Schooling the mean girl: a critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials

ABSTRACT

This paper is a critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials about girl bullying. The ‘mean girl’ phenomenon has been widely taken up as one of the current key narratives about schools and school girls. This paper argues for the importance of understanding the origins of this discourse within behavioural psychology, which coined the term ‘relational aggression’ to describe what is purported to be a uniquely female form of aggression. Our analysis problematises the ways in which this discourse reinforces gendered binaries and pathologises girls’ aggression. We trace the emergence of an ‘expert culture', exemplified by the texts we analyse, which disseminates this discourse and limits the range of ways in which girls’ aggression and friendships may be understood. We critique the raced and classed ways in which these texts establish hegemonic forms of white, middle-class girlhood. We show how the texts draw on neo-liberal ideologies of idealised forms of subjectivity and function as a mechanism for shaping these subjectivities within schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• girls
• discourse analysis
• North America
• cultural studies
• femininities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The interviews were conducted by one of the authors for a separate project focused on girls’ bullying in schools. We draw on this interview material here to show how widespread and dominant the understanding of the mean girl discourse has become in the everyday practices and understandings of teachers and school administrators.

2. We could not find any books targeted at teachers and parents which did not draw on these discourses of relational aggression.

3. A parallel can be drawn here between the ‘mean girl crisis' and its market solution and an earlier ‘crisis': the crisis in ‘failing schools' discourse in the USA that led to the introduction of No Child Left Behind and mandated reading programmes in schools. Smith et al. (2003) argue the conflation of commercial and educational discourses resulted in the ‘phonics-first approach' emerging as the winner of debates surrounding reading instruction strategies. Since the phonics-first approach requires the purchase of standardised teaching materials, the widespread acceptance of phonics-first led to rising profits in the education market, confirmed in a newsletter of the Education Industry investment specialists: ‘From an investment perspective, this crisis has created an enormous opportunity and powerful momentum for those companies with solutions to our educational problems' (Smith et al., p. 206).

4. Understanding Girl Bullying (Field et al.) does outline a series of exercises that has girls working to recognise four different kinds of aggression, including aggressive, passive aggressive, passive, and assertive. The goal of the Goodwill Girls Curriculum is for girls to learn to be assertive when they are involved in a social conflict.

5. The sector's giants, the McGraw-Hill group and Pearson have market capitalisations of $13 billion and $14 billion, respectively. For 2010, McGraw-Hill's net profit margin was 13.81% and Pearson's was 9.25% (Google finance 2011).