‘The power to squash people’: understanding girls’ relational aggression

Abstract

While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, although ever‐present ‘in girls heads,’ are typically absent in adult panic about girls’ aggression. Within peer culture, power comes from the ability to invoke the unspoken ‘rules’ that police the boundaries of acceptable femininity. We thus challenge the notion advanced by Pipher and others that girls’ empowerment entails (re)gaining an ‘authentic voice.’ In contrast, we suggest that such projects must be informed by an interrogation of how girls are positioned as speaking subjects.

Notes

1. Some commentaries blame the Women’s Movement because it has promoted the empowerment of girls. According to journalist Patricia Pearson, for example, thanks to feminism, in resisting sexism, girls have ‘gotten hip’ to their capacity for violence. Thus Pearson warns that women’s equality comes at a price: ‘We cannot insist on the strength and competence of women … yet continue to exonerate ourselves from the consequence of power by arguing that, where the course of it runs more darkly, we are actually powerless’ (1997, p. 32; also see Agrell, 2005).

2. We do not subscribe to the view of inherent ‘stages’ of socio‐psychological maturation; rather, we see what have become designated as ‘developmental’ tasks by psychologists as historically and culturally specific constructions of ‘personhood.’

3. Our focus on discourse reflects our interest, as educators, in school curriculum as among the discourses that shape young people’s sense of themselves and who they can become.

4. In other words, although ‘race, class and gender’ as theoretical constructs inform our thinking, we do not treat these categories as already in existence (see Cuádraz & Uttal, 1999).

5. In early stages of fieldwork we did not employ recruitment criteria, apart from willingness to talk to researchers and parental/guardian consent. As themes emerged that resonated with our interest in girls’ agency, we targetted girls who participated in activities such as skateboarding, making web pages, role‐playing on the Internet, and so on. The sample of 71 thus consists of about four samples clustered by activity interests.

6. Interviews conducted with pairs (and in rare cases trios) of friends are signalled with an asterisk (∗). Shauna conducted most of the interviews for the Girl Power project.

7. In this paper we use pseudonyms chosen by the girls. While we recognize that their age, class and other ‘identity categories’ are sociologically important, because we do not employ them in the analysis presented here we include descriptions of the girls at the end of the text rather than put them in the main body of the text.

8. As Hey (1997) notes adults can be reluctant to interfere because girls’ ‘conflicts’ are seen as belonging to the ‘private’ sphere of ‘friendships.’

9. A number of Hollywood blockbusters have featured mean yet Popular girls who rule their schools and are highly desired by boys: Mean Girls (2004, based on the best‐selling book Queen Bees and Wannabesby Rosalind Wiseman) and She’s All That (1999). An earlier generation of such movies includes Clueless (1995) and Heathers (1989).

10. These girls were not necessarily well‐liked by their peers. Thus to be ‘Popular’ is a figure of speech, referring to the way that Popular girls always had a following of ‘wannabes.’

11. Other researchers have found that sexual imagery among girls is racialized and classed (see Hey, 1997, p. 70; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Hurtado, 2003). Visible minority girls and working‐class girls, for example, have been found to be frequent targets of sexually demeaning labels. These associations were not apparent in our study. What we did find is that ‘Popular’ girls were not always White or middle class; in other words, although the femininity that could earn girls high status in our study is racialized and classed, it was uncritically accepted by many (but not all) girls as an ideal.

12. Despite our argument that the school is a context within which inequalities are reconstituted, we acknowledge that schools are among the institutions committed to gender equality (see, for example, Tyack & Hansot, 1988, 1990). Nevertheless, a gap exists in the school setting (as elsewhere) between the rhetoric that girls, like boys, can do and be anything and the everyday reality that girls, much more so than boys, are judged based on their looks and vulnerable to attacks on their social worth through sexually demeaning labels. Exposing this gap might allow youth space to challenge the kinds of ‘missing discourses’ that shape young people’s talk and to recognize the multiple discourses that shape their gendered identities. More specifically, teachers and other adults need to give young people a language to name the emphasized femininity that provides currency in the gendered economy where meanness plays out in order to criticize it (along with ‘hegemonic masculinity’; Connell, 1995), and provide support for other ways of being girls and boys.