INTRODUCTION
There is a popular view that men are unemotional, inexpressive, and
impersonal. Yet men clearly form friendships and larger friendship groups,
and must therefore manage to “connect” with one another
personally and emotionally. In fact, male solidarity – the
“old boys club” – plays a role in the maintenance of
men's power. However, beyond the claim that men connect with one
another in the context of competition (see, e.g., Labov
1972, Tannen 1990, 1998), little work has been done that shows how men
operating in a masculine cultural discourse1
I use “cultural discourse” here in the
poststructural sense of discourse, as opposed to discourse which is
talk-in-interaction. Such cultural discourses include culturally patterned
ideologies, practices, and figured worlds (Holland et
al. 1998). See Kiesling 2003, in press,
and below, for a discussion.
of dominance create and display
homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire. How do men use language to
“do friendship” in a heterosexist atmosphere? How do they talk
in a way to make themselves attractive to other men? How do cultural
discourses of masculinity structure the men's desires, and thus who
they find most attractive, or “cool”? Ultimately, how does the
way men create their relationships re-create patterns of dominance –
how do their everyday conversations re-create wider cultural discourses?
These are the questions I address in this article, using ethnographic
talk-in-interaction data from a men's social club, a fraternity, at
an American university. I argue that the men's talk – and the
existence of the fraternity itself – responds to and re-creates four
American cultural discourses of masculinity. These cultural discourses
describe the idealized forms of masculinity that men in American society
should display (even though few if any actually succeed). These discourses
are reflected in, and created by, these men's performances, and in
widely shared cultural performances such as literature and film. The
discourses are an unpacking of what “hegemonic masculinity”
was in North America in the late twentieth century, when the observations
in this article were made.
Cultural discourses refer to widely shared “background”
assumptions, or “truths,” about how the world works. Cultural
discourses of masculinity thus refer to the ways that men are assumed by
the majority of society to act, talk, and feel. In the dominant social
group in North America,2
Here I refer to
White, Anglo, middle-class heterosexuals, but I believe many of these
discourses are shared by other groups, although they may manifest in
different kinds of practice.
these cultural discourses of
masculinity include gender difference, heterosexism, dominance, and male
solidarity.
Gender difference is a discourse that sees men and
women as naturally and categorically different in biology and
behavior.
3 This discourse is one in which
“gender” (a term used to talk about social behavior) and
“sex” (a term referring to biological differences) are
conflated. In this discourse, gender arises “naturally” from
sex. I believe this discourse is so strong (as seen in the results of
Curtin & Kiesling 2003) that it is useless
even to use the term “sex,” because most characteristics that
are attributed to sex are in fact gender-based. Certainly, the actual
gestation of a fetus and giving birth are restricted to women, but the
social practices and significance of this event affect it so much that it
is hard to see how it is not gender as well. See also Bing & Bergvall 1996 and Connell 1987, 2002.
is the definition of masculinity as heterosexual; to
be masculine in this discourse is to desire women and not men sexually.
Dominance is the identification of masculinity with dominance or
authority; to be a man is to be strong, authoritative, and in control,
especially when compared to women, and also when compared to other men.
Male solidarity is a discourse that takes as given a bond among
men; men are understood normatively to want (and need) to do things with
groups of other men, excluding women.
These four cultural discourses are inherently contradictory, however,
because male solidarity and gender difference clash in many ways with
heterosexism and dominance. If men are to form close friendship groups,
how are they to do this without expressing desire for one another? And how
can all the men in such groups maintain a dominant position? This
“balancing act” is the focus of the analysis to follow. I show
that the men use linguistic and social indirectness to create and display
homosocial desire. These men never in my corpus express homosocial desire
individually to the object of their desire, nor do they claim to do so in
interviews. Nevertheless, such desire is effectively created and
communicated.
These findings are significant in two main ways. First, while I argue
that men are using indirectness in their creation of desire, this
indirectness is a social one. I suggest that the definition of
indirectness should be expanded to include social, addressee, and topic
indirectness. Second, the analyses presented here show the importance of
connecting dominant cultural discourses with everyday talk-in-interaction,
and how cultural discourses are produced on different social scales. This
analysis provides a model that shows some ways that this connection is
accomplished. Such a connection is especially important when issues of men
and masculinity are under consideration, because in the United States it
is these cultural discourses that legitimize men's privilege and
dominance as a class. Even when individual men actively dominate women (or
other men), their actions are often justified, both explicitly and
covertly, using these discourses (e.g., “she/he threatened my
masculinity”). These discourses allow men to participate in
relations of gender that privilege their gender class without the need to
believe that they are producing this privilege. Thus, it is important to
understand how men are able to take dominant, powerful stances that
re-create the cultural discourses of masculinity. In the widest
application, then, this article shows how hegemony works, and how
structure and practice are intertwined in everyday talk.
PRELIMINARIES TO ANALYSIS
Men, masculinities, discourses, and desire
In this section, I outline a view that draws on the notion of cultural
discourses and performance as a means of understanding and explaining
social practices of masculinity and gender. This discussion will take us
through a short theoretical discussion of desire as well, and it will
finish with the motivations for the hegemonic discourses outlined
above.
Cultural discourses, a notion that owes its genesis to the work of
Michel Foucault (see Foucault 1972), are
culturally shared ways of thinking, doing, making, evaluating, and
speaking. These discourses are similar to ideologies in that they describe
unquestioned background assumptions that people of a culture share.
However, discourses are more than ideology, even though they encompass it;
discourses include social practices, artifacts, processes, and even
desires. Most importantly, they are not controlled by one person or group
but instead arise through the social practices, talk, thoughts, and
desires of the people using them. They are therefore ever-changing and,
most importantly, contestable. It is the use of discourses that
distinguishes the current trend of feminist research increasingly referred
to as “third wave feminism,” a perspective cogently outlined
by Whitehead 2002.
Third-wave feminism incorporates a performative view of identity
(Butler 1990, 1993;
cf. Cameron & Kulick 2003), but it also
adopts the poststructuralist view that gender is composed of cultural
discourses. This view sees people as subjects who are acted upon by such
discourses, but at the same time these subjects are active participants in
the discourses' development and reinscription. The use of
performativity and cultural discourses has far-reaching consequences for
understanding language, gender, and social identity categories more
generally. Performances take place in the context of cultural discourses,
and the meaning of performances can be understood only through a decoding
of the social semiotic significance of these performances. Many of the
analytical categories and dichotomies often seen in gender studies are
thus products of cultural discourses themselves, and we must understand
how speakers understand and relate to those discourses (which include, of
course, their own performances). Importantly, while there may be one
dominant cultural discourse, there are always competing
discourses which people may adopt, refer to, and so on. As Foucault 1980 argues, social power works through these
discourses. Cultural discourses thus leave open the possibility of radical
social change and subtle mutation. Likewise, the dominant discourses of
masculinity are not without challenge, and there are many who ignore,
disbelieve, or resist them. We shall see that the fraternity men's
language use and other social practices tend toward adopting, reinforcing,
and re-creating these dominant discourses. However, by using the concept
of cultural discourses we can recognize the dominance of these beliefs and
practices of masculinity without having to argue that all men follow them.
In fact, these discourses affect all men in American society; men
who resist or ignore these discourses are nevertheless in a milieu in
which their practices are evaluated against the discourses, positively or
negatively depending on the evaluator's stance with respect to these
discourses. Cultural discourses are thus a valuable part of a theory of
how social practices, structures, and beliefs structure language use, and
how that language use as a social practice is interpreted. Finally, the
concept has the added benefit that it allows sociolinguists to theorize
not just how cultural discourses shape language use and interpretation,
but also how language in turn affects other social practices, beliefs, and
structures.
In connection with the central concepts of discourse and
performativity, Whitehead 2002 argues for the
use of three other important concepts for understanding masculinities: the
masculine subject, masculine ontology, and (ontological) desire. Whitehead
uses the concept of the masculine subject to capture the fact
that a man perceives and reacts to a set of cultural discourses. The
subject emerges into the world “to take his/her place as an
individual. He/she must take up an identity/identities, but cannot
do this with absolute choice; they must take up those ways that are
readily available” through cultural discourses (Whitehead 2002:207–8) There are thus two sides to the
masculine subject: the subjectivity of the individual, and the
fact that a person is a subject who is acted upon by cultural
discourses. Seeing a man as a masculine subject thus acknowledges his
subjectivity, while also realizing that he must negotiate the cultural
discourses in which he finds himself. It also places a focus on practices,
or ways of doing: “What is put under scrutiny is the material and
power consequences arising from the practices of gender signification
undertaken by discursive subjects” (Whitehead
2002:210). Or, as Cameron & Kulick put it: “What does
saying it – or not saying it – produce?” (2003:123).
The second notion Whitehead discusses is that of masculine
ontology, which is closely related to the third, desire.
Masculine ontology for Whitehead is “the pursuit of being and
becoming masculine by the masculine subject” (2002:210). In this pursuit, the masculine subject
searches for an authentic self (sometimes referred to as
“ontological security,” following Giddens
1991). But since the self is contingent and unstable, the masculine
subject must achieve masculine ontology only through a “constant
engagement in those discursive practices of signification that suggest
masculinity” (2002:210). In other words,
the psychological sense of identity is gained from performing acts
recognized in cultural discourses as being associated with the self. The
desire discussed by Whitehead is then the desire to have a self, and
especially the desire to construct this self relationally and in full view
of other subjects, who will validate the self and contribute to its
ontological security. This conception of self and identity assumes that
the psychological is at root a social phenomenon: The sense of identity is
not simply something passively believed by the subject but must be enacted
by the subject. We can thus view subjects' desires by viewing their
social practices. In understanding language and gender identity, then, it
is essential to understand how acts are recognized as masculine. Because
this understanding is done in the context of dominant discourses, the
desire of the masculine subject for a masculine self thus becomes the
desire to perform successfully the discourses of masculinity.
Here we need to take a short detour to discuss several ways of
thinking about desire. Most commonly, desire is thought of in terms of
sexual desire. But the term as used by Whitehead is much broader, and this
reminds us that desire is a central motivating concept in psychology
(although there too it tends to associated ultimately with the sexual).
Desire is most simply defined, in the spirit of Freud and Lacan, as that
which we lack but want.
Cameron & Kulick (2003:106–32)
provide a detailed account of what desire is and the role language plays
in its creation. In their review of literature on desire spanning
psychoanalysis, discursive psychology, language socialization, and
poststructuralist views on power and identity, Cameron & Kulick show
that although desire may be felt by social subjects, it is structured by
– and learned in – language and interaction. One way language
organizes desire, they argue, is by showing subjects what is socially
prohibited, absent, and thus desired. The talk analyzed below not only
creates homosociality but also creates desire; through talk, men show each
other what to desire and how to desire it. Cameron & Kulick suggest
several ways in which language creates and displays desire. Two are
particularly relevant here. First, they note that “intimacy is often
achieved, at least in part, through the transgression of public
taboos” (2003:115). Assuming that we can
have a homosocial as well as a sexual intimacy, the practices (including
language) in the fraternity clearly work by transgressing some public
taboos: talking explicitly about sex, engaging in unsafe, dangerous, and
prohibited behavior, and using taboo lexis in public situations. Of
course, the kinds of transgressions are limited by other cultural
discourses, particularly heterosexuality. Such a limitation on what is
transgressed points out the other way that Cameron & Kulick suggest
desire can be found in language, which is to analyze what is not, or
cannot, be said. One example they give is from Cameron's (1997) analysis of a group of fraternity men who
“gossip” about the bodies of men whom they portray as
homosexual. Cameron & Kulick argue that this dislocation of possible
homosexual desire outside the friendship group is an “unsaid”
that shows how this desire should be located. The processes of
homosociality I will analyze below are similar. For example, direct
expressions of homosocial desire are located away from individual members
to the group/institution. The fraternity thus provides an entity which
acts as a kind of tunnel through which homosocial desire can be expressed,
but expressed outside of the group of real people. This fidelity to the
institution is characteristic of most if not all men's homosocial
groups. In addition, in focusing below on the indirectness used by the men
in the speech events, we find what is unsaid: Why do the men say it the
way they do, rather than another way?
Desire, then, is something that is performed though social practice,
as is gender. A view of performance as outlined above, however, sees
performances not as unconstrained but as organized and even motivated by
certain cultural discourses. One component of cultural discourses in every
society is gender. Although gender takes different forms and different
importance across cultures, it is a bundle of discourses that in some way
help to organize every culture. In most cultures, these discourses are
organized by two main archetypes of gender: femininity and masculinity. If
we understand this engagement in social practices to be accomplished
through performances, then we arrive at a definition of masculinity as
social performances semiotically linking the performing subject to
men, and not to women, through cultural discourses. This definition
separates masculinity from men, who may not all be necessarily masculine.
It also allows women to be masculine, because masculinity is not dependent
on the actual performances of men. Furthermore, while “woman”
and “man” are also discursive categories, they are categories
that seem to be universal throughout human cultures (there is variation in
these “biological” categories as well; see Bing & Bergvall 1996). The definition is thus
categorically dichotomous and relational, because that is the way cultural
discourses organize gender: Feminine performances are categorically
opposed to masculine ones, and men are categorically opposed to women.
Masculinity presupposes femininity, and vice versa. Masculinity is thus
not just about what performances are stereotypically linked to men, but
also what performances are specifically not linked to women.
I deliberately make no specific claims about whether properties like
sexuality or power must be linked to men in the definition. Rather, these
specifics flow from the surrounding discourses of gender. The definition
is thus wide enough to encompass something like sexuality, and flexible
enough to see the interconnectedness in cultural discourses between, for
example, physical power and heterosexuality. This view is different from,
but compatible with, the theoretical perspective on masculinities of
Robert Connell, which has dominated masculinities research for the past
decade (Carrigan et al. 1985; Connell 1987, 1995, 2000). Although Connell does not use the terminology
of poststructuralist discourses, his work has been very important in
explicating discourses of gender and masculinity. Central to his theory is
the notion of hegemonic masculinity. This term is defined by
Connell (1995:77) as “the configuration of
gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the
problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to
guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of
women.” In other words, hegemonic masculinity is composed of the
specific social practices and structures that give men privilege. Like the
definition of masculinity above, “hegemonic masculinity” is
not meant to specify a universal hegemonic masculinity, but is “the
most honored or desired in a particular context” (Connell
1995:77; emphasis added). We can therefore
understand the cultural discourses described above as part of the
“particular context” that defines the “most honored or
desired.” “Hegemonic masculinity” has become so dominant
a notion in the study of men and masculinities that it has lost many of
the aspects that made it valuable in the first place. That is, rather than
using “hegemonic masculinity” to represent the fluidity,
contestability, and variety of masculinities, many researchers have begun
to use it simply as a replacement for “masculinity” or
“patriarchy,” without specifying exactly what hegemonic
masculinity entails in the specific context they are analyzing (Whitehead
2002:88–94). I will resist the use of the
term as shorthand for the cultural discourses of masculinity, because I do
not want to lose sight of the diversity and potential contradiction of the
discourses that make up a hegemonic masculinity.
Discourses of masculinity
I have distilled the four dominant, or hegemonic, discourses of
masculinity – gender difference, heterosexism, dominance, and male
solidarity – from a number of sources. First is participant
observation in the fraternity. I elaborate some of this work below, and
more detailed analyses can be found in previous reports on this research.
In an analysis of the fraternity's institutional organization of
sexuality (Kiesling 2002), I show how pervasive
the discourses of heterosexism and difference are in the men's
talk-in-interaction. In several reports (Kiesling 1996, 1997, 2001a), I focus on how the men create power and
dominance in interaction. I have also shown how the men display and police
heterosexuality in fraternity interactions (Kiesling
2002, in press). Finally, I have shown
how the address term dude is one solution to the clash between
discourses of heterosexuality and masculine solidarity, and that this
clash along with other cultural forces in the 1980s accounts for the
term's rise in use in that decade and later (Kiesling 2004).
In addition, one can discern these discourses from two other shared
cultural sources, and one idiosyncratic, but I believe valid, source. The
latter is my lifetime positionality as a man in American society: These
experiences have shaped my understanding of masculinity in America, and I
acknowledge this subjectivity but attempt to view it critically. This
personal perspective, however, is bolstered by discourses of masculinity
evident in American literature and film, and also in the rapidly expanding
field of masculinities research. To the extent that these four sources
agree on what these cultural discourses are, with the caveat that such
discourses are ever-changing, we can find validity by triangulation. That
is, we can be certain that these discourses are shared by American society
and help shape the ways that men perform masculinities in America.
Some of the most powerful sources for finding and understanding these
cultural discourses are films that men find compelling and somehow
“truthful.” One of these is the 1986 film Stand by
me, about four 12-year-old boys in a rural Oregon town who go on a
two-day trek to find a dead body. Along the way they both test and revel
in their friendships; it is a representation of “pure”
homosociality (without the interference of heterosexual attraction).
During the night, the boys sit around a campfire and talk, as described
wistfully by the narrator (one of the boys who is now an adult): “We
talked into the night. The kind of talk that seemed important, until you
discover girls.” The film ends with emphasis on the glorious, lost
quality of the homosocial bond: “I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” This
film thus artistically recreates a “golden age” of male
friendships that resonates with many men.4
That the film somehow strikes a chord of “truth”
can be seen in the comments posted at this web site:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/board/threads/.
The thread about this movie is still active even though the film is
approaching 20 years old.
The discourse of homosociality is a
desire to return to that golden age.
Such homosociality has been represented artistically throughout
Western literature, drama, poetry, and more recent media. There is not
space here to discuss all such work, but other authors have discussed
homosociality as being exalted in Star trek (Geraghty 2003), Tolkien (Craig
2001), medieval French literature (Adams
2004), Chaucer (Mitchell 2000), and
Japanese “gastronomic quest literature” (Aoyama 2003), among others. The best-known discussion
of homosociality is probably Sedgwick's (1985) Between men, in which she argues that
men's heterosexual rivalries produce a homosociality among men that
marginalizes women. Such rivalry is similar to the bantering and
“male bonding” we will see below. Sedgwick basically
identifies another form of the discourse of men's solidarity as a way
in which men's dominance is maintained: Nonsexual love between men is
superior to any sexual love, heterosexual or homosexual (and superior as
well to love between women). This argument is similar to that regarding
Stand by me above, in that there is a desire in men for a love
“higher” and more “pure” than sexual love. That
men's homosociality appears in so many works in so many different
times and places suggests that it is a particularly powerful and widely
shared discourse. The majority of this work on men's homosociality
shows that the discourse of men's solidarity is widespread
(especially in Western civilization), and that it is a powerful, almost
mystical state that many men are drawn to.
We are thus back to desire: These discourses do not limit the
fraternity men's behavior only as something by which men are
passively constrained. These discourses motivate the men's desires as
something the men actively seek. They organize the men's perceptions
of what is lacking in their identity, and how the men wish to achieve
masculine ontology. These cultural discourses are what these men need to
“Be Men” (the motto of the fraternity). However, while some of
the discourses such as difference and heterosexuality reinforce one
another, others such as masculine solidarity and heterosexuality are in
some respects incompatible. The men who desire a masculinity such as that
outlined by these discourses must therefore find ways of not performing
homosexuality even while they create and pursue homosocial desire. I will
show below that in the fraternity these performances rely heavily on
indirectness. Because my understanding of indirectness is much broader
than the standard pragmatic view, I turn now to a discussion of how this
view of indirectness is different from – but compatible with –
the traditional definition of indirectness, why it is useful, and where it
has been used before in sociolinguistics.
Indirectness
In the pragmatics literature (e.g., Grice
1975, Levinson 1982, Brown & Levinson 1987), “indirectness”
has a narrowly focused linguistic definition, based on a mismatch between
the intention of the speaker and the conventional illocutionary force of
the utterance form. That is, the conventional meaning of an utterance is
not what the speaker “means.” Students first learning the
concept, however, often assume a broader interpretation for indirectness,
believing that it includes vagueness, irrelevancy, and so on. Although I
have always managed to narrow their conceptions to be more in line with
the field, the consistency of this naive understanding of indirectness
suggests that perhaps there is more to indirectness than illocutionary
force and a linguistic device for indicating it.
This illocutionary indirectness is, in fact, only one way in which a
linguistic form does not match its canonical use. We should recognize at
least three further types of indirectness that speakers use in
interactions: social indirectness (e.g., conflict rather than connection),
addressee indirectness (e.g., addressing a different person with a
ratified overhearer as the “real” addressee), and topic
indirectness (e.g., a different topic or domain is used, such as a
connection through sports rather than directly interpersonal). All kinds
of indirectness refer to the fact that the linguistic form is not used as
it is canonically expected to be. For example, in social indirectness, we
find speakers taking a stance that has a different or added effect than
the canonical one has. The example below will be of men who use
oppositional stances to create stances of solidarity, a phenomenon also
discussed by Schiffrin 1984. Social indirectness
will also be shown below in the boasting and “cool” stances
the men take. In addressee indirectness, the addressee is a stand-in for
the intended primary recipient of the utterance, who is technically an
overhearer (in the format outlined by Goffman
1981). Morgan (2002:44–53) shows
how such addressee indirectness works in the African American community.
Finally, below we will see how sport is used as a domain in which men
“gossip”: The canonical topics of gossip – personal
details of those known to the participants – are not used, but the
effect is similar (see also Cameron 1997). In
sum, I advocate expanding indirectness to include interactional strategies
in which a social or discourse effect is achieved by means other than the
most canonical. Note that this broadening does not weaken the power of
linguistic indirectness, although it does weaken the role played by
intention, because I focus on the effect as much as the intention of the
speaker.
I have so far addressed some theoretical issues surrounding
masculinity, desire, and indirectness. In the final section of
preliminaries, I provide some background about fraternities in the United
States, as well as some information about the fraternity that was the
focus of my research.
Fraternity
Fraternities are social and service clubs which select their members
from among male undergraduates at universities in the United States.5
There are some mixed-gender fraternities and
some women's organizations at universities and colleges that call
themselves fraternities (Kappa Alpha Theta, for example). However, the
vast majority of fraternities require members to be men, and the primary
connotation of the term is of a men-only organization.
Most were
started in the nineteenth century or early twentieth century as literary
societies and eventually became social clubs and philanthropic
organizations, especially around the turn of the twentieth century. For
many members, the fraternity becomes the center of social life in college.
Members live with each other, take classes together, compete on the same
athletic teams, and organize social functions together. Most fraternities
are organized around fictive sibling relationships; members are known as
“brothers,” and the collective members of the fraternity are
often referred to collectively as the “brotherhood.” Most
local fraternity chapters are related to one another through a national
fraternity; I investigated one chapter, here referred to as “Gamma
Chi Phi,” of a national fraternity. As discussed more fully in
Kiesling 2001b, fraternities tend to be racially
homogeneous. Gamma Chi Phi was mostly White, with several Asian American
and Middle Eastern American men.
Although most men join the fraternity for social reasons, the
fraternity's stated reason for existence is public service, such as
raising funds for national charities, hosting blood drives, or providing
volunteer labor at fundraising events for charities. In the year that I
was researching, Gamma Chi Phi began an adopt-a-school program, in which
the members tutored children at a local school. Without the philanthropic
aspect of the fraternity, university administrations would probably look
on a fraternity as merely another social group, and one whose costs
generally outweigh its benefits. During the time I spent at Gamma Chi Phi,
however, the administration and fraternities in general had a good
relationship.
Some school administrations in the United States are (or have been
characterized as) anti-fraternity, and some schools have closed their
fraternity systems down altogether, although this is usually an
unattractive option when many potential donors are alumni of fraternities
and sororities. Much of this animosity can be attributed to the reputation
fraternities have for engaging in unwise, irresponsible, demeaning, and
criminal activities. Even though well-publicized incidents and films have
created this perception, everyday life in a fraternity is usually much
like that of nonmembers. One possible reason for fraternities'
reputation is the role that alcohol and drinking have historically played
in much of fraternity life across the United States. Although the practice
has waned significantly in the past two decades because of liability
concerns on the part of universities and national fraternities,
fraternities have often had parties which focus on “binge”
drinking (drinking many alcoholic drinks in a short time). Party attendees
at some universities have died as a direct result of alcohol poisoning and
also because of accidents that can be traced to unsafe behavior while
under the influence of alcohol. Fraternity members have also raped and
gang-raped women (cf. Sanday 1990). The
combination of the structure of the pledge period (described below) and
alcohol can easily lead to unsafe behavior. Thus, the often-earned
reputation of fraternities among non-fraternity members on many, if not
most, campuses, is negative. As with all things that are stereotyped,
however, all fraternities are not the same, nor do most fraternities have
the problems associated with the stereotype.
Of course, it may be that the reputation of the institution itself
attracts people who are predisposed to these sorts of practices. I cannot
say why every fraternity member joins, but there are indications about who
is likely to become a fraternity member, and I am familiar with how men
are recruited and enticed to do so. My own experience turns out to be
fairly typical. I went to college in 1985 believing I was not going to be
in a fraternity. But by the end of my first year I was “wearing
letters,” and in a class the next year I even defended the joy of
being in the fraternity. I joined simply because I had made friends in the
fraternity before I joined, and many of my current friends joined the
fraternity, so it seemed like a natural thing to do. Why did I put up with
hazing? For one thing, I was used to it. Hazing or hazing-like activities
were part of life growing up for me (on sports teams in high school, for
example), and I simply saw it as another challenge; my masculine identity
was very much tied to not failing at such challenges, given the discourse
of power and dominance. But my primary motivation was a wish for
“benign” (I thought) masculine solidarity, which, when I was
18, I did not see could be easily found in other ways. In interviewing the
members of Gamma Chi Phi, I found that this path to the fraternity to be
most common: A fraternity reaches out to men in their first year of
college and makes friends with them, and then when it is time to invite
people to join, it is “natural” for those men to follow their
friends. Other fraternity men may join for other reasons, such as status
or access to powerful networks gained by joining, but in my experience
they are the minority.
Fraternity members tend already to have a more traditional orientation
to society; although I have found no survey studies about this topic, the
majority of fraternity men whom I have known have tended to be politically
and socially conservative; there are usually one or two men in a
fraternity who revel in goading the rest of the group with their liberal
views. Fraternities are seen by many as part of a power establishment.
Given this perception, the membership is likely to be drawn from those who
orient to the established hierarchies of society. Fraternities thus to
some degree “self-select” a population that is more
comfortable with “traditional” American cultural discourses of
masculinity. This view is supported by Bird's (1996) finding that men who desired homosocial bonds
were more likely to agree with discourses of hegemonic masculinity. See
DeSantis (in press) for an excellent analysis of
“greek culture” more generally.
I was able to gain entree into this fraternity because of my
membership in the same national fraternity.6
Fraternities generally consider a member to be a member for
life unless he is specifically ejected. Although I have not talked to most
of my fraternity brothers for many years, I am nevertheless still
considered to be a member, as I am regularly reminded through appeals for
donations.
I eventually taped approximately 37 hours of
interaction. I recorded 15 hours of meetings (11 different meetings), 11
hours of interviews (nine different interviews), and 11 hours of
socializing, although much of that is blank because I would leave the
recorder running even when no interaction was occurring.
Members generally lived with other members. On campus, they shared
dorm rooms or apartments. Off campus, they found houses or apartments
together. “The townhouse” was the center of much of the
fraternity activity that I observed, from informal meetings and parties to
the rush event analyzed below. The residents were all older members,
including the president (Hotdog) and former vice president (Pete).
The fraternity distinguishes among men primarily based on their
membership status, with the most exalted members composing an inner circle
and less powerful members ever more distant from this group. At the
outside of the circle are nonmembers who want to become members, or whom
the fraternity wants to convince to become members. During the
university-sanctioned “rush period,” these men become
“rushes.” Once the rushes have been invited to join the
fraternity, they are “pinned,” and they become
“pledges.” They are not yet members, but if they successfully
pass through the initiation period of “pledging,” they will
become members. While rushes are usually treated well in order to attract
them to the fraternity, pledges are paradoxically treated as badly as
possible. Pledging is thus a period of testing to determine whether the
pledge has the desire and the stamina to become a member. At the end of
pledging, members are formally initiated, although they are still seen
informally as “neophytes” or “nibs” (“newly
initiated brothers”), and are seen has having little knowledge or
ability to do any but the most mundane jobs for the fraternity. In
becoming members they have moved closer to the center, but they are still
not at the core. After being in the fraternity for at least a year, and
perhaps serving in a few minor offices, they are regarded as full members,
and by the time members are about to graduate they have the most
privileges and the fewest responsibilities.
The fraternity social sphere was the background against which
non-fraternity events – such as classwork and other university clubs
– took place. The fraternity was not a club which was “added
on” to most of the men's lives, but the context and background
against which life was constructed and evaluated. As such, the
interactions in the fraternity took a central role in how the men viewed
and understood the world. But while the fraternity permeated the lives of
many of its members, it also allowed for diversity. The men did not all
wear their hair the same way or wear the same clothes. Some of the men
were fashionable by the standards of their peers, while others were more
conservative. Most wore the loose or baggy jeans and shirts fashionable at
the time. One common practice in dress was “wearing letters”
(shirts that had the Greek letters of the fraternity on the front, a
privilege reserved for full members) and the lanyard, a long rope with a
key chain that was worn in the front pants pocket with the ends hanging
out. These commonalities were of course also symbolic of membership in the
fraternity, so it is not surprising that they were a common denominator
for the men. But not all fraternities engaged in these practices to the
extent of Gamma Chi Phi; in several speeches in meetings men referred to
the pride of wearing letters and showing the world that they were members
of the fraternity. These comments made it clear that for many of the men
the fraternity has a status, and the wearing of letters and lanyard is a
way of claiming that status in public.
From these practices and structures, we can discern a number of
institutional discourses which are recursive of – and provide
evidence for – the cultural discourses outlined above. Dominance is
manifested locally as a hierarchical world view that values
competitiveness. Masculine solidarity is evidenced by the high value the
men placed on loyalty to the fraternity, and heterosexuality is seen in
many of their practices, including mixers, parties held with sororities so
that the men could meet, flirt, and often eventually be intimate sexually
with women (see Kiesling 20027
Note the similarity to rush here, although with mixers the men
were individually attempting to create sexual desire in women, whereas we
will see for rush that the desire being created is for the fraternity as a
whole. Nevertheless, this parallel points out the fine distinction between
the creation of sexual and social desire.
). Related to these
values are hard work for the fraternity, which is needed for success in
competition in a hierarchy, and responsibility, or working for the common
good of the fraternity. The discourse of power and dominance is clearly
evident in the stages of membership: Only certain men may join, and some
members, notably those who have been members longer, are more valued than
others, thus replicating the societal ordering of masculinities.
The importance of solidarity is evidenced less by what was said in
meetings than by what was said in interviews, and by how men acted during
rush. In interviews and even before I began my research, members told me
that their chapter was very “tight,” or very close-knit
socially. Perhaps the most important aspect of this
“tightness” is the acceptance a member feels in the group.
Thus “solidarity” here refers more to acceptance than to
connectedness, although members do share important events in their lives
with each other. Solidarity in the fraternity context means the freedom to
“be men.” This camaraderie is the most common factor the men
cited in explaining why they joined.
The men must create a sense of close homosociality not only for
themselves but also for the prospective members who come to their rush
events (parties held to attract new members), and this process can be a
balancing act which includes the prospective members just enough for them
to want to be fully admitted. The creation of this desire and these
connections must be accomplished in an overt environment in which
sexual relationships among men are nonmasculine, while
social ones are masculine. Although physically this is a fairly
straightforward distinction, socially it is not, because some kinds of
interaction have sexual overtones (e.g., showing the wrong kind of
interest in another man's body or looks, as discussed by Cameron 1997). The expression and creation of such
desire is thus a tricky proposition, and it is accomplished by engaging in
speech events that sanction such descriptions, as well as certain topics
and speech act forms that are understood to be social rather than sexual.
The bulk of this article will describe these “ratified”
contexts and forms for the display homosocial desire. I will begin with an
analysis of the strategies the men use to express homosocial desire with
seemingly direct expressions of homosocial feelings. I will then move on
to investigate the myriad strategies these men use to negotiate the
tension among the discourses of masculinity. I want to be clear that these
are not the strategies of all men; some men use other strategies such as
resistance to, or rejection of, the hegemonic discourses. These linguistic
strategies are solutions (or attempted solutions) to the problem of
masculine ontology: How does a man negotiate these discourses and the
desires they create, and “feel” masculine?
“BROADCASTING” OVERT EXPRESSIONS
OF HOMOSOCIAL FEELINGS
In the pledge period, the pledges are severely tested and dominated.
In order to pass the tests of the period they must unquestioningly follow
the members' orders, just as they do in their first pledge activity:
drinking, as fast as possible, an entire bottle of fortified wine (wine
with more than the usual alcohol content).8
This activity would be considered hazing and is no longer
practiced in the fraternity, and it is forbidden by the national
fraternity, the university, and most likely Virginia state law.
This is not a pleasurable or safe activity, but when I observed it, every
pledge did it unquestioningly, some with enthusiasm. There is thus a kind
of paradox to membership in the fraternity, in which each member must
first be entirely dominated and powerless before he can be accepted into
what the fraternity sees as a privileged and select group of men. What do
the men want from this organization? Is homosocial desire so important
that they will sacrifice their autonomy (and power) for months in order to
become accepted into this group of men? What is the nature of the
homosocial desire that motivates their sacrifice?
The following excerpt gives voice to that desire and allows us to hear
what might motivate men to join. This excerpt is from an “emergency
meeting” called to discuss solutions to flagging participation by
much of the membership. Jean, a recent graduate, gives this passionate
speech in which he articulates clearly the homosocial desire that
underlies the fraternity.
9 Transcription
conventions:
This
“bowl” is a football tournament in which chapters of the
national fraternity compete with each other every year in touch
football.
The fraternity often
cleaned up the basketball arena after events in order to raise
money.
What attracted Jean to the fraternity, therefore, is the sense of
belonging it gives him, a “place” socially speaking, where he
feels safe (line 40), even doing the silliest things. Because his speech
was followed by vigorous applause, we can infer that a large portion of
those present agreed with him. The men's desire to join the
fraternity is largely the desire to be unconditionally accepted and
protected by other men, and this togetherness in some ways
captures the golden age of homosociality. This speech articulates the
discourse of masculine solidarity: the fact that everybody was
together made it cool (lines 25–26). In interviews I asked men
why they wanted to be in a fraternity, and only one said that it had to do
with status and the experience of being part of an organization. While
several joked that it was to “get more chicks,” (i.e., attract
women for sex) the overwhelming majority said that it was precisely this
kind of homosocial interaction that attracted them to the fraternity.
The fraternity is a product as well as a producer of hegemonic
cultural discourses of masculinity. It is a product in that without the
gender order that supports such discourses, there would be no need for
some men to seek such safety. Consider Jean's example of singing,
certainly not an activity that displays the ideal of dominance, either
through physical strength, rationality, or singing ability. It is thus not
something these men would do on their own. However, in the context of the
fraternity they actually feel “liberated” for a while from
this hegemonic ideal. In a sense, then, the men can break taboos when they
are together. As Cameron & Kulick 2003 point
out, one of the ways intimacy is performed is through the breaking of
taboos together with one's intimates. In this case, the collective
breaking of taboos builds homosocial intimacy among the men.
This notion that the fraternity allows the men to shift the identities
they perform is exemplified as well by the restriction that the men make
such declarations in fraternity-only settings – in the meetings and
in interviews with me. For example, at one point in an election meeting
Hotdog simply says, without sarcasm, I love you all:
In fact, the homosociality of the fraternity is sometimes more
intimate than that between the men and their long-term heterosexual
partners. One member, Mack, told me in an interview, “I know that I
am more comfortable than I can ever be when I'm with my fraternity
brothers. The things that I can tell my fraternity brothers I can't
tell my girlfriend.” Some men were openly criticized when they began
to spend more time with a girlfriend than with the fraternity. This
closeness was even something that attracted status; in Mack's
interview, he told an imaginary member of another fraternity,
“You're not in love with your brothers as much as we are in
love with our brothers.” Here the tension between the cultural
discourses of masculine solidarity and competition have become
intertwined, as the closeness of each fraternity is being used by Mack as
a field of competition.
But these declarations are made in restricted speech activities and
production formats; as such, they are a form of addressee indirectness.
They are limited to meetings in which the declarations are
“broadcast” to the membership (with no nonmembers present),
and to very private situations with a third party (one-on-one ethnographic
interviews with no ratified overhearers). These restrictions can be
generalized by saying that the speaker is addressing not a single person
but the institution itself. This conclusion is supported by comments in
interviews, in which several members told me that they might talk about
how close they feel to another member openly if that closeness had been
violated by some argument. Based on these interviews, it appears that
there is no two-person situation in this community in which declarations
of brotherly love take place, except when it explicitly needs to be
“patched up.” Homosocial desire is abstractly expressed only
to the group and the institution.
The speech situations that license declarations of brotherly love are
one way of solving what I will call the “male homosocial double
bind” (cf. Lakoff 1975), which arises out
of two clashing cultural discourses: male solidarity and heterosexuality.
In the former men are supposed to form a close bond, but in the latter
they are supposed to refrain from intimacy. Because the speech situations
defuse or distribute the desire to the institution and group, they are not
construed as homosexual. Because heterosexuality is such a strong
discourse, the men must present their emotional intimacy as clearly
nonsexual, since sexual and emotional intimacy are often bound up with
each other.
These expressions of homosocial desire have allowed us to hear the
voices of the men tell us what this desire is like, and to understand its
connection with cultural discourses of masculinity. We have also seen that
such expressions are instances of addressee indirectness, because they are
addressed to the group or institution rather than to an individual. In the
following section we will explore more of this indirect expression by
focusing on how homosocial desire is created to attract men to the
fraternity, and what kind of interaction is commented on favorably.
DRAMATIZING AND INDIRECTNESS: THE
CONSTRUCTION OF HOMOSOCIAL DESIRE IN RUSH
One of the most important activities the fraternity engages in is the
attraction of new members. This attraction takes place formally in a
period known as “rush”; prospective members are known as
“rushes” or “rushees.” It is a time agreed on by
all fraternities of the university to hold meetings, parties, and other
events so that rushes can “shop around.” The process is
therefore basically a courtship, or a “homosocial flirting,”
with each side testing the other, each gauging their desire for the other
and trying to build the other party's desire for them. Such functions
are thus ideal places in which to investigate how men create homosocial
desirability.
One way homosocial desirability is created is through heterosexuality
and heterosexual prowess; a man attractive to women and a fraternity that
attracts desirable women are thus mutually desirable in greek society. But
there were several other, more common (and, I argue, more persuasive)
strategies used in the fraternity. One was topic indirectness in which
desirability was deflected to a nonpersonal domain, which in Gamma Chi Phi
was sports. Another strategy was a kind of addressee indirectness in which
a desirable camaraderie was displayed among the members of the fraternity
but excluded a rush. Similarly, the men would create a status for
themselves or the fraternity which would be attractive to the rush by a
kind of “status transitivity” in which the status of one
member of a group flows to other members of that group; one way of gaining
status is to therefore become a member of the group. These strategies can
be characterized as “homosociality by alliance”: The men are
desirable as friends because (i) they have status and therefore confer
status on their friends (allies), and (ii) the fraternity makes the need
for competition less important because one knows that one is accepted. By
making an alliance (i.e., friendship) with these men, a man thus moves
closer to two different cultural discourses of masculinity – male
solidarity and dominance.
Let us consider how homosociality is created in two excerpts from talk
at a rush event. The event, the sports-focused “College Hoops
Night,” was held during the university's official rush week in
the spring semester and was organized around watching college basketball
on television. It was held in the living room of a townhouse where several
members lived, with couches and extra chairs arranged around a television
tuned to a college basketball game. Watching sports, a common activity for
the men, was rarely a quiet, noninteractive activity but included talk
about the games as well as talk about other topics during the game. Much
of the time the games served simply as a conversation starter and faded
into the background as conversations moved to other topics.12
There is a common research finding that men
get together to do things, but women get together to talk (Cameron 1997; Coates 1996,
2003). This rush event (like others) suggests
that this finding is true only in part for the fraternity members: The
“doing” is an excuse to get together, but the activity is
quickly abandoned for the sake of talk itself.
For 45 minutes of College Hoops Night, a wireless lapel microphone was
worn by Saul, the rush chairman at the time. He was in charge of
organizing all the rush events and making sure they ran smoothly and all
rushes were welcomed. The excerpts below focus on his interactions. The
men he talked to were aware of the microphone; Saul explained its general
purpose whenever he started a new conversation. In the first excerpt, Saul
has just met a new rush and is getting to know him. The rush has
previously told Saul that he is from Manassas, Virginia.
There are two strategies being used to create homosocial desire here,
both of which are a kind of topic indirectness: finding common ground and
creating a desirable status. Finding common ground is skillfully performed
by Saul as he takes an innocent demographic question in line 1 (so
what high school did you go to?) and finds a common connection to
that school through a former roommate. The connection is tenuous in that
the person embodying the connection is unlikely to have been known by the
rush, but it is the attempt to make this connection and to display some
knowledge of the rush's home region that functions as a positive
politeness strategy (Brown & Levinson 1987:103ff.).
Saul is even more skillful in the way that he creates status for the
person who is the common link, and then appropriates this person as one of
the fraternity's own, followed by the status displays of the other
fraternity member. Saul initially does not explicitly point to the
connection between the man he knows and the rushee. Using a conversation
principle of relevance (Grice 1975, Sperber & Wilson 1995), though, this connection is
easily made. Such principles claim that people try to make utterances
connect in a relevant way to preceding statements, with the assumption
that their interlocutor is cooperating with them. Thus, the only way to
make Saul's statement relevant is to assume the rush's
statements are related to those that Saul is making. However, Saul
includes Mike Benson in his friendship group by using the first person
plural in line 5 (OK cause we got this guy),
then identifies him as a former roommate and a member of another
fraternity before getting to his name. He then also includes Mike Benson
in the we who played basketball, thus making further connections.
These strategies focus on Saul's connections with the man, and he
only incidentally implies that this man is actually a member of another
fraternity (Sigma Chi). He thus does his best to create
connections with the rush through his former roommate and basketball
buddy, using pronouns and the principle of relevance.
Saul introduces the status of Mike Benson as a good basketball player
almost as an afterthought in line 8 (We used to play basketball
he's really good). The rush cooperates in this endeavor by
asking if Mike Benson played for the local high school as well. The
participation framework (Goffman 1981) of the
conversation then shifts as another fraternity member, who must have been
acting as a ratified overhearer, enters in a dialogue with Saul by saying
Mike Benson's nickname (Ozzie), and Saul responds by asking
him to confirm Benson's skill at basketball in line 13 (Good
hoops player no?). This exchange sets up a confirmation of
Benson's status as well as the fraternity's connection with him.
One aspect of the creation of this status is its nonchalance: Saul
mentions Benson's skill as an extraneous comment in line 8, and in
line 13 he asks for confirmation from the other fraternity member by using
a very short grammatical form (Adjective-Noun-Tag question), as if this
fact were common knowledge. Hoops, as a colloquial name for
basketball, adds to the nonchalant stance in evaluating this man.
The second fraternity member and Saul then collaborate in a dialogue
that creates status for the second member even as the rush moves out of
center stage to a ratified overhearer position. The second member makes
another connection to the same high school through his roommate's
father, whom he says runs everything over there. Saul's
response adds to the implied status of being the main football and
baseball coach through his incredulous response in line 16 (I
didn't realize that holy shit). The last phrase (holy
shit), in fact, significantly upgrades Saul's reaction here from
the initial Oh, OK. The two members thus work together to create
a statusful personal connection to the rush, and the participation
framework which excludes the rush in fact works to enhance the genuineness
of this status.
Saul thus finds common ground, but it is a common ground that displays
status. The questions Saul asks lead him to talk about a person who has
status in basketball, and he receives support from the second fraternity
member in this regard. The connection displayed is more about
“connections” in the sense of knowing someone with status than
making a personal connection. The questions in this segment allow
Saul to display status rather than necessarily supporting and expanding
the rush's answers. There is a subtle form of social indirectness at
work here, one in which Saul creates connection and common ground while
also creating status. Both work to create homosocial desire.
It is not accidental that the topic indirectness in this short
exchange revolves around sports. This domain of life was pervasive in the
fraternity and was used as a way of creating connections with other men,
as well as a domain in which to create status. While the men took their
sports very seriously (both as participants and as spectators), it was
used as a domain for binding them together in a less serious way and
creating a common status. Indeed, one of the accomplishments that was
repeatedly pointed out to me was the fraternity's all-sports
intramural championship the year before my participant observation began.
Of course, I am not claiming that all men create connections
through sports, although the display of sports “gossip” is a
speech event exalted in the media through sports talk shows, as shown by
Johnson & Finlay 1997 (see also Bird 1996). This fraternity was particularly
sports-focused, but I know from other experiences that not all male groups
find sports so central to their communities. However, I would like to
suggest, along with Tannen 1990, that one
general property of male groups in North American and other European-based
societies is the use of common “nonpersonal” interests as a
metaphor or conduit for creating both connection and status, and sometimes
a shared status of a group. These interests are often groups formed around
professions, objects, or technology (cars, computers). This prediction
needs confirmation, but Coates 2003 finds a
similar pattern for the stories told by the English men in her study.
This indirect use of a topic about a domain not overtly focused on
personal relationships is a result of the competing cultural discourses of
male solidarity and heterosexuality; it is one way out of the male
homosocial double bind. It is similar to the gossiping about purportedly
gay men by the young men analyzed by Cameron 1997. But rather than gossiping about the appearance
of men, men also gossip about sports, cars, or technology, and so on. At
the same time, these topics often allow men to perform their expertise in
a given topic, thus displaying status through their knowledge at the same
time as they make connections to their interlocutors.
So the previous excerpt has shown us that one strategy Saul uses in
the rush event to create homosocial desire is the creation of connection
combined with status. The next excerpt shows some other
strategies in the same vein as those just discussed. The talk still
revolves around sports, but connection and status are created through
common interest and narratives about exciting sports events witnessed by
the participants. The same participants are still talking, although the
topic has moved to professional basketball and shifts further to ice
hockey during the excerpt. The Bullets are the Washington, D.C.,
professional basketball team (the name has since been changed to the
Wizards), and the Caps are the Washington Capitals, the local ice hockey
team.
Let us focus on two aspects of this excerpt. First, Saul's
statement in line 3, We'll get you out man, pulls the rush
into the fraternity and includes him in a future activity with other
fraternity members. Saul does not explicitly invite the rush; however, he
uses an ambiguous first person plural pronoun (we) to do this
work. The referents to this pronoun are unclear, as Saul could be talking
about himself in the plural, the fraternity in general, or some subset of
the fraternity. However, given the context of the situation, where Saul is
speaking not only as his own principal but also for the fraternity in his
role as rush chairman, the implication is that the fraternity as a whole
will take him to a Bullets game someday – if he joins the
fraternity.
The second aspect on which we should focus is the symmetry and the
sharing of experiences.13
Something, we
might note, that has been said to characterize women's talk, even
quite recently; Coates 1996:78ff.
After
the pause in line 4, Saul matches the rush's experience of not having
been to a professional sports match by admitting he himself hasn't
been to a game played by the local ice hockey team, and that admission is
in turn matched by Waterson, who is peripherally participating in the
conversation (he is sitting on the couch watching television, while Saul
and the rush are standing behind the couch). This prompts the rush to
begin a narrative about a game that he attended, encouraged by Saul in
line 11 (
That's the best man). Saul's statement both
encourages and validates the story the rush is telling by suggesting that
the story is a token of a type of event that Saul approves of and in fact
has witnessed. This interpretation derived mainly from his use of
that, which refers immediately to the events told by the rush but
must also be something known by Saul as old or presupposed knowledge.
That thus refers not just to the token as related by the rush but
also to the general type of events which are the best.
The matching and sharing of experience is completed as Saul mirrors
the rush's story with his own story about a fight at an ice hockey
game, which was the greatest. (It is of course stereotypical of a
certain kind of masculinity to glorify this violence as the
“greatest” aspect of this sport, but I will not elaborate on
this aspect of the excerpt; see Deby 2002.)
There is thus an adjacency pair-like structure (see Sacks 1995:554–60, Johnstone 2002:72–75) which is symmetrical in this excerpt
(beginning with line 5, after the pause):
Of course, there is also reciprocity in the agreement on the
evaluation of the hockey fights, and on the desirability of going to
sports events, but this content and approval is supported by the adjacency
pair structure, which shows a symmetry that implicitly creates connections
among the participants, itself a kind of indirectness. Notice, however,
that while these are shared values, the storytelling could also be viewed
as competitive: Who saw the most outrageous fight? Although this
competitive aspect is discernible, it does not negate the sharing aspect
of the speech event, because the participants share the values on which
they evaluate the stories, and they cooperate to allow each to tell his
story. Coates 2003 finds similar patterns of
story-chains used for competition and solidarity among men. The men are
again building homosociality even as they compete for status.14
The men also use other strategies identified
as “women's strategies,” such as finding agreement and
consensus, but these are often in order to create a pair or group against
another speaker, as Saul does with the rush in contrast with Alex, which
sets up a display of the fraternity and the benefits of creating an
alliance with its members. The men thus do not necessarily use formal
linguistic features associated with men to create desirability and
attractiveness in rush, but they use many features associated with women
and the creation of connection. This suggests that men in fact may use
these linguistic features as much as women do, especially when they are in
same-sex groups that focus on homosociality (cf. Goodwin 1980, 1990 on girls using
boys' strategies). However, we have seen the men use these formal
features in a strategic way that more often than not builds status for the
speaker. The men thus use these features in a way that supports cultural
discourses of masculinity, suggesting that men and women deploy linguistic
features and focus on different possible meanings because they are
“said” and “heard” within these very cultural
discourses. Such claims about how gender affects language use (and vice
versa) therefore must take into account the topic or domain of the speech
situation as well as the speech situation itself. If we still want to see
this interaction as “masculine,” then we also must claim that
it is not the formal features such as questions, floors, and even minimal
responses that make a speech style index masculinity or femininity, but
rather these features in combination with content, other forms such as
phonology and lexical choice (cursing), speech event context, and each
other that lead to an impression that talk is “masculine” or
“feminine.” The impression we get is rooted not so much in the
language but in the cultural discourses we connect to that
language.
The next excerpt shows a similar balance between displaying status and
finding common ground, this time in talk revolving around basketball and
basketball players. This discussion begins after Saul introduces the topic
with a question, which is relevant because the ostensible reason for the
rush event is to watch college basketball on television, and indeed such a
game is playing as these discussions take place.
There are no strategies in this segment that have not appeared in
other excerpts, but this excerpt shows another way such strategies are
employed, thus establishing a pattern. All are uses of social
indirectness. Saul finds an interest of the rush for a domain in which
Saul has considerable knowledge in lines 1–8, then shows he knows
something about the rush's concern in that domain – a personal
connection, who the players are, and what they are doing – in lines
15–28, then adds status through his association with the basketball
camp. Saul thus again creates common ground and then status. We can also
find a display of homosociality through the playful insult that Saul
levels at Waterson; the fact that Waterson does not respond negatively
points out the friendly nature of the insult being used to display the
solidarity between Waterson and Saul, a strategy we see employed in a
members-only interaction below. Status is also created through the display
of knowledge about basketball players: Notice Waterson jumping in when the
status of Sam Cassell is in question. Finally, note that Saul takes an
oppositional stance at first to the rush when he informs him that he
hates Virginia. This is another instance of social indirectness
in which an oppositional stance actually creates connection. Note too,
though, that this is done through the commonality of the ex-girlfriend who
taunts him about the talent of the Virginia basketball team. This strategy
again connects the two as assumed heterosexual men.
So there is a recurring pattern in these excerpts of a search for
common ground and tacit agreement on values, a display of camaraderie from
the members, and a display of status, that gives us an idea of how
homosociality is accomplished by the fraternity members and the rush. In
addition, we have seen how sports talk can be used as a domain in which to
accomplish homosociality.
One question remains is whether this talk was successful. Did Saul
like the rush? Did the rush join? In fact, the rush did become a member of
the fraternity. And it is clear that Saul liked the rush, because later in
the evening he talked to some other members arriving late in the kitchen
and said the following about the rush (pseudonym Tom) to whom he was
talking:
Although drinking with rushes was forbidden by the rush rules of the
university, it was common practice to have “after rush”
activities with favored rushes that included alcoholic beverages. We can
thus see that these strategies, on the part of both the rush and Saul,
were successful in creating homosociality.15
Note also that Saul talks of “taking him out,” a
construction similar to that used to describe a man taking a woman out on
a date, showing the parallels of rush and courtship.
We saw above a small view of the camaraderie that was displayed
between members in rush settings. Below is another example of such a
display. Saul is talking to a rush (not Tom) about the fact that the rush
plays baseball (but not for the university's varsity team), and has
asked him what position he plays. Saul then shouts across the room to ask
Alex what position he plays in softball. (It is useful to know that a
“dip” is a certain kind of chewing tobacco which comes in a
small can shaped like an ice-hockey puck; the men often “pack”
it by slapping the can to make it more dense before they put it in their
mouths.)
Saul and Alex have a recurrent sports-boast competition that forms
much of their relationship with each other (see the exchange in Kiesling in press), so it is not pretense that causes
Saul to yell to Alex; he may also have known that Alex plays first base.
But they are creating a camaraderie here with their verbal sparring, as
they do it constantly interspersed with laughter. Not only do they display
the camaraderie of the fraternity, but Saul momentarily includes the rush
in that camaraderie, and in fact includes him as a member of the
fraternity through his proposed place on the softball team. In lines 5
(Alex will get the water for us) and 7 (in case we need
another dip Alex'll just pack it up for us?) he constructs Alex
as a servant for an us comprising Saul and the rush, in which
Saul and the rush share a footing (in Goffman's 1981 terms), with Saul as animator and author for the
two, who together form the principal. Saul thus includes the rush on the
softball team in a status above Alex, and he inserts the rush into the
competitive but friendly exchange. If one of the attractions of the
fraternity is a sense of belonging and inclusiveness in a competitive
world, as suggested by Jean's speech, then Saul is in a sense giving
the rush a sample of it, showing him what camaraderie there is and thus
creating desire in the rush to join the fraternity. Here the boasting,
usually a confrontational speech act, has the effect of creating
homosociality and is thus socially indirect. It is not, however,
linguistically indirect: It still functions as, and has the effect of, a
boast.
Despite the performance and creation of homosociality in these
excerpts, the cultural discourse of power is pervasive. In fact, part of
how desire is created in these interactions is to display the status that
the fraternity holds and to show how it flows to the members. Homosocial
desire is created partially by creating a status for fraternity members as
somehow more masculine – a better example of the cultural discourses
of masculinity – than are the nonmembers in whom the desire is
created. The fraternity membership symbolizes power. A man is attracted to
the fraternity men in these conversations partly through the possibility
of an alliance with something powerful, and that will also make him more
powerful: I'm Gamma Chi Phi here I'm surrounded by all these
people, I feel OK. Those were the best feelings ever (Jean in ex.
1).
THE ANATOMY OF MASCULINE HOMOSOCIALITY
Homosociality puts men in a double bind of their own: To be a man is
to be powerful, and to be powerful in the current gender order is, in
part, to be heterosexual. But affiliation is often equated with
dependence, so homosociality is almost by definition not masculine.16
Michael Silverstein (p.c.) notes that this
tension is similar to the more universal tension between so-called
symmetrical T-T address term relationships and asymmetrical T-V
relationships (Brown & Gilman 1960),
suggesting that the double binds discussed here and by Lakoff are gender-
and culture-specific realization of a more universal tension in human
language.
To create a masculine identity along the lines of
dominant cultural discourses of masculinity, a man must not create love,
dependency, nor sexual desire with his “fellow” men, but at
the same time he must create solidarity with them. The men therefore find
ratified indirect ways of taking up homo
social stances that are
not homo
sexual stances. Most importantly, they take such stances
powerfully, redefining homosociality as a powerful concept, as Jean does
in his speech about the power of unity, which echoes cultural discourses
of male solidarity. In this article we have seen a number of strategies
that can accomplish this “powerful homosociality,” strategies
which invite other men into a powerful alliance. One strategy is to create
privileged speech events where the expression of homosocial desire is
ratified (even powerful), such as in ritual, where it is prescribed, and
in group meetings. These speech events are distinguished by the
foregrounding of the fraternity
qua institution or group as
almost another interlocutor; speakers tend to be ceding some of their
footing as the individual principal of the talk, in Goffman's (
1981) terms, to the fraternity. In other words, it is
clear they are speaking for, or to, the fraternity as an entity (addressee
indirectness). Fidelity and friendship are thus pledged to a group, and
this loyalty is evaluated quite differently from individual homosociality
vis-à-vis masculinity: Loyalty, as can be seen in the powerful
masculinities associated with patriotism, is a powerful trait. Thus, Jean
focused his love on the unity of the collective. These speech events are
therefore not arbitrary connections that license the expression of
homosociality; they are events that facilitate the indirect expression of
homosociality through prescribed speech or through participation
frameworks in which there is no single addressee.
Saul's rush conversations also show a deflection, or indirection,
of homosociality. In these conversations he either creates status for the
fraternity (social indirectness) or associates the interactants with the
sports teams they support or with their abilities in sports (topic
indirectness). This deflection to a ratified, less personal topic, as
opposed to more directly personal topics such as love relationships and
even homosocial friendships, is thus another strategy for creating
homosociality.
The men also rely on socially indirect speech genres, acts, and
stances, such as insults, boasts, and other competitive linguistic forms,
to create homosociality. They use these genres, acts, and stances within
homosocial interactions, as well as competitive (speech) activities such a
drinking games, betting, and board games (see also Kiesling 2001b). Finally, all of the men, to greater
or lesser degrees depending on the situation, employ a “cool”
stance. This stance allows for the expression of homosocial desire without
the speaker's coming across as “too earnest” in his
desire. This stance is encapsulated in the pervasive use of dude
within the fraternity and by men in general (see Kiesling 2004), as well as the greater use of
“casual” pronunciations such as [In] for
-ing among men (see Chambers 1995:109–13; Kiesling
1998). This “cool” stance is thus another example of
social indirectness, because while it continues to function to signal a
man's lack of effort or enthusiasm, it is nevertheless socially
connecting the man to his addressees.
While most homosociality is thus performed “indirectly” or
with “disclaimers,” it is nevertheless central to the
men's social identities, especially as fraternity members. Although
their identity as heterosexual is central, their interactions with women
are not evaluated as frequently, or monitored in the same way, as their
interactions with men. In many ways, the men's heterosexuality is
performed to help create their homosociality, and if this heterosexual
desire overrides the homosocial desire (i.e., a man becomes “pussy
whipped” by spending too much time with a girlfriend to the
exclusion of his fraternity friends) it can threaten the status of his
homosocial connections.17
I recently came
across a striking illustration of this antagonistic relationship between
men's solidarity and heterosexuality in the Disney film The lion
king, showing just how basic and pervasive this is. At one point, the
lion Simba's male friends Pumbaa and Timon weep over the fact that
Simba is falling in love with the lioness Nala. In fact, these two events
happen simultaneously and even comprise a single song in the
film.
The status of men with respect to other men, then, is
central to their identities.
This discussion has implications for both sociolinguistics and gender
studies. The data here suggest a reconsideration of what is meant by
“indirect.” They suggest that indirectness is more than simply
the substitution of one type of speech act for another (as in Brown & Levinson 1987). Such a view privileges the
“denotational” function of language. These data show that the
substitution of one strategy, such as competition, for another, such as
desire, is another kind of indirectness. An insult is still an insult, and
still competitive, but it is socially indirect in that it is
serving not only competition but solidarity as well. These findings also
support Tannen's (1993) claims regarding
the relativity of linguistic strategies: Linguistic features and
strategies rarely have a deterministic meaning but can always be
interpreted differently in actual interaction. Much of such interpretation
depends on the cultural discourses dominant in a group of people, and on
the norms of the speech activity in which the strategy is situated.
Finally, as Freed & Greenwood 1996 show and
Ochs 1992 suggests, speakers are as likely to
use strategies based on the kind of speech event they are engaged in (and
the roles taken up in particular speech events; see Ochs & Taylor 1995) as they are to use those based
on the gender of the speakers in the activity. We might find, for example,
that women engage in more symmetrical sharing strategies because they
interact more in speech activities of this kind than men do. It does not
mean that men do not and cannot engage in these kinds of strategies, just
that they usually do not; for example, Goodwin
1990 finds that girls can take confrontational stances in the right
situations. The task for researchers is then to find out if, and then
explain why, men and women tend to engage in different kinds of speech
activities: Cultural discourses are such that women are more likely to
choose one activity and men another. Drawing on the notion of cultural
discourses can thus truly explain why a certain bundle of behaviors tends
to be used more by women or by men.
The discussion above also has lessons for gender studies. The first is
that a “hegemonic masculinity” – the most dominant or
desired form of masculinity in a society – is composed of multiple,
sometimes conflicting cultural discourses, and that these multiple
cultural discourses and the conflicts between them might explain the
patterns of behavior we find much more clearly than can an appeal to a
single discourse. For example, Kimmel 2001
appeals to homophobia in his explanation of men's behavior, arguing
that men are afraid of other men because they are afraid of being
“unmasked” as homosexual. While I don't dispute that this
cultural discourse is important, I have shown here that it explains
behavior only if it is understood in the context of other cultural
discourses of masculinity which proscribe the limits of unmarked male
behavior.
Finally, this analysis shows how we can balance the macro, cultural
discourse explanations of gendered language use with micro,
interactionally focused data and explanations. We have seen here how the
dominant discourses present choices for the men in interaction, and how
the men negotiate these choices depending on the constraints of the speech
events and their goals for the conversation. Such micro-focus strengthens
the generalized argument from cultural discourses by showing that there is
a way that cultural discourses of masculinity are translated by men into
interaction in their everyday lives. In this way, we also balance an
analysis that takes into account the wider, “objective” view
of the analysts, as well as the subjective understandings the participants
have of the speech events in question. We thus come upon an explanation
that does not need to buy into the dominant cultural discourses but can
nevertheless use them to explain gendered patterns of language use –
the difference gender makes.
