Friendship, bitching, and the making of ethical selves: what it means to be a good friend among girls in a London school

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between friendship, personhood, and ethics among girls in a London school. While a Western ideal of friendship is posited as a personal, private, and spontaneous relationship between autonomous individuals, I argue that girls’ friendships are a complex entanglement and interaction between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Girls’ ideals of friendship, and practices of making friends, suggest forensic pre‐constituted selves acting with volition in order to become closer to other selves. However, bitching, exclusion, and breaking friendships foreground mimetic dimensions as girls shape each other and themselves according to gendered ethical criteria. Examining these analytical strands offers insight into how individuality is produced through sociality in everyday life.

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

“…Hanks looks at how paranormal investigators negotiate the edges of irrational and normative rationality through humour that allows investigators to pre‐emptively align themselves and their groups with hegemonic forms of rationality (Hanks ). And Winkler‐Reid () looks at how ‘bitching’ practices among girls in a London school allows us to rethink many of the philosophical assumptions we have about friendship, showing how emic ideas of persons in this context play with agonistic tropes of the authentic individual as much as do intimacies and solidarities. All of these varying analyses suggest the capacity to transform selves and sociality through transgressing the edges of experience, cosmologies and socialities.…”

‘Doing your best’ in a London secondary school: Valuing, caring and thinking through neoliberalism

“…For example, the anthropological recognition that personhood is not self-evidently individual, drawing from the mutually constituted anthropological relationship between the ‘familiar’ and ‘the strange’, has illuminated the complexities of British personhood as constituted intersubjectively and beyond assumptions of preconstituted individuality (e.g. Carsten, 2004; Degnen, 2012; Evans, 2006, 2010; Ouroussoff, 1993; Skeggs, 2011; Winkler-Reid, 2016). This insistence on examining the production of persons in practice, rather than simply accepting an ideal, can similarly be extended to the neoliberal subject, who is invoked with surprising uniformity, in anthropology and sociology, in Britain as well as ‘further-away’ places.…”