Homegirls in the Public Sphere (review)

Marie "Keta" Miranda writes in Homegirls in the Public Sphere that she hopes "to unsettle the typical image of girls in gangs" (6). She does more than that. This lucidly written book foregrounds the co-participants in the study, the ten gang members from the community of Fruitvale, in Oakland, California. Miranda's work establishes a collaboration with the young women and produces a study that they help shape; such an approach has heretofore been absent from other works on youths in gangs. John Hagedorn's work in Detroit and James Vigil's work in Los Angeles, for example, while providing insight and early research on the subject of youths in gangs, focus exclusively on the male members of the gangs and do not purport to include them in designing the study. Miranda offers a refreshingly feminist analysis as she and the young women develop a "co-discursive partnership reflecting our different stakes in the issue of representation" (5). Over a period of time, Miranda "hangs out" with the young women and collaborates with them in pursuing the making of the video It's a Homie Thang! and the presenting of the video to audiences. The result is transformative as it changes the project's goals and impacts the researcher, her project, and the young collaborators as well. Her exploration of how girls in gangs are retranslated and perceived by others and how they represent themselves becomes a study of how such representation occurs in public arenas and how the young women become agents in structuring and shaping these representations. The approach, the findings, and the writing make this an innovative and important addition to the literature in the field of ethnography and in urban and Women's Studies.

The recent move to acknowledge the ethnographer's subject position in any study and to actively reflect on the role of the ethnographer in shaping any results of a study bodes well for fields that use ethnographic methods of data gathering. While Miranda weaves such a self-awareness throughout the text of Homegirls, she devotes an entire chapter, "An Ethnographer's Tale," to the issue. Here she presents an ethnographic vignette where she outlines her own trepidation at the outset of the project, her grappling with serious and complicated questions of power relations in relation to the girls and her privileged position as a university doctoral student doing research in a community center. She further explores the ways that the project evolves from her initial plans to a look at the representations of the girls and the locations where such representations occur in the public sphere around their community and outside of it.

Seeped in Clifford's and Rosaldo's methodology and theories of how ethnographic work must turn to particular cases in interpretation, Miranda's multi-layered text involves levels of story and of analysis and finds that the young women do indeed have a voice; the subaltern does speak and not just speaks but presents and re-presents her position and her location in space and time, in the sitio y lengua to use Emma Perez's terms, a place where they are the ones that render their reality real for themselves and others.

Using Chela Sandoval's analytical model, Miranda manages "to situate the expressions of resistance and or accommodation that the girls exercise within each of the public places where they speak" (107). Additionally, her discussion of subaltern public places as sites for challenging power structures and expected social scripts illustrates how the young women situate themselves within traditional spheres of public discourse, such as the conferences and other public venues where they present their video and engage in question-and-answer exchanges with their audiences.

Miranda further grapples with the constant self-analysis after her data gathering, as it were, and in the writing phase as well as in the public presentation. Careful not to fall prey to "essentialist solidarity" with her collaborators, she is a member of the group ever...