‘It was Emma’s army who bullied that girl’: A narrative perspective on bullying and identity making in three girls’ friendship groups

In the present article, we explore identity making in narrative interaction in preadolescent girls’ friendship groups. The data draw on focus group discussions with three groups of preadolescent girls who in the presence of a moderator narrate different versions of an incident that was recognized as bullying by the authorities at their school. The constructions of multiple narrative versions of ‘what happened’ display the girls’ ongoing negotiation of potentially contradictive and multiple constructions of what it is (or should be) to be a girl, bully, victim, friend, etc. In so doing, the girls agentively position themselves vis-à-vis a normative discourse on bullying, based on predefined characterizations of individuals as either bullies or victims, that is being tested and put up for negotiation within and through narrative interaction.