Little fascist panties

[sabotabby]

Girlfighting: Betrayal, Teasing and Rejection Among Girls. This paper is about 10 years old, but I don't think anything has changed much. Today's high schools have a whack of anti-bullying initiatives, most of them based on Barbara Coloroso's theories, and I don't think they're actually working. The Toronto Raptors come into talk about how bullying is not cool, and kids perform skits and videotape them. What's lacking is structural analysis, as usual:

Put simply, this is divide and conquer. The constant surveillance of “other” girls’ flaws and faults creates a kind of low-level surveillance that produces a lot of anxiety. How does one know whom to trust? Like informants to the KGB, the watchers and judgers hope for protection and safety, but of course their activities separate them from one another, perpetuate the denigration of femininity, support the status quo and their subordinate place in it. That is, they are judging other girls against dominant cultural ideals of femininity: on how well they contain their sexuality and negotiate heterosexual romance, conform to white middle class ideals of beauty, and collude in a passive, nondisruptive “nice girlness.” Feeling the weight of expectations and the shame of not matching up and unable to openly protest or resist without being labeled a trouble-maker or disruptive or bad, motivates girls’ acts of hidden, horizontal violence.

I'm unsurprised that most of the comments to this post were personal stories about bullying, though whether the phenomenon is so widespread as to be ubiquitous, or whether a disproportionate amount of bullying victims wind up venting to the blogosphere about it, I'm not sure. What strikes me, now, is the emphasis on how a teacher should have intervened. This hits close to home for obvious reasons. I mean, the thing with bullying that doesn't involve explicit acts of violence is that it's invisible. That's why it's damaging, that's why it works. I can, and do, intervene when kids are calling each other by homophobic slurs, but the subtle cruelties pass entirely under my radar.

I'm not sure what a teacher could have done when I was experiencing girl-on-girl bullying in grade school; any attempt at intervention by an adult typically resulted in an increase, not a decrease, in nastiness. There's nothing worse than being told you need to act like a decent human being to someone, especially by a terminally uncool teacher. And the nature of these acts are such that the aggressor isn't committing any overt crime that can be punished.

I tend to think my kids are nice; they tease each other, but it appears innocent. If there's a dark undercurrent, it isn't obvious. Fixing these sorts of problems has to be structural rather than simply reactive, and that's what I like about the paper. It isn't enough for an authority figure to intervene. The school system itself is designed to provoke anxiety. In a competitive, hierarchical closed system like a school, of course children are going to ruthlessly compete and form hierarchies. That's what they know how to do, and that's how they succeed. Slaps on the wrist and "modelling respectful behaviour" will accomplish jack shit, because children aren't entirely stupid and are excellent at recognizing hypocrisy.

Not entirely related, but quite cool. Fallen Princesses. Autoplay music warning.

Comments

[kappsgurl.livejournal.com]

That Fallen Princesses thing is amazing.

And I find it odd that I'm still experiencing girl fighting, well after my grade school and high school years.

[sabotabby]

Of course, it happens a lot in the workplace. It's not directly evident among the people I interact with at my job, but we're also relatively gender-balanced and there's an age spread.

...I think one of my big gripes with the public school system is that kids are sorted by age. When I went to Montessori school, we weren't, which meant that my girlfriends were one or two years older than me (a huge difference at that age). Accordingly, I had to be more mature. When you are surrounded almost exclusively by people your own age, there's not the same push to reach beyond your limits. Behaviours tend to get reinforced amongst peers that don't get reinforced in more diverse groupings.

If my middle-aged co-workers mocked the appearance or sexuality or whatever of the younger ones, or vice versa, it would be a bit laughable.

[rojonoir.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that being around older kids would also give younger kids some protection by having older kids stick up for them, but the flip side is older kids bullying younger kids, which can get really bad.

In my son's kindergarten class, they have a cool thing where fourth graders come in and buddy up to help the kindergarteners read. I can imagine that some sort of structured and supervised mentorship program throughout K-12 would be useful, with college kids coming in to mentor highschool.

It seems like 3-4 years older is a good age where they are close enough to still be cool and can relate, but far enough apart to be more mature and less of a peer.

[rantipole6.livejournal.com]

Granted I've only been a public school teacher for a few years, but I seriously question the benefit of having kids herded into buildings for 8-9 hours a day surrounded by throngs of people their own age who outnumber overworked and underpaid teachers whose job is to manage them, often like cattle. It puts the world out of context. A child's role models become people their own age who lack wisdom and experience and whose immature world views don't really enrich them all that much. By the time they've learned to navigate the social environment of their large public high school, they have to go out into the real world which is full of far more diversity and complexity than they're used to.

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

Huh. Interesting read. My husband's a big fan of spy-fi, and we've had a few interesting conversations about Gossip Girl (which we both watched - haven't picked it up again for the most recent season, though) and surveillance culture.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:6YJKlNXK2bsJ:www.hardygirlshealthywomen.org/docs/girlfighting_paper.doc

link, minus the highlighting :)

[pluvka.livejournal.com]

http://womensglib.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/princess-fat-shaming/

http://www.racialicious.com/2009/06/19/fallen-princess-jasmine-raises-questions-about-stereotypes/

[sabotabby]

Good points on both of those. With Jasmine, I got the sense that the artist was attacking the disgustingly stereotyped image of the Middle East portrayed in Aladdin, but YMMV.

[sqrt-joy.livejournal.com]

I think wanting the teachers to intervene is a valid issue in some (but not all cases). I never wanted my teachers to force people to hang out with me outside of class, but I did want them to assign groups so I wouldn't always be assigned last, to give me options to eat in a different classroom so that I wouldn't have to sit at the loser table, and to recognize that having all but four girls in a group for a major group project was an insanely isolating experience that truly put me in my place. It would have also been nice for them to actually punish girls who were violent or who publicly humiliated me, instead of telling me I was taking it too personally.

As well, I think, especially at the elementary level, I think that there can be community building and explicit lessons in tact and grace without increasing the bullying by telling kids to "be nice". The other class in my elementary grade didn't have such an issue with bullying - not because there wasn't cool and uncool kids, but because it had been made clear that the class was a community and everyone got to participate and feel part of it. I'd love to pick the teachers brains on that one.