''I was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures''

I met a few hours earlier. Kiara is 22 years old with a light brown com-
plexion and long, wavy hair that suggests a multiracial heritage. Her style
of dress is 1980s-retro. She wears a purple lace glove with the finger cut
off on her right hand, a short-sleeved jacket over a yellow and green Brazil
fútbol jersey, and tight denim jeans that ride low, causing her belly to peek
out sometimes between her jeans and her jersey. Two large star-shaped
earrings dangle from her ears and a small white flower is tucked into her
hair. She was born and raised in the Fillmore, a once-vibrant Black neigh-
borhood that is now quickly gentrifying after decades of blight and
neglect. I have conducted field research here since 2005 and just finished
interviewing Kiara inside the café. Kiara’s grandmother, like many older
Black Fillmore residents, migrated from the South. She owned the house
in which she raised Kiara after Kiara’s mother was killed by her father,
who, Kiara tells me, was a big-time drug dealer in the neighborhood
before he was sent to prison. Kiara remembers how her father’s tough rep-
utation influenced how others interacted with her in the neighborhood;
even though she was a child she garnered a level of respect. She learned
early on how to manage her interactions with others differently in differ-
ent situations: “[as a child] I had the street element, and I was aggressive
for the streets, pretty for the pictures.”

Kiara is helping to collect signatures for an antiredevelopment cam-

paign in Hunter’s Point-Bayview, a larger and even more distressed Black
neighborhood in San Francisco. Kiara offers to give me a tour of the

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 1, February 2009 89-93
DOI: 10.1177/0891243208326676
© 2009 Sociologists for Women in Society

by Malgorzata Czyzewska on September 5, 2010

gas.sagepub.com

Downloaded from

GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2009

Fillmore and I follow along as she walks with clipboard in hand. Kiara’s
play on mainstream and local expectations of race, gender, class, sexual-
ity, and power is on full display during her brief interactions with
strangers. She confidently, assertively, even aggressively approaches men
on the street to sign her petition and then draws on normative expectations
of manhood and femininity to encourage them to add their names to the
list: Babies and women are in danger, she tells them, letting the implica-
tion that real men would sign up to protect babies and women hang in the
air. She switches from aggressive to demure just long enough to flirt with
a man passing by on the street and then to defiant when she passes the
police station on the corner. “They don’t give a fuck!” she declares loudly.
A few moments later we stop to observe the RIPs scratched into the con-
crete sidewalk of a neighborhood block “where a lot of the trouble hap-
pens.” Kiara calls these scratches that mark the murders of young Black
men “modern-day hieroglyphics.” She gets silent and still, but just for a
moment. She has work to do so she keeps on moving.

Twenty years after the publication of West and Zimmerman’s “Doing

Gender” (1987) critical and feminist scholars have the analytical tools to
observe and represent Kiara’s interactions on this city block in ways that
illuminate how gender, race, and class are accomplished during situated
interaction. An interactional analysis of Kiara’s walk through the Fillmore
reveals moments where the accomplishment of gender, race, or class
emerges as most significant. Such an analysis is also likely to reveal
moments when Kiara violates or manipulates the normative expectations
associated with categorical identity, and the consequences of her doing so.
Yet, as Patricia Hill Collins writes in her critical response to “Doing
Difference” (1995), such an analysis, on its own, is not likely to reveal how
the social contexts in which these interactions take place are shaped by the
“messy” intersection of various systems of oppression (1995, 491–94).
Kiara and other neighborhood residents describe these oppressive forces as
“Redevelopment,” referring to the urban redevelopment agency that many
longtime Fillmore residents hold responsible for decades of neighborhood
underdevelopment and exploitation. Another oppressive force that has
shaped life for young people in the neighborhood—boys and girls—is the
local police force, including the city’s gang task force, which has grown
stronger in the nation’s never-ending War on Drugs.

If we focus only on interactional accomplishments of categorical iden-

tity we can miss the chance to illuminate the recursive relationship
between Kiara’s interactions with others, her identity (or identities), and
these larger oppressive forces, which are shaped by various overlapping

by Malgorzata Czyzewska on September 5, 2010

gas.sagepub.com

Downloaded from

and intersecting–isms. To be fair, I do not think such an omission is a nec-
essary or desired outcome of the theoretical frameworks of “doing gen-
der” or “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995). However, the
ubiquitous use (or misuse) of the respective frameworks can sometimes
leave the impression that a scholar’s most important objective is to “test”
the respective theoretical approaches—spotting gender or difference here,
there, and everywhere—not, instead, to use these frameworks to illumi-
nate the complicated and sometimes contradictory ways in which situated
interaction is linked to structural circumstances.

My recent ethnographic work on Black girls and inner-city violence

does not set out to test either framework. My analysis is deeply and simul-
taneously informed by the interactional concerns of West, Zimmerman,
and Fenstermaker and the theoretical and political concerns of Patricia
Hill Collins, Howard Winant, and other critical race and feminist scholars.
After the sometimes contentious but important debates on how to concep-
tualize intersecting identities and oppressions, I find that drawing on both
approaches helps me to more accurately represent the lives of young
women like Kiara. Drawing on both interactional analysis and Black
feminist thought encourages us to situate Black women’s and girl’s expe-
riences, including their interactional experiences, at the center of our
empirical investigations. Such an integrative approach challenges us to
develop better explanations for how interaction, identity, and various
structural–isms are linked. Additionally, such an approach pushes social
scientists to consider Black women and girls not simply as problems to be
solved or explained (e.g., single mothers or “violent” girls) but rather
draws attention to the dilemmas and contradictions that Black women and
girls encounter and in some measure reconcile in their everyday lives.
This is a Black feminist interactional studies, perhaps.

At the same time that she is “doing gender” or “doing difference” with

others, for example, Kiara is also deeply invested in a struggle for survival.
“It’s about being a survivor,” she responds when I ask her how she devel-
oped the strong sense of independence that she revealed during our inter-
view, “and we have to survive.” This overarching concern for survival was
also revealed during my field research amongst African American inner-
city girls in Philadelphia (Jones 2004 & 2008). In a recent article, for
example, I describe how inner-city girls work the “code of the street,”
(Jones 2008) which is described by urban ethnographer and race scholar
Elijah Anderson (1999) as a system of accountability that governs formal
and informal interactions in distressed urban areas, especially interpersonal
violence. At the heart of “the code” is a battle for respect and manhood. In

Jones / GENDER, DIFFEERENCES, AND THE INNER-CITY GIRL

by Malgorzata Czyzewska on September 5, 2010

gas.sagepub.com

Downloaded from

Black Sexual Politics (2004), Patricia Hill Collins writes that as Black men
embrace “the code,” they embrace a hegemonic masculinity that is based
on the coupling of strength with dominance—white men with wealth and
power are able to demonstrate such masculinity through economic or mil-
itary dominance (in addition to physical dominance). Poor Black men in
distressed urban areas must rely primarily on physical domination, which
makes them and others in their community more vulnerable to violent
victimization.

African American inner-city girls may have no manhood to defend, yet

the shared circumstances of inner-city life engender a shared concern for
physical safety and survival. Over time, girls coming of age in distressed
urban areas come to realize too how respect, reputation, and retaliation—
the three R’s at the heart of the code—organize their social worlds. Much
like Kiara, the girls I met knew quite well the situations in which present-
ing oneself as “aggressive,” “good,” or “pretty” paid off. Listening to the
stories of these girls, it is difficult to imagine them as held hostage to
accountability. Instead, they strategically choose from a variety of gender,
race, and class displays depending on the situation, the public identity
they are invested in crafting, and in service of a survival project that has
historically defined the lives of poor, Black women and girls in the United
States—a project with especially high stakes in neighborhoods like the
one in which Kiara has grown up.

These stories complicate our understandings of “doing gender” and

“doing difference” in ways that take account the complexities of structure
and its intersections with race, class and gender. Twenty years after the
publication of “Doing Gender,” and over a decade after “Doing Difference,”
maybe the most fitting tribute is not only to offer a critique but also to use
our knowledge of the social worlds of girls like Kiara to complicate these
frameworks in ways that may or may not have originally been imagined
by their authors.

NOTE

1. Kiara is a pseudonym.

REFERENCES

Anderson, E. 1999. Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of

the inner city. New York: W.W. Norton Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1995. Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s “Doing

difference.” Gender & Society 9:491-94.

GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2009

by Malgorzata Czyzewska on September 5, 2010

gas.sagepub.com

Downloaded from