Mean Girls and Tough Guys

This chapter examines the gendered and sexual dimensions of bullying prevention programming. Drawing from analysis of anti-bullying campaigns and two school years of ethnography at Township, a rural high school in the Northeast, the author finds that anti-bullying initiatives individualize bullying practices and perpetuate gender and sexual inequalities through their tactics. Incorporating teens’ experiences of these programs, the author explores the gendered and sexual hidden curricula embedded in two national anti-bullying initiatives the school engaged: a campaign that positions girls as predisposed to conflict while assigning them responsibility for generating a kind and compassionate school culture, and a campaign that emphasizes girls’ sexual morality and the primacy of boys’ heterosexual desires. Prevention efforts must move beyond individualizing directives to attend to the deeper, more divisive inequities that shape teens’ experiences of conflict and schooling.