Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige

Inside Greek U. \ Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige \ \ By Alan D. DeSantis \ The University Press of Kentucky \ Copyright © 2007 The University Press of Kentucky\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 978-0-8131-2468-1 \ \ \ \ \ Chapter One \ Understanding Gender \ It is no exaggeration to say that this book has taken me over two decades to conceptualize. From the first day that I began pledging my fraternity in 1982, I remember being both intrigued by the Greek system's secrecy, friendships, and social life and disturbed by its elitism, sexism, and hazing. My ambivalence, however, did not prevent me from becoming-and remaining-an ardent, but critical, supporter of Greek life.\ In the years that followed my graduation and subsequent departure from my fraternity house, I conceived of at least a dozen ill-fated research projects, all attempting to address the nature of the Greek system's strengths and weaknesses. None was quite right. Then, in the summer of 2000, after returning from a four-day fraternity conference where I spoke-or, more accurately, hung out-with hundreds of undergraduate brothers from around the nation, I had a breakthrough, an epiphany of sorts. Fraternities and sororities can be best understood as gendered clubs where traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity are reaffirmed-and, in some cases, even reformed or replaced.\ This book, therefore, is about the symbiotic relation that the Greek system has with its members. It influences their gender conceptions; they influence its gender practices. And, when they leave college, they disproportionately influence America. It is crucial, then, that we understand fraternities and sororities not only as institutions but also as they affect and are affected by their members.\ The following discussion details the theoretical lens used to investigate that intersection between the individual and the institution. Specifically, I discuss why I chose to privilege gender over other aspects of identity, elaborate on the ideas of gender construction and performativity theory, and preview the nine most significant conclusions to be drawn from my work.\ Aspects of Identity\ While this book focuses on gender, masculinity and femininity are only part of the factors that inform the complex web of human identities. Other frequently discussed aspects of identity, as Gauntlett (2002) summarized, "include class, age, disability and sexuality" (p. 13). In addition, geographic origins (I'm from New Jersey), education, ethnicity (I'm an Italian American), and occupation (I'm a percussionist and a professor) can also shape an individual's sense of self.\ Which variables come to the forefront in the process of self-definition, however, are often determined by contextual and relational factors. For example, I think of myself as an Italian American only when I am around other Italian Americans or when the topic of Italian culture is broached. Similarly, I never thought of myself as a Yankee until I attended the University of Alabama. Before then, being from New Jersey was inconsequential to how I defined myself. After all, everyone I ever knew was from New Jersey-what was the big deal? In Tuscaloosa, however, my birthplace was a big deal; it was the major factor by which my Alabama peers (endearingly) defined me and, thus, became a major factor in my self-definition (see Hewitt, 1991, pp. 124-129).\ Such redefinitions affect not only the way we think about ourselves but also the way we act toward others. For example, when individuals or situations bring my Italian American identity to the forefront, my communication style changes noticeably. I become more ethnic in the way I talk, act, and walk. This transformation is made even more complex by the fact that my conception of what it means to be/act Italian is informed by my ideas of traditional, tough-guy masculinity and an aggressive Northeastern attitude, à la Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone or James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano.\ Because identity is so fluid and layered, multiple self-definitions are commonplace. Depending on the contextual factors at play at any given time, ethnicity, class, race, or gender will be thrust to the forefront of consciousness or relegated to its deepest recesses (Hewitt, 1991, pp. 121-123). What distinguishes people, therefore, is not necessarily their identities themselves but how often they are forced to think about and even redefine their identities. Generally speaking, those with power and in the majority (two factors that often accompany one another) are far less likely to have to think about or redefine their identities (Flagg, 1997; McIntosh, 1997; Morrison, 1993; Ross, 1997).\ Nowhere is this privilege illustrated better than in America's white social Greek system. Once young students pledge an organization and move into the Greek community, they are, for all intents and purposes, surrounded by a stable, homogeneous group of brothers and sisters for the next four to five years of their lives. And, since the overwhelming majority of their brothers and sisters are white, middle- to upper-class, Christian, and heterosexual, gender and Greek affiliation become the sole factors informing their self-identities. We should not be surprised, therefore, that, almost without exception, the men and women who participated in this study thought of themselves as just Greek men and women.\ But there is a price to pay for such comfortable conformity. When individuals are placed in such protective communities, other aspects of their identity become invisible to them. Those who never encounter African Americans never have to think about their own whiteness. Those who never encounter poverty never have to think about their own economic privilege. Those who never encounter homosexuals never have to confront the meaning of their own heterosexuality. Their own race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, therefore, are free to masquerade as natural and universal.\ The segregation in the lives of these men and women, however, is no accident or coincidence. Maintaining sameness is built into the very nature of these selective and secretive organizations. Nowhere is this more in evidence than during the all-important rush process, where the worth and fit of potential new members is deliberated. For over two decades, I have witnessed sameness methodically reproduced at rush not just by the favoritism shown to those rushees most similar to the older brothers and sisters but by the absolute exclusion of those who are significantly different-a practice that Cornell West (1994) has called racial nepotism.\ This selective exclusion is so well known on most campuses, in fact, that the large majority of black, Hispanic, Asian, homosexual, non-Christian, and disabled students do not even bother attending rush functions. For those brave, uninformed, and/or optimistic students who do, however, almost certain rejection-and, in many cases, humiliation-awaits them.\ Last semester, for example, I witnessed three international students from Saudi Arabia walk into one of GU's top fraternity houses looking for the all-American college experience. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, they were treated as trespassers. Not only did every active fraternity brother avoid conversation with them; none greeted, smiled, or even made eye contact with them. Within minutes of their entrance, they unceremoniously left. While I later apologized to them for their treatment and assured them that not all student organizations on campus were so unfriendly, I could not in good conscience encourage them to visit other fraternity houses, knowing that the same reception awaited them there too.\ This type of treatment of nonwhite students is not uncommon on GU's campus, or, for that matter, on most campuses that I have experienced. African American men and women (GU's largest minority group) who walk through white rush, for instance, often receive a similar collective cold shoulder. I have been in deliberative meetings, in fact, where blocs of members have convinced their chapters to exclude blacks because of the "dangerous" precedent it would set. At one such rush meeting, Mark, a senior Kappa, asserted that, if the chapter extended a bid to Jason, a young black man from Chicago, the floodgates would soon open, and the chapter would become "one big ghetto," inundated with "niggers." "Is that what you guys want?" The chapter answered with a resounding no. Jason never received a bid.\ While the fear of being ghettoized may motivate some organizations to remain segregated, other fraternities claim to have retained their all-white status out of fear of sorority rejection and isolation. At a 2004 international fraternity conference in Chicago, I asked a group of delegates representing four large Southeastern universities to explain this particular concern:\ AD: Tell me why extending a bid to a black member would be bad for your organization? Michael: The sororities won't socialize with you. No date parties. And, hell, no overnight formals. Sean: Exactly, especially like old row houses. AD: What are old row houses? Sean: The oldest sororities.... They are the richest and best. The really good ones. Spencer: They are just as bad as we are. Mommy and daddy would not like it if little Susie was fraternizing with black men. [Collective agreement.] Michael: Now, the bad sororities will still party with you. Spencer: Yeah, but they're desperate. Those cows will party with anybody. [Group laughter.]\ Some elite houses will, however, make the rare exception for certain African American rushees. At one of the best and richest fraternities on GU's campus, for instance, two black members, Kevin and Carl, have pledged and been initiated in the last four years. For this to have happened, the older brothers had to be convinced that Kevin and Carl were not "niggers." As Smitty explained: "We don't hate black people; it's only the niggers that we don't want. ... But if you are cool, you know, normal, then I don't think many of us would-well some would-really have a problem pledging a cool black guy."\ But to be classified as cool and normal by Smitty, his brothers, and the white Greek system in general, African American students must be black in skin color only. That is, to have any chance of acceptance, they must talk white, dress white, act white, have no black friends, reject black culture and tradition, and be light skinned. And, even then, the possibility of rejection remains disturbingly high, especially at universities in the Deep South.\ Some exclusionary practices that keep fraternities and sororities dangerously homogeneous, however, are not as consciously blatant or malicious. Sometimes, brothers and sisters naively vote for or against rush candidates solely on the basis of whether they like and feel comfortable with them. "I don't care whether you are black, white, pink, green, who cares," explains John, Omega's vice president. "When I cast my vote, I only think about whether I like you as a human or not. Period." What John and many of his fellow Greeks don't acknowledge, however, is that, as over fifty years' worth of social-psychological research has demonstrated, liking and comfort levels are highly correlated with perceived commonalities (Byrne, 1971; Cialdini, 2001). Thus, the more you think you have in common with people-for example, race, nationality, religion, and sexual preference-the more likely you are to enjoy their company and conversation and, by extension, rush, bid, pledge, and befriend them (Brewer, 1979; Tajfel, 1981).\ This link between similarity and liking, therefore, explains the absence of malice in the many good-hearted, moral students who, in choosing new brothers and sisters, favor similarity and exclude difference. The absence of malice, however, does not mitigate the effect. Sameness is perpetuated, the status quo is reinforced, and the organization is deprived of diverse perspectives and talents.\ As a researcher, I have found that this troubling absence of difference informing and complicating my subjects' identities has allowed me to isolate gender as key to understanding how fraternity brothers and sorority sisters define themselves, their compatriots, and their organizations. They see themselves, living in their homogeneous community where only gender and Greek affiliation separate one from another, as just Greek men and women talking, studying, playing, and partying with other Greek men and women just like them.\ The Theoretical Foundation of This Book\ This book adopts the general perspective that our ideas of gender (i.e., masculine and feminine) are shaped and constructed by social forces and discourse-such as media, family, societal traditions, and peer groups-not innate to the human biological form. That is to say, while after birth we have little say regarding our gender designation (male or female), how we come to understand our specific gender role is an ongoing cultural process. Parents and teachers, cartoons and toys, religion and MTV, all influence the way we come to understand what it means to be a "man's man" or a "good girl."\ This is not to imply, however, that gender is fixed or something that one is. Rather, as Judith Butler (1990) has argued, gender is something that one does. It is, as Salih notes, "an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a doing rather than a being" (2002, p. 62). Butler expands on the idea of performativity: "Gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.... There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (1990, p. 25). Thus, gender should be seen, not as a fixed attribute or idea, but as a "fluid variable which can shift and change in different contexts and at different times" (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 139). On my college campus, for instance, I find men and women adopting myriad different gender performances, some, admittedly, more encouraged and rewarded than others. Lisa, a Kappa sister, for example, told me how she "kicked ass and took no prisoners" in her finance report on Wednesday, dressed provocatively and "danced dirty" at the clubs on Saturday, and presided over a meeting of her 160-member chapter on Monday. Similarly, Mark, a Chi brother, proudly told me how he spent his Saturday afternoon encouraging and hugging Special Olympic athletes and his Saturday night drinking, fighting, and aggressively pursuing women.\ Lisa and Mark's activities, as different as they may seem on the surface, highlight the fluid and mercurial nature of gender in practice. With each new performance, their gendered identities changed, illustrating that no single performance is more essential or authentic to their core. Or, to put it another way, there is no "core gender identity that produces one's gendered activities." "Rather," as Eckert and McConnell-Ginet have argued, "it is those very activities that create the illusion of a core. And it is the predominance of certain kinds of performances that support the illusion that one's core is either 'male' or 'female'" (2003, p. 316).\ Conceiving of gender as performance, however, is not to imply that men and women are free to perform where, when, and how they wish. Our choices of gender scripts are set within a "highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (Butler, 1990, p. 33). To pick the wrong performance within the wrong context can, as many gay men and lesbian women can testify, result in ridicule, ostracism, violence, and even death.\ For most of the fraternity brothers and sorority sisters who participated in this study, however, the process of selecting the most culturally appropriate gender script has been largely unconscious and effortless. Because traditional masculine and feminine behaviors repeat themselves over time, most subjects viewed their performances as following natural, ahistoric, and God-given paths. It is this masquerade of neutrality that prevents them from both seriously contemplating the logic or saneness of their gendered actions and conceiving, much less adopting, new and unconventional scripts. Indeed, for many of these students, only the insane (including queers, fags, dykes, queens, etc.) and the misanthropic (including hippies, punk rockers, druggies, etc.) disobey the natural dictates of appropriate gender behavior.\ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Inside Greek U. by Alan D. DeSantis Copyright © 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

Contents Introduction: Life at Greek University....................11. Understanding Gender....................192. Studs and Virgins....................433. The Tough Guy and His Date (Rape)....................774. Her Laxatives, His Steroids....................1155. Bros before Hos....................1536. Soccer Moms and Corporate Dads....................1917. Cleaning Up after the Party....................217Acknowledgments....................235Notes....................237References....................247Index....................259

\ Library JournalDeSantis (communications, Univ. of Kentucky) takes an ethnographic approach to investigating what members of Greek organizations at one university can tell us about the impact of Greek life on perceptions about gender among fraternity and sorority members. As a fraternity member himself and a longtime faculty and alumni adviser to Greek organizations, DeSantis takes an empathetic approach to his subject. Based on statistical data about Greek life from various sources, his own experiences with these organizations, and focus group and individual interviews with over 200 fraternity and sorority members, DeSantis's work addresses how traditional-sometimes exaggerated-gender identities are reinforced in Greek organizations, affecting members' views on issues such as sexuality, emotional intimacy in same-gender relationships, body image, and post-college aspirations. Always respectful of his participants, DeSantis produces a sympathetic work that seeks to help future members of Greek organizations to critique and avoid the often harmful gender ideals that fraternities and sororities can perpetuate. This book should be required reading for college students thinking about pledging a fraternity or a sorority. Recommended for academic libraries.\ —Elizabeth L. Winter\ \ \ \ \ \ From the Publisher"This is powerful information, and for lawyers who interface with the Greek system, either as university counsel or as an attorney prosecuting or defending a particular house or member, DeSantis's book is sure to become "must reading." But even those not so employed will find it engaging and though provoking." -- Robert M. Jarvis, Journal of Law and Education\ \ \