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Latina Girls, Sexuality and Gendered Messages
Girls receive messages about what it means to be a girl from a variety of sources, including families, peers, schools and the media (Orenstein, 1994; Brumberg, 1997; Adler and Adler, 1998; Hesse-Biber, 2007). As they approach puberty, many girls begin to develop an awareness of their own sexuality (Pipher, 1996; Lamb, 2001). Young women must often negotiate a complicated terrain replete with gendered messages about how they should feel, think and act. These messages typically focus on young women's sexuality with an emphasis on how they should express themselves and how they should act in relation to others. Such messages have historically been consistent with traditional gender scripts, which dictate that women should be sexually inexperienced, ignorant about their own bodies, heterosexual and demurely attractive (Tolman, 2002). Although these gender scripts are changing in the United States (Laumann and Gagnon, 1995), it is still the case that young women who dare to challenge traditional gender scripts, by being explicitly sexual, run the risk of being labeled as "bad" or worse, a "slut" (White, 2002).
Race, ethnicity, gender and class often inform the classification of girls as either "good" or "bad." While the good, innocent, virginal girl continues to be an idealized image of womanhood associated with white females, it remains largely unattainable for young women of color, who are often characterized as hypersexual, manipulative, violent and sexually dangerous (Stephens and Phillips, 2003; Garcia, 2009). The available gender scripts for girls of color, particularly Latinas and African Americans, emphasize their innate "badness." While girls who are explicitly sexual are still demonized as "bad" girls and "sluts," those who are in monogamous relationships are also treated with suspicion (Stephens and Phillips, 2003). Such stereotypical images represent powerful forms of domination and control because they shape how young women of color view themselves, how they relate to others, and how others relate to them (Bettie, 2000; Chavez, 2004; Rolón-Dow, 2004; Garcia, 2009). They also serve to maintain a status quo of gendered relations that continues to marginalize and demonize young women of color.
The purpose of this study is to explore how one group of ethnic minority girls - "high-risk" Latina girls - view themselves in relation to how they think others...