The identity politics of school life: territoriality and the racial subjectivity of teen girls in LA

Abstract

This paper explores the processes through which teen girls attending a multi-racial high school in Los Angeles, California, USA, contend with racial territories and segregation on campus. They express discomfort and pain when their racialized bodies enter into the ‘wrong’ segregated territory and are met with stares, racial epithets, or silence. I argue that the girls' pain indicates the power of social categories to mark their bodies, but that the girls' subjectivities exceed their bodies of difference. Rather, their narratives point to the ways their racial identifications are fundamentally social and intersubjective, or made in relations to other bodies/subjects, and spatial, articulated through struggles over territory and space at school.

Keywords:

• race
• ethnicity
• embodiment
• subjectivity
• teen girls

Introduction

Mayra, a Latina Los Angeles high school student:

At school my [white] friend today, she walked over to the spot [where I was with my Mexican friends]. And what did they do? Everyone just looked at her like, ‘What are you doing here? Get away from me’. And I felt so bad for her, so I told her, ‘You know what, let's just walk this way’. […]1

Mary: Is it mostly the girls who looked at her funny?

Mayra: It was guys, too. Guys, too. Like, ‘There's a white girl here? And you're talking to her’, like, you know, ‘What's wrong with you?’ [… Because] then you're like [labeled], whitewashed. You know, ‘Get away from me’.

This paper explores the ‘misplacement’ of racialized bodies in one US high school's segregated territories of racial-ethnic difference. In particular, it considers the importance of the subjective experiences of the teen girls, like the 15-year-old Mayra, who either venture into strange racial territory or find themselves receiving friends who have crossed racial-ethnic boundaries. Over the course of my conversations with girls from this school, Mayra's story became a familiar one. The ‘funny’ looks, the discomfort, the hurt feelings, and the accusations of being a race traitor, I argue, are important clues in examining the role that the social body plays in subjectivity. While subjects like Mayra are categorized by peers according to their bodies of difference and are policed to maintain behaviors following those stereotyped bodies, simultaneously feelings of pain and discomfort indicate the subject's failure to be fully captured by the categories that mark them.

The processes through which individual subjects embody and experience profoundly social racializations are key aspects of subjectivity (Alexander and Knowles 2005). Indeed, racial-ethnic identifications, like gender and sexual ones, are the normative necessities of being subjects in the first place. As feminist scholars have taught us (Butler 1993, Grosz 1994, Weigman 1995, Silverman 1996, Ahmed 2000), what social subject can not be raced, gendered, sexed? Subjects become invested in social differentiations like gender, class, age, and race-ethnicity through identification and reproduce social meanings by incorporating them as aspects of the self (James 2000, Bettie 2003). Part of this process also includes the multiple ways that subjects in turn mark the social differences of others, which normalizes the evaluative identification of difference or commonality of other bodies (Ahmed 2000, Butler 2005). Thus, while the spatiality of the social-racial body is acutely experienced – in this case, by young women – as part of the pressures to conform and solidify identifications in their teen years, the girls also reproduce racial-ethnic identification and segregation by accepting and often reproducing the same categorizations of difference that pain them (cf. Driscoll 2002).

This case study also contributes to work on the territoriality of school social spaces in the urban US, again in particular the territoriality of racial-ethnic belonging (also see the review by Holloway and Valentine 2000, Vanderbeck and Dunkley 2004). While this topic is definitively not unique or new to children's and youth geographies (e.g., Dwyer 1999, Hyams 2000, 2002), racial difference in high schools is often given little explicit attention to spatiality, since the study of race-ethnicity in US secondary schools often stems from other disciplines (Perry 2002, Bettie 2003, cf. Stearns 2004). Perhaps more has been written in geography about schools and gender/sexual identity and practice (e.g., Holloway et al. 2000, Morris-Roberts 2004a, 2004b).

My concern in the paper is to read the example of school racial territoriality, one of the spatialized, normalizing processes of racialization for youth, alongside the excesses of that process. Hints of those excesses, I argue, include girls' insistence of being ‘more’ than just a racialized body. This argument requires a theory of subjectivity that extends beyond a description of habits, behaviors, and identities of individuals. Rather, ‘subjectivity’ conceptually insinuates that the formation and social survival of the ‘I’, that is, the self, involves processes that are not always self-evident, visible, or consciously verbally communicated. The spaces of the subject are similarly masked. For example, identification and social differentiation proceed via a complex spatiality of subjecthood: how race, ethnicity, gender gain meaning over time/space, through historical, geographical, familial, and personal myth-making about origins. Contingent social practices, personal desires for belonging and investments in race-ethnicity, and daily geographies that include youthful insecurities about not being seen, liked, or truly honored by friends, all are part of a concept of embodied subjectivity.

Norms that preexist the subject (like racial and gender-sexual difference) mold the visibility of bodies, yet remain present only through the everyday practices of actual bodies. Butler (2002, p. 17)2 writes:

[W]e will become attached to ourselves through mediating norms, norms which give us back a sense of who we are, norms which will cultivate our investment in ourselves. But depending on what these norms are, we will be limited to that degree in how we might persist in who we are. What falls outside the norms will not, strictly speaking, be recognizable. And this does not mean that it is inconsequential; on the contrary, it is precisely that domain of ourselves which we live without recognizing, which we persist in through a sense of disavowal, that for which we have no vocabulary, but which we endure without quite knowing. This can be, clearly, a source of suffering. But it can be as well the sign of a certain distance from regulatory norms, and so also a site for new possibility.

The conditions of subjectivity include entering into social visibility, i.e., bodies are legible only given their recognizability (you cannot see something you do not know how to see). As Butler notes, however, the subject also exceeds its social visibility, since it is also founded on a governing disavowal of what falls outside of normative social life. The suffering she suggests, then, results from the pain of the gap between the social normatives that govern embodiment, and the subjective embodiment that is not transected and divided by fundamentally social categories like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (also Butler 1993).

Sara Ahmed (2002) theorizes the relationship between painful feelings and the encounters between the body's surficial boundary with others. She suggests that ‘one is more and less aware of bodily surfaces depending on the range of intensities of bodily experiences’ (Ahmed, p. 21). For example, a painful experience, as she puts it ‘rearranges’ bodies because one's body is never the same after pain.3 The memory of pain creates an historical and spatial legacy, in other words, that determines a new identity of one's body or one's encounter with others (p. 26). The intimate connections to others that produce pain determines that one is never fully alone with their pain; she writes, ‘it is because one can know what it feels like to have my pain that I want loved others to acknowledge how I feel. The solitariness of pain is intimately tied up with its implication in relationship to others’ (p. 23). Literally, bodies form through painful experiences; they are the material effects of affect (p. 27). This encounter of bodies, and the subject's desire to have her pain acknowledged by others, indicate the fundamental relationality of bodies and subjective embodiment.

I utilize Ahmed's relationality of painful encounter in this paper to explore girls' narratives about the discomfort of being reduced to a racialized other. While girls do not use the word ‘pain’ explicitly (they do use ‘uncomfortable’ quite a lot, as you will see below), their stories evidence their painful experiences of racial reduction. In other words, their discomfort of being ‘out of racial space’ invokes the pain of being reduced to their racialized body. My focus on identity, territoriality, and bodies further indicates the ways that normative spatial constraints are taken up by youth and thus operate to insist on ‘proper’ racialization and subjecthood. In section three below, I argue that girls suffer when their subjectivity is reduced by the visibility of their racial-ethnic bodies (i.e., what others see), but their narratives also indicate that they do not know how to contend with this pain. Instead of Butler's ever-optimistic indication of possible – and progressive – social change, the girls I met end up re-inscribing racial-ethnic difference by shrugging to their pain and then accepting these identifications and productive powers as inevitable (also Mahmood 2005). This normalizing racial difference, despite the pain it invokes, is a step that should discourage easy suggestions of embodied agency within the confines of a highly regulated and invested racial economy of subjectivity. Before returning to the girls' narratives in section three, in the next section I first outline the research project's goals and methods.

The research

This project was initially motivated in part by the question of how the multi-ethnic and racial Los Angeles urban context shaped young women's social geographies in high school and in the city more generally. The particular topic of this paper arose from studying the transcripts of all the girls who participated in this project.4 The repeated story of being caught ‘out of racial place’ had the common themes of pain, hurt feelings, and discomfort and often included the story of feeling betrayed by friends who caved in to the racial policing of same-raced peers. The story was repeated among many girls and thus stood out among the most common themes of the interviews.

In the spring of 2005, I interviewed 26 young women (who self-reference as ‘girls’, which I therefore favor here): 12 Hispanic/Latina (Hispanic was most commonly used self-identifier), seven Armenian, three Filipina, two African-American, and two Anglo/white. They were all fluent in English. Almost all the girls were 15 or 16 years old and were interviewed for 75–90 minutes. I recruited girls by visiting several classrooms and handing out fliers, after which they all contacted me by telephone to opt into the research. I met the girls off campus at a local coffee shop and paid each girl $20 for their time.5 They chose their own research names. Two of the girls also took photographs at my suggestion to document their social lives/spaces, but I did not do a systematic autophotography project. I refer to the photos here only to give further context of the school's territories of race and ethnicity.

The high school is located in the San Fernando Valley in the city of Los Angeles, California (all but two of the girls attended this high school at the time I met them). The primary student populations, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District, are Hispanic (just under two-thirds) and ‘white’ (about one-third, primarily Armenians), while African-Americans and Asians (largely Filipinos) equally constitute a very small minority of the school's remaining population. The great majority of the students at this school are categorized as lower income, given high rates of participation in the federal free lunch program. All of the girls who participated in the research were in lower income brackets, as determined by parental occupation and housing type.6 The girls referred to their ethnicity as their ‘race’, e.g., ‘Mexican race’, ‘Armenian race’, ‘white race’. I follow their use of ‘race’ here, rather than insist that they should say ‘ethnicity’.

Like many schools in multiracial US cities, this one's spatiality is dramatically marked by racial segregation on campus (on teens and territory see also Leonard 2006; on difference and schools, see also Van Ingen and Halas 2006). There are few liminal spaces for integrated socializing, and segregation is common in classrooms and when working on group academic projects. Few of these students participate in extracurricular programs, since most of them work after school. Mayra explained her school's racial geography with this photo diary excerpt:

My school is shaped like a rectangle. There is a big piece of grass in the middle and surrounding the piece of lawn are four sides lined up with buildings. The Punks, Goths, and Rockers hang out on one side of the school. Most of them are Whites and Asians. They hang out on the lawn or on the left side of school. One of my best friends hangs out there and although she's my best friend, we don't hang out [there] together. On the opposite side of the punks, there's the place where the gangsters hang out. The 300s building is where their main spot is. You will not see Armenians there because mainly Hispanics hang out there. On the up side of school is where the preps, ‘pretty people’, and populars hang out. The lower side of school, ‘the forest’, is where the Armenians hang out [Figure 1]. You won't see Hispanics there because this is their [Armenian] territory. The gangster spot and the Armenian spot are divided and the picture shows you the ‘border line’ that divides these two [Figure 2]. Where there are fights between the two, they meet up here and that's where it happens. And finally there's the picture which explains all four major hang out spots and where they are located [figure 3].

Figure 1. Mayra's photo of the ‘forest’ zone of campus.

Figure 2. Mayra documented the border line between Latino and Armenian student groups, represented by the sidewalk.

Figure 3. Mayra's annotated picture of the campus’ racial–social territories.

Mayra's photos and diary indicate the territoriality of the school's racial-ethnic spaces. They also communicate the class dimension of difference, with references to ‘pretty people’, coded for higher income groups (e.g., those who can afford brand name clothing like Abercrombie and Fitch, the brand most cited by girls as desirable). ‘Gangsters’ refer to the poorer Hispanic students, many of whom do not actually belong to gangs despite the representation of those spaces as gang-related.

Mayra's phrase, the ‘fights that happen there’, in part refers to a large, racially-motivated fight that occurred between Latinos and Armenians two months before I began interviewing girls about their social interactions at school. Several hundred students met at this dividing line and fought until the Los Angeles Police arrived, in riot gear, and locked down the school. Mainly boys, the fighters also hurled whatever objects they could find or had (e.g., from trash cans to milk cartons to golf balls) as part of the violence that day. Here I do not focus on the gendered dimensions of this school's racial fighting or segregation practices, since that is a topic of another work in progress (also see Thomas 2008).7

Despite the disarray following the fight, the campus had been quiet since the ‘riot’, as the fight became known. The usual racial territories outlined by Mayra were again maintained and self-surveilled by youth at the time I met with girls. This fight, however, is an important backdrop to the research, since racial conflict was on the girls' minds after it, although the stories they told that I include in the next section reflected occurrences that happened largely before, not after, the fight.

The wrong body for the territory: the politics of racial reduction

In this section, I draw attention to the prevailing feeling of discomfort that girls highlight when they tell of entering into the ‘wrong’ racial-ethnic territory on campus. Discomfort indicates the girls' painful experiences on campus, and it points to the gap opened up between the girls' racialized bodies and how the girls themselves subjectively embody difference. In other words, as introduced above, the girls' peers at school racialize bodies by marking improper mobilities. When a teen enters into a racial-ethnic territory that she is seen to not properly ‘embody’, she is met with stares, verbal assault, or is quickly and sometimes silently encouraged to leave. The girls who are thus marked feel hurt, I argue, since their subjectivities far exceed the categories of difference that police their behavior and social practices. They yearn for friends and peers to see them for ‘who they are’ rather than what ‘race’ they embody. As Ahmed indicates, this desire for recognition is an indication of how one's pain produces embodiment through the encounter with others.

While Mayra's narrative at the start of the paper provides one example of the problems that exist for those who are visited by their ‘other race’ friends, most of the girls talked about how they felt to be the ones who ventured into the ‘wrong’ territory at school. This first example, from a group interview with three Filipina girls (all 15 years old), illustrates the often extreme racism and verbal assault that resulted from their misplaced racial bodies.

Sephi: I walked in the Armenian territory, and they just started saying bad stuff at me.

Chibi-Kim: […] They do that.

Zelda: That's really stupid.

Mary: So what did the Armenians say to you when you walked over there?

Chibi-Kim: Chinky!

Sephi: Yeah, Chinky.

Mary: Chinky?

Zelda: Yeah. […]

Mary: Why do they say Chinky? Why do they –

Zelda: You know your eyes are kind of slit. Not all Asians have those eyes [though. …]

Sephi: They imitate Chinese. [Mimics stereotyped sounds imitating Chinese language.] It doesn't really make sense.

Zelda: They think, they automatically assume we know martial arts, and they go, ‘I heard you Asians can fly’.

Chibi-Kim: From Hero the movie.

These girls' story show how they share a clear understanding of which ‘territory’ belongs to which ethnic-racial group. Venturing into Armenian territory elicits a verbal onslaught of racial epithets, which these girls said to me they ‘tried to ignore’. The girls explained that Latinos similarly called them ‘Cheenas’ in Spanish when they went into Latino territories, and that they received these kinds of remarks on a weekly basis, at least. These three girls, however, do not claim that such epithets hurt their feelings, since the racism does not come from friends. Of course, being on the receiving end of such remarks must be painful (Sephi calls it ‘bad’), but the girls shrug off that possibility by reducing the Armenian attacks to stupidity. Chibi-Kim told me, ‘We're the minority at school, they're like less of us than them. […] We don't have the power over them, they have the power over us’. ‘Ignoring them’ is the girls' only stated agential act that they claim to reduce both the epithet's impact and the power of Armenians and Latinos to name these girls as ‘Asian’ through racist bodily stereotyping. Of course, narrating to me the story of these encounters evidences the girls' inability to just ‘ignore’ the effects of these painful memories.

Zelda's remark about ‘your eyes are kind of slit’, brings the racial exchange back to her body, and those of so-called ‘Asians’. Certainly this racial category is stretched hard by the girls to encorporate both Filipinos and Chinese. Sephi reproduces the imitative mimicry used by the Armenian students to make fun of ‘Chinese’ language. This exchange by the girls indicates how their bodies' placement in Armenian territory enables an encounter of racial difference that defines them and their bodies as primarily (or even solely) as ‘Asian’. However, Zelda says, ‘Not all Asians have those eyes’, as a way to insist she is more than her eyes and their racialized marking on her body. At the same time, her remark also points to her racialized Asian self-identity, since indicating an Asian category beyond stereotypical eye shape, is a way to open the category for her own inclusion. Here, the girls' use of Asian also points to the power of racial categories over those relying on ethnicity and language specifically.

The use of they–us also performs the girls' inclusion into an Asian–other division at school. These girls have only close friends who are Asian, in particular other Filipino youth (in fact, there are very few Chinese students at this school). These words invoke Zelda's ethnic-racial identifications and point to the ways that bodily norms ‘cultivate’ investments in the self (per Butler). The fantastic claim by the Armenians that she can fly – a joke made by the Armenians – also places her racialized body in a media exchange after the martial arts film Hero, and out of reach of Zelda's control of her own defining embodiment. ‘They have power over us’ literally means that these Filipina girls are powerless to effect the ways their racialized bodies are marked, defined, policed, and mocked. Norms (and discourses which include stereotypes) like these provide the girl subjects ways to recognize themselves and to recognize themselves in the eyes of others. However, while they take up certain modes of identifying (as Asians with Asian bodies), they also maintain a ‘distance’ from the norms that regulate their bodies (Butler 2002), as evidenced through the comments about not being that kind of Asian-eyes. Here their ethnicity (and their own racial stereotyping) asserts itself, by marking their Asian-eyes as supposedly less ‘slit’ than those of Chinese.

Violet, 15, and Denise, 16, are Hispanic sisters whose peer groups are largely composed of Anglo students (Denise goes to a different high school, however). Violet, a cheerleader, insists that race is not an important determinant of belonging in her group of mostly sports-identified youth; rather, individuality and ‘coolness’ count:

Violet: [In my social group at school] each person has their own individuality and, like, we really don't, like, we don't, like, really look at your race. And, like, [we don't say,] ‘oh, you can't do this because you're this race’. If you, if you're really cool, then we're with you, it doesn't matter. Like, our group of friends has a mixture of race, of race and stuff. […] It just so happens that we just, we just, like, click together.

Mary: Do you have a certain territory at school?

Violet: We all, our group, we always hang out by the senior sign. And that's where the football players and the cheerleaders and the white people are right there, and the black people too. And then the Hispanics are in the cafeteria, that's where they […] have lunch […]. And the Armenians are in the front of the school […]. Each person has their own set. But, like, I, I go to different groups, like, I'll go to, like, the metal people and, like, the rockers. I change a lot.

Mary: Would you ever walk up to the Armenian group? […]

Violet: I have, I have been there, like with my friends. Like, some of my friends are Armenian. I'll go there, I'll say hi or whatever. I really, I feel really uncomfortable sometimes, but I do go. Yeah. But I really don't want to.

It is hard to know whether Violet does indeed have the racial mobility she claims, given her discomfort and seeming lack of words to break the discomfort when visiting Armenian friends in ‘their’ territory. But her insistence that race does not ‘really’ matter to her friends, and her example of being in cliques that form based on music and alternative identities and activities (like rockers, cheerleading), indicates Violet's investment in her identity as ‘different’ from the other highly racialized, regulated students at school (also see Morris-Roberts 2004b).

What does it mean, though, that Violet emphasizes ‘really’ when she says, ‘we don't, like really look at your race’? In part, at least, it points to the impossibility of not looking at race. Violet knows that she cannot not look at race, since race is marked on the body, but she disavows the power of that visibility to determine friendships. She resists the power of embodied ethnicity-racialization, but her comment also acknowledges the inability to escape the confines of normative ethnic-racial difference. While she resists the normative differentiation, she also marks the constraints of that resistance. ‘Coolness’ is instead the litmus test she espouses for belonging to this peer group, but Violet does not have any African-American or Asian friends, and most of her white friends are Anglo, not Armenian or Hispanic. The mobility of friendship groups she claims are all music and sports based groups, not racial-ethnic ones.

In fact, Violet and Denise noted to me their inability to ‘fit in’ with many Hispanics due to their own poor Spanish language skills. They often themselves felt ‘uncomfortable’ in what they call ‘Hispanic locations’ where Spanish is dominant.

Denise: Only when I go into like, Hispanic locations, like, to certain stores, when I go in there, they look at me because I'm different from them. […] They just stare at me. Like, I feel uncomfortable, and then I feel like leaving. But my dad, he's buying something, and like he speaks the language better than I do.

Mary: Right.

Denise: And I just feel uncomfortable. That's why I don't really like going with him to, like Spanish places and stuff like that. […]

Violet: I never ever, since middle school, hung out with Hispanic people. I just never got really along with them because I'm not like them. But I do associate with them sometimes, but only during class for like projects and stuff. Other than that I hang out with the white kids, white people and football players and, like, people who don't really look at my ethnicity, just who I am.

These girls find more social comfort around other English speakers, notably ‘white people’. White people, according to Violet, ‘don't really look’, which is remarkably similar wording to her statement that she and her friends don't really look at ‘your’ race when interacting with peers at school. In this second case, however, it is Violet's own racialization that is not really noticed. (Although it is noticed, since there is no not noticing.) But Violet insists that she is not reducible to her ‘ethnicity’. It is not ‘who I am’ to her. The discomfort she and Denise describe by being reduced to the ‘Hispanic’ girl in Armenian territory (Violet), or the poorly-performing Hispanic girl who cannot speak good Spanish (both girls), point to the anxieties of being partially or incompletely seen as merely an ethnic and racialized body. Violet desires recognition, but certainly she desires a wider recognition than one based on her ethnicity. Whiteness to Violet marks the ability to look beyond race, while the Hispanic Spanish-speakers reduce her to her ethnicity, and note her failure to live up to it properly (cf. Dwyer and Jones 2000).

Language, style, dress, music, body features, and media are all examples from the girls' narratives that mark their ethnic-racial difference and that serve as modes through which girls self-identify as feminine, racialized subjects. The range of these examples illustrate the ubiquity of how ethnic and racial difference saturate the girls' narratives and identifications. These practices – whether dress, music, speech, or narrating frustrations – also show how the girls' subjectivities develop via the norms that circulate in their particular spatial and social contexts. The girls have a deep sense of themselves through these social markers, including those visual bodily markers, yet they also often gloss the attachments to ethnic and racial difference that their practices of language, style, or dress simultaneously invoke. Even explicitly resisting race's defining powers over the self marks the subject's intimate connection to normative difference. Thus, resistance to norms is highly constrained, contra to Butler's hope for ‘new possibilities’ (see introduction).

‘Rockers’ were one clique at school that did partially transcend ethnic-racial divides between Latinos and Armenians (although I did not hear any examples of African-American or Asian youth in this group except in Mayra's note above, nor were very recent immigrants part of it due to language barriers; the group spoke English only).8 Lola, a Latina, and her friend, Sammie, Armenian, shared an identity at school around music and style. I interviewed the girls together. Lola shared a similar story as Violet's about entering Armenian territory.

Lola: At our school, it's like, there's a little zone of Armenians, and then there's like Hispanics. Well, one day there's this [Armenian] girl that my boyfriend was talking to and she, like, kind of wanted to leave her group because she was a really, like, hard. Like, she was a [hard] rocker or whatever, and they were kind of criticizing her for it, so she came over to our group. And then one time, she didn't come, and there was a guy in our group that kind of liked her, so we went over [to visit her in the Armenian zone]. And, like, all of the Armenians, when we pulled her over and talked to her, they just like all, like, gazed on us. […] Like, all of them were looking at us, and we're just like, yeah [nodding], ohhhhh, okay [i.e., oh, I see how it is].

Mary: […] They're staring you down.

Lola: Like as long as you're not, like, well, we didn't do anything bad to them. They were just looking at us, so we were just like, felt a little uncomfortable. […] It's just like, if you're one of those people that just likes to talk about people a lot, then that's when you get in trouble, you know? But if you just, like, mind your own business and just, like, stay with your own, like, I guess, like [trails off, shrugs].

Chibi-Kim, Sephi, and Zelda did find that ‘they’ do just ‘go off’ for no reason, as evidenced in the racist epithets that they encounter when they venture into ‘Armenian territory’ (above). However, Lola's story does share similarities with Violet's, particularly ‘gaze’ (Violet spoke of ‘looking’ at race), and of course the feelings of being ‘uncomfortable’. Both Lola and Violet are Latinas who found themselves in the Armenian zone/territory. Lola here also notes that staying with ‘your own’ prevents such discomfort, and in her case it refers to her own clique and its ‘zone’ at school. ‘Trouble’, as Lola notes it, is the conflict that is reflected by the gaze, the looks, that tell her not to be in that territory: she does not belong in Armenian space as determined by the visibility of her racial (and stylistic) difference. ‘Minding your own business’ means minding your racial-ethnic territory. There is also some confusion in this quote, since she insists that they ‘didn't do anything bad to them’, and were not people who would ‘talk about people a lot’. Therefore, she does distance herself from being in ‘trouble’ with the Armenians, since there was no overt challenge or verbal assault. Instead, the gaze indicated the potential trouble and is reason enough to Lola to ‘stay with your own’.

The gaze – the viewing of the visible racialized body as well as being viewed – is inevitable in Lola's account. I think the important aspect of her narrative is the discomfort she notes, rather than the marking of the othered body. The regulation of this discomfort means that Lola will stay with ‘her own’ group, since she says that if you ‘stay with your own’, you can prevent tense interactions arising from inter-racial and inter-clique confrontations. The discomfort may be an example of what Butler both calls ‘a source of suffering’ and marks as a potential point for resisting ‘regulatory norms’, but Lola's shrug also suggests that she prefers not to make waves. Thus, status quo segregation remains the normative and normalizing spatiality of the school. This segregation and racial territoriality may be painful, but at the same time they are comforting to the girls. The fact that they have ‘their own’ people to be with is both inclusionary and exclusionary.

Armenian girls likewise experienced similar situations. Jackie, 16 years old, told me about running into her Hispanic friends at the mall and being ‘cold-shouldered’ by them. Her 15-year-old sister, Amy, then chimed in with her own story.

Jackie: Like, me and my [Armenian] friends went to the mall, and I saw […] a couple of my Hispanic friends there. So we gathered all together, and they were with another group of [Hispanic] friends. And then they just started ignoring us. And then, like, my friends were like, ‘okay, well, we'll just see you later’ [shrugging]. So then they just passed by. And then, like, I felt that like […] they were just leaving us because we were there, you know? […]

Mary: So they were avoiding you because they didn't want to –

Jackie: Be seen [with us] or be around, I'm not sure. They're like, after that, still me and my friends are still friends, but [trails off, shrugs].

Mary: Right.

Jackie: I didn't say anything, but you still felt it, you know? […]

Amy: Incidents like that – when I was walking, I saw a friend of mine, she was Latino. And she was with a group of her other Latino friends. It's like, I wanted to say hi to her, but I didn't feel comfortable because her other friends were there, and they were looking at me in a weird way. So I was like, okay, stay away from trouble. I just, like, ignore it, and I just smile, you know?

Jackie: Yeah, when they're individuals, and you're friends with them, you can say hi, but if they're with groups and you're alone, you can't just pretty much go say ‘hi’ to your friends.

Amy: Yeah, you feel like, outcast. You know?

Jackie's shrug showed me that she did not trust her ‘Hispanic friends’ after this experience, and she did not confront these friends for what she thought was their poor behavior towards her at the mall. The racial territories at school are not place-specific to the campus, but the spatiality of segregation is enforced even in what could possibly be more fluid spaces for teens, like the mall. The peer pressure of staying with ‘your own’ is a strong segregating force. Jackie's discomfort and hurt feelings of being ignored by the Hispanic girls whom she had thought of as friends further encourages her to stay with Armenian friends and in Armenian territory at school. The mall interaction suggests to Jackie that her ‘real’ friends may only be other Armenians, thus her hurt feelings indicate the rejection she feels from her Latina friends. Its also notable that she refers to Armenian friends simply as ‘friends’, but Hispanic friends are racially qualified in her narrative. The pain of being an ‘outcast’ to the Hispanic girls is one effect of Amy's ethnic-racial identification and embodiment, and it marks the ways that identification proceeds through the rejection and disavowal of encounter, just as much as similarity and solidarity.

It is also important to note that in all of the girls' narratives, they posit themselves as the heroes of their stories. That is, they are the ones who attempt to transcend racial segregation and enforcement, only to be rebuffed. Not one told me, for example, of incidents in which they coldly rejected friends who came to visit them. Furthermore, very few of the girls I interviewed had close friendships with girls of other ethnicities-races, including Jackie (Sammie and Lola were exceptions), and few girls had been to the homes of their friends who identified as other ethnicities or races. Many of the Armenian girls even said that their parents (all of whom were born in Armenia) forbade them from being in non-Armenian homes.

Mayra, whose story began this paper, told me the following about the same white friend, whom she described as ‘one of my best friends’:

Mayra: I know her, and I know that, you know, she loves every race, you know, she loves every person. And with her I feel the same way. She's not, she's not white to me, you know, she's just my friend […].

Mary: What about when you go home with her? […]

Mayra: We've never hung out [outside of school].

Mary: So why is that? I mean, why don't you hang out at each other's house?

Mayra: That's – I think it's because, I mean I would be scared to meet her mom because she'd probably be like, ‘this is the kind of person my daughter hangs out with?’ You know?

I do not know if Mayra's friend had, in fact, ever invited her home. Mayra, who faces the scorn of her Latina friends for being ‘whitewashed’ by having this white friend, herself devalues her ethnic body and worries that her white friend's mother would think she was a dangerous gangster-Mexican who, as she qualified to me, had ‘failed four classes’ (her white friend had also failed four classes, as Mayra made sure to add). Mayra said to me, ‘I was, you know, growing up I was taught, oh, [to] look like a gang banger is what's “in”’. Mayra's white friend may ‘love every race’, but Mayra relents to the negative racist views of Latinas in LA who are low income, i.e., look ‘gangster’. Her shame in the way she represents her ethnic body, through dress and academic performance, is notable.

It is also remarkable that Mayra insists that her friend is ‘not white to me’. This phrase points to Mayra's desire not to be reduced to her racialized body and its failure to achieve normative white visibility. However, the desire to surpass her racial appearance and body has not been able to achieve a friendship off campus. Nor does Mayra have a language to discuss this friendship's ability to transcend the pressures of racial-ethnic segregation without resorting to a ideal of racial harmony; fundamentally, this ideal is based on the love of racial difference (‘she loves every race’). In other words, if this friend was not white, or Mayra was not a Latina (both impossibilities), perhaps they would be able to hang out outside of school. Despite ‘not being white to me’, their bodies do mark the limited potentials of the friendship.

Like Mayra and Jackie, many of the girls claim to have friends of other races and discount the power of racial difference to prevent friendship. Yet all of them also tell of the effects of racial difference on their friendships at school, in public, and in homes. Very few of them actually have friendships that extend beyond school spaces, and even the friendships they claim have difficulty finding space to be at school. The girls indicate the multiple ways that they are marked by their racial-ethnic bodies, and that these marking epithets (Sephi and friends), looks (Violet), gazes (Sammie), and rebuffs (Jackie and Mayra) cause them discomfort, hurt feelings, or shame. These subjective feelings hint at the anxiety the girls have for not being adequately or fully acknowledged, seen, befriended. Next, to conclude I consider what these feelings tell us about the spatiality of racial subjectivity for youth.

Embodiment, territoriality, and subjectivity: conclusion

While geographers have worked hard to insist that the practices of young subjects are always embodied (e.g., Teather 1999, Hyams 2003, Evans 2006, Cahill 2007), these girls' narratives may also indicate the importance of considering the failure of embodiment to fully represent the subject. The ‘uncomfortable’ awkwardness of being in the wrong racial territory, as laid out time and again by the young women at this multi-racial high school, marks how complexly the social body is taken up. These discomforts are also productive of the pain of not being recognized as a subject, as being reduced merely to one's visible racial difference. These moments do surely draw out the embodiment of subjectivity, such as how social norms and categories are ‘stuck’ to and are taken up by the subject, but they also insist that the body's boundaries are fluid, intersubjective, and multispatial. In other words, the body is recognizable only because of social meanings and norms; therefore, every body is an effect of its relations to others and the process of painful encounter (Ahmed 2002). The girls' depictions of their bodies in ‘other’ territories point to the intersubjective, spatial negotiations at the heart of coming to terms with social relations, norms, and differences. This in a sense situates embodiment as both integral and exterior to the subject herself. They only find the investments of difference through their encounters with others, the subsequent surveillance of racialized space, and their own emotive processes of dealing with the encounters of theirs and others' bodies (see also Ahmed 1999, Chin 2001).

That girls indicate their pain of being not fully seen illustrates that the categorical empirics of bodies – for example, how bodies are seen according to race or ethnicity or gender – do not fully capture the subjective effects of those empirics, i.e., how those bodies are experienced. However, girls' claims to be seen for ‘who they are’, or ‘as more than their race’ (as opposed to being seen foremost as their race-ethnicity) rely on the fantasy that they themselves are not also fully and fundamentally invested in those social categories of difference. The girls may insist they are more than their race, but their narratives also show how they rely on a logic of racial difference in their own practices of identification. They shrug and leave the territories of their ‘friends’, they live segregated social lives, and they claim ethnic-racial identities smoothly and without irony in their self-descriptions and through their casual marking of others' racial-ethnic identifiers.

There are thus limits to their self-knowledge because the self is fundamentally socially informed and founded. In other words, ‘subjectivity’ does not denote a self-reflexive process (see also Thomas 2008). Instead, the psychic-social processes through which norms become personally invested as aspects of the self are not wholly conscious ones, nor are past and present processes necessarily recallable. As Butler puts it, the identifications used to recognize – and to be recognizable – are not ‘ours’ (Butler 2005, p. 19). In a sense then, one's body is also not one's ‘own’ – and the discomfort, pain, and hurt feelings of the girls point to that. Their desire for recognition will never be fulfilled because they are always experientially more than the sum of their social-racialized parts/bodies. Paradoxically, subjectivity, that highly personal experience of being a self, is achieved only by entering into fundamentally social spaces of difference, although the origin of those founding moments are lost to the subject herself (Ahmed 2002, p. 27, Butler 2005, p. 38).

The self is also fundamentally spatially informed and founded. The complicated geography of the racialized bodies in this LA high school includes: how race has materialized particularly in the US context; the immigration stories of the girls' families; the relationships to families and ‘home’ countries of Armenia, or Mexico, or the Philippines; the particular ethnic-racial composition of this high school; multi-racial geographies of LA; and the specifics of age and gender to the girls' racial practices. The list could go on. Each of the girls references these complicated trajectories and themes in her narrative, pointing to the unbounded nature of how each girl became ‘who she is’. Yet, while the racial territoriality of this one high school results from complex interactions, spatialities, histories, and subjects, the girls themselves try to understand the space of racial interaction at school in her own time, in her own individual place. As Ahmed (2000, p. 7) insinuates, the face-to-face encounter of bodies ‘does not simply happen in the privatized realm of the subject's relation to itself. Rather, in daily meetings with others, subjects are perpetually reconstituted: the work of identity formation is never over, but can be understood as the sliding across of subjects in their meetings with others’. The girls' pain and discomfort indicate the personal struggles each girl experiences as her ‘own’, yet these painful encounters and processes develop through the on-going formation of each girl's subjectivity and sense of self and are intimately social. The complicated geographies through which race came to be, and continues to be, personally invested, are fundamentally socially defined. The girls' pain marks the limits to which they conceptualize and extend their racialized bodies beyond their own individuality, despite their bodies and selves being produced through a long history and through multiple spatialities.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the special review editors and the blind reviewers for their many helpful comments.

Notes

[…] denotes eliminated text. I would like to thank my research assistant, Kathryn Linder, for her careful transcription of the tape recorded interviews.

Here Butler is discussing Foucault's work on power in terms of what it teaches about subjectivity.

She is referring to both physical and emotional pain.

I did not do an ethnographic project at this school. Thus, in the paper I explore the girls' narratives for the ways they create meaning through story-telling. I cannot provide contextual detail of girls' daily lives beyond what they told me.

I gratefully acknowledge a UCLA Faculty Senate Grant which provided these funds for participants.

I refrain from providing the source of these data or more detail on the school or its surrounding neighborhoods to protect the identity of the girls and their school's exact location.

I did not interview boys for this research. The research design centered on racial practices of femininity, and the fight only coincidentally changed my primary research motives. I did not have human subjects approval for interviewing boys, so I kept to my original plans to interview only girls even after the fight occurred.

Because Latinos and Armenians are the overwhelming majority of the school, it may be that I just need not meet girls who fit this possibility, or did not specifically talk to girls who mentioned black or Asian ‘rockers’.