Kim Hong Nguyen's "Mean Girl Feminism"

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

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss, and reported the following:

Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss examines the ways in which gender performativity operates as resistance. The book argues that mean girl feminism encourages white subjects to believe that their tone (e.g. say it with snark and sarcasm!), attitude (e.g. be bitchy!), and other communicative cues will help them successfully navigate interpersonal dynamics and relations of power. Such aggressive performances are interpreted as evidence of one’s social commitment to and identity as a feminist. Thus, mean girl feminism collaborates with neoliberalism in ways that most problematically optimize particular forms of articulateness, all the while further diminishing the subaltern’s capacity to speak.

Page 99 of the book is located in the conclusion where I am summarizing and discussing strategies and suggestions to challenge mean girl feminism. Page 99 gestures to the importance of thinking through mean girl feminism as the current state of feminism: “Where traditional femininity might emphasize innocence and niceness, mean girl feminism encourages women to interpret Collins’ figure of the Bitch and Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy as if they are an identity category to be performed, a personhood that has assumed permanence—a defiant attitude, the unsmiling face.” Additionally, I look to Jessie Daniel Ames as an important figure to consider. To this extent, page 99 is a great page for those who seeking a shortcut into the action-oriented discussion about what can be done or what is next.

Learn more about Mean Girl Feminism at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue