“Don’t Be a Whore, That’s Not Ladylike”

Abstract

While multiple and competing understandings of sororities exist in popular culture, academic research on sororities tends to homogenize the experience of sorority women, simplifying their existence to a quantitative understanding of specific behaviors such as those associated with binge drinking, eating disorders, and heterosexuality. Specifically, it ignores processes of discursive discipline that converge to disseminate social expectations, maintain dominant discourse, conceal processes of social control, and limit possibilities for gendered subjectivity. Therefore, in order to provide a more complex understanding of sorority women’s gendered subjectivity and to produce research cognizant of cultural discourse, this study explored sorority women’s experiences through an ethnographic lens informed by poststructural theory. Represented by creative analytic practice as an ethnographic screenplay, this research provides contextualized insight into societal relationships of power and gender as they produce and reproduce specific historical and cultural regimes. In particular, I contextualize the experiences of sorority women, explore the dissemination and discipline of femininity within the sorority, and show how such discipline relates to Foucauldian theorizations.