In \u201cYou\u2019re the Only Friend I Need\u201d, Heredia shows how Noel and (especially) Fabio are othered gender-wise by both their male and female peers.\u00a0 Throughout the story, the two friends are thoroughly ignored by the boys of their school.\u00a0 Outside of the bounds of this story\u2019s timeline, it is implied that Noel and Fabio were long ago abandoned by the other boys because of \u201cthe secret that everyone knows, but no one braves themselves to say\u201d (p. 35).\u00a0 They possess mannerisms which position them as \u201cless than\u201d their male peers, because of how societally, AMAB people who adopt femininity are not just seen as vaguely strange, but also are looked down upon for \u201cgiving up\u201d masculine power which is supposed to be coveted by all members of society.<\/p>\n
Fabio ends up getting into a fist-fight with a popular girl after she calls him an offensive term because of his femininity, which Heredia describes as \u201cunapologetic and exuberant.”\u00a0 It is important to note how this resistance on his part is positioned within the story.\u00a0 This reaction is not seen as Fabio reclaiming some level of masculine violence, but on the contrary, cements<\/em> that Fabio is less than a \u201cproper\u201d boy is supposed to be.\u00a0 It\u2019s implied that his male peers wouldn\u2019t even have deigned to fight a girl, because doing so would be construed as putting themselves on an equal playing field as her.\u00a0 \u201cAfter Fabio\u2019s fight, there was no question,\u201d Heredia writes.\u00a0 \u201cFabio was a girl-fighting maricon, and Noel, by association, was maricon adjacent, far too close to be considered straight\u201d (p. 36).\u00a0 Even in fighting, which is typically considered a very cis-het male pursuit, Fabio\u2019s context has doomed him to not-quite-boyhood, not-quite-girlhood.<\/p>\n When Noel decides to wear a less stereotypically-feminine outfit when going to the party with Fabio and Ren, Fabio is again quick to lash out, especially after Noel describes his decision as wanting \u201cto look more cool than girly\u201d (p. 39).\u00a0 This, again, is an understandable reaction after Fabio has spent his entire adolescence being scorned by almost everyone he knows for expressing any amount of femininity.\u00a0 A bit earlier in the story, when Ren is putting on makeup, Fabio is described as looking \u201cas if he\u2019s found a pearl after searching long and hopelessly in the dark,\u201d and is lost for words.\u00a0 Finally, someone Fabio looks up to is offering a path which doesn\u2019t acquiesce to the default ideal of what someone like him should want to be.\u00a0 However, his walls immediately spring back up when Noel expresses less comfort in himself looking girly and says it\u2019s uncool, which once again places Fabio\u2019s desires at the bottom of the familiar societal hierarchy.\u00a0 He had been vulnerable enough to take the leap into presenting fully feminine, which Heredia established that he tries to do only when he feels safe, and is met with his best friend unexpectedly orienting himself with masculine ideals after all.\u00a0 No wonder Fabio\u2019s so defensive \u2013 it takes so little for his true self to be denigrated, explicitly by the gender-conforming boys and girls around him, and even implicitly, when Noel unthinkingly expresses that girliness can\u2019t be cool, and that coolness is what they should strive toward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In \u201cYou\u2019re the Only Friend I Need\u201d, Heredia shows how Noel and (especially) Fabio are othered gender-wise by both their male and female peers.\u00a0 Throughout the story, the two friends are thoroughly ignored by the boys of their school.\u00a0 Outside of the bounds of this story\u2019s timeline, it is implied that Noel and Fabio were … Continue reading Firmly Feminine, Forced to be Furious: Fabio<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}