A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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, 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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it