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One of the Guys, by Jody Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Dead End Kids: Gang Girls and the Boys They Know, by Mark Fleisher. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 278 pages.
In her study of present-day gangs, Jody Miller interviewed the female members of several gangs (and a like number of nongang girls) in Columbus (OH) and St. Louis, and describes several gender-mixed gangs from the girls' viewpoint. Mark Fleisher's book is a participant observation study, mainly of one gang (the Fremont Hustlers) in Kansas City (MO). Miller's gangs are rather homogeneous African-American groups; Fleisher's are mixed racially as well as by gender. Miller mixes quantitative and ethnographic methods; Fleisher's study is strictly ethnographic. Yet despite these differences, the two authors describe in very similar terms what appear to be youth gangs that exist almost everywhere today except perhaps in the inner-city areas of chronic gang cities.
Fleisher's Kansas City gang members are adolescents. Some of Miller's gangs include adults, who generally are gang leaders (OGs). These gangs are more violent than those studied by Fleisher. Members of the gangs in both studies deal drugs, but this is not the main source of violence. It exists in their everyday lives, inside and outside the gangs, and the members were involved in violence before they joined the gangs.
From this point of similarity, the two authors take different paths. Fleisher concentrates mainly on the "dead end" road that his gang members are traveling, while Miller explores in meticulous detail the role of gender in shaping gang girls' experiences.
Both books read much like well-written novels. Miller methodically leads the reader through a well-documented but colorful analysis of gang girls' experiences and how they view gang life, vividly illustrated in their language and feelings as expressed in interviews. She makes the reader wonder, "What did Miller intend by the title of this book? Did she mean to put a question mark after
One of the Guys? Or an exclamation point? Could there be a more subtle meaning?" The reader is kept in suspense, so I will not give away the ending here except to say that it is enjoyable and enlightening. Fleisher reveals his conclusions in his introduction; then he leads the reader...