“In Order to be a Girl, You Have to be Pretty and Popular”: A Phenomenological Analysis of Femininity Enforcement, Appearance-Based Targeting, and Peer Hierarchies Among Adolescent Girls In U.S. South

Background and Purpose: More than 20% of U.S. school-aged youth report being bullied, with girls reporting higher rates than boys (Irwin et al., 2023). Research on gender and bullying has primarily compared rates by biological sex rather than treating gender as socially constructed, leaving girls’ femininity construction and bullying underexplored (Hellstrom & Beckman, 2019). Research suggests that appearance-based bullying among girls may function as femininity enforcement (e.g., Bhana, 2024; Puutio et al., 2024), yet few studies have examined how adolescent girls interpret these dynamics. Without youth-centered perspectives, bullying prevention risks overlooking gendered peer structures underlying bullying. This study explores how adolescent girls understand the link between peer bullying and femininity norm enforcement, focusing on their lived experiences.

Methods: Five girls ages 11 to 14 were recruited from urban and suburban communities in the U.S. South. Four identify as Black and one as white. All reported prior bullying involvement and varied in socioeconomic background and adverse experience exposure, informing the study’s attention to how material disadvantage intersects with femininity enforcement. Semi-structured Zoom interviews covered perceptions of femininity, bullying experiences, and the roles of race and socioeconomic status. Analysis followed van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic thematic approach through holistic, selective, and line-by-line reading of lived experiences, with researchers’ interpretations integrated throughout.

Results: Three interconnected findings emerged. First, participants described femininity as a visible performance organized around branded clothing and bodily presentation that peers continuously evaluate. As one explained, “Friends think that in order to be a girl, you have to be pretty and popular.” Participants varied in how they accepted or contested this standard. Second, girls whose appearance signals material disadvantage were collectively targeted. One observed peers ridiculed for off-brand clothing, noting, “They don't know what she got going on at home.” Another argued that presentation rather than actual wealth is operative, noting affordable “dupes” buffer against targeting. Third, participants described a popularity hierarchy in which femininity compliance purchases status and enables downward enforcement toward peers who fall short. Together, these patterns suggest that peer bullying among girls is organized around femininity compliance, with appearance and material resources shaping who holds status and who becomes a target.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that bullying among adolescent girls can be more fully understood as femininity enforcement than interpersonal aggression. This reframing extends theoretical work on femininity hierarchies (Schippers, 2007; Paechter, 2018) by demonstrating that compliance is organized not only around behavioral and bodily ideals but also around material markers indexing class position, a dimension undertheorized in adolescent femininity scholarship. For prevention, findings point toward approaches that are both culturally situated, given this study was conducted in the U.S. South where racial segregation continues to shape school demographics (Mann & Rogers, 2021), and structurally oriented, engaging girls in examining appearance norms and status hierarchies driving targeting rather than treating bullying as individual misbehavior. Future research should investigate how these material dimensions of femininity enforcement operate across varied school contexts and whether they shift as girls move through adolescence.