Becoming Plastic: Don't Hate Me Because I'm Mean

Abstract

This paper platforms the popular film, Mean Girls (Michaels & Waters, 2004), to demonstrate how construction of the subject takes place. Deleuze’s political courses of molar, molecular, and lines of flight are used to explore subjectivity through his concept of becoming. How a product of visual culture can be used to explore the subjectivity of adolescent females is demonstrated as the film characters enter continuous states and stages of becoming animal, monster, and woman. The idea of a self that is a shifting identity, influenced by body, mind, and affective response, is defined by Deleuze’s Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is guided by desire and, in fact, is desire. This desire is revealed through mean-ness. Becoming mean is explored, as an additional stage of becoming that can be particularly visible with girls, in the micro-society of the school.