Gender Stereotypes In Mean Girls

“Ex boyfriends are just like off limits to friends. I mean that’s just like the rule of feminism” (15:15). This famous saying said by Gretchen Wieners from Mean girls is widely known and most of the time ridiculed by people. Mean Girls is a movie that portrays the stereotypical American high school life. The movie has a main focus on the girls of high school, rather then on the boys. It centers on females and how they act at that certain age. The four mean girls, Regina George, Gretchen Wieners, Karen Smith and Cady Heron represent the stereotypes of the popular girls of high school. The role of gender plays an important role in the movie. The movie discusses the aspects of how a “typical” teenage girl should be, in order for her to fit in.

Cultural theories by Kathleen Rowe, Laura Mulvey and Stuart Hall can help the audience seek an explanation to how these stereotypical gender roles are portrayed in the movie and how it can create power for the specific

The movie Mean Girls can be decoded in many ways because there are multiple meanings to this movie. This movie portrays the general stereotypes of teenage women. Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, presents the idea that movies and medias are encoded and decoded a certain way. It is the audience’s job to decode it. Some meanings are considered to be very easily found and the audience decodes the meaning of the movie the way it’s suppose to be. Stuart Hall calls this the hegemonic position out of his three hypothetical positions. In Mean Girls, the movie uses many female stereotypical scenes that show what color women should like or how women should look and dress. The famous saying “On Wednesdays we wear pink” implies that girls love the color pink. In Stuart Hall’s essay, Hall said, “ Certain codes may, of course be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age…” (Hall:2005, 481). As kids, society teaches them at a very young age that pink is a representation for girls, and blue is for boys. It implies the stereotype that girls have to like pink or wear pink because of their gender. Also there is a part in the movie where Regina George shops for her spring fling dress. She shops at a store named 1,3,5. The name of the store refers to the sizes of their dress. The dresses only come in three sizes, so size