Disciplining Women

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Description

Black Greek-letter organizations offer many African Americans opportunities for activism, community-building, fostering cultural pride, and cultural work within the African American community. Disciplining Women focuses on the oldest Black Greek-letter sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, established in 1908. In this innovative interdisciplinary analysis of AKA, Deborah Whaley combines ethnographic field work, archival research, oral history, and interpretive readings of popular culture and sorority rituals to examine the role of the Black sorority in women's everyday lives and more broadly within public life and politics. The study includes sorority members' stories of key cultural practices and rituals, including political participation, step dancing, pledging, hazing, and community organizing. While she remains critical of the shortcomings that plague many Black social organizations with activist programs, Whaley shows how AKA's calculated cultivation of sorority life demonstrates personal and group-directed discipline and illuminates how cultural practices intersect with politics and Black public life.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Stomp the Yard, School Daze, and the Cultural Politics of Black Greek-Letter Organizations

2. Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Ambiguity of Social Reform

3. Stepping into the African Diaspora: Alpha Kappa Alpha and the Production of Sexuality and Femininity in Sorority Step Performance

4. Disciplining Women, Respectable Pledges, and the Meaning of a Soror: Alpha Kappa Alpha and the Transformation of the Pledge Process

5. Voices of Collectivity/Agents of Change: Alpha Kappa Alpha and the Future of Black Counterpublics

Conclusion: Sorority Sisters
Appendix: Alpha Kappa Alpha Fact Sheet

Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438432748
• Langue: English

Extrait

DISCIPLINING
WOMEN

Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities
DEBORAH ELIZABETH WHALEY

Cover photo of Delta Chapter, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 1930, women in front of AKA house in Lawrence, Kansas (Dorothy Hodge Johnson Collection). Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth.
  Disciplining women : Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black counterpublics, and the cultural politics of Black sororities / Deborah Elizabeth Whaley.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-3273-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  ISBN 978-1-4384-3272-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
  1. Greek letter societies—United States. 2. African American Greek letter societies. 3. African American college students—Societies, etc. 4. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. I. Title.
  LJ31.W43 2010
  369.082—dc22
2010004840
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ILLUSTRATIONS F IGURE 1 Delta Chapter, Alpha Kappa Alpha, The Jayhawker, 1921. p. 178. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 2 Delta Chapter, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 1930, women in front of AKA house in Lawrence, Kansas (Dorothy Hodge Johnson Collection). Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 3 Alpha Kappa Alpha house, 1011 Indiana Street, Lawrence, Kansas, 1940. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 4 Delegates to Tri-annual YWCA Conference, including AKA members Dorothy Hodge Johnson and Maxine Jackson, who aided in the adoption of the YWCA to end its policy of racial segregation, 1946. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 5 AKA Rushees paying pledge fees, Kansas City, Kansas, 1955. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 6 AKA Delta Chapter, University of Kansas from The Jayhawker, 1959, p. 118. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas. F IGURE 7 AKA Delta Chapter, University of Kansas from The Jayhawker, 1963, p. 166. Courtesy of the Spencer Research Library, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A lpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority members offered me support, guidance, and interviews. Cheryl Washington, the former graduate advisor of the Zeta Psi AKA chapter, made it possible for me to sit in on AKA meetings and locate internal publications of the sorority through her contacts. AKA member Tajuana (TJ) Butler granted me an interview and encouraged me despite her busy schedule as she toured in 2000 for her book Sorority Sisters. Other AKA women helped me, and their voices were the heart of my project. Although most asked that I not name them in the book, they know who they are and how much I appreciate their help.
Many scholars, mentors, colleagues, and students supported this project and offered their scholarly advice. I appreciate their important work and time and their emotional support and for pressing me further along intellectually and creatively. My editor at State University of New York (SUNY) Press, Larin McLaughlin, believed in the merit of this project; her detailed attention to and suggestions for the manuscript, in addition to the comments of the press's anonymous readers, helped make this a better book. My thinking through of Black sorority activism and symbolic and ritualistic practices was shaped by the wisdom and feedback of two of my earliest academic mentors, Michael Cowan and Ann Lane, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. David Katzman and Maryemma Graham at the University of Kansas were persistent champions for this book project and provided advice during various stages of its advanced development in dissertation form; they have been consistent and positive guiding forces in my career. The Center for Cultural Studies (CCS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provided office space, resources, and a community of intellectuals with whom to engage while I began revising this study during my year (2003–2004) there as a Visiting Scholar. I thank Gregory S. Parks, Tamara Brown, Clarenda M. Phillips, and Craig Torbenson for providing the opportunity to publish in their collective and individual projects on Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs).
Portions of chapter 1 appeared in Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), and in Parks and Torbenson, Brothers and Sisters: Diversity in College Fraternities and Sororities (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2009). I am especially grateful to Gregory Parks for his colleagueship, for our many discussions about BGLOs that helped sustain my momentum for this project, and for putting me in touch with a wonderful network of scholars working in the field. Parks continues to define, contribute to, and press the boundaries of BGLO studies.
I was lucky to complete the proposal for this manuscript while I was a faculty member at the University of Arizona in its Africana Studies Department, where I had intellectually engaging, caring, and collaborative colleagues. I extend heartfelt thanks to Geta LeSeur in Africana studies for her mentorship and to the members of my writing group—Beretta Smith-Shomade in media arts and Dana Mastro in communication studies—for their friendship, conceptual advice on this and many other research projects, and professional encouragement that nurtured me. My research assistant at the University of Arizona, Carmella Schaecher, was also of great assistance.
I have a strong institutional support base at the University of Iowa, which provided financial assistance for this project in the form of research funds. Thanks also to my colleagues, mentors, and friends at U of I who compose the American studies and African American studies units. In particular, I am appreciative of Horace Porter, who offered his help and advice and regularly sent me BGLO resources that came across his desk. Gyorgy Ferenc Toth, a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Department at the University of Iowa, aided in identifying sources on Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority's 2008 centennial celebration, which led to a new, exciting direction for the framing of the interviewee voices in chapter 5 .
I am thankful to the editorial board of the journal Contours , including its editor Barry Gaspar in the History Department at Duke University, and two anonymous readers for their helpful review comments on an earlier portion of chapter 2 , published there as “We Strive and We Do: The Counterpublic Sphere Work of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority,” Contours 3:2 (Fall 2005). Hank Nuwer, an independent scholar, helped me tackle the legal, ethical, and writing issues that arose in my discussion about hazing and the pledge process. His encouraging, detailed, and thoughtful responses to e-mail queries in the late 1990s about hazing were invaluable. I was also fortunate to receive feedback on a condensed version of chapter 3 by a group of scholars that attended a talk I gave on sorority stepping at the 2000 American Studies Association meetings in Detroit, Michigan.
Several librarians and archivists at the University of Kansas Law School, the Kansas Collection on Black history at the University of Kansas, and Kent State University worked with me long distance. The University of Kansas Law School helped me obtain and research AKA hazing cases. Deborah Dandridge at the Kansas Collection aided me in identifying AKA members' personal papers and collections at the University of Kansas. Kent State University sent me copies of its college paper, the Kent Stater . Ivy Center in Chicago, Illinois, allowed me to read and photocopy its sororal magazine, The Ivy Leaf , in the winter of 1995.
I thank the San Jose State University chapter of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity and the Long Beach State chapter of Zeta Phi Beta sorority for allowing me to film their step practice sessions and step shows and for granting me interviews in the spring of 2000. On many occasions, Steven Millner at San Jose State University put me in contact with fraternity and sorority members for interviews and other resource information on stepping.
Finally, I am eternally indebted to my parents, Emma and George Whaley, and to my sisters, Lisa Whaley and Twilynn Whaley-Collins. I thank them for their love and support and for making my career in academia possible. I dedicate this book to them.
INTRODUCTION
A lthough I received yearly invitations, I never pledged a sorority when I was an undergraduate. I did my undergraduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), a place known for making the linkages between being a public intellectual and community organizing. My chosen field of study