Sociological Themes Sociology – Mean Girls

Stacy Gregg Sociology M/W 11:30 Sociological Themes Sociology is everywhere we look, its everything thing we are, and can be described within everything we do. The traditional focuses of sociology have included social stratification, social class, culture, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military and penal institutions, the Internet, and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
Looking through films you can see many sociological themes. I chose to look at “Mean Girls” and pull the sociological themes out. Mean Girls is a movie about a girl, Cady, who moves to the US from Africa and starts at a new school. She immediately befriends two outcasts, who explain the school’s social scene. There are a group of three girls (the “Plastics”) who are popular, malicious and rule the school. As a trick, these three girls befriend Cady.
Her outcast friends encourage her to hang out with the Plastics to see what they do. But as she spends more time with them, she becomes more and more like them, backstabbing, mean, self-obsessed, and superficial. When Cady and the leader of the Plastics go after the same guy, she begins to plot their destruction, and starts sabotaging the girls in worse and worse ways. Eventually she separates from her original friends and her Plastic friends.

When the entire school finds out about some of the terrible things the Plastics have said about them by finding a “Burn Book” everyone turns against the Plastics and Cady. Eventually, she must apologize to everyone she hurt and begin to find a way to become a better person. The first sociological theme I would like to address is stereotypes. A stereotype is defined as a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
Mean Girls portrays high school stereo types rather well, at school there are groups such as try-hards, wannabes, burn-outs, band geeks, nerds, the popular girls, the jocks and art freaks. All the girls wants to be a plastic so to speak and they all display it in different ways like how the girls who eat nothing are trying to be thin so they can be like the plastics, but the girls who eat their feelings are also trying to be a plastic but by eating they are showing I don’t care what anybody thinks of me, which is a popular trait.
Then when everyone is explaining Regina George and one girl says “One time she punched me in the face… It was awesome! ” this implies that this “wannabe” made contact with Regina George even though it is contact most people don’t what it is contact nonetheless which she hopes has passed on a bit of Regina George’s popularity. References: (2011, 04). “Mean Girls” Analysis. StudyMode. com. Retrieved 04, 2011, from http://www. studymode. com/essays/Mean-Girls-Analysis-676080. html