Lord of the Guys: Alpha Girls and the Post-feminist Landscape of American Education

Abstract

A recent discourse of girlhood, that of alpha girl and empowerment, has emerged in US popular literature with claims that adolescent girls are uniquely positioned to become the new economic, cultural and social winners of the twenty-first century. Similar to Sheryl Sandberg’s story in Lean In, Alpha girls embody both traditional masculine characteristics, such as competitiveness and independence, with traditional features of femininity such as collaboration, according to psychologist Dan Kindlon, author of Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World. However, little research has been conducted that explores the alpha girl discourse in the day-to-day lives of adolescent girls, deemed alpha, in US public school classrooms. Using interview and observation data, this paper examines how Kindlon’s supposed alpha girls and their middle school teacher make sense of and live this notion of empowerment, and argues that their experiences both complicate and reify the alpha girl discourse.