Overview

White feminists performing to maintain privilege Mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it coopts its affect, form, and content from racial oppression and protest while aiming meanness toward people in marginalized groups. Kim Hong Nguyen’s feminist media study examines four types of white mean girl feminism prominent in North American popular culture: the bitch, the mean girl, the power couple, and the global mother. White feminists mime the anger, disempowerment, and resistance felt by people of color and other marginalized groups. Their performance allows them to pursue and claim a special place within established power structures, present as intellectually superior, substitute nonpolitical playacting for a politics of solidarity and community, and position themselves as better, more enlightened masters than patriarchy. But, as Nguyen shows, the racialized meanness found across pop culture opens possibilities for building an intersectional feminist politics that rejects performative civility in favor of turning anger into liberation.

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9780252045578

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Reviews

"""I am so glad someone finally wrote this book; I am only sorry it wasn’t me! In it, Kim Hong Nguyen takes white feminists to task on our performativity, practices and power structures that only serve to perpetuate white supremacy. Being mean isn’t it, white feminists, and it’s time we take a critical look at how we overcome it in service to liberation for all."" --Ms. Magazine “This is an important book that is beautifully and powerfully written and deeply original while offering productive interventions into the study of mean girl culture and its larger impact on conversations on feminism. Nguyen does an excellent job showing the systemic and historical ways white supremacy and patriarchy enact themselves on white women’s feminist practices and creation of mean girl feminism. A vital contribution.”--Kishonna L. Gray, author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming"

This is an important book that is beautifully and powerfully written and deeply original while offering productive interventions into the study of mean girl culture and its larger impact on conversations on feminism. Nguyen does an excellent job showing the systemic and historical ways white supremacy and patriarchy enact themselves on white women's feminist practices and creation of mean girl feminism. A vital contribution. --Kishonna L. Gray, author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming

Author Information

Kim Hong Nguyen is an associate professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo and the editor of Rhetoric in Neoliberalism.

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