Title: Surviving the streets
First published: 1997
Description: If you've ever been a girl, you will want to read this book to understand how, as an adult, you can conduct research with and for young women/girls. There are many youth cultures; this study focuses on punk-identified girls living on their own in San Francisco.

Unraveling the complex social constructions of gender, poverty, being on your own, having green hair, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and the social production of space in an urban environment is groundbreaking work, because there are so few studies about young women. Researchers have ignored the, policy makers have pathologized them, and most people fear and don't like them. This study argues that young women make competent decisions in the face of dominant moralistic policies which criminalize their sexuality, independence, and spatial choices to sleep in abandoned buildings or the streets.

Incorporating analyses of over 100 years of interdisciplinary research about girls and 10 years of reporting in five major national newspapers, this study gives life to the static social construction of the girl on her own in our society. Photos taken by the study participants, capturing their physical and social environments, are categorized and discussed to bring to light the sophistication of punk girls' environments and the limited choices they face. The exchange of cameras in this project also created a commodity for young women to trade on their homelessness.

This book challenges the traditional notions of "youth at risk," and girls on their own, and exposes the historical betrayal of their epistemologies.
Subjects: Punk culture, Street youth, Homeless youth, Social conditions, Young women, Homeless girls, Girls, Poor children, Homeless women
Places: San Francisco, California
LC classification: HV1437.S35 P45 1997