Dynamics of Female Bullies: An Analysis of Mean Girls (2004)

Mean Girls (2004) is a movie portraying an elite clique who controls everyone in the entire school. Through its materialistic lifestyle, they attract people and make themselves the public figure in the school's society. This elite clique actually gets popular because it gains the support from its peers, and this support actually presents certain admirations towards the clique. It is argued that these admirations become some sort of consent to preserve and maintain the clique's dominant power – a form of hegemony. The strategies to build and sustain the hegemony are the focus of this study. Bourdieu's concept of social capital is used to show how the clique achieves and maintains its power. The finding reveals the rise to power as well as the fall out of this hegemonic elite depends on the agency of its own member. This study contributes to the scarce literature on representations of female bullies, providing a framework for understanding why bullying persists and how it operates within the society.