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This paper will examine talk and physical interactions between Heather and Erika, two
adolescent girls—one Anglo-Latina; the other African American—who have been engaged in a
long-term interethnic friendship. I will address how interethnic friendships are maintained through
talk and physical interaction. More specifically, I intend to focus on how power is exercised and
exhibited in their talk and physical interactions without destroying this friendship. The young
women in this study have identified themselves along ethnic lines. This is revealed in their
dialogue with each other and me. Using the Bakhtinian analytical tools of social language,
speech genre and voice as ethnic indicators, I have determined that evidence of distinct racial
and ethnic socialization can be found in the girls' talk. Based on this premise, I will show the
“politics of representation” at work as they try, often unknowingly, to define themselves, each
other, and others outside of this dyad through talk. I will also examine power processes at work,
as they are exhibited through ethnic and maturity-related speech markers in addition to the girls’
physical interactions with each other. Though the Bakhtinian tools used here help reveal ethnic
markers in speech, this does not mean that these young women are locked into a particular
ethnicized (essentialized) speech. They often use several resources available to them to create
liminal discursive spaces within which they negotiate their friendship. With the use of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA), Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, and Foucault’s conception of power, it
will become clear that as social positions are fluid in interaction, so too are language, meaning
and power in the “politics of representation.” The subjects in this study were observed in their
freshman, junior and senior years of high school, but the data presented here will rely on one
particular encounter at the end of their freshman year to exhibit how friendship operates on
cultural boundaries.
Literature Review
Though the participants had been friends for over eleven years when this study began, it
was suggested (by a close relative of one of the participants in this study) that this friendship was
at risk of deterioration due to strong racial segregation in their high school. DuBois & Hirsch
Convention