This article examines recent sensationalist media attention to mean girls. Popular
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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, held 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.
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