Racialized Gender and the Punishment of Violent High School Girls

• In Event: Structural and Macro Perspectives on Gender

Abstract

During the past three decades, feminist researchers have made significant contributions to our understanding of how systems of male domination influence girls’ violence as well as the way that violent girls are punished in schools and the justice system (Artz 1998; Jones 2010; Chesney-Lind & Belknap 2004; Chesney-Lind & Morash 2006; Schaffner 2006). Although there is considerable support for a multiracial feminist perspective in criminology (Proctor-Burgess 2006), to date, feminist examinations of girls’ violence tend to overlook historic race-based systems of control. This paper attempts to fill some gaps in the literature by relying on data from a nine-year ethnographic study conducted in two public high schools on Oahu, Hawaii. More specifically, this study reveals how imperialist systems of racial control deployed in the Pacific and the historic racialization of indigenous women played out in the present realities of girls who were designated as being Native Hawaiian, Samoan, or Tongan. Such historic race-based inequalities seemed to set up a contemporary system of racialized gender (Pyke and Johnson 2003) that shaped, first, how students, school staff, and parents explained girls’ violence and, second, how and whether violent high school girls were punished.

Author

• Katherine Irwin, University of Hawaii at Manoa