VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships

Abstract

If the 1990s 'girl' was represented by Ophelia and the call for her rescue (Pipher, 1994), the 2000s have seen the rise of a new 'it girl' who, like Ophelia, is also used to mark a perceived crisis of girlhood. The vulnerable girl has recently been replaced by the 'mean girl' in public consciousness. Nowhere is this concern more visible than in the proliferation of best-selling books such as Rachel Simmond's Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Aggression in Girls (2003), Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabees (2002), Emily White's Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (2002), and Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do -Sex Play, Aggression, and their Guilt (2002). Each of these books is a consideration of the trials and tribulations of relationships between girls -their friendships, fights and foes.In this article, I pose a series of questions about the links between the explosion of popular, professional and academic interest in, and concern about, 'the mean girl' to a public anxiety and cultural fascination with girls and girlhood more generally. These questions are meant to trouble common sense understandings of girls and the current media fascination with, and representation of, their relationships, and to reveal an intriguing contradiction in its discursive construction and deployment. On the one hand, discussions about the 'problem' of young women's relationships gone-wrong are used in the media as a cultural symbol of disorder, moral decay, and social instability in North American society more broadly. Yet at the same time, the treatment and resolution of the problem is almost always articulated in individualized and individualizing terms. This ambivalence about young women and the contradictory uses of the 'mean girl' offer critical insights into new discursive constructions of femininity in a time where, as McRobbie has suggested, girls have replaced youth as the metaphor for social change (2000: 201).

Competing narratives, gender and threaded identity in cyberspace

“…This myth-puncturing style makes it possible to argue that the anger and expressions of aggression in these British and Spanish female adolescents' narrations of their break-ups show not only that their expressions are a clear example of 'laddish' communication strategies but also that they are calculated and targeted (Gonick 2004). The discursive strategy associated with the narration of their former love relationships is based on a twofold process: self-assessment and self-enhancement.…”

“…Despite the commonality of 'laddish' aggression in their writings (Campbell 2002, Gonick 2004, the bloggers' discursive construction varies widely from one culture to another in so far as British bloggers tend to use and validate masculine expressions and Spanish bloggers tend to use feminisations of masculine expressions: British female teenage bloggers seem to validate masculine expressions as an attempt to exert power over their ex-boyfriends and try to chastise them about the mistakes they made during the relationship. The adoption of this myth-puncturing style stands in direct contrast to the narrations the same bloggers constructed when they were in love.…”

Multi - Girl - Culture : An Ethnography of Doing Identity

“…problems make for better news). The discourse about girls at risk continues well into the current decade, and recent media panics about girls include the 'mean girl', following the movie Mean Girls (see Gonick, 2004;Ringrose, 2006), and the 'bimbo culture' discussed in chapter 1 (see Frank, 2007;Pitcher, 2006). …”

Asia Pacific Education : Diversity, Challenges and Changes

“…Listing a number of best-selling texts that address girls' relationships with one another, Gonick (2004) explains that these publications consider 'the trials and tribulations of relationships between girls -their friendships, fights and foes' (p. 395). What I question, however, is how these texts are catapulted to the status of 'bestselling' and what influence this kind of popular cultural text has for discourse around adolescent girls and their relationships.…”

“…Having made a valuable contribution to girls' studies through her work spanning a range of feminist concerns including girl studies, visual culture, identity, feminist cultural studies, feminist pedagogies, feminist post-structural theory, feminist qualitative research and gender and schooling (MSVU 2009), Gonick (2004) asserts that 'Best-selling books galvanizing public attention in girls are in both cases often written for, and targeted at, parents, or more precisely mothers, rather than girls themselves ' (p. 396). Listing a number of best-selling texts that address girls' relationships with one another, Gonick (2004) explains that these publications consider 'the trials and tribulations of relationships between girls -their friendships, fights and foes' (p. 395).…”