A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".