Liminal Spaces: Examining discursive negotiations between adolescent females in an
interethnic friendship”
It has been documented that adolescent females are the most difficult social group to penetrate.
As they move from junior high school to high school, their friendship selection patterns become
much more stringent, often excluding others who do not share their class and ethnic background.
This paper examines the exception to this data, as I present dialogic interactions between two
adolescent females—one African American; the other Anglo-Latina—who have been friends for
over eleven years. Using the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, social language, speech genre,
voice, addressivity, and answerability, I analyze strategies the girls use to maintain their long-term
friendship despite latent cultural insults. Under some of the tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis,
I trace how this negotiation is done through the constant shifting of power relations between the
girls by invoking Foucault’s notion of power as an analytical tool.