ABSTRACT
While inner-city life has garnered much research attention, we still know too little about how teens protect themselves and combat their vulnerability within a hostile inner-city environment. Sexuality is a primary instrument for doing so. This ethnographic study investigates the sexual strategies a group of teens used to establish control, status, and meaningful identities in response to their environment. Drawing on a doing difference perspective, it conceptualizes sexuality as something teens do ideologically and interactionally. It finds that boys’ sexual strategies allowed them to establish status and control but drew on gender discourses and dynamics that reinforced male entitlement and exploitation of girls. Girls attempted to balance their desire for attention from and status through boys. It discusses the relationship between gender and sexuality, as well as the implications of how the teens do heterosexuality.
