“Pay Attention in Class… [and] Don't Get Pregnant”: A Discourse of Academic Success among Adolescent Latinas

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the significance of an urban high school in the process of gender and sexual identity construction for a group of adolescent Latinas in Los Angeles. I explore multiple discourses of adolescent femininity, masculinity, sexual morality, and achievement conveyed through consecutive, in-depth group discussions with friendship groups of young Latinas. I argue that for these young women, studenthood is not a generic stage in the life course, but one that is embedded in society's expectations of and anxieties about young women. In and through dominant discourses and institutional practices they are constituted as vulnerable and as out of control in terms of sexual desire (their own as well as others' for them). In a ‘spatiality of protection’ they are positioned, precariously, as singularly responsible for both their academic diligence and their bounded sexuality in order to succeed as young women in high school and realise their goals as adult women beyond high school.