PERHAPS the latest sex scandal at Duke University will inspire the university to expand into a full-fledged academic major its 2007 course “Hook-up Culture at Duke,” which looks at the pressing subject of how “particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture.” Here is the course description from the university’s catalogue: 

Prerequisites 

None, although a previous course in Cultural Anthropology would be helpful.

Synopsis of course content 

What is “hook-up culture”? What does it have to do with power and difference? Is the concept useful for framing gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized experiences at Duke?

This course, designed as a direct result of events last year on campus, will give students a unique opportunity to examine and reflect upon gendered/sexualized life at Duke in relation to contemporary life in the U.S. We will ask: how has the history of university attendance in the US (in terms of race, class, and gender) impacted campus culture? Are new technologies changing intimate or familial relationships between people? How are distinctions between “at home” and “at work” (or public and private) linked to new kinds of subjectivity and sociality? How do particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture? And finally, what does the lacrosse scandal tell us about power, difference, and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US?

Each course unit will include theoretical readings that contextualize Duke campus culture within these larger US cultural and economic formations, emphasizing the ways that “hooking-up” at Duke must be understood in relation to larger intersections of sex, gender, power, and capital. To this end, in addition to theoretical readings, we will also devote a substantial portion of the class to both case studies (drawn from popular media, film, or ethnography) and to Duke-focused student ethnographic research projects.

The goal of the course is two-fold: 1) to understand “hooking-up” at Duke in terms of larger frameworks of race, capitalism/consumerism, class, lifestyle, identity, (hetero)normativity, and power, and 2) to enable students to critically assess both the nature of Duke hook-ups and the institutional setting of Duke itself. 

Exams 

None.

Term Papers 

Final ethnographic paper/project: students will work on this project throughout the semester.

                                                                                — Comments —

Laura writes:

Imagine soaking an impressionable mind in this solution of political jargon, thinly-veiled lies and brain-bending nonsense. When studying the “larger intersections of sex, gender, power and capital” regarding the Duke lacrosse team incident, I don’t suppose they found an anti-white, anti-male bias. And what are “Duke-focused student ethnographic research projects?”Is sex with one’s classmates now an ethnographic research project?

John E. writes:

It doesn’t surprise me that such a course is offered, though it is jolting to see it described so unabashedly in their catalog. If it does nothing else for me, it at least it puts the final nail in the coffin of any anxieties I might have suffered about how my wife and I would be able to afford to send the children God gives us to a college or university like Duke. If my kids want to go to a place like Duke, I think they will have to pay for it themselves, because I can’t see myself outlaying the expense for it. Granted there are still some good things offered at Duke and similar universities, but there are only slim chances that anything good that can be gotten there cannot be gotten for much less expense through another route, and without the clown act being put on that we are seeing in American colleges and universities.

Laura writes:

If you confined your children at home and made them read old comic books for four years, they’d come out better-educated than if they went to Duke.

Grumpy Grizzly writes:

Your comment about keeping children at home and making them read old comic books is remarkably close to what I am fond of saying to friends about my public school education. I tell them that if I had stayed home every day and watched soap operas I would have been better off. Then, I step back and enjoy the looks of horror.

Laura writes:

It’s one thing to become stupid on one’s own; it’s another to spend 12 years in enforced confinment and four years in expensive classes such as this, and still know very little.

Grumpy adds:

In all the discussion of Karen Owen on your blog, I think one important point has been overlooked.

Karen Owen, no doubt, has always been, by the standards of liberal culture, a good girl. Throughout her youth, I’m sure her parents were very proud of her good grades, her popularity and the image she put forth.

Her now infamous thesis is simply the culmination of her efforts to please those she perceives to be in authority. Those in authority taught her traditional sexual morality was a farce, a construction, a cover for the oppressive forces of patriarchy. Like any good girl, she accepted what these authorities said without question.

In short, Ms. Owen and her list are the final result of all that Duke and its ilk teach. The fact that administrators and others there panic when scandals like this break out shows their vacuity. Had they an ounce of integrity, they would applaud Ms. Owen as an example, a good girl, of all they desire to see women be.

Laura writes:

Yes, she is the modern good girl, good by the standards of the warped culture in which she grew up. It’s fair to assume her family considered her a great success, at least before all this came to light and possibly even now. (After all she has been contacted by a major publisher.) And, as I said earlier, she is the product of a culture of promiscuity that the university has encouraged.

And, if you read her thesis she is indeed trying to please with her display of cleverness, however much she might not have wished its full contents known to the university or her family. It was this cleverness that got her into Duke in the first place and was probably always encouraged and applauded.

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