Mean Girls, Ressentiment, and the Disaffected Racialized Women

This article delves into the popular feminist celebrations of mean girls in film, television, and videogames. Mean girls who take no shit and instead gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss their way to empowerment and success are a staple of popular media. As Gill and Banet-Weiser argue, popular feminisms advance individualist notions of empowerment as success in the neoliberal marketplace, which is most accessible to able-bodied white women. Indeed, Nguyen argues the figure that best encapsulates popular feminism is the mean girl, a white feminist who co-opts racialized performances of resistance to enact a purely performative feminism through bitchiness, aloofness, and irony. This paper examines the less common centering of racialized mean girls in popular media, analyzing Kat (Lyric Ross) from Wendell & Wild (2022), Wednesday Adams (Jenna Ortega) from Netflix’s Wednesday (2022), and Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and Joy Wang/Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) from Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Drawing from Nguyen’s figure of the mean girl of white feminism, Coulthard’s theorization of ressentiment, and Yao’s conception of disaffection, the article argues that racialized mean girls are associated with the affect of ressentiment and a community-oriented politics more so than the white mean girls’ neoliberal politics of individual empowerment and snarky affect. And while racialized girls and women’s meanness is depicted as rooted in deep-seated hurt and resentment linked to structural inequities and the abuse of institutional power, this is not the paralyzing ressentiment that arrests progressive politics, but rather a bridge to community, relationality, and meaningful change.