In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Immigrant Girls in Multicultural Amsterdam juggling ambivalent cultural messages marion den uyl lenie brouwer At school, they tell me I need to work on my verbal and non-verbal presentation and expression. Well, then you try. And then you’re with your classmates . In the classroom. And then my teacher says in front of the whole class something like, like that is not verbally expressive, or something like that. And at that moment I think: what the hell is this? I’m trying, I’m doing my best. I don’t like it when people try to change me. Take me as I am, or don’t take me at all. I am who I am. And then it just came out. I said: “Fuck the whole verbal and nonverbal shit, just fuck it!” These are the words of Davinya, a teenage girl from the Bijlmer, a disadvantaged , culturally diverse neighborhood in the district of Amsterdam South-East. At the time of the interview, Davinya was seventeen and living with her Surinamese mother; her Antillean father had moved back to the Caribbean and started a new family there. Davinya continued, “When one of my friends calls, I say: ‘Bitch! Whore! Cunt! Cow!’ When my mother hears that, she really stares at me, disapprovingly, but I say to her that it’s just the way we say hallo to each other, we’re not calling each other names.” Davinya was far from shy, timid, or soft; she spoke loudly and, often, crudely. She said that she enjoys the cultural codes she shares with her friends and that she wants to be respected for who she is. Her native Dutch teacher tries to polish and soften her behavior and language, and her Surinamese Dutch mother frowns at the rude communication codes of Davinya and her friends. The cultural messages that her teacher and her mother try to instill in her can be interpreted as “decent,” that is, these messages represent a set of values associated with various aspects of middle-class culture. The teenage girls in our research area are growing up in a district with other immigrants from more than one hundred different countries of origin . The girls therefore have to deal with the different cultural messages, or desired behavior, that their parents and teachers transmit to them. These 65 messages, however, have to compete with less decent messages—with “street” messages of desired behavior—offered by the girls’ peers, the media, and street role models. These various messages can be incongruent or even conflicting.1 The population of the Bijlmer is composed mainly of immigrants from a variety of non-Western countries such as Surinam, Dutch Antilles, several African countries, in particular Ghana, and some Asian countries. During our anthropological study, which we carried out during several periods between 2004 and 2007, we interviewed teenage girls, mothers and fathers, youth workers, social workers, teachers, and district officials. We also attended discussion meetings and observed at various locations such as schools, churches, and community centers. During our research, we studied the girls’ dreams and desires, the tensions and conflicting cultural messages they are confronted with, and the ways they negotiate, as active or competent agents, these different cultural messages.2 The importance of girls’ own voices and their articulation of their needs and wants must be a centerpiece of girls’ studies. We argue, in line with Sherry Ortner, who advocates that we look for agency and for signi ficant intentionalities, that girls perform as active agents in dealing with the different messages they receive from parents, school, peers, and the media. In Ortner’s words, agency is “defined minimally as a sense that the self is an authorized social being.”3 In this chapter, we first discuss the dynamics of the different cultural messages by using the conceptual framework of Janis Lynn Goodman, who studied identity formation among African American schoolgirls in innercity Philadelphia.4 We use her framework to analyze the different cultural scripts of female identity and behavior in our research area. Next, we elaborate on the social context of the district, in particular its “superdiversity,” which refers to the local multitude of ethnicities, religious convictions, and histories of migration.5 Our analysis pays special attention to the important role of mothers in a neighborhood where the majority of children grow up in single-parent households. We then focus on the core role played by sexual codes and sexual behavior in differentiating and negotiating...

Share