ABSTRACT
Thanks to the discovery of female bullying and girls’ aggression (see Crick & Grotpeter, 1995, for a review), a phenomenon often described as “mean girls” in popular media outlets (Garbarino, 2006; Simmons, 2002; Wiseman, 2002) – the idea that girls are not always and everywhere kind, nurturing, and docile – has been embraced widely by the scientific community. What is largely missing from this bullying literature is an analysis of the structural context surrounding girls’ aggression, including their bullying. When we refer to the context of girls’ bullying we specifically mean the ways that female aggression is framed by interlocking systems of inequality such as gender, race, class, age, Western modes of nationalism, and sexuality. During a ten-year ethnographic study in a public high school on Oahu, Hawai‘i, we discovered several ways that interlocking systems of oppression shaped female aggression. In this chapter, we place what is often called girls’ relational and physical aggression into a broad, historical perspective. We conclude this chapter by showing how analysis of the interconnections of Western systems of inequality can significantly expand current theories about girls’ aggression, especially dominant perspectives of female bullies.
