‘Girly Latina versus girly American’
the articulation of levels of femininity through indexicality in a Latina student’s narrative explaining discriminatory classroom interactions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.29351Keywords:
Latinas, indexicality, discrimination, femininityAbstract
The construction of gender and race are constantly negotiated by community members, and both categories affect the way speakers see themselves and others. By analysing a Latina student’s narrative, this study explores how she articulates through the use of several indexical processes, not only her own identity but also her friend’s, in order to explain how their classmates perceive them. In this narrative, the speaker explains how different levels of femininity, ‘girly American’ versus ‘girly Latina’, affect the way Latinas are perceived and, in some cases, treated in discriminatory ways. This analysis finds that her articulation of different levels of femininity, and her arguments about how different stereotypes associated with Latinas may cause discrimination, shows how the construction of gender and race are interrelated and fluid, and how there are certain performances of gender more acceptable than others even within the heterosexual norm. This analysis shows how language practices are fundamental to create and circulate ideologies about gender and ethnicity, and how essential it is to understand these practices in order to recognise and challenge the discrimination faced by minority groups in the United States, especially women of colour.
References
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Madsen, L. M. (2013) ‘High’ and ‘low’ in urban Danish speech styles. Language in Society 42(2): 115–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404513000018
McCabe, J. (2009) Racial and gender microaggressions on a predominantly white campus: experiences of black, Latina/o and white undergraduates. Race, Gender and Class 16(1–2): 133–51.
Mendible, M. (2007a) Embodying Latinidad: an overview. In Mendible (2007b): 1–28.
Mendible, M. (ed.) (2007b) From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Molina Guzmán, I. and Valdivia, A. N. (2004) Brain, brow, and booty: Latina iconicity in US popular culture. The Communication Review 7: 205–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420490448723
Negrón, R. (2011) Ethnic Identification among Urban Latinos: Language and Flexibility. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishers.
O’Brien, E. (2008) The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living beyond the Racial Divide. New York: NYU Press.
Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E. (1996) Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity 407–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.
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Rivadeneyra, R. (2011) Gender and race portrayals on Spanish-language television. Sex Roles 65: 208–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0010-9
Rojas, V. (2007) Chusmas, chismes y escándalos: Latinas talk back to El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. In Mendible (2007b): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926515605961
Rojas-Sosa, D. (2016) The denial of racism in Latina/o students’ narratives about discrimination in the classroom. Discourse and Society 27: 69–94.
Roth, W. (2012) Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Taylor, D. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385318
Trechter, S. (2014) A marked man: the contexts of gender and ethnicity. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender (second edition) 335–52. Malden, MA: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch17
Van Dijk, T. (1993) Denying racism: elite discourse and racism. In J. Wrench and J. Solomos (eds) Racism and Migration in Western Europe 179–93. Oxford: Berg.
Vargas, D. (2010) Representations of Latina/o sexuality in popular culture. In M. Asencio (ed.) Latina/o Sexualities Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies 117–36. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Barrett, R. (2006) Language ideology and racial inequality: competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant. Language in Society 35(2): 163–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404506060088
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2010) Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (3rd edition). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bucholtz, M. (1999) You da Man: narrating the racial other in the linguistic production of white masculinity, Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 443–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00090
Bucholtz, M. (2001) The whiteness of nerds: superstandard English and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1): 84–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.84
Bucholtz, M. (2011) White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407
Bucholtz, M. and Lopez, Q. (2011) Performing blackness, forming whiteness: linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(5): 680–706. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00513.x
Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791178
Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511755064
Davila, A. (2001) Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
De Fina, A. (2000) Orientation in immigrant narratives: the role of ethnicity in the identification of characters. Discourse Studies 2(2): 131–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445600002002001
De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Fina, A. and King, K. (2011) Language problem or language conflict? Narratives of immigrant women’s experiences in the US. Discourse Studies 13(2): 163–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445610392135
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. and Bou-Franch, P (2014) ¿! Hispano y Blanco?! Racialización de la identidad latina en YouTube. Discurso and Sociedad 8(3): 427–61.
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Bou-Franch P. and Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2013) Despierten, Latinos (‘Wake up, Latinos’): Latino identity, US politics and YouTube. Journal of Language and Politics 12(4): 558–82. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.12.4.04bli
Gimenez, M. (1992) US ethnic politics: implications for Latin America. Latin American Perspectives 75 (19): 7–17 https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X9201900402
Hall, K. (1995) Lip service on the fantasy lines. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self 183–216. New York: Routledge.
Hill, J. (2008) The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732
Holmes, J. and Schnurr, S. (2011) ‘Doing femininity’ at work: more than just relational practice. In J. Coates and P. Pichler (eds) Language and Gender: A Reader (2nd edition) 315–31. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Lieblich, A., Mashiach, R. and Zilber, T. (1998) Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412985253
Lippi-Green, R. (1997) English with an Accent: Language Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge.
Lopez, Q. (2014) Aggressively feminine: the linguistic appropriation of sexualized blackness by white female characters in film. Gender and Language 8(3): 289–310. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v8i3.289
Madsen, L. M. (2013) ‘High’ and ‘low’ in urban Danish speech styles. Language in Society 42(2): 115–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404513000018
McCabe, J. (2009) Racial and gender microaggressions on a predominantly white campus: experiences of black, Latina/o and white undergraduates. Race, Gender and Class 16(1–2): 133–51.
Mendible, M. (2007a) Embodying Latinidad: an overview. In Mendible (2007b): 1–28.
Mendible, M. (ed.) (2007b) From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Molina Guzmán, I. and Valdivia, A. N. (2004) Brain, brow, and booty: Latina iconicity in US popular culture. The Communication Review 7: 205–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420490448723
Negrón, R. (2011) Ethnic Identification among Urban Latinos: Language and Flexibility. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishers.
O’Brien, E. (2008) The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living beyond the Racial Divide. New York: NYU Press.
Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E. (1996) Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity 407–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. and Charalambous, C. (2012) Crossing. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism 482–98. London: Routledge.
Rivadeneyra, R. (2011) Gender and race portrayals on Spanish-language television. Sex Roles 65: 208–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0010-9
Rojas, V. (2007) Chusmas, chismes y escándalos: Latinas talk back to El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. In Mendible (2007b): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926515605961
Rojas-Sosa, D. (2016) The denial of racism in Latina/o students’ narratives about discrimination in the classroom. Discourse and Society 27: 69–94.
Roth, W. (2012) Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Taylor, D. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385318
Trechter, S. (2014) A marked man: the contexts of gender and ethnicity. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender (second edition) 335–52. Malden, MA: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch17
Van Dijk, T. (1993) Denying racism: elite discourse and racism. In J. Wrench and J. Solomos (eds) Racism and Migration in Western Europe 179–93. Oxford: Berg.
Vargas, D. (2010) Representations of Latina/o sexuality in popular culture. In M. Asencio (ed.) Latina/o Sexualities Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies 117–36. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Published
2018-05-11
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Rojas-Sosa, D. (2018). ‘Girly Latina versus girly American’: the articulation of levels of femininity through indexicality in a Latina student’s narrative explaining discriminatory classroom interactions. Gender and Language, 12(1), 61-86. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.29351
