"Bad" Girls

A book by fourth-grader Rosa hints at the tensions some girls may feel between operating within a discourse of love and romance and an alternative 'good girl/good student' discourse. Love and romance may represent a sanctioned cultural pathway for girls, but they receive conflicting messages about when and how they are to embark on it, such that in certain times and places for girls to operate within a discourse of love and romance is to position themselves as "bad." This may be especially true for Latinas, who are often stereotyped in good/bad binaries, and for girls within the context of schooling, where being “good” generally requires a denial of one’s sexuality. In the initial draft of her story, Rosa wrote about a girl who watched too many soap operas, talked about them incessantly in school, kissed a boy while under their influence, and performed miserably as a student until her teacher talked to her mother. At that point the girl stopped watching novelas and became a model student.

-Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Good guys and "bad" girls: Identity construction by Latina and Latino student writers in Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse