We’re Creating Ourselves Now: Crafting as Feminist Rhetoric in a Social Sorority

We’re Creating Ourselves Now: Crafting as Feminist Rhetoric in a Social Sorority

Peitho Volume 18 Issue 2 Spring/Summer 2016

Author(s): Faith Kurtyka

Abstract: Drawing from a nine-month ethnography of a sorority, this article shows how the discursive and material practices of crafting empower one group of sorority women to adopt a creative and critical approach to sorority life, explore alternative roles as sorority women, and theorize their sorority as an alternate formation of sorority culture. The sorority members pick up the three ideologies of crafting—having a vision, forming a community, and a feminist pedagogy for teaching group values—to navigate between the existing structures of a sorority and their present-day interests and needs.

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