Playing aggression: The social construction of the 'sassy girl' in a peer culture play routine

The ethnographic analysis presented here examines a play routine that centered on two four-year-old female children constructing and being ‘sassy girls’. Data was gathered over the course of six months in one preschool classroom by acting as a participant observer, videotaping, audiotaping, and conducting formal and informal interviews with the teacher. The analysis consisted of taking a broad contextualized ethnographic view of the children’s play themes in the daily life of the classroom, followed by a focused eight-week observation of the reoccurring sassy girl play routine. Patterns and themes that emerged from all data sources were triangulated and interpreted through feminist and peer culture theoretical lenses. Results revealed that the girls used this play to create gendered affiliations, perform ‘meanness’, explore power, and resist the school culture rules about aggression in the classroom. How are girls constructed into categories such as successful girls, mean girls, bad girls, and violent girls? How are major concerns over girls’ aggression and meanness related to current gender anxieties over middle class ‘girl power’ and girls’ success? How are girls pathologized into such oppositional categories as the successful but mean ‘Supergirls’ and the counterpart to this type, the failed, deviant, abject, violent non-feminine girls who must be transformed? These are some of the core dilemmas foisted on girls within contemporary girlhood in the West. (Ringrose & Walkerdine, 2008, p. 6) Ringrose and Walkerdine raise questions about contemporary girlhood and the construction of categories, such as mean girl, bad girl and successful girl, and the relation between those categories and gender anxieties over girl power and girl success. They make visible the dilemmas and subject positions young girls face not only with their ‘gendered identities’, but also their gendered ‘emotional’ identities in contemporary girlhood. Gonick (2004, p. 395) writes, ‘The vulnerable girl has recently been replaced by the ‘mean girl’ in public consciousness’. If this claim is true, how has the mean girl been appropriated to wield power and serve friendship dynamics in the lives of preschool girls in Western society? How has the social practice of meanness impacted young girls peer culture play? This article explores how two four-year-old girls socially constructed a peer culture play routine (i.e. sassy girl) to create gendered affiliations, perform ‘meanness’, explore power and resist the school culture rules about aggression in the classroom. More specifically, the sassy girl embodied the performance of the ‘mean girl’ and provided a play venue where the girls could explore direct and indirect aggression through exclusion, teasing, taunting, tricking, hitting and name calling. Gendered Play and Emotion One way that young children produce and negotiate their gendered and emotional identities is through play (Davies, 1989; Fernie et al, 1993; Thorne, 1993; Gilbert, 1994; Walkerdine, 1997;