Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey assess whether student behavior violates a statewide harassment, intimidation, and bullying law. We find that, according to administrators, violations require relational asymmetry between an aggressor and victim: an imbalance of power and disproportionate participation. Administrators rarely see gendered harassment as bullying because of the relational stereotypes they attach to girl students, which often preclude interpretations of relational asymmetry. We discuss how gender beliefs among administrators and “bracketing failures” explain the ways antibullying laws allow hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality to remain untroubled.

中文翻译：

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括号外：为什么学校管理人员未能在反欺凌法中看到性别骚扰

大部分校园欺凌涉及学生监管其他学生的性别角色和性行为。反欺凌法的激增提供了一个机会来正式惩罚性别骚扰并将其标记为不可接受的。然而，当这种形式的同伴监管涉及女孩时，管理人员通常认为它不在法律范围之内。我们使用括号理论来了解新泽西州的中学管理人员如何评估学生行为是否违反了全州范围内的骚扰、恐吓和欺凌法。我们发现，根据管理员的说法，违规行为需要侵略者和受害者之间的关系不对称：权力的不平衡和不成比例的参与。管理人员很少将性别骚扰视为欺凌，因为他们对女学生的关系刻板印象，这通常排除了对关系不对称的解释。我们讨论了行政人员之间的性别信仰和“括号失败”如何解释反欺凌法如何允许关于性别和性行为的霸权信仰不受干扰。