Dughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female - Book Review

Adolescence, Fall, 2002

KENNY, Lorraine Delia. Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 256pp. $50.00 (h), $20.00 (p).

White middle-class suburbia represents all that is considered "normal" in the United States, especially to the people who live its privileged life. Part ethnography, part cultural study, Daughters of Suburbia focuses on the lives of teenage girls from this world -- the world of the Long Island, New York, middle school that author Lorraine Kenny once attended -- to examine how standards of normalcy define gender, exercise power, and reinforce the cultural practices of whiteness. In order to move beyond characterizations of "the normal" (a loaded term that can obscure much of what actually defines this culture), Kenny highlights both the experiences of the middle-school students and the stories of three notoriously "bad" white middle-class teenage girls: Amy Fisher, the "Pistol-Packing Long Island Lolita," Cheryl Pierson, who hired a classmate to murder her father, and Emily Heinrichs, a former white supremacist and a teen mom. Arguing that middle-class whiteness thrives on its invisibility -- on not being reco gnized as a cultural phenomenon -- Kenny suggests that what the media identify as aberrant, as well as what they choose not to represent, are the keys to identifying the unspoken assumptions that constitute middle-class whiteness as a cultural norm. Daughters of Suburbia makes the familiar strange and gives substance to an otherwise intangible social position.