“Even the Good Girls Have Their Moments”

Abstract

Director’s Comments: In 2008, I undertook an ethnographic study to better understand how women negotiated competing discourses of femininity within Southern sorority spaces—women-centered, member-only social societies that promote friendship and philanthropy in American colleges and universities. This final manuscript of three, exposes the small post-structural resistances of discursive discipline that sorority women negotiated both overtly and “accidentally” through mis-repeats as they moved from freshman to senior sorority women at USouthern, a large university situated in an active college town in the Southeastern region of the United States. The following three ethno-screenplay scenes are used to reintroduce the discourses of ladylikeness that have already been unpacked in prior articles, and to further develop and explore issues of negotiation and subversion around those discourses.