A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology.

This article examines recent sensationalist media attention to mean girls. Popular constructions of the mean girl are argued to be rooted in a developmental psychology debate on girls as indirectly and relationally aggressive. The developmental psychology model of feminine aggression is analyzed as a postfeminist discourse, illustrated to pathologize girls through universalizing, essentializing and context-devoid models of girlhood, which contribute to a shift from notions of girls as vulnerable to girls as mean in popular culture. Constructions of the mean girl are also linked to postfeminist gender anxieties over middle-class girl power and girl success. Regulatory strategies emerging to manage mean girls are examined as oriented toward maintaining appropriate modes of repressive, white, middle-class femininity. When ‘other’ girls do figure in the mean girl story, it is through sensational incidences of isolated girl violence, hem up as a dangerous risk of uncontained feminine aggression. Girlhood is argued to remain carefully regulated, through class- and race-specific categories of femininity, which continue to produce normative (mean) and deviant (violent) girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]