Abstract
Investigations of university campus life and the formal and informal curriculum are core staples of the sociology of education. In this book, Karioris adds to this trend but significantly turns his attention to, as the title suggests, the ways (male) students learn the institutionally sanctioned – indeed, mandated – version of heteronormativity. This is achieved through a detailed ethnographic account of the lives of various groups of men – or ‘guys’ in the author’s parlance – living in an all-male residence at ‘University of St Jermone’, a Catholic, urban-based, private university in the US.
Karioris’s investigation is an expert exploration of sociality and liminality – central planks in the author’s analysis of how the young men ‘contest, work around, and co-construct pieces and parts of the ethos of the hall, community, and their relationship with each other and the university’ (p. 12). This ensures the book goes well beyond the ways that this particular university makes efforts to structure the possibilities and scope of sexual and romantic engagement among the student body.
Karioris opens the text with an introduction that sets the backdrop, outlining important details about the US university sector, paying attention to the possibilities of gendered dynamics in these spaces and making clear the centrality of the role of residence halls in the building of (the myth of) university community. Here we are also introduced to the book’s conceptual cornerstones, youth, liminality, masculinity. Unapologetically eclectic, Karioris works with a research ‘tools’ approach rather than using a specific framework, drawing on (largely [pro-]feminist) ideas and concepts from sociology, philosophy and anthropology.
Chapter 1 introduces the main groups of men who are core in the study and goes about setting the scene in ways so vivid it begins to feel like one is on campus. This is compelling, but also important because the physical space is a central part of the analysis that follows. A fuller account of the methods comes only at page 51, despite an extensive discussion of some meetings with the various groups of ‘guys’ in the preceding pages. This would have been better served up front, in my view, as the section also contains various important points about the decisions made in the research and writing that I found myself already pondering as I read the introduction and first chapter. One such decision pertains to situating the study participants as ‘guys’ – that is, as neither men nor boys. While laudable, this informality potentially disrobes the participants of their imbued institutional power as men – indeed, white men. In this chapter, we also learn about the logic of the descriptive labels given to the groups of guys identified in the study – ‘the Step Kids’, ‘Man Cave Guys’ and the ‘Third Floor Group’. While necessary and helpful for the reader to keep track and get a sense of these young men, I wondered whether the likely multifaceted components of subjectivity – their separate and overlapping identities as learners, workers, consumers. etc. – gets lost in the labelling process.
Chapter 2 centres the young men’s ‘Geographies of life’. Here even more detail is offered, working in tandem with the analysis to illuminate the articulation of physical space and prospects for interaction that underpin modes of sociality. This is not necessarily negatively constraining; indeed, the men often ‘struggle to find a place for themselves, [but] through this struggle form deep bonds with their friends’ (p. 65). Chapter 3 continues the ethnographic journey, exposing the ideals and pronouncements of community embedded in university discourses as ‘fictive, fictitious, and fictional’ (p. 81). Chapter 4 takes us to the institutional arrangements and efforts to promote heterosexual coupling. This material is as interesting as it is head-scratchingly bizarre. A Dean’s opening address and an organised dance offer examples of how the college makes efforts to promote heterosexual coupling in ways that echo popular culture depictions of college and high school-life from the 1950s (I’m thinking Grease, but without hair gel and subcultural stylising).
Chapter 5 foregrounds resistance, showcasing how, through ‘prioritizing their social relations over their sexual ones, these male students temporarily undermine the heteronormative order and push away from relational models premised solely on the heterosexual marital couple’ (p. 103). This is a not only a rejection of university heteronormative ideals, but a smart and useful reminder that the obsession with sex and hooking up might not be the all-powerful motivator that academic research very often documents. The conclusion locates the book in wider debates and confidently pushes the research community to take heed of some of the study’s key messages.
To offer critique, I found myself distracted by the conscious mixing of past and present tense of the writing around data. This goes similarly for some of the prose, which I found drifted from excellent to, occasionally, a little clunky. Further, while Karioris excels in moving from Bourdieu to Foucault and back again, a more overt theoretical mooring would have been beneficial. The brief deployment of some concepts or ideas occasionally leads to theoretical and allegorical dead ends. This is exemplified in the fleeting use in the analysis of Wacquant in relation to sparring (p. 61) and the brief encounter with jokes and humour (p. 47), both of which, I think, would have benefited from consistent engagement with the masculinities literature. This lack of overt grounding in more of the wider masculinities theorising also means that, in discussing the men’s ‘rebuttal of normatives of socializing’ (p. 14), the chance is missed to locate this as part of the wider structural dimensions of change that have aided a contemporary transformation of masculinity which has resulted in hitherto unprecedented levels of male-to-male intimacy.
As is clear, there is much to enjoy in this text. Karioris excels in making us think harder and more carefully about assuming that young men rely on traditional modes of masculinity in their interaction with other men, while making overt, but not over-playing, the very real possibilities for homosociality to be underpinned by authentic platonic intimacy.