Multicultural girlhood: racism,sexuality,and the conflicted spaces of American education Mary E Thomas

Reviewed by: Jane EM Callaghan, Psychology Division, University of Northampton, UK

Drawing on resources from social geography, psychoanalysis, poststructural and postcolonial theory, Mary E Thomas presents a detailed and critical analysis of young women’s experiences of navigating racial and class-based subjectivities in the American high school. Set against the context of a recent school based ‘riot’, her book Multicultural Girlhood draws on a series of interviews conducted with working African American, Armenian, Latina, Filipina and Anglo girls, in a Los Angeles high school. In these interviews, she explored the meaning of race and ethnicity, of multiculturalism, masculinities and femininities, and of campus-based violence, to girls within the American school system.

Having introduced the context of the book in Chapter 1, Thomas explores the limitations of multiculturalism as a ‘solution’ to the problems of race and racism in Chapter 2. She notes that the girls rely heavily on the trope ‘why can’t we all just get along’ as a strategy to critique campus violence and interracial conflict, and also to distance themselves from such problems. In this sense, the girls rely heavily on a dominant reading of cultural conflict, which seeks to resolve racial and ethnic tension through the discourse of multiculturalism. It is this taken for granted reliance on multiculturalism resolving racial conflict that Thomas seeks to disrupt throughout this book. In contrast to seeing multiculturalism as a solution to the kinds of conflict that the school ‘riot’ typifies, she suggests that ‘banal multiculturalism’ is best understood as a part of the problem. She suggests that the discourse of banal multiculturalism intersects with social practices of segregation and other racist social arrangements. She begins to explore how these constructs intersect with gendered and heteronormative discursive formations. She argues that dominant understandings of multiculturalism neglect social and political histories of empire, colonisation, patriarchy, etc., suggesting that if we all just ‘choose’ to not be racist, if we all just ‘choose’ to be just and fair, then everything will be alright. In Chapter 1, she suggests that ‘the girls rely on a humanist trope of universality that blunts their engagement with difference in its particularity at school and with their peers’ and that blame for racism is displaced ‘on those who do not subscribe to the universal humanism that they themselves repeat’ (p. 34). Thomas argues that, for girls, and particularly for girls from ethnic minority backgrounds, the emphasis on agency places a significant burden on young people to save society from the problems of racism.

In Chapter 3, Thomas goes on to consider in detail how these complex and interweaving discourses intersect with gender and sexuality. Here, Thomas makes use of psychoanalytic theory (particularly the concept of condensation) to explore the ‘interdefinition of race with gender and sexuality’ (p. 52). She suggests that condensation enables us to consider how multiple ideas and emotions intertwine with social and spatial relations, and that making sense of these as a ‘mappable junction’ (or intersection) erroneously implies that race or gender can be understood separately. Using the notion of the sexual desire of racism, she explores how girls talk about racial conflict in gendered and sexualised ways, relying on an understanding of violence as naturalised for boys, and racial conflict as an expression of macho ‘racial pride’. Throughout the book, Thomas highlights the repetitive framing of the riots around two stock phrases: ‘Boys are stupid’ (violent, aggressive, prone to getting into riots) and ‘Why can’t we all just get along’ to argue that girls themselves are drawing on racialised and gendered discourses to make sense of the campus violence they have experienced. She also notes that there was some pleasure taken by girls in racialised fighting – that they noted they enjoyed ‘being taken care of’ and ‘protected’ by their own boys. In this sense, Thomas argues that racialisation permeates the girls’ evaluations of boys’ involvement in the campus violence and that this is embedded too in naturalised understandings of gender and sexuality. She notes that ‘sexuality and gender-sexual identities are practiced through intimate racial beliefs and normative spatial segregation’ (p. 76).

In Chapter 4, the author explores the spatial relations of the campus, arguing that the condensation described in Chapter 3 is not just about emotions and social interactions, but also occurs within embodied and physical/geographic spaces. She highlights that these spaces are not bounded, not limited to the campus, but take place within many other spaces in young peoples’ lives. She extends this analysis in Chapter 5 to explore how racialised practices on campus take place within, extend and (re)produce other socio-spatial phenomena like migration, and consumerism. In Chapter 6, Thomas considers the emphasis on neo-liberal practices of education in the girls’ school context. The girls suggest that the school did not ‘care’ about what had happened, and that they had failed to provide an appropriately nurturing and caring school environment. By focusing on the perpetrators of the violence, the girls suggest the school neglects those affected by it, and they argue that the school should have used the riot as an opportunity to democratise the campus by involving young people more. ‘Talk’ is held up as a possible solution to the conflict – using small group discussions and better communication as a strategy to help everyone ‘get along’. However, alongside this talk, girls note that the school is ‘under the control of the students’ and that the administration needed to ‘take charge’. Thomas argues that this combination of ‘not being heard’ with a feeling of being unsafe secured their acquiescence to a more controlled campus environment – the school’s own response to the campus violence. Thomas concludes the book arguing that by placing too much emphasis on ‘agency’ for girls (or for other marginalised or oppressed groups) we risk making young people responsible for ‘rescuing’ themselves, without recognising that they too are embedded within complex socio-spatial contexts. She suggests ‘this neglect of space and subjectivity naturalizes girls’ agency as always possibly active and progressive’ and ‘youth as always potentially politicized’ (p. 179).

This is a useful and engaging book for anyone interested in gender, education, ethnicities or ‘racial conflict’. The earlier chapters of the book are perhaps more theoretically interesting; in the later chapters analysis gives way to description a little too often. I found the notion of banal multiculturalism as Thomas uses it to be particularly useful, and I also was particularly engaged by her analysis of how an emphasis on agency and resistance can function to entrench rather than challenge liberal humanist discourses. However, ultimately Thomas’s conclusion does not offer a particularly well worked through alternative to a focus on agency in girlhood theory – though there are many interesting glimpses of alternative theorisations that flicker through the book, and might offer fruitful openings for future work.