Habitus, Visual and Cultural Identity: Mean Girls’ Hyperfeminine Performances as Burlesque Pastiche and as Archetypal Female Pariahs

Abstract

Visual and cultural identities are situated in habitus, social theory on the body and clothing. Framed by narrative inquiry, girl method, and feminist research, I investigated the mean girl experiences of Grace and Hayley, who witnessed hostility alongside an exaggerated policed feminine sartorial aesthetic. White, middle and upper class, managers of members’ social lives and aesthetic performances in designer clothing, mean girls purvey gossip and aggression. Masked by a visual aesthetic of sexualized heteronormativity enhancing their appeal to teenage girls, they incarnate binaried conceptions of gender performativity. Their aggressiveness reflects a third wave postfeminist narrative for which feminism is held responsible and accountable. As neoliberal post-feminist media and cultural constructions, they perform like Eve and wicked fairy-tale stepmothers, as archetypal female pariahs. Schools are sites of identity conflict: Bourdieusian habitus lenses offer possibilities for multimodal inquiries into visual and cultural re/presentations of situated identities in art teaching and learning.

Notes

¹ The Western lens referred to includes popular culture, media, and scholarship in western Europe and North America.

² Mean Girls is a movie about Cady, a teenager whose family has moved recently from Africa to Illinois, where she experiences public school for the first time. Cady encounters various subcultures in her new school, and is embraced by the “Plastics,” a group of shallow, unkind girls obsessed with their looks. Mean Girls charts Cady’s journey in and out of the group.