Disciplining Women by Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Author:Deborah Elizabeth Whaley [Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781438432724
Google: mfd9GB0ljMgC
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2010-09-01T05:35:53+00:00

Purnell's statement goes beyond warnings about the ramifications of injury during pledge rites and hazing; it illuminates other problems within the realm of culture and everyday life of which the Black sorority pledge process refracts. Her counsel that chapters not choose members on the basis of materialism and beauty aesthetics is a clear indicator of perceptions of class and its intersection with the construction of femininity as shifting and unstable criteria. Similarly, Purnell's statement about maintaining unity by force denotes an already formed cultural politics of induction and conception of identity with which the organization was struggling at the time. That the AKA president found it necessary to speak on the matter of hazing in its internal publication without naming chapters or a particular individual's mistreatment of pledges indicates that members commonly knew of and practiced these rites. In 1962, two years before Purnell's statement in the Ivy Leaf, AKA at Howard University was suspended until 1966 because of inappropriate initiation rites.22 Purnell's statement is thus fourfold in understanding how Black sorority women are rearticulating femininity through the pledge process, as her commentary aids in seeing the pledge process as a site where class, culture, femininity, and violence intertwine and are performed, taking form on the bodies of Black sorority women during and after their pledgeship.

Research and field informants for this study substantiate that the 1960s were particularly prone to an increase in hazing, which many believe has a causal relationship to the overall cultural and racial turmoil of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights era. Members say this moment has intensified the necessity to put pledges through rites that would aid them in the hostile racial environment they inhabited. One of the foremost writers on hazing, Hank Nuwer, states that “little hazing took place in Black sororities before the 1960s,” which coincides with historian Paula Giddings's brief treatment of the subject in her work on DST, where she also marks this particular decade of civil rights activism as a moment of increased hazing during pledgeships.23 Prominent politician and civil rights activist Andrew Young commented in a 1990 New York Times article that in 1949, his pledge process with the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, which he claims consisted of mental challenges and not physical abuse, was good training that helped him and others face the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.24 Yet there has always been, and likely always will be, a period of turmoil for Black Americans. Young refers to a strenuous pledge period in 1949, indicating a struggle over civil rights for Black Americans before the 1960s. His statement incites conjecture as to whether there was an increase in strenuous pledgeships and hazing in the 1960s, as Giddings, Nuwer, and my informants suggest, or if pledges and universities felt freer to report and act upon the incidents.

It is more likely, I argue, that although pledging practices may have intensified during the 1960s because of the racially in-tense environment that surrounded Black American men and women, the opportunity and ability to

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