This ethnographic study examines the ways in which a group of American low-income Black teenagers construct affirming identities through heterosexuality. The youth undertake a number of strategies to create and protect their heterosexual identities, including adopting heterosexist ideologies, conflating heterosexuality with gender nonconformity, disassociating from gay-coded behaviors, and threatening nonconformists. These strategies allow girls and boys to fashion themselves as moral, legitimate, and superior to others: benefits they otherwise lack. While previous research suggests that policing sexuality is a way to construct masculinities, this study finds that policing gender is a way to affirm heterosexuality.

The concept of emotional capital suggests that adults transfer emotion management skills to children in ways that are consequential for the social reproduction of inequalities. Using ethnographic data from a popular after-school program, this study analyzes the emotional capital transmitted to low-income black girls by staff. They passed on four aspects of emotional capital: stifling attitude, being emotionally accountable for peers, sympathizing with adult authority figures, and emotional distancing from cultural "dysfunction." Staff intended to teach girls to manage their emotions as a way to counteract racism, but the socialization largely promoted emotional deference, thereby reinforcing racialized, classed, and gendered ideologies.Emotion management is the power-infused way individuals cultivate particular feelings among others or themselves. It entails "stir[ring] up a feeling we wish we had, and at other times [trying] to block or weaken a feeling we wish we did not have" (Hochschild 1983, p. 43). In Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart, company scripts increasingly determined how workers were supposed to think and feel, alienating them from their true emotions. Since then, research has focused on the identity-related and emotional consequences of adults' emotional labor, but Hochschild said that individuals learn to manage emotions far earlier-in childhood. What's more, she argued that adults socialize children to manage emotions in classed and gendered ways that lead to inequality along class and gender lines. Spencer Cahill's (1999) and Diane Reay's (2000) notion of "emotional capital" further offers a framework to connect emotions to social reproduction through socialization of youth. Studies on socialization and emotions suggest competing social processes may be at work. If only individuals from dominant groups learn a detached emotional capital

Critics argue that abstinence-only programmes reinforce gender inequality when they contain discourses that equate being a 'good girl' with sexual restraint. Yet they too often overlook how racial and class inequalities shape discourses about girls' sexual agency. This ethnography extends gender scholarship by analysing the racialised, classed and gendered dynamics of an abstinence-only programme for low-income black girls. It finds that black adults viewed the girls as sexually vulnerable because of racism and class inequality. They tried to mediate this vulnerability by transforming girls into sexual agents. They did so, though, by exaggerating the gendered discourses of the official sexuality education curricula that framed girls as victims and their sexual restraint as a matter of morality. Thus, the programme reinforced gender inequality while trying to disrupt race and class inequalities.

This study demonstrates the centrality of emotion work, especially sympathizing with beneficiaries of help, to sustaining volunteerism. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 42 volunteers and paid volunteer coordinators, it explains how volunteers cultivate sympathy, and thus commitment to helping, by framing beneficiaries as deserving. Volunteers constructed recipients as "deserving" along three dimensions: neediness, blamelessness, and impressionability. However, challenges to deservingness disrupted sympathizing, thereby undercutting volunteers' commitment. But rather than quit, volunteers were able to salvage beneficiaries' deservingness by pointing to authority, elaborating on victimhood, relating beneficiaries to their family and friends, and universalizing risks. Engaging in emotion work reinvested volunteers in volunteering.

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