Abstract
In Multicultural Girlhood Mary Thomas explores the responses of economically disadvantaged schoolgirls of various ethnic identities to a violent riot within the school believed to be the result of racial tensions. However, Thomas’s insightful analysis goes beyond this incident and the spaces of the school to explore the way in which racialized discourses are present in the girls’ everyday social and home spaces and in the construction of subjectivity. Throughout the book, Thomas adopts a psychosocial approach to analysis that makes for a really interesting read: she competently explores the way in which the girls’ narrative accounts of their daily geographies and unconscious identifications contradict their consciously spoken calls for racial harmony and their own non-racist beliefs. Thomas’s approach to analysis reveals that the girls were largely unaware of the racist and misogynist beliefs often embedded in their own stories. This, she argues, is due to the fantasy that America is a ‘postracial society’ (p. 4) and the ‘banal multiculturalism’ that pervades the American education system. From Thomas’s analysis of the girls’ narratives, she concludes that, rather than the discourse of multiculturalism resulting in an appreciation of diversity without an effect on other cultures, it shapes contemporary forms of racialism and identifications within a narrow definition. In fact, her analysis of the racially motivated riot within the school demonstrates the extent to which banal multiculturalism has the potential to exacerbate conflict and racial-ethnic resentment within the diverse student population.
The second chapter in the book builds on these themes and specifically explores the girls’ responses to the riot. Throughout the chapter, and indeed the book, the girls’ accounts denounce the riots, and the actions of the boys who they believed to be responsible, as ‘stupid’ through reiterating the notion that ‘we’re all the same’. However, the excerpts from Thomas’s interviews and her perceptive analysis demonstrate that even as they espouse multiculturalism and their hopes for humanism, their narratives detail their own racist resentments, actions and thoughts. This chapter thus expertly analyses how these contradictory messages and practices frame subjectivity using a psychosocial lens. This approach enables Thomas to explore the girls’ own anxieties about racializing others (being seen as ‘racist’) and being racialized by others themselves in the school space and beyond. Their anxiety, the author argues, indicates the impossibility of being seen as non-racist and the impossibility of experiencing a ‘full’ self, which is inherently a ‘white’ self.
The third chapter focuses on the girls’ accounts of the ‘stupid boys’ that they believe are to blame for racial-ethnic violence and tensions within the school. In this chapter, Thomas argues that sexuality and desire are the key aspects of the racialization of the school’s segregative spaces, resulting in girls’ investments in a misogyny that happily self-regulates them to feminine passivity in the face of boys’ racialized violence. Thomas reveals how the girls’ accounts naturalize masculine fighting, which overlays and obscures racial conflict: the girls lament it, yet they also desire it, and Thomas’s analysis demonstrates the ways in which the girls enjoy masculine shows of strength, and consequently racially motivated violence. Indeed, many of the girls’ accounts demonstrate the way in which race and ethnicity pervades their thoughts about their own dating practices. This chapter also importantly explores the way in which the girls criticize other girls using racialized discourses, demonstrating how girls’ misogyny works against gender solidarity in service to racial-ethnic segregation.
This racial segregation is explored in more detail in chapter four, which analyses the ‘misplacement’ of racialized bodies in the school’s racially segregated territories. In this chapter, Thomas demonstrates that whilst the girls’ narratives contain pain and anxiety at the way in which their own bodies are racialized, they often reproduce racial-ethnic identification and segregation by accepting and reproducing the same categorizations that pain them. Thomas argues that whilst this segregation and racial territoriality may be painful, it is also comforting to the girls in terms of having ‘their own people’ (p. 91) to be with. Thus, whilst the girls might insist that they are seen for ‘who they are’ and as ‘more than their race’, Thomas’s analysis highlights how they rely on a logic of racial difference in their own practices of identification.
Chapter five explores the way in which history and culture inform the girls’ accounts of subjectivity through the stories the girls tell about their family’s migration experiences. Again, Thomas’s psychosocial approach highlights that, whilst the girls take pleasure in distinguishing themselves from their parents and their ‘racist’ attitudes, they also reveal that they are as committed to social identifications such as nationality and race as their parents are through their unconscious abjections of other racial-ethnic groups.
The penultimate chapter explores the girls’ attitudes towards education: whilst the topics of this book go far beyond education and the school space, it is the issue the girls returned to repeatedly. Thomas explores the girls’ belief that the school’s administration failed to quell racial-ethnic conflict in the wake of the riot, and yearned for a strict campus that would ensure their bodily safety and academic advancement. This chapter discusses the school’s response to the riot and the girls’ interpretation of these actions as misguided and devoid of understanding of the issues underpinning racial conflict. It also highlights the way in which the school’s actions had a direct negative impact on their own education.
Thomas’s conclusion draws out the issues the book raises around youth, and young women in particular, and the banal multiculturalism that has given rise to problematic identities that ‘allow youth to espouse humanistic beliefs of similarity while remaining committed and invested in racial, sexual and gender difference’ (p. 173). Her analysis shows the complexity with which the girls make particular racial-ethnic identifications, which she argues needs to be taken account of in any solution or response to school violence, as well as an understanding of the way in which youth inhabit the spaces beyond the school campus itself. Her conclusion relates her arguments skillfully to the field of girlhood studies and explores the problematic of all girls’ potential ability to embody feminine success in light of her arguments.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book: the psychosocial approach to analysis allowed Thomas to go beyond the girls’ calls for racial harmony and explore the way in which racialized discourses are unconsciously embedded in girls’ everyday practices, geographies and subjectivities. Whilst the author does explore gender, class and ethnicity in relation to subjectivity, the focus is particularly on the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity. I think the author’s excellent psychosocial analysis would therefore have benefited from a more in-depth exploration of the way social class intersects with gender and ethnicity in the accounts and subjectivities of the girls in the study. Those interested not just in the field of education, but also gender, class and girlhood studies, will find this book most interesting, as well as those interested in the study of the psychosocial more generally, since this is an excellent example of this approach to analysis. Furthermore, anyone interested in the issue of multiculturalism more broadly will benefit from reading this book.