Kim Hong Nguyen's book examines the phenomenon of the title – 'Mean Girl Feminism' – which, she argues, 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 marginalised groups.

The 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 colour and other marginalised 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.

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

University of Illinois Press,160pp, 15cm x 23cm, paperback, 2024