Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 105

Some feminist gang scholars have situated girls in gangs as “bargaining with the patriarchy” (L. A. Hughes et al., 2019; J. Miller, 2001), a concept borrowed from Kandiyoti (1988) that explains marginalized women and girls’ negotiations with a sexist culture and how accepting parts of it is both rewarding and negating. Girls’ gang membership has been situated in “bargaining with the patriarchy” whereby the young women “accept and help perpetuate the marginal position of girls in the gang in exchange for social benefits of gang members, such as protection and respectability in the streets” (L. A. Hughes et al., 2019, p. 4). Notably, L. A. Hughes and colleagues’ (2019) recent analysis of historic 1959 to 1962 Chicago girl gang data did not find girl gang members striving to be “one of the guys” and attributed this to the girls feeling less empowered to try to “pursue equal footing with the boys” given the time (p. 20). Perhaps nowhere is this “bargaining with the patriarchy” more intense than among women in El Salvadoran gangs, with their “precarious” agency:

The ways in which the link between women, transgression and violence is usually addressed, by associating passivity or limited agency with femininity in contexts of vulnerability and harm … the complexity of approaching these … tensions and paradoxes that their violent action entails, since their incorporation into a group such as Salvadoran gangs—which seeks homologation in/of identity through the exercise of violence—means that agency can only be produced from their subjection and simultaneous deviation from the (male) frame of production of the gang-member-prototype. (Santacruz Giralt, 2019, p. 1)

Girls’ length of membership in gangs is shorter than that of boys (Panfil & Peterson, 2015; Pyrooz et al., 2013), which could be further evidence of their independence and agency. Not surprisingly, some (but not all) girls leave gangs due to pregnancy or becoming mothers (Fleisher & Krienert, 2004; Moloney, Hunt, Joe-Laidler, & MacKenzie, 2011; J. W. Moore, 1991). Research on boys/men in gangs as fathers is almost nonexistent.