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The sexual attraction of racism: Hispanic and Armenian teenage girls explain a school race riot in Los Angeles, California, USA
| During the winter and spring of 2005, Los Angeles public high schools broke out in a spate of racially/ethnically motivated riots. In this paper, I will examine how Latina and Armenian girls at one of these high schools explained the reasons for this violence. I will focus both their narratives regarding gender-masculinity and racial-ethnic difference (in this case, between Hispanics and Armenians). The girls criticize masculinity, especially the ways that boys are ‘competitive’ and ‘stupid,’ yet they rarely criticize the ways that boys compete and fight with other boys in racialized conflicts. Furthermore, the girls often valorize boys’ strength as ‘sexy,’ despite criticizing boys’ violent behavior. I suggest that the girls have a harder time analyzing racial and ethnic conflict than they do gender conflict, and I ask what this difficulty presents for conceptions of the intersections of social differences like race, gender, and sexuality.
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