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UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Constructing Bullying UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Constructing Bullying Perpetrators and Victims: How Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation Help Create Victims and Bullies in Media Discourses DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Criminology, Law and Society by Victoria Philice Foreman Dissertation Committee: Assistant Professor Sora Han, Chair Professor Susan Coutin Assistant Professor Keramet Reiter 2015 Chapter 2 © 2015 Sage Publications All other materials © 2015 Victoria Philice Foreman DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my families of origin and choice. To my parents, Teddie and Paul Foreman, you have provided unwavering support to each and every one of my endeavors. Your hard work has given me the opportunity to explore, follow passions, and create without fear. I share this accomplishment with you and hope that it makes you proud. To Sean Glas, thank you for your impeccable timing, your attempts to make me smile in the midst of a writing crisis, and for your endless encouragement. Kudzu, my love. Paul Foreman-Glas, you were born only a month after I proposed this project. It is a funny thing to be consumed with a new child and a dissertation at the same time. Both require patience, the ability to silence your inner critic, and an incredible amount of caffeine. I’ve struggled with and loved both processes. Your existence has made me a better writer, and I hope this project will one day help you grow into the compassionate, sensitive human being I know you will become. Finally, I’d like to share one of my father’s oft recited “Southern-isms”, which I wrote down on a note card and posted above my desk when I began working on this project. It provided comfort when I was unsure of myself and, like many of his other Southern-isms, is just plain old good advice. “Don’t worry about the mule going blind, just load the wagon.” - Paul Foreman ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iv LIST OF TABLES v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Methods 22 CHAPTER 2: Constructing the Victim in the Bullying Discourse 32 CHAPTER 3: Searching for Race in the Bullying Discourse 71 CHAPTER 4: The Bully 111 CHAPTER 5: Summary and Conclusions 148 REFERENCES 162 APPENDIX A: Mentions of the Term Bullying in Article Databases 184 APPENDIX B: Vanderbilt Television Archive “Bullying” References 187 APPENDIX C: Data Coding Themes 189 iii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 2.1 Prince Data Set Themes (1) 52 Figure 2.2 Prince Data Set Themes (2) 52 Figure 2.3 Clementi Data Set Themes 55 Figure 2.4 Comparison of Prince and Clementi Data Set Themes 56 iv LIST OF TABLES Page Table 2.1 Prince Date Set Themes 51 Table 2.2 Clementi Data Set Themes 55 Table 2.3 Comparison of Prince and Clementi Data Set Themes 56 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Sora Han. While my own personal writing process was not always easy, receiving feedback and edits from Sora was always a privilege. She consistently provided in depth assessments of my work and encouraged me to dig deeper into the data to produce more through and nuanced analysis of the bullying phenomenon. She is a fantastic scholar and amazing mentor. I always looked forward to our conversations and I hope to work with her again in some capacity in the future. I would like to thank my committee members, Susan Coutin and Keramet Reiter, for their thorough readings and editing suggestions on each chapter draft. Their advice and encouragement was absolutely essential to completing this project. I thank Sage Publications for permission to include Chapter Two of my dissertation, which was originally published in Crime, Media, Culture. Financial support was provided by the Criminology, Law and Society Department, and the Social Ecology Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. vi CURRICULUM VITAE Victoria Philice Foreman 2002 Bachelor of Arts. with High Honors in Religious Studies University of California, Santa Barbara 2004 Certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution Pepperdine Law School 2005 Juris Doctorate University of California, Hastings College of Law 2006-08 Lecturer, Law and Society Program University of California, Santa Barbara 2008-14 Teaching Assistant, Department of Criminology, Law and Society University of California, Irvine 2011 Master’s of Arts in Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine 2015 Ph.D. in Criminology, Law and Society University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Media representations and constructions of deviance; bullying PUBLICATIONS Foreman, V. (2015). Constructing the victim in the bullying narrative: How bullying discourses affirm rather than challenge discriminatory notions of gender and sexuality. Crime, Media, Culture . vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Constructing Bullying Perpetrators and Victims: How Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation Help Create Victims and Bullies in Media Discourses By Victoria Philice Foreman Doctor of Philosophy in Criminology, Law and Society University of California, Irvine, 2015 Assistant Professor Sora Han, Chair To explain the categories of bully and victim in the bullying discourse I performed a qualitative form of content analysis, known as ethnographic content analysis, on three sets of news articles about bullying. The three data sets were compiled through a Lexis-Nexis search of the names “Tyler Clementi”, “Phoebe Prince”, and the term “racial bullying”. An analysis of the discourse shows that victims and bullies are constructed along gendered, racialized, and sexualized lines. The discourse on victims can be read as upholding discriminatory systems of patriarchy and heteronormativity based on the explanation of suicide as an expected or predictable response to homophobia and sexism. The discourse on bullies focuses primarily on gender distinctions in bullying (the mean girl or relational aggression discourse) and descriptions of bullying behavior as normative and correctable, and also as unalterably pathological. Finally, the bullying discourse contains evidence that less attention is paid to racial bullying incidents. When attention is directed at racial bullying, the media response tends to focus on the emotional and potentially unruly responses of the minority victims, and these victims are expected to take responsibility by moving on and not focusing on the bullying incident. viii INTRODUCTION Statement of the Problem In recent years a new kind of deviance, or more accurately, an old behavior newly labeled as deviant has emerged as the focus of social, legislative, and criminological attention. Taking into account the media coverage, anti-bullying school programs, research projects, and new state laws it appears that the attention paid to bullying and its dangers are at an all time high. Some researchers describe bullying as the most predominant form of aggression in American schools (Sanders & Phye 2004). One study of US students in grades 6-10 found 29.9% of students were involved in moderate to frequent bullying (Nansel et al. 2001). Experts, school districts, prosecutors, and lay observers are in an ongoing process of defining and recognizing bullying behaviors, distinguishing juvenile incivility from more serious forms of peer victimization, and drawing boundaries around the ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ categories to make them socially and legally recognizable. Despite the availability of neutral definitions of bullies, bullying, and bullied victims from legal and academic sources, there are still questions about what cultural discourses on bullying are adding to these categories. The purpose of this study is to begin to examine and analyze this discursively prolific category. As a first step in doing so, this work examines how the victim and bully are constructed in media representations along gendered, racialized, and sexualized lines. The bullying discourse produces a series of expectations and ways of understanding both bullies and victims that draws heavily on notions of sexuality, gender, and race. This project examines these productions and uncovers ways in which gender, sexuality, and race are used to create victims and bullies that have not yet been identified by other studies. To explain how the categories of bully and victim are constructed in the bullying discourse, I performed an ethnographic content 1 analysis (Altheide, 1987) on three sets of news articles about bullying: the Phoebe Prince case, the Tyler Clementi case, and articles about racial bullying. Throughout this project I discuss and analyze information from news articles, anti- bullying laws, and the psychological literature on bullying. I examine law and psychological research to give the reader a context for understanding the ways in which bullying is described and treated by these expert discourses, and also to interrogate this literature. Recitations of the legal and psychological literature will, at times, give the impression that bullying is a discrete, objective category of behaviors and individuals with accompanying psychological profiles. I do not read the literature this way, but instead analyze these discourses from the perspective that bullying, as a category, is porous and far more fluid than the legal and psychological literatures would indicate. I include the psychology and legal literatures to help interrogate the bullying category and present it as a productive social construct. 1 After examining bullying laws and psychological
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