I read Chesney-Lind & Irwin's Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence & Hype, which looks critically at the somewhat recently "discovered" phenomenon of the "mean girl".The authors argue that this focus is really part of a feminist backlash, reinvoking age-old negative stereotypes of girls and women as duplicitous. The cultural focus on "mean girls" detracts from more serious problems faced by girls, and folding "relational aggression" into anti-bullying programs means that girls are being increasingly surveilled and policed, and their relatively minor actions are viewed as as serious and damaging as more openly aggressive and violent behavior which is more typical of boys.
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