Home   |   Lg & Gender   |   Lg & Adolescence   |   Gascon   |   Courses   |   3rd Wave

The Preadolescent Heterosexual Market

This project is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in elementary and then middle school, following two age cohorts from fifth through seventh grades. The cohorts were from very different but neighboring neighborhoods in San Jose, California. Steps Elementary serves a primarily poor and highly diverse student body, with a large cohort of Latino, Asian, African American and Pacific Island kids. Fields Elementary serves a primarily White Anglo working class and middle class population. Christi Cervantes, now teaching at University of California at Sacramento, worked with me at Fields. (The link here is to her old page at UIUC because it's more informative, but here's her Sacramento info as well.)

The project focuses on the emergence of the adolescent peer social order, in order to understand how it emerges from a child social order, how gender differences in phonology come about, how adolescent linguistic styles emerge from kid talk, and how to theorize style as social practice. The social action in both schools centers around the emergence of a peer-based social order, as kids pull themselves away from adult domination. And as their social arrangements move away from normatively asexual into normative heterosexual, the new social order centers around an emerging heterosexual market. This market will eventually become the basis for an adolescent social order. You can download my paper on the heterosexual market.

Micha Rinkus and Rebecca Regos

The linguistic analysis has begun with an examination of the Northern California Vowel Shift. I began the phonetic analysis with graduate student Laura Staum. Sarah Pritchard, Junior Linguistics Major at Smith College, worked on the project in the summer of 2004. Senior Linguistics majors, Rebecca Regos and Micha Rinkus, have done the bulk of the phonetic work. The social focus so far has been on the split of /ae/, in which occurences raise before nasals and lower elsewhere. This appears to be a change in progress in the White Anglo dialect, and it functions as a stylistic resource for kids at Fields. Most particularly, girls participating in the heterosexual market tend to have a greater split than other girls; and these girls also increase the split when they're speaking in a heightened style (e.g. when they're engaged in social drama). This effect is shown on the Northern California Vowel Shift Page. At Steps, however, in the Latino-dominated heterosexual market, there is an inverse relation between /ae/ splitting and participation in the market. Some Anglo kids at Steps do show the split, but not nearly at the levels that appear at Fields. Stay tuned for more.