Abstract
In this book Pia Pichler analyzes spontaneous talk in three pre-established all-girl groups of adolescent friends (15–17 years old) who attend ‘Year 11’: five British Bangladeshi girls from a state school in the East End of London, four white English/Irish working-class girls from the same state school in East London, and four upper-middle-class girls from a private school in West London. The talk analyzed was recorded by the girls themselves over 12 months in 1998–1999.
The author’s aim is to explore the interactive positioning of girls from different backgrounds and their discursive construction of identities (e.g. being a ‘cool girl’ in the West London school, an identity which is defined by Pichler as ‘tame non conformity’ (p. 35) in the posh surroundings of the privileged private school). Drawing on cross-disciplinary approaches and frames, Pia Pichler examines how the girls negotiate their identities in interaction in their peer-groups, and how they position themselves in relation to a network of discourses which index their membership in different socio-cultural groups: mothers, school, truancy, marriage, sex, music, or social class.
After an introductory chapter where the author situates her work within the frame of a socio-cultural linguistics and outlines the different methodologies and perspectives she will use, the book is divided into two parts: Part I, ‘Talking Young Femininities: Identity and the Interplay between Gender, Ethnicity and Social Class’, and Part II entitled ‘Sex Talk and the Construction of Young Femininities’. In turn, these two parts are divided into three chapters, each one devoted to the analysis of the talk of one of the three groups of adolescent friends. A final chapter sums up findings, provides conclusions, and insists on the need to explore identities in relation to a range of local positions and larger-scale social categories, mainly ethnicity and social class. The brief introductions to Parts I and II provide relevant summaries of previous research carried out on youth identities (Part I) and on girls’ sexualities (Part II).
The book offers an excellent detailed micro-linguistic and discursive analysis of selected excerpts, exploring the complex negotiations occurring when the girls align themselves with, resist, switch in between and even amalgamate different ranges of discourses in their talk. In order to carry out her research, the author successfully combines linguistic analysis and postmodern approaches to identity with insights from several cross-disciplinary studies (social psychology – especially the works by Skeggs, 1997, 2004 and Walkerdine, 2003, educational research, feminist research on hybrid British Asian identities, cultural studies, multiculturalism, ethnography and studies on sexualities). While she focuses on linguistic features which have been identified as relevant in previous language and gender analyses – lexical and syntactical features, prosodic elements (such as stress, pauses or intonation), paralinguistic cues (i.e. speed, volume and voice quality), discursive features (turn-taking, interruptions, hesitations, intertextuality and general orientation to each other’s contributions), and the structure and organization of talk – Pichler adopts a social constructivist approach to identities (a sociocultural linguistic perspective). She complements this approach by resorting to theoretical and analytical concepts such as: Bourdieu’s (1986/1983) ‘cultural capital’, Silverstein’s (2004) ‘cultural concepts’, Skeggs’s (1997) ‘legitimate cultural capital’, Bakhtin’s (1981/1035, 1986/1953) and Maybin’s (2007) ‘voice’, Goffman’s (1974) ‘interactional frames’, Hall’s (1990) ‘positioning’, etc. These and other relevant concepts are introduced and developed throughout the volume.
The study provides the language and gender research community with a very interesting analysis of a corpus of conversations among young female friends. Pichler focuses on the records of adolescent girls’ speech alone – only in the British Bangladeshi case does she use additional interviews with an in-group informant. But her thorough discussion of what is going on at every instance of the interactions allows readers to know how these girls feel and understand life, and also what subject positions they negotiate/play within their discourses. We can see, for instance, how friendship is co-constructed by means of alignment with other girls’ positions, by mirroring and reinforcing other girls’ words and by the negotiation of common ground (as in the discussion on p. 98). Very little confrontation among the friends can be found, although teasing seems to play a more significant role in the British Bangladeshi group.
This qualitative fine-grained study of the girls’ talk is occasionally complemented with quantitative data. I particularly found it very significant that the working-class girls consistently choose sex as their topic. Another interesting fact is their frequent mention of both their mothers and fathers – even though they live in single-parent families.
Another main strength of the book is its integration of ethnicity and social class into the discussion of gender and adolescent identities. Pichler maintains that gender must be seen in relation to social categories such as class and ethnicity, and thus she approaches gender identities and social class in Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 7, and (British Asian) ethnicity and gender identities in Chapters 4 and 6.
As for its weaknesses, I might mention that the book focuses perhaps too much on the British context: for example, it is explained that ‘the girls attended year 11’ (p. 1) (without any further clarification for non-British readers on the English school system). Also, a bit more concern for certain linguistic features of ‘style’ linked to social identity (not only accent or dialect, but the range of elements known as stylization) in the groups would have been welcome. Finally, although the book is very pedagogic in its presentation of frames of analysis and in its discussion of data, the prose occasionally falls into repetition. Sometimes the same claim or comment, with almost identical words, is put forward once and then again a few pages later.
I would strongly recommend this book for Pichler’s insightful resort in each chapter to the most appropriate analytical concept or theoretical approach as an additional support to her linguistic exploration; for her successful attempt to strike a balance between micro- and macro-perspectives on identity; and for her contribution to the discursive exploration of heterosexual identities and desires.