Mean Girls: Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees And Wannabes

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Introduction Mean Girls, loosely based off of Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, is a 2003 comedy that follows Cady Heron’s first venture into a public high school after being homeschooled. Cady moved to Illinois from Africa due to her parent’s receiving tenure at Northwestern University for their research. She befriends two outcasts, Janice Ian and Damien, who warn her about the Plastics, a clique of popular girls. Cliques can be “sophisticated, complex and multilayered, and every girl has a role within them (Wiseman, 2009). Though the Plastics is not the most complicated clique, each girl has a role. The members of the Plastics are Queen Bee Regina George, sidekick Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith. Regina is the queen bee, who typically have “a combination of charisma, force, money, looks, will, and social intelligence,” all of which are seen in Regina (Wiseman, 2009). The audience also sees Regina as the center of attention, and all eyes are on …show more content…

nurture. (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). Biology is one part of gender identity, but more importantly are societal, community, religious, cultural values (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010); “biology and environment… continually interact to inform virtually every aspect of human social functioning” (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). People pick up gendered norms through family life, the neighborhood and the media (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). School is a major place where gender identity is acted out and defined and gendered scripts on what it means to be male or female are made during early adolescence (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). This can be seen with Cady, as she has no idea what the gendered norms are due to her background of being homeschooled in Africa. We see over the movie that she becomes immersed into the gendered norms of her school. The work of Carol Gilligan has helped people understand how gender identity is

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