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  • Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities
  • Diana B. Turk
Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities. By Deborah Elizabeth Whaley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xii + 206 pp. $24.95 paper.

In Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley offers a case study of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) Sorority, the oldest and, according to Whaley, one of the most highly visible of the Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs). This book aims to fill a gap in the literature surrounding the Black Greek system in terms of close, critical studies of these organizations. Many studies of BGLOs focus exclusively on the men's organizations and thus have little to offer to the history of a highly feminized—at times feminist, at times feminine—organization. Other works on BGLOs can be characterized as "inside histories," those written by fraternity or sorority members that are largely laudatory approaches to recounting BGLOs' pasts, rather than texts that engage in critical analysis of their activities and evolution. Whaley offers a study that neither lauds nor critiques but instead provides an exploration of the contradictions inherent in AKA's formation and identity. Using a comparative analysis that takes into consideration both the historically white sorority system and other BGLOs for women, Whaley presents an interdisciplinary study that draws on film, popular literature, dance, and initiation rituals and uses historical sources as well as interviews, participant observation, legal records, and questionnaires in exploring the past and present meanings of the AKA Sorority.

Whaley is not a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha or any other BGLO. At the same time, she has close family ties to AKA and other BGLOs (pp. 2-3), and her inclination is to look broadly and favorably, though not uncritically, at these organizations and their efforts. Her insider/outsider stance serves as a running theme throughout the book, especially as she moves from some of the [End Page 334] more "culturally beneficial" aspects of sorority life, such as community involvement and service to others, into the more contested and potentially "negative" ground of hazing, exclusivity, and elitism.

The chapters of Disciplining Women employ different methodological lenses and bring to bear different theoretical frameworks. They tackle topics such as popular culture representations of BGLOs and their relationship to both the historical and contemporary complexities of these organizations; the practice of "stepping," the organized dance forms that many BGLOs use as a means of self-presentation; the relationship of BGLOs to counterpublic work and the complex role of class within AKA; the formation, re-creation, and maintenance of a "respectable" sorority through the practices of selecting, pledging, and, at times, hazing members; the relationship of AKA as a sorority—and its members as individuals—to larger questions of societal and political change; and finally, what it has meant and means to be a sorority member in AKA. Whaley begins her study by examining the history and cultural location of AKA and other BGLOs within African American class structures and juxtaposes these organizations' complex qualities against somewhat simplistic portraits painted by two popular films, Stomp the Yard and School Daze. She does not shy away from examining questions of elitism, colorism, and sexism as they relate to fraternal formations, arguing that "there is credence to the accusation of colorism, classism, heteronormativity, and the overall elitism of BGLOs" (p. 28). Whaley draws distinctions, however, among the different groups that share the umbrella of a BGLO. "AKA is not immune to the problems of everyday life hitherto explained," she asserts, yet its service-oriented and political work within the wider Black community renders AKA more complicated than the picture of an elitist, classist, colorist sorority might suggest.

Whaley's second and fifth chapters are the richest in the book. These delve into the relationship of AKA to counterpublic works. Through an examination of the politics of respectability within AKA and an exploration of how the sorority stands at a juncture between social club and political reform movement, Whaley argues that "AKA['s] counterpublic sphere work maintains that the...

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