A Space Apart: Kairos and Masculine Possibility in Retreats of Adolescents

The article examines the discursive and ultimately conservative function of a high school retreat. Utilizing Critical Geography Studies as a lens for examining heterotopic spaces, the author addresses the ways in which the Kairos trip, as a retreat from a familiar space, allows briefly for the transgression of gendered and masculine norms encoded in the building-place of the school. In the process, issues of the manipulation of time and the confessional trope in Catholicism come to the fore for the author himself as well as for the students engaged in retreating. But retreating from what? It is a retreat from tightly ordered and limited embodied possibilities offered for young men in a single-sex, Catholic environment. Ultimately, however, the retreat through its clandestine approach to time and space ghettoizes alternative masculine and religious manifestations of self, effectively preserving the conservative theological and gendered views maintained in the space of the school.