Female Bullying At School Through An Intersectional Perspective

Reading bullying through a gender perspective is a need matured through the recognition of the potential and limitations of literature that interprets phenomena, such as male and female bullying, as universal and therefore, neutral masculine. Women's and feminist thought have articulated a scientific discourse over the last four decades that has enriched the reading of reality in its complexity. It shed light on the sexed and partial subjects (Diotima, 1987), on a perspective linked to sexual difference and gender reflection as an essential hermeneutical perspective, as well as on knowledge located and embodied in specific subjects and contexts (Donna Haraway, 1988), coming to the interesting intersectional perspective that allows us to talk about diversity, because each person carries with him/herself more diversities at the same time (Yuval-Davis, 2006). The motivations, symbolic needs, identification processes, and behaviors of boys and girls are different at the root. It is therefore important to open both female and male bullying to autonomous reading keys. Even the relationship between female-male bullying and homophobia, in the dual version of gayphobia or lesbian phobia, can only emerge from a sexual reading nourished by gender reflection (Burgio, 2018; De Vita 2018). In this contribution, we will discuss findings from 5 different Focus Groups implemented in three high schools located in Verona (North-East Italy), selected by their significant female population (48 participants). Our interest was to outline the first exploration following the intersectional interpretative framework which allowed us to understand how the "bumping differences" articulate and define adolescents. To do so, we have coded and analyzed data using Nvivo10 for Windows following the thematic analysis approach (Gavin, 2008; Clarke & Braun, 2014). The intersectional perspective encouraged us to intertwine different factors of oppression related to the fact that girls can be bullied by their peers for various reasons, as we know from the literature and as we saw from the results. Hence, we found three different patterns of victimization: “the bumping differences”, “the body as a battlefield” and “the strength and the weakness”.