tightly bound to a gendered division of athletic labor – jocks are to beautiful people as female is to male – guys playing on the field/court and girls spectating in the stands; note further that girl athletes have to negotiate a fine line in this division of labor, as reflected in the differences between the figures of the girls’ soccer captain (the athletic-inflected girl-ness that verges on threatening the guys’ privileged athletic domain) and the head of the cheerleading squad (girl-ness inflected athetlically so as to completely reinforce rather than at all threaten the guys’ privileged athletic domain); and

- Artists/Nerds, some of whom may be attractive, but who do not have sufficient bodily-attractiveness capital to trade in that economy, and who therefore establish a subaltern economy whose currency is based on intellectual ability, distinguished in terms of whether it is performed through argumentation (in the classroom or on the Debate team) or artistic expression (music or drama): note here an interestingly different dynamic from the Jocks/Beatiful People in that, vis-à-vis Jocks/Beautiful People, Artists/Nerds as a whole are “queer” (in the academic sense of contesting male-dominated heteronormativity) because by definition the Jocks/Beautiful People aggregation excludes any element of “queerness”; but at the same time, Nerds are stereotyped as sexually awkward straight guys (i.e., “queer” on account of dysfunctional heterosexual maleness) while Artists are stereotyped as girls of weird sensibilities, suspected dykes, and imputed fags (i.e., “queer” on account of dysfunctional heterosexual femaleness or dysfunctional heterosexuality).

Now, let me own immediately that there is much greater nuance to these groupings in terms of gender and sexuality, but I’ve presented the broad norms against which various possibilities of blurring or transgression or resistance occur – with varying costs in social capital. Furthermore, this model works in a significantly monoracial context, but changes HUGELY in different kinds of significantly multiracial contexts (where class may or may not directly map onto race and onto the aggregation to which one is assigned). And, of course, even in significantly monoracial contexts, students of color, especially girls of color, have to play very fine games of fitting into a system designed on white norms. Ditto regarding the different mixes of family socioeconomic status.

Assuming that the gender/sexuality and race limitations of these terms do not render them un-usable, then it seems to me that the social order of a US public HS is typically explicable as follows:

(1) The Jocks/Beautiful People aggregation constitutes the core of the élite, establishing a configuration of social power-relations that seeks to freeze each person’s access to social currency.

(2) The Artists/Nerds aggregation is figured by the Jocks/Beautiful People aggregation as its abject other; at the same time, the Artists/Nerds aggregation resists their abjection by constructing a discourse that abjects the Jocks/Beautiful People. (Where there is power, there is always resistance.) The paradox, of course, is that the Artists/Nerds’ sharp self-distinction from the Jocks/Beautiful People only reinforces their own status as the Jocks/Beautiful People’s abject other.

(3) There are always transgressions across the boundary between the two – the basketball star who does well in classes, the debater who also plays soccer, the hot girl who plays in band (usually a male-stereotyped instrument). But these transgressions always involve a contest and a risk: can a Jock/Beautiful Person retain enough bodily performance to stay on the right side of the queer line? can an Artist/Nerd be trade in Jock/Beautiful “coolness” without being seen as having sold out or betrayed one’s aggregation? A certain number of Artists/Nerds need to be accommodated by and into the social practices of Jocks/Beautiful People, but this is a mixture of (at least) two needs in the Jocks/Beautiful People aggregation:
- the need for the aggregation to conceal the structure of domination from the other aggregation; and
- the need within the aggregation to push against, but not undo, the norms that define it.

Now, much more could be said on all of these issues. But what is also missing is the fact that each of the four sub-cultures delineated above have within them their own élites, and many students are excluded from this broader élite class. Moreover, students who aren’t in the élite of a given sub-culture often move more fluidly among the four sub-cultures, for a number of reasons. So this needs to be explored/imagined more. On a separate note – one keenly relevant to my own HS experience – are the forms of social policing and rewarding by school administrators as well as the forms of resistance-to-administration across student sub-cultures (creating opprtunistic alliances across the two major aggregations); AND, finally, the various alignments of faculty factions with different sub-cultures, and the power-plays among these faculty factions.