Can the sorority girl be a feminist?

• Author: Tolentino, Jia
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Can the sorority girl be a feminist? The short answer, of course, is yes--if for no other reason than the fact that no one is in a position to make a blanket statement otherwise. No single person is a feminist by everybody's definition. By some definitions, including my own--the only one that matters to me--I am a feminist. Five years ago, I was also a sorority girl.

That was while I was an undergrad at the University of Virginia--an institution that, since I graduated, has been on a streak of female-facing tragedy. There was the murder of one girl by her abusive boyfriend, the abduction of another by a man prowling town, and the now notoriously discredited Rolling Stone story about a girl gang-raped by seven boys pledging a fraternity. Consequently, the media picture of the female UVA student is essentially the broad stereotype of the sorority girl: rich, beautiful, superficial, slutty; someone who pretties up the scenery until someone in the horror movie either screws her or kills her off.

That image was created and constrained by the violence of men. But people still audition to be the sorority girl in the movie, as they do in life. It's a strangely strong identity category, in that it's a voluntary one. And, at least in terms of the sororities that most people think of--the overwhelmingly white sororities governed by the National Panhellenic Conference--the category is voluntarily elitist, with all the embrace of discriminatory power that such a definition entails.

I knew all that when I was a sorority girl. Who turns down privilege when they can rush it so easily? But the media coverage surrounding girls at the University of Virginia--the shamefully salacious journalism, the decontextualized discussions of violence, the general whitewashing of the whole system of power and silence--has made me realize how much I missed when I was a student there, and how much that system worked on me, too.

I came to Virginia fresh from a private, ultrawhite Christian school in Bush-era Texas, a place that was almost explicitly against the development of independent thought. Virginia felt like a liberal paradise in comparison. Distracted by the freedom to assume progressive ideals and independent thinking, I didn't quite see clearly all the things that a genteel and intelligent surface can hide.

For one, I didn't understand how openly classist and explicitly segregated UVA's Greek system was, a setup in which the "mainstream" (almost completely white)...