Pathologizing Latinas

Racialized Girlhood, Behavioral Diagnosis, and California's Foster Care System

in Girlhood Studies
Author:
Isabella C. Restrepo University of California, Santa Barbara icrestrepo@ucsb.edu

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9502-9724
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2019.120303
Keywords:
carceral; control; criminalization; Oppositional Defiant Disorder; punishment; resistance; transcarceral continuum
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Abstract

Scholars of the welfare system have explored the racialized criminalization of mothers of color who are punished by the foster care system, through control of their children, when they are unable to meet the ideals of middle-class motherhood but have yet to fully articulate a language to understand the ways in which this criminalization and punishment extends to youth once they are placed in the foster care system. Using ethnographic interviews with agents of the care system, I explore the ways in which the system pathologizes Latinas’ quotidian acts of resistance and survival like their use of silences through the behavioral diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). I argue that California's foster care system is an arm of the transcarceral continuum, marking girls of color and their strategies of resistance as pathological, thereby criminalizing them through the diagnosis of behavioral disorders.

Contributor Notes

Isabella Restrepo (ORCID: 0000-0002-9502-9724) is a doctoral candidate in the department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores the criminalization of California's Latina girls in foster care. Restrepo earned her master's degree from Rutgers University in Women's and Gender Studies where she used semiotics to analyze ubiquitous Chicanx cultural iconography like La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, and Lotería. She recharges by being outside and working with girls on probation or in foster care. Email: icrestrepo@ucsb.edu

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Girlhood Studies

An Interdisciplinary Journal

Cover Girlhood Studies
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
17
Keywords:
carceral; control; criminalization; Oppositional Defiant Disorder; punishment; resistance; transcarceral continuum
Print Publication Date:
01 Dec 2019
Online Publication Date:
01 Dec 2019
Copyright:
© Berghahn Books 2019

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