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

Methodology

In order to continue exposing the complexity of the discourses of femininity in sorority women’s lives, I will present the conclusions for the second research question guiding my eleven-month, poststructural feminist ethnographic study. This study was carried out with the pseudonymous Zeta Chi sorority located at a large university (“USouthern”) situated in an active college town in the Southeastern region of the United States. Zeta Chi is a traditional sorority of more than 150 members ranging from freshmen to seniors who were mostly White, middle class, Christian, heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 24. This research began in July 2007 and continued until May 2008, with data collected in multiple sorority social spaces such as the sorority house, women’s apartments, dances, flag football games, bars, dinner parties, parents’ weekends, pageants, and carnivals. The research questions guided more than 70 hours of participant observations, 17 two-hour in-depth unstructured interviews, and numerous artifact collections, reflective journals, and informal interviews and observations.

Data collected from these methods were eventually analyzed through a rhizomatic, contextualizing process, although I began my analysis with a more postpositivist categorizing process, coding line by line for a priori poststructural feminist themes of discourse, discipline, subjectivity, and performativity as well as for those concepts that I identified as repetitive within the data. These codes were then categorized into groups; however, rather than continue with a more postpositivist categorizing analysis that attempted to reduce data to discrete categories, I quickly moved into a contextualizing analysis focused on showing how various codes overlapped and connected among categories (Berbary, 2011). This process created a “rhizomatic concept map” that provided a visual of how categories played off of and related to each other, helping to highlight the useful aspects of the data while contextualizing them from within.

Using these contextualized categories as a starting point, creative analytic practice (Parry & Johnson, 2007; Richardson, 2000) was then employed to construct an ethnographic screenplay that presented the data in a polyvocal genre. This ethnographic screenplay was composed of quotes and passages taken directly from transcripts and field notes and rearranged into a script to convey insight into each research question. For each research question, there are four scenes that both focus specifically on the findings relevant to that research question and are simultaneously contextualized in those themes and ideas that were identified as repetitive or in relation to a priori theories. Following each scene are Director’s Comments. These comments provide a space for my own voice to seamlessly enter the screenplay in order to help the reader make connections between the scenes and my theoretical interpretations. In this sense, my voice is present in the screenplay in the same way a director’s voice would be present to help actors interpret the connections, underlying tensions, and complex relationships found in the screenplay’s overarching purpose.

My intention was not to follow specific screenplay expectations, but rather to use the “free flowing, floating, and authorless” possibilities of a screenplay to represent the complexities of my data in an accessible way (Kohn, 2000, p. 489). Therefore, at times my ethnographic screenplay breaks from tradition and uses narrative moves such as italicized internal dialogue and/or director’s comments in order to provide insight. I feel comfortable with this break from traditional screenplay expectations because while not always explicit, “even screenplays for production at times use extended descriptions of settings and characters in order to provide details that help in its realization on film” (Berbary, 2011).

Previously, in my 2011 article, I detailed the construction of this screenplay, including the construction of settings, characters, content, and director’s comments. However, while this earlier article specifically addresses the methodological construction of my ethnographic screenplay, it does little to discuss the findings and theoretical connections of the larger study. Therefore, in this article, I use the screenplay as data representation and focus on findings and theoretical connections by highlighting scenes that illuminate my second research question: How are discourses of femininity disseminated and disciplined within Zeta Chi? Specifically, I will highlight overt discipline regarding the sorority’s discourse of femininity, the processes of dissemination and indoctrination into that discourse, and the processes of covert discipline through which members of the sorority monitored one another’s gendered behavior. I present the specific scripted representations of these processes of discursive discipline, followed by a Foucauldian analysis of discourse and discipline in the sorority.

Overt Discipline

FADE IN:

AUGUST: CRESCENT AVE-MID-AFTERNOON-DAY OF RUSH

As we zoom in from a blue sky, bird’s-eye view we see a small corner area where students and locals have parked and are crowded around a coffee shop, an ice cream store, and an organic food market. Moving from the bird’s-eye view down the street, the roofs of the houses lining the street are wide and black, the first feel we get for the large Southern antebellum houses that set the Greek feel of the Crescent Ave. area. We see and hear traffic driving by, female students laughing as they walk down the street with purses and flip flops, and the noise of a university bus stopping to pick up students.

CUT TO:

ZETA CHI HOUSE-CONTINUOUS

As the camera focuses on the street side of the USouthern bus, it pulls away from its stop to reveal two concrete benches surrounded by yellow, white, and purple flowers, manicured shrubbery, and a green lawn spotted with large trees and flowering bushes that lead to the walkway of the Zeta Chi house. Two waist-high bushes frame the six-foot-wide square-tiled cement walkway as it opens into a circle right before reaching the cast iron railing and first stair to the front stoop and main door. The door is black with a shiny brass doorknob and kick plate and a gray finger pad for easy keyless access by members. The house has bright white wood siding, a black roof and eight windows facing the street, each divided into nine smaller windows by black molding and each framed by impressive black shutters. The flatness of the roof is broken up by three triangular windows, and the front stoop is covered by a triangular roof held up by four large white columns, all adding to the impressiveness of the large antebellum house. Most importantly, above the stoop on the triangular roof-front hang three, two-foot-high black cast iron Greek letters that read ZXX (Zeta Chi Chi), the formal name for the Zeta Chi sorority.

CUT TO:

ZETA CHI FRONT ROOM-CONTINUOUS

The inside of the house has black marble floors with purposeful white cracks and white walls with waist-high white molding all around the room. There are dark wood couches and chairs covered in thin-ribbed black corduroy and embroidered with the Zeta Chi seal. The couches are situated around a large fireplace whose mantel is adorned with framed pictures of past Zeta Chi bid days, pageants, and philanthropic events as noted in each picture by the banner hanging on the stoop above a group of smiling girls. The room is decorated with large wooden china cabinets filled with books, Zeta Chi yearbooks, black and gold plates with pink, yellow, and blue flowers, crystal knickknacks, and small gold statues. Antique wooden tables also pepper the room holding various lamps, all antique, ranging from colorful glass lamps decorated with exotic birds to tiered glass/marble lamps with decorative shades. The walls are decorated with random antique frames and paintings including exotic birds and Asian-inspired prints. This room, like the rest of the house, is a combination of comfortable puffy couches, creaky old wooden chairs, metal, marble, candlestick holders, plates, bookends, and old books. The front windows are just as impressive from the inside, each framed by white indoor shutters.

The camera leaves the front room to focus on a girl entering the house as she opens the door, says hello to other passing Zeta Chis, waves to an older White woman (the house mother who lives in an adjacent apartment), and picks up a cookie from a plate left for the girls by the house cook, Miss Althea. The camera follows the sophomore Zeta Chi as she devours Miss Althea’s famous chocolate chip cookie and moves up the flight of carpeted stairs leading to the second floor bedrooms where sophomore members and sorority officers (mostly juniors and seniors) dorm. While there are strict rules for living in the house, such as no boys or alcohol, most sophomores hope their GPA’s are high enough to earn them a place in the house so that they can build stronger friendships with the other girls in Zeta Chi. The sophomore moves down a cream carpeted hall lined with wooden doors numbered and labeled with hanging pinup boards that display the room’s motto (chosen by the girls) and a picture of the room’s inhabitants hugging each other and smiling. As the sophomore stops at the door to her room, we see by the hanging picture that she is in fact Yarah’s roommate. Wiping crumbs from her mouth, she opens the door.

As the door opens we see Yarah, a sophomore Zeta Chi, and two housemates commenting on different dresses as they stand in front of Yarah’s closet.

Yarah has straight brownish black hair down to the middle of her back that is pulled into a side part and braided down her neck, big brown eyes with long eyelashes, thick red lips, white teeth, and clear white skin with rosy cheeks. She is about 5’8” and has recently put on enough weight to become a size 6, which she comments on often so that “she says it before someone else does.” Her mother is from Korea and her father is, as her friends joke, “Pakizilian,” since he is both Pakistani and Brazilian. She can speak English and Korean fluently. She grew up in Atlanta and attended public school, an experience about which her private school friends often joke. She is an international business major with a minor in advertising and hopes to move overseas to work with the UN. While her parents knew nothing of the Greek system, her older brother joined a fraternity at USouthern just two years before and played a big part in talking Yarah into rushing. Now as a sophomore living in the house, Yarah gets to see the insider view of living in a sorority and following sorority rules.

We see Yarah’s roommate wipe crumbs from her mouth as she flops down on her bed, ignoring the group of girls looking at dresses in the closet. The camera moves around the green pastel room as a Martina McBride CD plays in the background. The room, identical to all rooms in the house except for color, is 15 by 20 feet, with two raised single beds with wooden frames, two built-in wooden closets, a 6’-by-4’ window, a six-drawer dresser, and a desk and chair. Yarah and her roommate, like all their housemates, have coordinated their brightly colored pastel bed spreads and have decorated their room with a mixture of similar colored posters, drawn pictures, and wall hangings. Their room is also plastered with photographs of themselves and friends/dates hugging and smiling at sorority events and with mascot-decaled cheeks at USouthern football games. Yarah looks over from her conversation, smiling at her roommate.

Dissemination

CUT TO:

USOUTHERN FRESHMAN GIRLS DORM-DATE NIGHT-7:00PM

As we zoom in from a sunset sky, bird’s-eye view we see a large university campus spotted with green spaces, street lights, sports stadiums/fields, and brick buildings. Moving in from the bird’s-eye view, the camera focuses in on a fifteen-story, gray brick building with square windows and a white and black marker reading BOGART TOWER, FRESHMAN WOMEN’S DORM. The camera lands on this marker at the doorway of the building and then moves quickly up the outside of the building until it reaches a ninth floor window. We immediately hear the song Soulja Man blaring from the room’s iTunes library. The camera moves inside the window to reveal a typical freshman dorm room with two beds, two closets, and two desks each displaying a MAC notebook. The room is decorated with pictures of family and friends from high school, a USouthern Centaurs calendar marked with sorority events and course exams, and white Christmas lights strung around bed posts and over the window. We find Margaret, a newly pledged Zeta Chi, pouring newly purchased eyeliner, mascara, blush, and lip gloss from a Macy’s bag onto her desktop. Margaret has straight, below-the-shoulders caramel blonde hair, big blue eyes with long black eyelashes, freckles, white teeth, and thin pink lips that curl when she smiles, showing her top gums and making her look like a little kid. She is about 5’10,” a size 4, and is used to getting the attention of guys although she is not into being girly and has never been one for fashion. Although her family is Episcopalian, she attended a private “hard core” Catholic high school, and if given a bid will be a third generation Zeta Chi. She hopes that these next years in Zeta Chi will be “the best of her life” as her mother has promised.

Margaret seems exasperated as she moves from the desk to the mirror to her closet and back again, picking up dresses, holding them up to herself, and then throwing them on the bed. She has spent the last half hour sorting through dresses as she attempts to get dressed for one of her first Zeta Chi events. Her roommate, a high school friend who decided not to rush a sorority, sits on her own bed looking on in disbelief.

Covert Discipline

CUT TO:

UNOFFICIAL OFF-CAMPUS ZETA CHI APARTMENT-DATE NIGHT

The camera scans the crowded downtown streets and eventually focuses on the old, brown, four-story building that we recognize as the unofficial off-campus Zeta Chi apartment. The camera enters their second-story apartment window where “Happy 22nd Birthday Christine” was written a month earlier. Entering, we see the familiar living room now decorated with Christmas lights illuminated under a sheer, purple wall hanging which gives the room a purplish glow. A roommate’s long-time boyfriend is sitting in the living room watching football on TV, drinking a beer, dressed in black pants, a tie, and black suit coat. We hear voices coming from the front of the apartment and the camera leaves the man behind, following the voices to where we find Summer and her two roommates getting ready for date night.

Summer, a junior Zeta Chi, has straight bleached blonde hair cut into a chin-length bob with wispy bangs and big brown eyes lined with blue/black eyeliner which she wears at all times. She has clear, tanned skin with thin pink lips, white teeth, and light brown freckles. She is about 5’4” and is a size 12, which she hates because she can’t borrow her friends’ clothes, even though she is so stylish wouldn’t be caught dead in most of them anyway. Coming a long way from her upbringing on a small dairy farm in upstate New York, Summer has taken to sorority fashion with flying colors and despite being a bit larger than the other girls, is now known as one of the more fashion savvy of her pledge class. Today she has purposefully chosen to wear dark skinny jeans, a long gray shirt, pearls, and a very cute short pink jacket with a ruffle collar and big black buttons. As an education major, she should be more interested in her upcoming student teaching, but with her transformation from Northern geek to Southern chic, her true love has become fashion and fashion photography. While she loves fashion, she also questions the dangers of women’s obsession with appearance. She combines her love and her concerns about fashion in her photography and uses her photographs to make statements about American values about women’s appearance. Her work has won awards and has given her a new confidence. Her parents, a bit weary of the new and improved Summer, still remain impressed with her acceptance to Zeta Chi since she is the first in her family to become Greek. Summer also gloats, although secretly, about her acceptance to Zeta Chi since as a “discovery,” someone the sorority doesn’t know anything about before recruitment, she can be sure that Greek ties didn’t pave her way. She got in on her own merits.

As we enter, Summer is walking around in sweatpants and a blue shirt T-shirt with no bra made obvious by the way she is crossing her arms over her breasts as she runs frantically from room to room. The doorbell rings and knowing it is her date, a best friend from high school who fills in when she has no real prospects, she runs to the door to let him in.

Summer

Hi! I’m running late! Christine, come take care of Brooks.

Summer runs off before Brooks really can get a good look at her. Brooks is about 5’9”, with floppy, wavy brown hair, big hazel eyes, devilishly handsome dimples, and wire-rim glasses. He is thin with a 32-inch waist and is wearing khaki pants with a blue shirt, a Centaur bowtie and a black Centaur lined sports coat. Although he does not even attend USouthern, his father, mother, and brother did and he is a big fan of their football team. While his dress may seem corny in other cultures, here two girls who held the door for him to enter the building have already complimented him on his USouthern pride. Although he knows he will never “get anything” from Summer, he likes being her date to get the Zeta Chi event T-shirt she is obligated to buy him. The shirt lets him brag to his buddies that he’s hanging out with USouthern sorority girls.

Christine comes walking out of her room in a white shirt with a black short shirt over it with a hippy-like necklace and jeans. She seems oddly out of place compared to her roommates’ dress. She has chosen not to attend the date night since she’d feel weird attending an event for a sorority from which she might be de-sistering. As she approaches Brooks she is immediately put off by his Centaur pride, but remembers the times she wore similar offenses and tells herself to be nice. She greets him in the hall and they both go to meet her roommate’s boyfriend who is watching football in the living room. The three begin to have a very surface conversation about football. These are the types of conversations Christine has grown bored of.

Back out front Summer and her roommates continue to get dressed.

Zeta Chi Discourse of Ladylike

According to Foucault (1972), discourse is always already present as a regulatory structure, however contingent or fleeting, that imposes rules and regulations. Discursive rules and regulations reinforce those expectations and regularities that we come to regard as the realities of our lived experiences. Within the culture of USouthern, discourses of femininity helped to construct and regulate the reality of gender for all college students. These collegewide dominant discourses were multiple and competing and offered various options for acceptable gender performance.

However, the multiple and competing discourses of femininity at USouthern were not all represented within Zeta Chi. Instead, within the sorority there was a strong disciplinary process that reinforced one very dominant traditional discourse of femininity grounded in White, Christian, upper-class, heterosexual values—the discourse of “ladylikeness.” This dominant discourse had specific expectations for women that were shaped by a geographic history influenced by notions of race and patriarchy, Christianity, the Bible belt, and conservative fundamentalism (Scott, 1984; Shaw, 2008; St. Pierre, 1995). Shaw (2008) specifically reinforced the roles that fundamentalist Christian roots played in Southern expectations of women, noting that Southern White men, in the face of the civil rights and economic downtown, “found themselves with little social power, except that which they could exercise over women” (p. 52), therefore contributing to an increasing need to maintain strict gender roles in order to maintain boundaries and reinforce male control (Bendroth, 1993). Scott (1984) also concluded that these Southern Christian legacies created highly prescribed notions of femininity, making the traditional role for women in the South often more confining than in other parts of the country. Therefore, the expectations of femininity that were highly disciplined within Zeta Chi were not unique to that sorority, but remained tied to the very traditional sociocultural and socioreligious discourses grounded in a particular historic Southern geography. While less traditional expectations for women were present at USouthern due to nontraditional, non-Southern, non-Christian, nonheterosexual influences, these less traditional discourses did not align with what was expected from the women within the more traditional Zeta Chi culture.

Sociopolitically, Zeta Chi was located in a historic moment in which the fervent feminisms of the first, second, and even third waves had been replaced by a “re-turn” to traditional femininity or a postfeminist mentality. The sense of chaos and loss of control felt by many due to civil rights movements, feminist liberations, gay and lesbian liberations, and the current crisis of masculinity has left some Americans feeling a need to return to a time when things were more simplistic, less fluid, or more clear cut—to a time when people had specific roles related to gender and sexuality (Berbary & Richmond, 2011; Levant, 2003; Shaw, 2008). This desire to return to an earlier time has led some to adopt either a faux feminism that claims to advocate for gender equality yet still reinforces highly prescribed and traditional gender roles or a postfeminist mentality that there is no longer a need for feminism or that feminism itself has been detrimental to women and therefore should be rejected (Joseph, 2009; Shaw, 2008). Shaw (2008) exposed the promotion of a faux feminism within Southern culture:

The fundamentalists argue that women and men are of equal worth before God, but that God has ordained specific gender-based roles, which, interestingly enough, make the man the head of the house to whom the wife is to “submit herself graciously.” Again, the fundamentalists draw from the rhetoric of feminism even as they oppose it. While espousing a belief in the equality of women and men, they reinforce patriarchal family structures that disadvantage and control women. These statements attempt to appease women’s sense of fairness and need for self-worth, all the while maintaining them in a subordinate position, completely reliant on the benevolent protection of men. (p. 64)

Such faux feminism was reinforced within the discourse of ladylikeness in Zeta Chi, particularly in the ways that women were encouraged to be strong, intelligent, and proud while simultaneously upholding a highly prescribed notion of being ladylike in a very traditional, fundamentalist sense. While there was the sentiment of a faux feminism within Zeta Chi, there also seemed to be a postfeminist mentality that denied further need for feminism and/or concluded that feminism itself was a sort of evil that hurt women more than it helped them, was unladylike, and was therefore suspect (Joseph, 2009). Due to this postfeminist mentality in the sorority, women often failed to “see” how they were disciplined either because of a false sense that feminism had won and that they were now “free” to be anything they like or because they believed that the feminist woman was unladylike and therefore a less desirable woman to be. Within some of the women’s circles, this dismissal of feminism also helped to support the belief that the inequalities between men and women where “just the way things were” and were uncontestable because they were natural and innate. Therefore, the women of Zeta Chi were clearly caught in a postfeminist sociopolitical climate that conjoined with the traditional socioreligious, sociohistorical legacies to further enforce the discourse of “ladylikeness” and discipline women to accept subordinate positions with highly prescribed notions of gender cloaked as “natural,” “innate,” or even “feminist” ways of being.

In order for this one discourse to remain dominant, Zeta Chi had to create and discipline boundaries around members’ performances of femininity, forcing the exclusion of alternative or competing expectations, performances, or possibilities of gender. In this sense, in order to remain the privileged discourse or only dominant discourse within Zeta Chi, there was a need to compete with and exclude those alternative discourses of femininity found outside of the sorority. As a result, there was little clash of competing discourses inside the sorority. Instead, the power of this overarching dominant discourse prevailed and was cyclically reinforced within the various spheres of the women’s lives, including their Southern upbringings, the general USouthern culture, and the specific culture of Zeta Chi.

This is not an essentialist claim that the overarching dominant discourse of femininity within Zeta Chi is discrete, bounded, stable, and singular. Foucault (1976/1978) reiterated the need to trouble any essentialist claims of overarching dominant discourse when he warned that “we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (p. 100). Instead, rather than being a bounded discourse, the dominant discourse of femininity in Zeta Chi only appeared to be bounded due to the coordination of discursive elements that were strategically disciplined to create the “fiction” of a singular, bounded, and stable discourse of Truth within Zeta Chi.

Foucault explained such discourse as a violence imposed on subjects because of discourse’s ability to conceal power, set boundaries, create expectations, limit that which is considered possible, and discipline individual existence to remain within what the discourse deems “appropriate.” To Foucault, these actions were violent because they coordinated to conceal power and expectations in notions of taboo, rationality, and Truth and to impose regulations on individuals without their awareness of their own complicity. In other words, individuals accept many contestable, discursively imposed expectations as Truth and remain unaware of their own complicity. The ability to recognize one’s own complicity becomes particularly difficult when discursive expectations are misjudged as innate and natural rather than as historically and culturally defined regulations open to contestation and negotiation. This means that rather than appear as expectations that could be challenged or subverted, many discursive regularities are instead often regarded as uncontestable “Truth” to be performed without question.

Such discursive regularities often went unchallenged within Zeta Chi. For example, Zeta Chi women were expected to be heterosexual, but were “not good girls” if they were too loose with their heterosexual sexuality. Rather than challenge this expectation, the convergence of overt discipline and covert discipline led many of my participants to discipline their own and others’ gendered behaviors. My participants accepted that these expectations of decency were just the way things were for women—a Truth of the “lived experience” of being a woman. This made the negotiation of those expectations inconceivable to my participants who were caught within a cycle of discursive discipline.

Discursive Discipline in Zeta Chi

While participants were strongly disciplined by discourse, they were not always only an effect of discipline; at times they were the cause. Disciplinary power was used both on and by the women to maintain a specific reputation of Zeta Chi and to uphold the discourse of ladylike that constructed the expectations of appropriate gender behaviors. Discipline, as Foucault (1977) stated,

trains the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements—small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline “makes” individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. (p. 170)

Therefore, while the sorority women were disciplined by discourse, they also simultaneously became the instruments that helped to employ the expectations of that discourse. The following Foucauldian analysis illuminates the ways that women were both controlled by discipline and became “controllers” of that same discipline.

Silencing Intersections

In the same way that data are always “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 3), my analysis and interpretations are also always already partial and incomplete. In particular, privileging the analysis of gender within Zeta Chi simultaneously silenced an analysis of the complex intersections of gender, race, and class that played out within the messy lives of the women. More specifically, my focus on gender ignored the ways in which discourse also disciplined the performative acts of race and class in ways that served to maintain a legacy of privileged whiteness. This privileged whiteness was based on performative acts of class, which were inexplicitly tied to historic, cultural, and geographic legacies of race that surrounded the Southern sorority subculture. This intersection of class and race created both explicit and implicit expectations for behavior that were based on dominant expectations of classed-Whiteness and also created expectations related to the treatment of and reference to people of color.

While many of the dominant expectations of whiteness were more strongly linked to the intersection of class and race than pure race, the treatment and reference to people of color was very much grounded in historic legacies of race—legacies that had the potential to simultaneously reinforce historic tendencies that devalued and generalized people of color, yet also, within the current climate, made it inappropriate to be discriminatory, unaware, and/or outwardly racist. These legacies played out in complex ways that were at times contradictory. On one hand, sorority members celebrated diversity and equality, at times even bragging about the unique diversity that was present in Zeta Chi due to the membership of the “ethnic girls”—girls who I was told included the eight Jewish members, one Chinese member, and one member who was both Pakistani and Brazilian (all American-born). Yet at the same time, even these notions of diversity seemed forced or lacking in awareness of the complexities of race and race relations in America. In practice, even with the recognition of the importance of diversity, some participants still retained historic tendencies that privileged whiteness by devaluing “otherness.” In other words, this “valued diversity” was at the same time often disciplined, made token, and negatively commented on.

In particular, the privileging of whiteness could be observed in discriminatory statements that attributed negative behaviors to race, in practices of colorblindness, in overarching statements about racial groups, and in racially charged comments in which the White teller was sure to alert her friends of color that they were in fact excluded from such generalizations or that they simply should not take offense. For example, Cassie (a pseudonym) was known for her “political incorrectness” about race and, while her closest friends included two sorority members of color, she often looked directly at them and stated “no offense” before making a racially charged comment. My field notes captured one of these “no offense” moments: after her half Brazilian friend, Juliana (a pseudonym), who was wearing hoop earrings, mentioned that it was common for Latinas to wear such earrings, Cassie stated, “No offense, but only hoes wear hoop earrings.” Although Juliana tried to defend what she saw as culturally relevant jewelry, Cassie refused to acknowledge cultural difference and ended up reinforcing a kind of elitist ethnocentrism. Therefore, while Cassie was accepting of diversity enough to be close friends with Juliana, her values surrounding class and race remained grounded in a discourse that privileged classed-Whiteness through the silencing of counterintelligibilities.

While such overt instances of privileging of whiteness were fairly rare, the covert expectations for behavior and appropriateness that were grounded in this elite discourse were pervasive. Even girls who were considered “ethnic” or who saw themselves as non-White often still embraced a Southern, Christian, heterosexual, upper-middle-class value system that due to historic and geographic legacy was inextricably connected to privileged whiteness. Therefore, the discipline and intersections of gender, race, and class not only groomed women to be appropriate women, but to be appropriate middle-upper-class White women. I will expand on this analysis of the intersections of gender, race, and class in a future manuscript.

Final Thoughts

The women of Zeta Chi were disciplined through hierarchical/lateral observation, normalizing judgment, and social examination in order to fulfill those expectations of gendered subjectivity enabled by the discourse of ladylike within the sorority. The combination of the overt power of Standards/Nationals and the covert power of girl talk worked to simultaneously to construct a disciplinary process that observed, judged, normalized, examined, and recorded the gendered performances of women and revealed that within sororities there were strict forms of domination, particularly related to performative acts of gender, although similar discipline occurred around race and class as well.

Although subsequent manuscripts will focus on the discipline of race and class and the women’s ability to subvert such disciplinary power, this manuscript focused specifically on sorority women’s subjection to discursive discipline, highlighting how they were often left “caught in a punishable, punishing universality” (Foucault, 1977, p. 178). The combination of discourse and discipline worked together to produce and reproduce “appropriate” women as subjects of the Zeta Chi sorority. Although there was always the potential to resist, re-create, and reinterpret expectations, the highly prescribed discourse of the Greek system easily maintained the appearance of “uncontestable” boundaries and disciplined the possibilities of viable gender performance, often limiting the women’s failure to repeat. In other words, the subjectivities of the women of Zeta Chi were not based on simple choices to perform, but rather were constituted within “socially constructed rules and regularities [that] organized a way of thinking into a way of acting in the world” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 485).

Within the sorority, discursive discipline was encompassing and pervasive. However, as Foucault (1977) reminded us, power should not only be seen in negative terms. Instead, power is also productive and so where there is great power there is great chance for resistance: ‘‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact power produces; it produces reality” (Foucault, 1977, p. 194). Illuminating the existence of strong discursive disciplinary processes within the sorority simultaneously shows the possibilities of transformation through “seeing” how we are disciplined, challenging that discipline, and promoting new possibilities for our own gendered selves. Therefore, if power is understood as a constantly negotiated relationship, an important step in potentially subverting or challenging expectation is to do the work of this manuscript—to expose how power works and to “learn what is being produced” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 491) in order to begin the labor of strategically redeploying “the terminal forms power takes” (Foucault, 1978, p. 92).