Mean Girls: High School Identity

When we think of identity, we usually relate it to biological concepts such as race, gender, age etc. These are all essential factors of one’s identity, but it’s also important to look at social construction of identity. Culture plays an important part in how people form their identity. If you look at high school life, you will definitely see the existence of various cliques. You spend four years of your life in high school, and the way you act, the people you hang out with, and other factors joined together form who you are in high school. There are various group identities in high school, and through them we definitely see the existence of power as well.
Throughout various texts of popular culture, we have seen the representation of high school group identities. We constantly see it on television shows, in books, and in movies. One particular movie that comes to mind when thinking about high school identity is Mean Girls. Mean Girls is a teen comedy movie that was released in 2004. It’s directed by Mark Waters and it stars Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Here’s a link to the trailer for the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YjSIvmNjT8.
The movie mentions several different cliques. There are the Preps, ROTC guys, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, Cool Asians, Varsity jocks, Desperate wannabes, Burnouts, Sexually active band geeks, and of course, the Plastics.

This movie gives the perfect example of how one’s high school identity is formed. Cady (Lohan’s character) is new to the school, so she isn’t a part of any particular clique yet. The group that she will begin to hang out with will then form her “identity”. Even though it was all part of a plan, we see this happen as she starts hanging out with the “plastics”. In this movie, we also see power in its relation to identities. You witness all the various marginalized groups, and then there’s the one that holds the most power: the plastics. Although certain aspects of the film may have been exaggerated, it does demonstrate a good example of what true high school life is like.