The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion
In this ground-breaking ethnography of girls on a playground, Goodwin offers a window into their complex social worlds.
- Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other
- Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups
- Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others
- Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series
2. Multimodality, Conflict, and Rationality in Girls’ Games.
3. Social Dimensions of a Popular Girls’ Clique.
4. Social Organization, Opposition, and Directives in the Game of Jump Rope.
5. Language Practices for Indexing Social Status: Stories, Descriptions, Brags, and Comparisons.
6. Stance and Structure in Assessment and Gossip Activity.
7. Constructing Social Difference and Exclusion in Girls’ Groups.
Appendix A: Transcription Symbols.
Appendix B: Jump Rope Rhymes.
Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of the now-classic He-Said, She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (1991). Her primary research interests are on the ethnography of communication, human interaction, conversation analysis, language and gender, workplace ethnography, and children's social organization.
- Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other.
- Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups.
- Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others.
” The book offers both rich and rigorous ways of looking at children's naturally situated conduct that speak(s) to larger concerns of social science research.” "It is clearly of great value to students of language and social interaction, interpersonal communication scholars, and researchers concerned with the development of communication competence or with group processes…” (International Journal of Communication)