An Education in Sexuality and Sociality: Heteronormativity on Campus

(Hardback)

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Description

While hook-up culture on university campuses represents a part of the story, it is only part of the story. It is important to add to this and investigate the way the university itself brokers and seeks out specific forms of sexuality, sex, and connection amongst students. This book sheds light on how the university as an institution endorses certain forms of sociality, sexuality, and coupling, while excluding others. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this book furthers the discussion on the impact these institutional measures have on students, and how students work through and around them while simultaneously establishing relations outside of and beyond hooking-up.

Reviews

Male friendships and vulnerability are at the heart of Karioris intimate ethnography. The careful fieldwork of An Education in Sexuality and Sociality offers us an important and original corrective to the stereotypes of college men as violent misogynists. Karioris shows us instead how homosociality can be a form of resistance and source of self-esteem on a campus saturated with heteronormative values, hook-up myths, and class hierarchies. -- Nancy Lindisfarne, co-editor of Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies
Bringing together three old institutions- higher education, marriage and heterosexual masculinity that are assumed to be redundant at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Frank Karioris has produced a unique text of major significance for the future. A highly skilled researcher, he wonderfully captures the social and sexual intimacies, caring and anxieties of a group of male friends, revealing a university-based hidden pedagogy as they are prepared and prepare themselves for their future domestic and public lives. The intertwining of the young mens narratives and the authors analysis serves to rework the three concepts providing a highly innovative language to understand An Education in Sexuality and Sociality at a time when the sex/gender order is in the process of being challenged and reconfigured. -- Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, Newman University
With high rates of sexual assault on university campuses, this insightful book explores the role of all-male residence halls in the sexualities, homosocial relations, and heteronormativity among college-age young men. Its vivid ethnographic detail will be invaluable to constituencies committed to institutional polices, practices, and traditions that disrupt patriarchy in higher education and beyond. -- Joseph Derrick Nelson, Professor of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College

Author Bio

Frank G. Karioris is visiting lecturer of gender, sexuality, and womens studies at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Center for Critical Gender Studies at the American University of Central Asia.