Searching for Sisterhood : Friendship and Sorority Culture in Tajuana Butlerâ s Sorority Sisters.

This essay examines Tajuana Butler's Sorority Sisters (1998) regarding its portrayal of friendship, sisterhood, and sorority culture. The novel conceptualizes 'sisterhood' as a fictive kinship structure and emphasizes the empowering potential of friendship among women. It fully embraces sorority culture and presents pledging as a 'social drama' in all its facets. Overall, Sorority Sisters provides an intervention into dominant representations of sorority life and black femininity. Yet, this intervention hinges on a discursive system of control shaped by conventional femininity and an uncritical affirmation of the ideology, practices, and significance of sororities.