Party animals or responsible men: social class, race, and masculinity on campus

Abstract

Studies of collegiate party and hookup culture tend to overlook variation along social class and racial/ethnic lines. Drawing on interview data at a "party school" in the Midwest, I examine the meanings and practices of drinking and casual sex for a group of class and race-diverse fraternity men. While more privileged men draw on ideas of age and gender to construct college as a time to let loose, indulge, and explore, men from disadvantaged backgrounds express greater ambivalence toward partying. For these men, partying presents both opportunities and dilemmas and taps into tensions inherent in being upwardly mobile college men. For some, symbolic abstention from extreme party behavior addresses some of these tensions and validates their place on campus. Men's talk of collegiate partying reveals the dynamic and relational construction of intersectional identities on campus.

Dibs on that Sexy Piece of Ass: Hegemonic Masculinity on TFM Girls Instagram Account

“…Hegemonic masculinity is seen as problematic and reinforces a gendered heirarchy that subordinates women both in physical spaces and online (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014;Connell, 2005;Sweeney, 2014). Through interactions on the comment section of TFM Girls Instagram posts, men not only reify hegemonic masculinity but also legitimize it.…”

“…Previous research has found fraternities on college and university campuses, because they make up the vast majority of attendance at social gatherings to control the organization and themes of parties (Sweeney, 2014). Fraternities control access to the college social experience, thus reinforcing dichotomies of both power and privilege.…”

“…One space in which hegemonic masculinity is performed and policed is within collegiate fraternities (Kimmel, 2008). College students, who seek acceptance and affiliation from their peers (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt, 2005), may turn to fraternal organizations for friendship, shared meaning, routines, and artifacts (Sweeney, 2014). The idea of a fraternity, whose membership is male dominated and space is male-only, is in itself a practice of hegemonic masculinity.…”

“…Fraternities control access to the college social experience, thus reinforcing dichotomies of both power and privilege. This social space is rife with practices of hegemonic masculinity, which includes, among others, assessing women's physical attractiveness, playing wingman on hookups (Grazian, 2007), homosocial drinking (Bird, 1996), sexual conquest, and strong disapproval for those who do not conform (Sweeney, 2014). TFM focuses on such types of social interactions as content for its website and social media feeds.…”

Stitching together the heterogeneous party: A complementary social data science experiment

“…This approach of ours shares its overall orientation, as noted, with like-minded attempts to work across the ethnography-big data divide (e.g., Curran, 2013;Ford, 2014;Taylor and Horst, 2013) -while also, we believe, adding notions of complementarity, stitching and granularity as novel methodological orientations for what that might entail in practice. Moreover, the particularities of our data test site mean that we inscribe this exploration into the wider research field of college parties (e.g., Ronen, 2010;Sweeney, 2014), understood here in the Goffmanian sense of a relatively dense, evanescent yet semi-coordinated social occasion of bodily co-presence (Goffman, 1963;Wynn, 2016). While our approach gives us little to say on such otherwise important topics as gender and sexual relations (e.g., Tye and Powers, 1999) or alcohol consumption (e.g., Workman, 2001), we thus conceive of our joint big data-ethnography focus on party intensities as aligning closely with Goffman's Durkheim-inspired interest in the social forms and affective-normative patterns of interaction rituals.…”