Masculine Privilege - Geographies of Privilege - page 263

CHAPTER 13
Masculine Privilege
The Culture of Bullying at an Elite Private School
BRETT G. STOUDT
A broadly defined study of privilege—not only class, but the intersection of race, gender,
sexualorientation,religion,nationality(tonameafew)—representsanimportantpursuit
of social justice scholarship. In 1946, Kurt Lewin (founder of modern social psychology)
recognized this: “In recent years we have started to realize that so-called minority prob-
lems are in fact majority problems, that the Negro problem is the problem of the white,
thattheJewishproblemistheproblemofthenon-Jew,andsoon”(Lewin1946,44).Des-
pite his early claims, privilege has long remained an underscrutinized topic in the social
sciences.However,anincreasingbodyofcriticalresearchhasemergedinareaslikehege-
monic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), whiteness (Fine et al. 2004), the
rulingclass(Domhoff2002),privateschools(HowardandGaztambide-Fernandez2010),
andhetero-normativity(Kimmel2001).Newtothisencouragingwaveofscholarshiphas
beentheuseofparticipatory actionresearch(PAR) 1 todirectly studyprivilege with those
individuals and inside those institutions that are most structurally advantaged (see Kur-
iloff et al. 2009; Stoudt et al. 2010).
The Rockport Bullying Study is one illustration of the critical study of privilege
bridged with PAR. This project involved a faculty research team and a student research
team from Rockport, an elite private school educating mostly white, economically ad-
vantaged boys. 2 Together, the student and faculty researchers set out to examine how
students experienced bullying and how it was connected to masculine performances at
Rockport (see Stoudt 2006, 2007, 2009; Stoudt et al. 2010).
The student researchers and I identified four types of verbal and physical bullying,
which we defined broadly as ridiculing/teasing, bullying/intimidation, hazing/initiations,
and fighting/physical violence (Stoudt 2007, 2009). We created an instrument based on
our understanding of bullying at Rockport 3 and then used it informally throughout the
day (e.g., halls, cafeteria, classrooms, locker-rooms) to interview a sample of ninety-six