Girls just Wanna have fun in a Man's world: Sexualities Surviving the Patriarchy

Student: Madelyn Boyd

Faculty Mentor: James Dean

Sociology

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

Historically, femininity has been discussed as second class to masculinity, with little understanding of how sexuality influences these dynamics. This paper aims to fill this void by explaining the ways women are socialized into negotiating femininity within the patriarchal system. The patriarchal system is studied using intersectional approaches to analyze social groups of women, and then used to understand how women bargain with the patriarchy in social circles outside of men. To address this, there is ethnographic data from sorority recruitment processes to articulate to what extent sexual identity shapes how women negotiate gender dynamics and inequality in social groups of all women. These preliminary results show how homophobia and bodily capital are products of the patriarchy, which shape the social circles of women.