Mean girl feminism How White feminists gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss

In this groundbreaking critique of contemporary feminism, Nguyen (communication arts, Univ. of Waterloo, Canada) examines feminism through media texts that serve as examples of how discourses surrounding the tropes of the bitch, the mean girl, the girlboss, the power couple, and the global mother "traffic in a toxic white womanhood that sustains imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-heteropatriarchy" (p. xii). Mean girl feminism "makes white meanness palatable by constructing patriarchal ills as aggression" and fails to be intersectional because it acts as a "resistance" feminism that only examines gender (p. xii). Nguyen calls upon white feminists to reflect on how these tactics--often utilized in white women's quests for career success, monogamous love, and civility in the face of anger--"obscure how embourgeoisement reproduces toxic white womanhood by both rendering white women vulnerable within cis-heteropatriarchy and empowering white women to enact meanness … with historically violent effects on people of color" (p. 15). Feminist struggle demands that we name mean girl feminism and hold ourselves accountable to the ways in which the norm and form of white feminist civility maintains systems of power. This highly theoretical analysis might be a challenge for some undergraduate-level readers, but this text is essential for graduate students and scholars who want to move beyond these troublesome legacies. Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Laura Mattoon D'Amore, Roger Williams University

Nguyen (communication arts, Univ. of Waterloo; editor, Rhetoric in Neoliberalism) deftly delves into the damage white women feminists do when they uphold racist structures that benefit them, refuse to acknowledge their privilege, serve as gatekeepers, utilize patriarchal tactics to maintain power, or remain complicit in ongoing oppression. Building on the work of Rachel Cargle, Laila Sayad, Rafia Zakaria, and others, Nguyen offers a roadmap of what it would take to abolish "mean girl feminism." To define that term and to describe the four types of people it involves, Nguyen uses examples that range from post-civil rights movement discourse, novels, and political theories to Gossip Girl episodes and Saturday Night Live sketches. Nguyen expertly and engagingly explains what performative activism is and analyzes how it shows up in popular culture and harms others. VERDICT A sweeping, smart manifesto that's crucial for white feminists to read in order to acknowledge, mitigate, and correct microaggressions and challenge oppressive systems.--Emily Bowles