House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town

5. Hot Box, Box Office, and Fill’er Up: Reflections on Gender and Sexuality

c h a p t e r f i v e Hot Box, Box Office, and Fill’er Up: Reflections on Gender and Sexuality Never wear patent leather shoes on a date; they reflect. Never wear a red dress; it inflames. Don’t eat olives; they’re passion pills. Always carry along a telephone book (or a newspaper, or a copy of the Saturday Evening Post) in case your date asks you to sit on his lap. A coed must turn the picture of her boyfriend to the wall before undressing at night. —Richard Dorson, The Folklore of College Students, Ameri­ can Folklore In keeping with the goals of writing this book—particularly the argument for the consideration of language in context—I hope that the passage above prompts a number of questions. All of the statements are rather absolute, and all but the last are commands. We know that the person being commanded is a female college student, and Dorson tells us that the person issuing the commands is the dean of women. The parallel construction of the commands suggests a genre, perhaps a set of rules. We are not told, however, just how these rules came about, what those people to whom they apply (or don’t) might have to say about them, and where and in what form they might be found. Did Dorson copy them from some source? Did he compile them from several sources, shaping them into the pleasing form we encounter in his book? Did an actual dean of women hand him the list? To be fair, these concerns themselves must be contextualized. Richard Dorson published his overview of the 196 Hou se Sign s a n d Col l egi at e F u n folklore of the college student in 1959, before concerns about the social location of the textual life of folklore were salient, much less important. Nevertheless, there are aspects of the “The Folklore of College Students” by Dorson that remain quite relevant to the exploration of house signs, specifically relationships between gender and sexuality depicted on them. Contemporary scholars have become increasingly interested in investigating and demonstrating the immense complexity entailed in the relationship between gender and sexuality. In a review of work on language and gender conducted since Robin Lakoff’s seminal publication, Language and Woman’s Place, in 1975, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-­ Ginet explain that gender is an especially complex social phenomenon for its reproduction of ideology in service of constructing the natural: Gender is the very process of creating a dichotomy by effacing similarity and elaborating on difference, and even where there are biological differences, these differences are exaggerated and extended in the service of constructing gen­ der. (2003, 13) The quote by Dorson can be used to illustrate Eckert and McConnell-­ Ginet’s claim. Gender is not a symmetrical and equal division between female and male, for example, because the objects that participate in establishing gender difference can be particular to one and not the other. Whereas men might wear patent leather shoes, they do not wear dresses. And these gendered differences far exceed the sexual differences of the clothed bodies in elaborateness and complexity of expression. Words, as Robin Lakoff points out, can similarly establish gender difference in an uneven way. She notes that descriptors such as “ecru,” “lavender ,” and “mauve” or “adorable,” “lovely,” and “divine” sound natural only when being used by women (2004, 43–45). Underpinning the gendered status of such words, Lakoff notes, is the idea that only women should be concerned with matters frivolous and unimportant. Lakoff calls such language “women’s language” to mean not language used by women but language that emerges from and reestablishes the position of women.1 Not just objects and words, but ways of moving and speaking can similarly participate unevenly in the construction of gender difference. For example, Dorson says that men ask women to sit on their laps whereas women turn over the pictures of their boyfriends while undressing. Such patterns establish an oppositional dynamic for gendered difference: everything has to fit into two categories. The two Hot Box , Box Off ice , a n d F i l l’e r Up  197 sexes are implicated in these gendered scenarios such that the gendered scenarios inform what girls and boys do. Indeed, the social manifestations of difference based in gender exceed the sexual differences entailed in the attributes...