Interactive Dynamics of Bullying Among Girls: Exploiting the Plots of Learning Gender

Abstract

Interactive Dynamics of Bullying Among Girls: Exploiting the Plots of Learning Gender
This study analyzes how girls between 11 and 15 years old manage bullying as a socializing mechanism, which classifies the peers into a game of differences and oppositions. It is an ethnographic research carried out in two public schools of the states of São Paulo and Salvador, Brazil. Bullying practices constitute a form of interaction that orders them socially, through the regulation of sexuality. In this context, disputes over power structure the prescription of ways of being girl and defne positions in the social hierarchy. The micropolitics established in this dispute shows how social control and punishment lead to the learning of conventional representations of femininity.