Description

In 2011 Jana Mathewss career took a surprising turn What began as an effort for a newly minted college professor to get to know her students turned into an invitation to be initiated into a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor For the next seven years Mathews attended sorority and fraternity chapter meetings Greek Week competitions leadership retreats and mixers and formals Combining her personal observations with ethnographic field analysis and research culled from the fields of sociology economics and cognitive psychology this mustlisten book examines how white Greek letter organizations help reshape the conceptual boundaries of societys most foundational relationship categoriesincluding friend romantic partner and family

Mathews illuminates how organizations manipulate campus sex ratios to foster hookup culture broker romantic relationships transfer intimacy to straight samesex friends and create fictive family units that hoard social and economic opportunity for their members In their idealized form sororities and fraternities function as familial surrogates that tether their members together in economically and socially productive ways In their most warped manifestations however these fictive familial bonds reinforce insularity entrench privilege andat timesthreaten physical safety