Negative Intra-gender Relations between Women: Friendships, Competition, and Female Misogyny

The following chapter explores the nature of women’s negative intra-gender social relations, offering new insights into gendered organizations and how gendered organizing processes impact upon social interactions and relationships between women. We theorize women’s negative intra-gender relations by fusing theory in the areas of doing gender well and differently (Mavin and Grandy 2011); gendered contexts; homophily (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954) and homosociality (Gruenfeld and Tiedens 2005); women’s intra-gender competition (Campbell, 2004), and processes of female misogyny (Mavin, 2006a, b), as complex interlocking gendered practices and processes (Acker 2009). Our contribution is a conceptual framework of women’s intra-gender relations, which reveals under-researched, often hidden forms of gender in action. We extend the theoretical development of women’s negative relations by recognizing that they have the power to limit the potential for homosocial and homophilous relations between women and conclude by offering questions to guide future research agendas.