African American Sorority and Fraternity Dress used as Language

African American Sorority and Fraternity Dress used as Language

Introduction

Being born female does not make a girl feminine. A girl's social group, in interaction with her family and society at large, socializes her to be feminine. Femininity, then, is not an absolute condition, but rather is socially constructed, in that it is created through social interaction. An institution intimately involved in the social construction of feminine identity is the American college sorority. Modeled on fraternities, sororities originated in the United States in the early twentieth century. Found in public and private universities, sororities are secret societies with Greek names that allow for social interaction and often provide group living within an exclusive sorority house.

Within this system, young sorority women are not just passive products of socialization; they actively create their own femininity. In a sorority, achieving the appropriate look becomes a gender role obligation; it is expected of members. For researchers interested in idealized images (visual norms), exclusive organizations can provide for interesting fieldwork. Idealized images function as a covert means of social control within some greedy organizations, such as sororities. There are two main types of exclusive organizations: the total institution and the greedy organization. In organizations that retain rigid control of their members, as in total institutions (prisons, the military and some religious groups), dress codes are often quite explicit1. Many sororities can be considered greedy organizations in that they balance constraint and freedom for their members. In a greedy organization, group ideology may not be as visually apparent as in a total institution.

Social Construction of Gender

The development of femininity occurs through the social construction of gender which, according to West and Zimmerman, occurs in routine interaction. Within a sorority house, routine interaction includes members' being involved with each other for a large part of each day. Members dress together, eat together, and attend social functions together; they often choose the same classes as their sorority sisters1. As a consequence, influences from other groups are kept to a minimum, allowing the sorority to more strongly enculturate the young women who are in the process of actively learning to be highly feminine women. Femininity is learned; it is a social organization of relations among women and between women and men that is mediated by powerful images.

I refer to these images as idealized images because they are visual representations of a culture's notion of idealized womanhood. Within the sorority members learn traditional gender roles that become gender role obligations. Interpretation of these images depends on the group's doctrine of femininity; as such, the idealized images are visible expressions of gender role obligations. In this paper, I examine the relationship between the social construction of femininity and its manifestation in the idealized images of two sororities at an American university1.

Research questions focused on how each sorority defines idealized images and the relationship between a member's role commitment and adherence to these images. As new members (pledges) became embedded in sorority culture, ...