Frenemies and Friendly Fire at Underground Railroad High
The first chapter presents the theoretical framework of this book by foregrounding structural violence, highlighting the nexus between culturally approved hegemonic female- specific power and the reproduction of gender inequality. It looks through the prism of symbolic violence and the way its perceived ordinariness, normality, or blandness is implicated in its misrecognition among school officials and the entire student body. It is especially devoted to chronicling the anthropological theoretical claims shaping the ethnographic data presented in this book, especially as they are related to the society’s major social categories: race, class, and particularly the intersectionality of race and gender. It is here that the author begins to propose a theory of gender-specific competition in which the often hidden and/or misrecognized objective of female competition is to lose—in order to win.