CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Karioris, Frank George |
|---|---|
| Title | Between Class & Friendship: Homosociality in an All-Male Residence Hall in the U.S. |
| Summary | Based on extensive residential fieldwork, this dissertation aims to present a more rounded perspective on men’s homosocial relations than current literature in Critical Studies of Men & Masculinities and demonstrate the importance of these relations in these men’s lives, within the context of an all-male residence hall at a midsized, private university in the USA. It aims to showcase the cross-disciplinary lacuna that exists on this topic in both anthropological studies of men and their relations, as well as within the field of Higher Education and its understanding of the way that men socialize and orient themselves during their first year at university. In this way the dissertation hopes to open up a discussion not just about these specific men and their relations, but also to locate the role that the university itself as a primary socialization institution has in the creation of these roles, production of gender subjectivities, and positions; in particular as universities take on greater and greater importance for wider and wider groupings of people within the United States. I argue that these homosocial relationships provide an insight into the institutional mechanisms of the university, as well as opening up a more rounded understanding of the role that these relationships play in these guys’ lives during their time at university. Further, I argue that university sets up a particular heteronormative framework for students and in so doing it positions the campus in spatial and temporal ways that are aligned with this, to which the guys’ homosocial relations act as a form of resisting these spatio-temporal constructions and pursuing a vision of space and time that is constituted through enactments of homosociality. To do this I will bring to bear not just empirical data from my year long fieldwork but will also tackle theoretical issues surrounding ideas about liminality, sociality, intimacy, and the role of higher education in the US in the 21st Century. Running throughout the dissertation is a question of the configuration of masculinity in the United States presently, which argues for a questioning of the position that universities play in shaping and forming class hierarchies and gender relations, and, further, demonstrates the importance of the university as a site of symbolic as well as cultural capital. The thesis takes as its theoretical grounding a neo-Bourdieusian framework, utilizing both his conceptual tools as well as his work directly on education (and higher education). This work will be augmented with more recent writings on higher education, masculinity, and anthropological inquiries. My thesis is that the university holds a crucial place in the US in the way that it sets up classed and gendered (as well as raced) hierarchies and produces specific forms of relations that students work through and around, building their own worlds under the watchful eye of the administration; particular to this is the way that men mobilize their homosocial relations producing relationships that alter the meaning of ‘friendship’ and intimacy while simultaneously conjuring positions of liminality, community, and nostalgia as part of their social milieu and through this challenging simplistic notions of ‘university life’ or the meaning of men’s friendships. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel J.B. |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/karioris_frank.pdf |
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