Subject to sorority: women's negotiations of competing discourses of femininity

Based on the need to expand literature on sorority women and explore all womens negotiations of gendered discourses, this dissertation details the process and findings of an ethnographic study of a southern sorority. This ethnography was grounded in a priori theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler and their notions of discourse, discipline, subjectivity, and performativity and was guided by the following research questions: 1) What discourses of femininity are enabled within Zeta Chi sorority culture? 2) How are such discourses of femininity disseminated and disciplined within Zeta Chi culture? and 3) How do women in Zeta Chi negotiate the gendered expectations disciplined within such discourse? The findings of this study were presented through a creative analytic "pseudo" screenplay that illuminates the ways sorority women learned gendered expectations, were disciplined towards compliance, and sometimes resisted or re-interpreted expectations of the dominant discourse of "ladylike". The fact that some women resisted and re-interpreted expectations even within this strictly disciplined discourse of gender reinforces the possibility for us all to potentially "see" ways that we are disciplined, to challenge that discipline, and to open new possibilities for our own gendered selves.