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Signature Redacted Signature Redacted Signature Redacted Signature Redacted OFF THE RECORD: SEX, INTIMACY, AND DISCOURSE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE by MELISSA AYN SOULE Gregory Mitchell, Advisor Amy Holzapfel, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts For my friends and advisors, who kept me going. For my cast and community, who made it real. Andfor my family, who taught me that just because the best things in l fe are free, doesn't mean they don 't take work. Thank you . * INTRODUCTION: STRUCTURES AND SYMPTOMS OF SYNCOPE "Event: Sex and Slices!" "Ephs Confess All on Men For Consent'/ New Tumblr" "Beyond Hookup Culture: Faculty Debates Value of Love vs. Lust" "Few Surprised By Results of Alcohol Survey" "Purple Cows Make Wedding Vows: Alums Tie the Knot" - Selected headlines fTom The Williams Record Archivei * In proposing this thesis, both as performance project and written analysis, I reacted to a sense that sex at Williams College had become a divisive topic. Reduced through repetition and distended bureaucracy to a series of buzzwords - "hookup", "Ephs/everyone", "alcohol"- sex did not seem to exist within the Williams lexicon as pleasure, but only as problem. I cited academic and administrative protocols as the origin of this issue, noting orientation programming, classroom environments, and extracurricular events that seemed irresolute in their articulations of sex and consent. While events like those above were well intentioned, most fell flat, were attended by students who could ah·eady be described as sexually enlightened, and inevitably led to insular (albeit important) discussions of alcohol abuse and sexual assault. By reexamining the joy of sex, I had hoped to engage with my peers about the local and national factors that seemed to threaten intimate connections. Begilming my research, however, I was surprised by a more specific commonality: underneath disdain 1 "Men For Consent." Facebook. Accessed May 13, 2015. An all-male student group founded in 2012. They describe themselves and theiJ· mission as: "A group educating about and advocatil1g against sexual assault and violence ...We aim to educate people about and advocate against sexual assault and violence to cultivate a healthier and safer sexual culture on campus." 2 "Search: Sex." The Williams Record RSS . Accessed May 13, 2015. for the sexual culture, students shared a deep sense of emptiness regarding intimacy. This began in their sexual experiences and identities, but for many extended into all areas of life at the college. All twenty students, in other words, identified with being the exception to social or sexual rules for success.3 Within the first week of interviews, I altered my research question to develop this trend. Instead of "What does sex look like at Williams?" I began instead to examine how intimacy functioned at the college: sexually, socially, and systemically . How did people connect? Understand each other? Resolve differences, sexual or otherwise? How and why was each individual asserting that they were not a part of "everyone"- if they weren't, who was? If they weren't represented by or identifying with events and publications created by their peers, what stories weren't being told, acknowledged, and recorded? What mediums might be more successful in accurately depicting intimacy within the campus community? Responding to these questions, I argue in this analysis that sexual and social life at Williams College is defined by the experience of syncope. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word "syncope" indicates in noun form a "failure of the heart's action" and "in extended sense, suspension of vitality ." In verb form, it means "to cut short, cut down, reduce" or "to syncopate or slur over (a word or syllable)." 4 My usage emphasizes these latter definitions, proposing that intimacy at the college is 3 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. While the level of anxiety and isolation varied between students, its presence was consistent in each of the twenty individuals. 4 "Syncope.": In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Accessed May 13, 2015 . characterized by both a lack of vitality and the slurring over of that which is already "there".5 More concretely, I attest that systemic paradigms limit the college population from engaging in substantive, intimate cmmection, while the state of syncope prevents these subjects from fully comprehending the nature of their discontent. By virtue of the stylized presentation and momentary emotional distance of a theatrical space (a temporal abjection\ performance creates the unique opportunity to isolate and occupy syncope. This, in turn, allows both audience and ensemble to better conceptualize collectivity and also subjectivity , acknowledging that others share in their experiences of isolation and dissonance and understanding that they are influenced by an intersectional web of systemic factors. In this sense, theatre capitalizes on the liminality of syncope to examine social paradigms while also helping to alleviate the anxieties they create. SYNCOPE Steve Pile, a scholar of globalism and the politics of identity, provides a helpful model for demarcating the breadth and function of syncope. In his book, Geographies of Resistance, Pile states, "There is never one geography of authority and there is never one geography of resistance ...the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination- if only because each is a lie to the other, and each gives the lie to the 5 Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. Pg. 289. 6 Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. The abject is rejected by/disturbs social reason (communal consensus). The ability of theatre to draw out a moment past its temporal and social boundaries creates this opportunity to access/isolate the abject. other."7 As Williams College finds itself within a moment of social change on a local, national, and global scale, syncope prevents students/subjects from fully comprehending their contributions to both domination and resistance, enforcing a rigidity of personal and political practice that leaves all participants categorically unsatisfied. Put simply, the skipping over or dropping out effect of syncope prevents students from making and understanding crucial connections between their personal and political selves, a cmmectivity that is necessary both for individual contentment and political progress. In isolating this disjunction, theatrical explorations are able "give [back] the lie" of intimacy, interrupting narratives of either/or to remind us that interpersonal connection is a study in dynamics rather than binaries. But what is the construction of syncope, and why does it exist at Williams? Above, I cite both systemic and social paradigms as contributing to the concept. Specifically, I mean to implicate neoliberalism and the rhetoric of "tolerance" prevalent in current sociopolitical discourse. The relationship between syncope and these two ideologies is explored extensively below. In brief, I argue that social practices and values instilled by neoliberal economic policies exacerbate the experience of syncope by inscribing "free market" strategies onto students, thereby creating umeasonable expectations of independence, ease, and immediacy within intimacy. These, in turn, lead to disappointment and isolation when the commodity fantasy is interrupted: the emotional equivalent of an economic bubble bursting . The rhetoric of "tolerance" - or universal/utopian inclusivity - furthers the work of neoliberalism by providing a vocabulary for this illusion of independent subjectivity. 7 Pile, Steve. Geographies ofResistance. "Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance". Political theorist Wendy Brown identifies this concept in her book Regulating A version: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. She states, Tolerance is exemplary of Foucault's account of governmentality as that which organizes 'the conduct of conducts' ...Absent [] the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities. This [ ] is achieved not through a rule or concentration of power, but rather through the dissemination of tolerance discourse across state institutions; civic venues such as schools, churches, and neighborhood associations; ad hoc social groups and political events; and international institutions or forums.8 Importantly, this dissemination is not coded as a political endeavor, but instead an appeal to non- specific "humanity". This ambiguity is particularly important to my discussion because it suggests that tolerance can be sustained through spaces like the academy. Though private liberal arts institutions like Williams would prefer to understand themselves as an intellectual check on the metaphysical powers of the state, in this respect they are actually helping to further governing agendas. While the rhetoric of tolerance seems to open up opportunities in classrooms and other scholarly domains for inclusivity , in other words, it actually reasserts dominant pedagogies of professionalism, classroom comportment, thinking, and argumentation that are inherently majoritarian. We can therefore understand syncope, neoliberalism, and tolerance as representing complimentary layers of obstruction, each contributing to a sense of personal and political dissonance. Tolerance , as fa9ade, obfuscates the influence of systemic structures on subjectivity. Neoliberalism, as the building itself, resituates social equity as an individual rather than state responsibility. Syncope , as foundation, 8 Brown , Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance In the Age of Identity and Empire. Pg. 4. demarcates the gap between personal and political, the bridging of which is necessary to maintain a satisfactory social "self'.9 The remainder of this introduction therefore seeks to contextualize what I am calling syncope within supporting texts and theoretical developments . In addition to describing the function of tolerance and neoliberalism in greater depth, I also hope to familiarize the reader with related themes and evidence. These include the links between intimacy, privatization, and capital; marketing or "brand" practices in evidence at Williams College; the origin and functionality of hookup culture; commodity and fantasy in the millennia! generation , including the significance of social media; and finally, a reiteration of the opportunities presented in theatre and more specifically in performance ethnography. INTIMACY AND CAPITAL: SELLING PURPLE Historian and gender scholar John D'Emilio explores the connection between intimacy and economy by tracing the history of capitalism and gay identity. Citing the shift from family as physical necessity to emotional preference, D'Emilio suggests that, Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity- an identity based on the ability to remain outside of the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to one's own sex. 10 Self-sufficiency therefore predicates sexual identity not only in terms of emotion but also fiscal responsibility; in an evolving capitalist system, the family transitions from 9 Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 10 D'Emilio, John. 1997. "Capitalism and Gay Identity". Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. Pg. 101-113. a site of production to one of emotional sustenance, and is then reconstituted as a moral imperative. This narrative of the family was constructed during a period of economic liberalism in the U.S., but cemented and codified throughout the Fordist era. 11 A similar process can be seen in the branding/marketing process of private colleges, where the fraternal structure of all-male universities traditionally represented the acculturation of privileged, white young men. Embracing diversification, liberal arts colleges have reoriented their social and educational objectives in order to establish themselves as a worthy "investment": educationally, socially, and fiscally. Shaped by tolerance, institutions have distanced themselves first from the church community, then from class-based and racial exclusivity, and have traded the filial narrative of collegiate brotherhood for a non-gendered understanding of "school pride" or "community". Institutions must then rearticulate their value in terms aligned with those of the modern nuclear family, communicating their worth by demonstrating a) morality and b) success; not only regarding institutional cache but also in the (systemically validated) "quality" of the students they produce. Theorist Jon Bi1mie further elucidates these policies through his concept of the nationalized "gaze of the state", stating that "Desires that were a threat to the forging of [the] new social order needed to be reined in through moral regulation ...Desire was subject to the gaze of the state, and the gaze of the mother and father within the panoptic family." 12 As private colleges pmtray themselves as morally responsible for children after parents relinquish control, college-wide practices and policies therefore become 11 D'Emilio, John. 1997. "Capitalism and Gay Identity". 12 Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. Pg. 17. entangled in even the most seemingly personal aspects of student life. The college "cotmnunity", in other words, replaces the family as regulatory system. This dynamic is apparent, for example, in the Williams College mission statement, which reads as follows: "Williams seeks to provide the finest possible liberal arts education by nurturing in students the academic and civic virtues, and their related traits of character" and, later, "Ultimately, the College's greatest mark on the world consists of this: the contributions our alumni make in their professions, their communities, and their personallives." 13 In this sense, Williams students are coded as both educationally and morally gifted, the college fulfilling an extension of the nuclear familial intent in that it impacts both their professional and personal lives. The college motto, however, is "Through the Generosity of E. Williams, Esquire." 14 Williams would not exist without the (financial) "generosity" of Eplu·aim Williams and contemporary funding from alumni (primarily in the finance and consulting industries), but in emphasizing its role as moral arbiter the college conveniently escapes the label of "business" in favor of the more ambiguous "institution". Ignoring the implications of business ventures like the ownership (and exorbitant rent) of one side of Spring Street and a college-owned hotel and bookstore, Williams applies highly evocative words like "contribution", "nurturing", and "virtue" in the same way that politicians utilize themes like "freedom": appealing, in theory, but largely meaningless in practice. 13 Binnie. Globalization of Sexuality. Pg. 17. 14 "Williams College Mission and Purposes." Accessed May 13, 2015. So where does the meaning come from? Following the logic of "trickle down" economics, the responsibility for the quality, enjoyment, and virtuousness of the college belongs first and foremost to faculty and students, among whom there is no universal agreement upon what learning and acceptance ought to be. In the resultant climate of inevitable disagreement, students and faculty accuse both one another and the college administration of threats to an essential, fragile, and ultimately intangible Williams-ness. They want to know who really "bleeds purple" 15 , when in fact the social core of Williams is as fluid as its student body itself but regulated by systemic formations of identity, achievement, belonging, and connection. NEOLIBERALISM Earlier, I cite Binnie's analysis of economic liberalism and its influence on sexuality, but Williams and the culture of the United States has moved past this fiscal era. In her essay "Understanding Neoliberalism", sociologist Raewyn Connell succinctly defines the term: Neoliberalism is most familiar to us as a set of economic policies and their supporting ideas and images. The 'free market' is the central image, and the deregulating measures that 'freed up' markets, especially capital markets, were among the earliest and most important neoliberal policies ...[But] to unbind existing markets was not enough. Neoliberalism is a missionary faith: it seeks to make existing markets wider and to create new markets where they did not exist before. This impulse has taken neoliberalism far beyond the strategy of deregulation, into a strategy of the endless commodification of services . 16 It is this element of commodification that pmticularly interests me, as the neoliberal branding and marketing mechanisms of Williams College increasingly creep 15 A phrase used on many a sports jersey or t-shirt at the college. 16 "Understanding Neoliberalism." In Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, edited by Meg Luxton, by Raewyn Connell. Pg. 23. into student life. The services mentioned above are no longer limited to traditional business models, but instead represent a commodified means of accessing intimacy, from dating apps to contemporary gender roles and "hookup culture". Before exploring these aspects of the college, however, it is impmtant to understand the direct link between contemporary intimacy and political systems of governance. In keeping with my interpretations of the isolating quality of tolerance, neoliberalism, and syncope, theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner outline the systemic origins of contemporary intimacy. In their article "Sex in Public", Berlant and Warner emphasize the constructed nature of neoliberalltolerant subjectivities, suggesting that intimacy itself is a heterosexual, hegemonic, and political endeavor that distracts from the desire to make demands of the state or to otherwise acknowledge inequality or alternative opportunity. 17 Impmtantly, intimacy therefore becomes both private and punitive, since "one of the unforeseen paradoxes of national-capitalist privatization has been that citizens have been led through heterosexual culture to identify both themselves and their politics with privacy". 18 This formation of intimacy, the authors suggest, "replac[es] state mandates for social justice with a privatized ethics of responsibility ...enforcing boundaries between moral persons and economic ones." 19 17 Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex In Public." Critical Inquiry (1998): 553. 18 Ibid: 553-54. 19 Ibid. TOLERANCE Intimacy therefore becomes a "fantasy" compensation for the disappointments and inequalities of the political world. The fantasy itself, however, remains a political project ultimate benefitting hegemony. In their book Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, scholars Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jacobsen note the religious origins of the concept of tolerance (now enjoying a renaissance), and assert that it has always been hierarchical. 20 Originally in response to the religious disagreements of sixteenth through nineteenth century Europe and the formation of nation-states, "tolerance" was a peacekeeping mechanism that never distinguished between civic liberties and religious identity. 21 Jacobsen and Pellegrini argue that tolerance therefore provoked/provokes increasing distinctions between citizens, troubling the difference between being able to "live in peace" and "being a free and equal member of society".22 Wendy Brown further emphasizes this inadequacy, explaining the exponential affect of tolerance in marginalized populations: When those identified with minority religions, ethnicities, and sexualities are simultaneously rendered as objects of social tolerance yet formally enfranchised, their marginal status in the nation is continually inscribed by the former while their political inclusion is established by the latter. Tolerance discourse in the social thus restores the hegemony that state-sponsored egalitarianism threatens to undermine. 23 This facet of tolerance (and therefore intimacy) is particularly significant at Williams, as it directly impacts the degree to which students experience isolation and discontent. Imagine, for instance, that tolerance, neoliberalism, and syncope are contained 20 Jakobsen, Janet R., and Ann Pellegrini. "What's the Matter With Tolerance?" In Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. Pg. 45. 21 Ibid. Pg. 46. 22 Ibid. 23 Brown, Wendy. Regulating A version. Pg. 208. within a cyclone. Syncope represents the eye of the storm, a liminal moment of silence that can either provide an opportunity for reflection or panic about what is to come. Tolerance and neoliberalism construct the remainder of the funnel, and individual subjectivities are picked up by the winds at different rates depending on their social and systemic positionality. The more marginalized a student is, the higher in the air they are flung, and must therefore land further and further away from the central identity mechanism of belonging within a "community". MILLENNIAL LIFE Significantly, students are also asked to brave this storm alone. While generational factors represent a facet of syncope rather than defining it, they are nonetheless important. As articulated by a US Department of Commerce summary for the year 2014, millennials are the largest, least white, and most studied generation to date. They are hugely invested in and addicted to technology, particularly with regard to expressing themselves and creating a personal "brand". They consume most of their news online and most of their social life happens or is planned via text. They are more heavily influenced by their parents than any generation prior, from political opinions to choice of employment, and similarly value a stable home, successful career, and nuclear family model. Their only major area of difference in this respect is religion, as the millennial generation is increasingly more secular than their parents. They have, however, received a tremendous amount of spiritual or moral affirmation from guardians and educators as they have grown up.24 This last characteristic is particularly important within my discussion of syncope, as many correspondents indicated that much of their identity structure was based on their performance as students prior to Williams and during their tenure at the college. Still addressing generalities made across studies, the Department of Commerce report also notes a number of significant personality traits. First, millennials are more optimistic than past generations, even at the same age, and despite having lived through traumas like 9111, Hurricane Katrina, school shootings, war in the Middle East, and so on. Next, they are more socially minded, valuing a broader array of friendships and experiences than past generations. Lastly, they are highly accepting, their growth toward adulthood having been characterized by large changes in public attitude toward gay marriage and race relations, and regarding intimacy they are more likely than any generation prior to have dated or be dating someone of a different race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. This understanding of a generation so open, so interconnected, and so invested in social life has led a number of scholars to conclude that millennials are the solution to a number of societal ills. Unfortunately, I would have to disagree. While the above traits seem to indicate noteworthy levels of social equity and responsibility, such progress is sustained by vocabulary rather than action. Overly familiar with the rhetoric of tolerance, millennials engage with narratives of inclusivity without an appreciation for systemic origin or influence. Shaped by supportive parents , 24 "The Millennia! Generation Research Review." U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. November 14, 2012. Accessed May 13, 2015. teachers, and endless commodities, millennials look , above all, for ease and efficacy; traits learned from their neoliberal, privatized world. In exploring the many issues of an achievement-oriented nation of excess, psychologist J.R. Slosar points out that the contemporary culture of globalized, commodified, and mediatized personhood permits multiple identities to be played out- not only in fantasy but also the semi-reality of digital social spaces. This is a tempting prospect for many adolescents and young people with a strong urge to gain control. In articulating this concept, Slosar cites the theory of "MAMA" processes of identity formation: alternating stages of identity "moratorium"; feeling stuck or sticking to what's familiar in a form of stasis, or identity "achievement"; experimenting with some new pursuit or belief and being met with success and affirmation. 25 Slosar confirms that this back and forth is healthy for younger people, particularly when they have a stable "home" set of values to return to. This process, however, is greatly complicated by the immediacy and digitized vicariousness of millennials. Armed with by-the-minute feeds and tweets, "a year of selfies in one minute" videos, mood-specific radio stations, and many other means of personalizing their world, the newest generation has the ability to enact MAMA cycles at an alarming rate. Millennials want everything to happen faster, want to gain limitless success, and generally struggle to conceptualize their lives as incremental stages of growth rather than seismic shifts in maturity, popularity, etc. When realities like economic recessions, flawed educational access, or the complex nature of another person impede this growth, therefore , the generation takes it hard. Often, they run to next best 25 Slosar, J. R. The Culture of Excess: How America Lost Self-control and Why We Need to Redefine Success. Pg. 147. thing, pursuing new and different opportunities with the expectation that their results will change in kind. In this sense, the millennia! generation can be seen as somewhat rightfully frustrated: their parents and educators have always assured them that they were special, and yet the limited realities of our world suggest otherwise. As a result, they are caught in a cycle of trying to learn and apply skills so rapidly that there will be no risk of failure, and in many ways hookup culture can be understood as a subset of this drive: if Williams students keep moving, keep changing their partners, location, or approach, eventually they will achieve seamless and truly "string"-free intimacy. This is, at least, the intent, but since such an approach makes no effort to link political positionality with personal desire, students are quickly returned to a syncopatic dissociation with their intimate environment. Furthermore, failures or dissatisfactions in intimacy can begin to threaten other areas of their lives, including their education. Because students understand (or are taught to understand) Williams not as business or institution but as home, they dutifully trust in linear systems: "come to class, pay attention, get the grade" becomes "see a partner, make conversation, head home." When one area of this tenuous web of commodity begins to fail- they are rejected by a potential partner, a paper comes back with a bad mark, etc.- the rest is believed to follow. HOOKUPS AND SOCIAL EXCHANGE Sociologist Kathleen Bogle's landmark study on hookup culture is similarly shaped by commodity. Bogle begins her 2008 study by tracing the evolution of dating culture through various social and sexual scripts over the course of the past century, identifying three distinct periods of coupling conduct, referred to as "the calling era", "the dating era (rating and dating)", and the contemporary era of "hooking up."26 During the "calling era", an emphasis was placed on young women receiving young men in their homes in the company of a chaperone, potentially showing off a skill like playing the piano in order to keep their suitors entertained. 27 At the close of this section, Bogle includes innocuously that lower- income families did not have the time, space, talents, or resources to entertain in this way, and therefore would go out on "dates" in semi-public places. Bogle makes very little of these class distinctions, but the link between financial and relationship potential is clearly defined. In the next era of "rating and dating", independently social women began verifying their suitors personally instead of allowing them to be vetted by their parents. More importantly, dating became tangential rather than precursory to . 28 marnage. Citing sociologist Willard Waller's 1920s and 30s study on Penn State University students, Bogle next includes that "Waller characterized dating as a sort of 'dalliance relationship'. These relationships were particularly prevalent in college because students [especially men] wanted to delay marriage until they were married and settled into their post-college careers."29 During WWII, however, this transient mentality dissolved in favor of a new emphasis on "going steady" and settling down due to the lack of available men. Bogle suggests that this mentality persisted until the 1960s, when co-ed college campuses, drug use, youth activism, free love, and the expansion of globalization 26 Bogle, Kathleen A. Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships On Campus. Pp. 12- 23. 27 Ibid. Pg. 12. 28 Ibid . 29 Ibid. Pg. 13. changed the social script from individual pairings to group hangouts and parties and therefore laid the groundwork for the sexual scenery of today. 30 While Bogle may situate the origins of contemporary hookup culture within the free love movement, the sexual freedoms of the millennia! generation include more utilitarian and currency-based social scripts than their predecessors. Specifically, Bogle's case studies explicitly and implicitly identify several areas of distinction in hooking up such as physical attractiveness, alcohol use, athletic participation, and intellectual ability, all of which are echoed on the Williams College campus. In these delineations, there is a distinct narrative of value and exchange. Like reading a market, however, the realities of hookups involve different consequences for men vs. women and different levels of investment, and are similarly dependent upon variables determined by the sexual and social environment. For the men and women of Bogle's study, for instance, alcohol was considered a necessary social lubricant, and a complimentary aspect of hookup culture more generally. In a study recently published in the Journal of Sex Research, researchers concluded that, Among participants who consumed alcohol prior to their last hookup, a notable 30.7% of females and 27.9% of males indicated that they would likely not have hooked up with their partners had alcohol not been involved. Further, 34.4% of females and 27.9% of males indicated that they would not have gone as far physically if they had not been drinking. Among participants who reported both drinking beforehand and hooking up with unfamiliar partners, greater number of drinks consumed was associated with more advanced sexual behaviors. 31 30 Bogle, Kathleen A Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships On Campus. Pg. 21. 3 1 Labrie JW, JF Hummer, TM Ghaidarov, A Lac, and SR Kenney. 2014. "Hooking Up In the College Context: The Event -Level Effects of Alcohol Use and Partner Familiarity On Hookup Behaviors and Contentment". Journal of Sex Research. 51 (1): 62-73. In Bogle's work, the scholar similarly describes a correlation between alcohol consumption and social/sexual success, noting, "in general, students who struggled with finding hookup partners seemed less involved with social events, particularly events that involved alcohol."32 A similar dynamic exists at Williams, with a number of correspondents citing the "work hard, play hard" atmosphere as a major factor in their discontentment and inability to find partners. This frustration was much more dramatic, however, in students of marginalized identities: ah·eady constructed as exterior to the social scene, a refusal to participate in hard alcohol or binge drinking culture placed them in smaller and smaller circles of potential partners, decreasingly their likelihood of finding a pleasing connection. More generally, however, alcohol practices seemed to contribute to the lack of pleasure or pleasure discourse inherent in sexual culture at the college: sex seemed largely a performative endeavor to be discussed the following day, rather than an enjoyable act unto itself. Theorist D.M. Currier's essay on "strategic ambiguity" discusses the structures through which embedded gender norms force students to overcompensate for this lack of sexual fulfillment. "Strategic ambiguity" seeks to articulate the useful vagueness inherent in the term "hooking up", which is used by both men and women to protect and enhance sexual reputation according to a hegemonic narratives. 33 Quoting R.W. Connell's research, Currier begins her analysis in the context of the "hegemonic masculinity" and "emphasized femininity" acted out by players in the collegiate social sphere: Hegemonic masculinity is the form of masculinity that is most highly valued in a society and is rooted in the social dominance of men over women and 32 Bogle. 2008. Hooking Up. Pg. 62. 33 Currier, D. M. 2013. "Strategic Ambiguity: Protecting Emphasized Femininity and Hegemonic Masculinity in the Hookup Culture". Pg. 704. nonhegemonic men (particularly homosexual men). Emphasized femininity is 'the pattern of femininity which is given most cultural and ideological support ...patterns such as sociability ...compliance ...[and] sexual receptivity [to men]' (Connell1987, 24). [...]Although there are variations of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, there are commonly accepted and expected displays of both, grounded in time- and culturally specific contexts.34 Currier's theory is useful in articulating why hookup culture is often understood to be heteronormative and even misogynistic. Rather than constructing itself anew, Currier suggests that hookup culture borrows from its historical roots in order to maintain distinct gendered and sexual roles, which in turn shape the ways in which students struggle to articulate why their "free" sexual practices often leave them feeling more constrained than traditional dating. Understanding strategic ambiguity as a primary component of hookup culture, Currier's research also affirms the hegemonic narrative prevalent throughout Bogle's earlier interviews. Though college campuses have necessarily become more diverse in recent years, both authors found sufficient evidence to support that racial and sexual minority students generally abstain from hookup culture. In fact, Bogle's earlier research would seem to indicate a purposeful - rather than tacit - homogenization of the hookup scene: One factor that makes hooking up easy is the admissions process. Generally, the college one attends reflects one's social class .. .In addition to social class, students at [the two] universities [studied] have other important similarities: the overwhelming majority of students on both campuses are white; and [ ] most students are Catholic and many attended private or parochial high schools. Thus, students at both universities are surrounded by people like themselves. 35 34 Currier. 2013. "Strategic Ambiguity." Pg. 706. Quoting: Connell, Raewyn. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. 35 Bogle. Hooking Up. Pg. 56. This system of cultural currency and homogeneity is again echoed at Williams, where syncope prevents marginalized students from both claiming spaces for themselves or fully recognizing the ways in which they are incapable of doing so. Relationally, the proliferation of social media since Bogle's publication in 2008 has hugely expanded the vestigial "rating and dating" aspect of hookup culture, wherein people rank and compare various couplings, their frequency, and the purported "satisfaction" of partners on a semi-constant basis. Tracking "friends", photos, and event invites on social networks, colleges have hyperbolically extended what Bogle refers to as the "fishbowl effect" of campus life, wherein students are constantly watched and adjusting themselves to fit within the social scenery. 36 Further exacerbated by explicitly sexualized and mobilized programs like dating apps, this voyeuristic policing becomes inextricably linked with hookup culture. Armed with smartphones, students can identify partners online, vet hookups with friends, and monitor even the movements of peers as they "check in" at surrounding bars, parties, and restaurants through apps that broadcast GPS location. The system of constant evaluation and ranking is in turn exacerbated by the mobility of the digital era, and evaluations of individual bodies and practices are rendered simultaneously private and public. In this sense, even the momentary becomes digitized and archived, the sexualized evaluation of, by, and for others memorialized for all to see. Binnie's analysis of globalized sexuality is particularly applicable herein in that the theorist suggests that modern narratives of identity and social practices include an increasing amount of anthropomorphized capitalism, rendering the constant "feeds" that define modern social 36 Bogle. Hooking Up. Pg. 73. media a veritable sexual stock exchange. 37 In conceiving of human relationships on an emotionally and physically cost-effective basis, the millennia} generation becomes buried in a cycle of discourse and surveillance. This, in turn, informs the dissolution between the social and sexual selves authored online and in person conduct, exacerbated by the gapping or disjunctive affect of syncope. With no recourse in life or online, students are therefore left only with incidental oppmtunities for the creation of intimacy, and it is no surprise that few take advantage of them successfully. THEATRICALITY Williams students, in sum, are beset from all sides, constantly attempting to resolve divisions between personal need and political position, intimacy and independence, success and fulfillment. How, then, should intentional communities­ both those constructed by the college and those in opposition to it - go about eliminating this gap? While I cannot argue that theatre is an instantaneous cure for the anxieties of syncope, theatrical projects nonetheless lend themselves to a different perspective and analysis of syncopated affect. In distilling the experience of syncope from the everyday and portraying it onstage, there exists the unique opportunity to examine moments of disjunction in isolation, and perhaps to better understand them. At the risk of complicating what I understand to be a specific function of performance ethnography, my portrayal of syncope might be compared to theorist Jill Dolan's concept of "utopia in performance", wherein "live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning 37 Binnie. Globalization. 2005. making and imagination that can describe or captme fleeting intimations of a better world ."38 Her concept of embodiment is especially important to me, as the experience of hearing words verbatim from interviewees was a particularly striking one for audiences of my performance piece. In reaching individuals within the emotive space of theatre, I aimed not only to mirror the sentiments of their peers but also to demand a certain type of attention in return. I wanted, as Dolan goes on to suggest, for my own performative space to help others "ponder how, rather than ending with the curtain call, utopian performatives might ripple out in other forms of social relations." 39 This is not an original aim, as many theorists, artists, and ethnographers before me have sought to articulate various aspects of humanity onstage. It has been particularly meaningful, however, for me to appreciate the political possibility of this project. Much like scholar David Roman asserts in his book Performance in America, "the signif icance of the performing arts in contemporary U .S. culture [lies in] challenging the conventional wisdom that performance is marginal to the national imaginary ."40 Roman suggests that, rather than existing as merely the celebration or reflection of life, theatre should be considered an active means of adjusting it, transforming world views and concepts in order to bring about material alteration. He codifies this throughout his book, gesturing to the fact that the rhetoric and ideologies we regularly use to define ourselves- nationality, sexuality, identity- are themselves performances . It is from this perspective that I consider my work as ethnographer and director most intuitive, whereby I am uniting Erving Goffman's everyday performance, J.L. 38 Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Pg. 1. 39 Ibid . Pg. 34. 40 Roman, Dave . Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Pg. 1. Austin's performative utterances, and the space of syncope between. As suggested by performance scholar Richard Schechner, this exploration of the "between" is much of the work of theatre, and in attempting to conceive of what those gaps might signify audiences and actors might arrive at something new. Schechner states, "The distance between the character and the performer allows a commentary to be inserted; for Brecht this was most often a political commentary, but it could also be [ ] an aesthetic and personal commentary."41 This understanding of theatre is echoed by other ethnographers, as in Dwight Conquergood's Cultural Struggles. In his work, Conquergood specifically emphasizes the unique quality of the "consciousness" of the actor in ethnographic projects. He states, "Performance, both for the fieldworker and the stage actor, requires a special doubling of consciousness, an ironic awareness. One must take oneself simultaneously as subject and object."42 The ability to observe both aspects of themselves and others onstage can therefore provide students a unique means of accessing and analyzing the precise nature of their own syncope. This opportunity, in tum, might prod students already engaged with the emotional content of theatre to delve into its more difficult, intangible, and troublesome facets. Conquergood cites this as a particular strength of performance ethnography, suggesting that, "[Ethnographers] are calling for empathetic performance as a way of intensifying the participative nature of fieldwork, and as a corrective to foreshorten the textual distance that results from writing monographs about the people with whom one lives and 41 Schechner, Richard, and Victor W. Turner. Between Theater & Anthropology. Pg. 9. 42 Conquergood, Lome Dwight, and E. Patrick Johnson. Cultural Struggles: Peiformance, Ethnography, Pra.;'Cis. Pg. 21. studies."43 In the "world of the play44" that I strove to create, therefore, there were actionable as well as emotive expectations for audience members. But does learning a story make an audience accountable to its morals? Can a play provoke as well as perform change? Can it educate, rather than simply teach? We'll see. INTENTIONS In the chapters to follow, I seek to articulate personal, political, and artistic structures of intimacy at Williams College, attempting to pinpoint more closely the locations and implications of syncope . Arranged as a chronological narrative, these supporting arguments delineate syncope in past, present, and future com1otations. Chapter One is backwards-looking, employing the subject of student activism at Williams to examine and compare syncopated discourse then and now and identifying the ways in which syncope attaches to the political self. Chapter Two is situated in the present moment, exploring in particular the implications of syncope for the intimate lives of interview participants and guided by a personal emphasis. Lastly, Chapter Three includes a methodological analysis of my performance piece, including both my own process, the aesthetic work completed with the ensemble, and the show's community reception. Through these lenses, it is my aim to affirm the existence of syncope and the efficacy of theatre as political project, as well as to trouble the limitations of performance as activist practice. Welcome to the show. 43 Conquergood, Lome Dwight, and E. Patrick Johnson. Cultural Struggles. Pg. 66. 44 Fuchs, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play." Pg . 4-9. ONE: A HISTORY OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE RELATIONS "Aprivatized, individualized approach to leadership is an impediment to understanding the extraordinary power of ordinary human beings when they come together," said Davis. "Leadership in the 21st century requires a feminist approach, " [meaning that] we must grapple with "the deep relationality that links the personal and the political, that links the institutional and the intimate, that links the public and the private ...We have to learn how to reinvent our personal lives, to recraft our selves. " - The Williams Record, reporting on a lecture by Angela Davis at Williams College on April 1ih, 201445 * In the spring of last year, Williams College welcomed renowned activist, scholar, and author Angela Davis to the stage of Chapin Hall. Delivering a lecture entitled "Leadership in the 21st Century", Davis spoke about activism and the need to develop social consciousness. Though she is known for her radical politics, Davis' lecture took a more general tact, critiquing the tendency of contemporary activists to avoid intersectional or historical approaches to social justice. The failure to comprehend an issue's origins , she argued, left advocates working in a vacuum, attempting to alter individual opinion s without appreciation for the scope of the system that had created them.46 This formlessness is an important function of syncope: as part of the college "community", students are encouraged to accept the "we" of Williams without regard for its long history of sexism, racism, class ism, etc. Denying this, students must choose between creating welcoming spaces within the institution and investing their time in exterior conununities. Each tactic, however, comes with its own host of problems, 45 Lee, Kirsten. "Angela Davis Examines Leadership and Intellectual Activism." The Williams Record RSS. April16 , 2014. Accessed May 13, 2015 . 46 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. creating a binary in which students either subscribe (actively or tacitly) to the dominant majority, or fully embrace life on the social periphery. The "I am Williams" and "I, too, am Williams" campaigns can serve as example. "I am Williams", a photography campaign, was started by the Williams College Office of Communications, dovetailing the Diversity Initiatives of 2004 which aimed to make the college more accessible to students of color and/or limited income.47 The project features photographs of selected students, staff, and faculty, who share their stories and values in a few words, and is generally cited as one of many ways that Williams symbolizes an inclusive and intimate community. "I, too, am Williams", inspired by an identical project at Harvard University, aimed to interrupt the constructed nature of the original series. In similarly formatted photos, marginalized students described the ways in which they were forced to account for -rather than celebrate - their identities on the college campus. While these projects are well intentioned, they fail to acknowledge a basic tenet of modern activism in assuming that the master's house will fall to the master's tools.48 The "I am Williams" campaign, while meaningful , was and is a public relations initiative on behalf of the college. It is not meant to portray the institution accurately, but rather in a flattering light. While the "I, too, am Harvard" and Williams campaigns aimed to interrupt this public relations stunt, the act of mirroring a capitalist, institutionalized program is inherently a failure in critique. By functioning within the system, by fighting for a space within the "we" instead of obviating their position outside of it, contemporary students and activists compartmentalize issues rather than ascribing them to larger 47 "I Am Williams." Office of Communications. Accessed May 13, 2015. 48 Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. movements or strategies. Attempting to navigate this catch-22, students are caught in a cycle of defending their "right to be at" Williams, forced to constantly reassert and reframe their own subjectivity instead of focusing on the flaws of the institution itself. Intimacy at the college has a similar historic weight, one bound up inevitably with race, gender, class, and other crossroads in the form of activist change. Examining these knots, I hope to arrive at a vantage point from which I might fully explore contemporary characteristics of the Purple Valley. Drawing fTOm college archives, my own research and field notes, and the student newspaper (The Williams Record), this chapter aims to marry larger political and social changes with a brief history of Williams, placing local events more accurately within my discussion of neoliberalism and tolerance and framing the current state of syncope. Building to present-day social life, I trace three pmticular shifts at the college: the fight for gay rights, feminisms and sexual violence, and the civil rights movement. Through the lens of these larger social justice movements, I hope to better contextualize and historicize the social, sexual, and political moment within which my analysis of intimacy takes place. LGBTQ CONTEXTS AND CONTRADICTIONS Though an understanding of tolerant and neoliberal influences is not explicit in student discourse, many correspondents affirmed its impact on their experiences at Williams, with one student describing freshman year as a learned ability to "neutralize."49 49 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September ­ October, 2014. Pg. 4. A white, upper-middle class, socially conservative Christian, Bethany 50 had attended religiously affiliated schools for the majority of her educational experience. She was, she remembers, extremely overwhelmed at the prospect of interacting with a greater diversity of people during her time at Williams. For her, a predilection for shyness became a boundary between herself and others, thereby allowing her to "opt out" of many conversations rather than defending potentially polarizing viewpoints . Another woman, Maria, felt a similar need to fit herself within a certain model, noting that she always experienced an "adjustment period" upon returning to school, which manifested most clearly in changing her manner of dress.5 1 Maria identified strongly with her Indian heritage, and poignantly described the first three weeks of school as the steady process of sifting through her clothing to remove what was most colorful or unique, her exterior presentation echoing an interior effort to regress to the social mean. But what does this "mean" signify? The desire to become "average"? To be included within a ubiquitous "everyone"? Asked more specifically about the pressure to conform and the concept of the "normal" Williams student, one woman gestured to a recurrent concept of community at the college. A gregarious senior, Kyle also had a quiet, observant side that fed into her love of poetry, and offered the following explanation for the "everyone" narrative I found so prevalent in interviews: "There's this idea of the Williams community that people will buy into, and I think that that does exist of its own accord. But it's held in a certain regard and we're all part of it, so that 50 Names have been changed. In order to protect student's identities on a small campus, names, hometowns, and otherwise revealing information have been withheld or changed when necessary. 51 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 6. facilitates some of the [social dynamics] that might not happen otherwise. 52" In this sense, Kyle implied that it was the expectation to take part in the Williams "community" that constructed the community itself. In high school, she clarified, there were many different cliques and groups, but while the same dynamic occurred at Williams, she sensed an underlying expectation that the identification with "being an Eph" was meant to supercede more specific social spaces. Similarly, another student described himself as exterior to the "preppie"53 mindset of Williams, by which he meant to delineate this same constructed/generalized sense of community by specifically ascribing it to a prior form of private school education. A gay, "non-binary male", mixed-race, varsity athlete, Josh had attended a private high school while living on the border of a working-class suburb and a "sort of ghetto", and had sustained friendships and hookups in both areas.54 A wiry student who bounded into the interview, his energy shone through in moments of self-deprecating charm that were surprising in a first-year student, and highlighted his strong opinions about the college. Asked about social dynamics, Josh described most friendships as superficial and "business-minded". A fellow athlete agreed, stating that he experienced connections as "going out the window at 9:30 on a Friday night" and "Not about the other 52 Ibid. Pg. 22. 53 Referring to a culture of dress, athletics, background, speech and values associated with those who attend (most East Coast) college preparatory schools. Used here in a derogatory sense. 54 Self-identification, meaning here that the individual experiences their gender presentation on a spectrum, passing daily as male but from time to time experiencing themselves as non-male or explicitly female. person. [But] about you."55 Josh's experiences were particularly noteworthy, however, in the context of his intersectional position on campus. Asked about his negotiation of homosexuality , athleticism, and race, he expressed frustration that there were very few men in Anything But Str8 (ABS), an LGBTQ group for athletes at the college: "And I know, like, other guys who are out56 off the field , but they don't want their teammates and coaches to know for sure, so they just don't bring it up, I guess ...You could say they, like, don't bring it into the locker room."57 Josh found it difficult to experience a sense of community in the group, since he was largely expected to commiserate with women or female- identified athletes. Unfortunately, he also felt similarly exterior to the Williams Queer Student Union (QSU): "I feel like -like a lot of the gay white men ...they, like, don't need to feel a sense of community because they're like comfortable with the dynamic of how it works here, I guess."58 Again finding himself in a female-identified space, Josh had tried to bond with other students in the group based on his racial minority status, but had quickly become overwhelmed: "It's been- yeah, it's just been a lot in those meetings. I mean, I'm mixed, but people are so vicious about 'people need to respect my identity(ies)' and I just don't feel as strongly about it."59 In this moment , Josh identifies himself as an inhabitant of syncope: attempting to negotiate an identity both within the dominant athlete culture on campus and alternative spaces, he felt somewhat uncomfortable in each group. 55 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 26. 56 Meaning "out of the closet"; openly homosexual. 57 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 2. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. Pg. 2. QUEERNESS AND TOLERANT RESPONSIBILITY Coupling the queer history of Williams with nation-wide progress, there is a clear mirroring of the rhetoric of tolerance. In 1971, just as many neoliberal economic policies began their implementation, Daniel R. Pinello became the first openly gay student at the college, coming out on the cover of The Williams Advocate, a student newspaper that would go on to become the contemporary Williams Record.60 Until1976 and the creation of the first campus LGBT organization, further growth was limited to written discourse and private conversation. The Williams Gay Support Organization (WGSO), founded in April1976, was met with opposition from students, administration, and faculty, but the ensuing history of LGBTQ life at the college is nonetheless one of slow, largely unified development. Why, then, does Josh's contemporary picture indicate such an ideological disparity? In the current climate of social neoliberalism, and especially within a rhetoric of tolerance, the historic, privileged whiteness of the college has superceded the marginalization of certain students. As a result, homosexual men and women who meet the proper qualifiers (white, of privilege, of normative backgrounds, etc.) can sometimes distance themselves from the social justice movements that preceded them, existing in relative comfort within the general population. Josh notes this exact dynamic in his speculations about "gay white men" on campus. As a result, "queered" or otherwise alternative spaces become sites of extremity, attempting to house intersectionally marginalized students who cannot fit the neoliberal model of the white, wealthy, consuming (both in terms of physical/economic commodities and rhetoric), "normal" 60 "History." Davis Center. Accessed May 13, 2015. homosexual. These alternative communities therefore largely include students of color, trans*-identified or gender non-conforming individuals, low-income students, and other systemically marginalized persons. TEACH ME ABOUT YOU Within a system of tolerance, these subjects also become responsible for filling the gaps of institutional failing. In the quote below, Josh explained the dynamic that resulted from his open, patient attitude regarding his race and sexuality: At Williams people like to think that they're very accepting. And I think they are, but a lot of it is that they're just not very familiar with queer issues and stuff. So they don't really know how to react. Like, my suitemates- so I told them I'm gay and they're fine with that but I can see like ...like when I talk about someone that's attractive, if I'm like 'that guy is hot', I can tell they get very uncomfortable around it.61 This comment itself subscribes to tolerant ideologies, excusing the suitemates from their discomfort by suggesting that that they are trying to be accepting, but are simply unfamiliar with how to go about it. Tolerance is particularly dangerous in this respect, as it leaves marginalized students responsible for a) educating their peers, and b) controlling their resentment against those who discriminate or hate. In this sense, the recipients of bias or ostracism from the dominant culture are increasingly estranged, while the obfuscating rhetoric of tolerance allows the majority to conceal their actions . Alternatively, this polarized dynamic can also limit the growth of students who are sympathetic to marginalized peoples and issues, as in the following quote from Tessa. 61 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 2. Self-conscious even in repeating her feelings , Tessa's soft-spoken depiction of her first impressions of the college is nonetheless significant. As an international student and person of color, she felt that she had provoked unexpected reactions in her first few days at Williams, and regretted that she had not initially understood the reasoning behind her classmates' defensiveness : In high school I felt like people were giving each other the benefit of the doubt when it came to misunderstandings regarding difference. Because you didn't have a choice- you were kind of stuck with these people . . .And when I got to Williams I felt like it was a little less forgiving ....I felt like there were a lot of rules that I didn't know but I was always expected to know, and breaking one by accident wasn't really an accident: it was that I was a product of society, that I should be aware of everything and that I should be dealing with everything head-on ...Like, just on a very basic level, going into Paresky as a freshman and wondering why it seemed like all of the black kids were sitting together, and not feeling like I could ask that question .62 It is no surprise, then, that the communities of queerness and color Josh encountered above seem insular. Rather than functioning as support systems, these groups can become alienating to those , like Tessa, who expect a (non-existent) tolerant utopia. This dichotomy situates Josh in a state of syncope: unable to be part of the dominant group and unwilling to radicalize as part of the periphery, his experience - and the experiences of many non-normative Ephs- is one of relative isolation. In the section to follow, I further emphasize the scope of this intimate loneliness . PICK AND CHOOSE Attempting to alleviate social pressures by finding ever more alternative communities , students are also limited by the size of the college population. Referring to 62 Anonymou s. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October , 2014 . Pg. 19. his status as a sexual minority, Josh summarized the personal side of the issue as follows, explaining that he was currently required to choose between the emotional security of having a social group and the fulfillment of sexual or intimate needs: There's a group chat of all the queer freshmen, and I was talking to my friend that's on it and she was like 'I feel like it's going to be weird later on because we'll all have hooked up with each other'. So I kinda made a rule not to mess with freshmen, because I feel like it would ruin the dynamic- because I just want to build a community first and then, you know, have fun. The friendships are more important than getting what I want physically right now.63 Even as the Supreme Court is poised to legalize gay marriage throughout the United States, therefore, syncope poses a new danger to LGBTQ movements . Though gay rights activists have succeeded in making their agenda a part of liberal/progressive political platforms, they have necessarily adopted the rhetoric of tolerance abused by those constituencies. Increasingly, there is a "right" way to be queer, which mimics hegemony/heterosexuality and is shaped by national and neoliberal discourses. 64 At the college, this creates tension between the specificities of a given individual - such as Josh's personal expectations as an athlete and moderate thinker vs. his politicized position as a gay man of color- and often leads to students feeling as though their identities within an "all or nothing" binary. Josh must either accept unsatisfactory participation in the dominant culture, or a life on the social periphery: he finds few options in between, and even these are incomplete. More importantly, he becomes individually responsible for the consequences of each choice, rendering him increasingly 63 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 19. 64 Puar, Jasbir. "Rethinking Homonationalism." International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 336-39. susceptible to burnout, apathy, and a general understanding that Williams is a place where he will constantly need to defend his selfhood rather than explore it. NEW FEMINISMS AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE A similar dynamic can be found in contemporary feminism on the Williams campus. Much like LGBTQ initiatives, majority feminism in the current moment derives from a normative population comfortable with the terminologies of tolerance. From this lexicon, educated, white, cisgendered women can claim their identities as feminists. For others, however, mainstream feminist language and objectives do not provide a secure community. For women of color, those who are economically or educationally underprivileged, those who have non-normative gender presentations, and those who are trans* identified, disabled, or otherwise marginalized, feminism is yet another styling of the rhetoric of tolerance. Rather than empowerment, it leads only to syncopatic disillusionment , ignoring the specificities of personal experience to either generalize women as part of a normative, neoliberal, capitalist feminist movement, or to compartmentalize them as part of a more "radical" collectivity. Normatively, feminism at Williams focuses on individuated agency and equality in intimate relationships. 65 Echoing a moderate, liberal feminist agenda, feminist- identified interviewees primarily spoke about their efforts to sustain self-sufficient intimacy, within which they aspired to be in control of choosing their partners, the situation, and how they felt about a given encounter. Many interviewees focused on the 65 Meaning that, while there are also many laudable initiatives, events, and conversations about body ethics, gender presentation, feminism in the workplace, self-pleasure, etc., most women-identified and other feminist-identified students at the college first access the topic through discussions of agency and consent. need to eliminate slut-shaming sentiments on campus.66 Others critiqued the lack of committed or public relationships. Though I will focus much more extensively on these dynamics of personal intimacy in the following chapter, their inclusion here is necessary to mticulate the primary foci of the dominant feminist initiatives on campus. Significantly, many self-identified feminists described themselve s as uncomfortable within activist spaces on campus, describing their practice as largely rhetorical rather than action-based in the classroom or bedroom, and therefore alluding to clear correspondences with the syncopatic state of intimacy at the college. Few women saw themselves as inclined to engage with the systemic "why?" of sexual violence or inequities of pleasure - in fact, few chose to broach these topics at all - and instead spent much of their time debating the usage of the word "feminism" and the concept of equality. In sum, there are two separate feminisms currently in practice at the college: one that concerns itself with activist initiatives and action, and one that has been subsumed by rhetoric . Isabella, a senior with a variety of relationship experience, articulated a common problem stemming from this anxiety over "equal" or "official" connections. A down-to- earth club athlete, she had acquired a sense of solidity and self-confidence in her demeanor during her four years at the college. By attempting to avoid commitment, she suggested, students were also unable to create sexual or otherwise intimate spaces where agency and consent could be effectively negotiated: I think that there's a sense that, like, you've got to 'hit it and quit it', right? Because once you have that emotional intimacy things get weird .. .I think that everyone just needs to be on the same page and everyone needs to take 66 Wherein women with multiple sexual partners are subjected to a greater amount of social stigma than similarly behaved men. themselves a little bit less seriously and be willing to mess up. You can't mess up and just have it fall on the other person, but I think if you see your sexual experiences as entering into a pact with someone, you're creating your own little community of two- or three, however many- even if it's just for a very short period of time, and you need to treat each other well.67 Though the feminist objectives above are important, they lack the systemic connections and perspective of the section prior. Rather than engaging with questions of agency, protection, and pleasure through an intersectional lens, many correspondents focused exclusively on the sexual act itself. Without a multifaceted approach to consent, students who must negotiate complex systemic biases like race, class, or sexuality on top of intimacy remain voiceless, sympathetic to the feminist movement but finding its efforts insufficient or outright superficial in application to their experiences. In this sense, the general reluctance for students to speak about sexual pleasure can be attributed in part to tolerant rhetoric and neoliberal practices. By creating only certain spaces, for instance, where self-aware students can choose to go and learn about pleasuring themselves and their partners, feminist groups unintentionally create an expectation of mastery through social commodity. Much like more experienced students might skew the curve of a given classroom, sexual education opportunities are used only by those already informed or otherwise versed in the trade of sexual information. This is not to say that feminist spaces on campus do not attempt to be welcoming - the recent transition from "Women's Collective " to "Feminist Collective" make this apparent- but rather that they must enforce certain expectations in order to create safe, separate spaces for themselves, sometimes to the detriment of those populations most in need of an 67 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 23. education from them. Without the emotional time and resources to open these spaces to less savvy (and therefore potentially offensive or ignorant) students, feminist collectives can become static social groups, largely unable to grow or facilitate intimate connections outside of their own rhetorical limits. NEOLIBERAL SEXUAL VIOLENCE While there are many areas of the Williams College campus ripe for analysis through this lens of interpersonal, tolerant boundaries, the issue of sexual violence remains one of the most prominent. In conceiving of and proposing this thesis, I was largely responding to the fact that almost all discussions of sex and sexuality on the college campus either explicitly concerned sexual violence or quickly gravitated toward the topic. Framed by press coverage (both accurate and otherwise), federal initiatives, a dramatic uptick in public concern, and the hiring of Meg Bossong '05 as a dean of sexual assault, my proposal in the spring of 2014 dovetailed an explosion of reiterated conversations. On the national stage, TIME Magazine's coverage of assault on college campuses sparked debate across news outlets, while at Williams most of the conversations surrounded Lexie Brackenridge, former Williams class of' 16. Already a transfer student at Columbia University last spring, Brackenridge published an article in The Williams Record detailing her rape during her first semester at Williams, as well as its ensuing fallout from a lack of administrative support.68 68 Brackenridge, Lexie. "A Survivor Speaks Out." The Williams Record RSS. May 14, 2014. Accessed May 13, 2015. Though Brackenridge's experiences and general campus conversations about assault are important and necessary, I felt then and now that something was missing. Discussing sex and sexuality only as a path toward violence seemed a disservice to more meaningful considerations on what good, positive sex - rather than just safe sex - meant. Approaching this thesis, I wanted to skirt the topic during interviews in order to more broadly evaluate the state of intimacy at Williams, and yet the ways in which it did arise gesture toward a larger systemic origin that merits analysis. Notably, mentions of sexual violence by correspondents most often concerned elements of "rape culture". A theoretical development of second wave feminism, rape culture delineates the set of normativized gender roles, jokes, and cultural understandings and/or practices that understand rape as an unavoidable feature of society.69 Put simply, the concept articulates beliefs and practices surrounding sexual violence that permit, among other wrongs, victim blaming, the denial of systemic failings, and trivialization. While this is the classical definition, I would add that the prevalence of these ideas and images has drastically increased through social media, which exacerbates in particular an element of perceived illegitimacy regarding the stories of survivors. Accustomed to constantly evaluating cross-referenced stimuli, students often tend to question the "reality" of sexual violence: several interviewees mentioned that they "had heard" or "felt" that Brackenridge had been dishonest in her reporting process. Extrapolating from field notes as well as interview data, I can assert that for most this 69 "What Is Rape Culture?" WAV AW Women Against Violence Against Women. 2014. The phrase, now part of the feminist lexicon, was first published in 1974 in Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, edited by Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson for The New York Radical Feminists. Sociologist Joyce E. Williams, however, says that a 1975 documentary film called Rape Culture took credit for first defining the concept. was due to rumors that Brackenridge had "changed her story", behaved "irresponsibly" prior to her assault, and was supposedly involved in a similar case at her new school.70 Students, in other words, chose to reference the incident as an example of individuated illegitimacy (via the tolerant rhetoric of rape culture) rather than engaging with the systemic problems it represented. SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND THE STATE Scholar Kristin Bumiller's book In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence can provide a historical foundation for this discussion, situating the critique in the formation of the feminist movement against sexual violence in the 1970s. Neoliberal echoes in socio-sexual policy, Bumiller suggests, "[have] arisen from a dominant construction of sexual violence as a 'social problem' ... In the United States, awareness of the problem of sexual violence was accompanied by a phenomenal growth in the crime control apparatus."7 1 Bumiller goes on to expand this insight throughout the book, communicating that "the contemporary campaign against sexual violence is fundamentally shaped by dramatic shifts in welfare policies, incarceration rates, and the surveillance role of social service bureaucracies over recent decades."72 As the problem of sexual violence grows, it is therefore framed by corresponding discourse and new initiatives, but these efforts seem only increasingly prolific rather than increasingly effective. The concept of "public order", Bumiller suggests, is used to sustain a narrative 70 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. 71 Bumiller, Kristin. In an Abusive state: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence. Pg. xii . 72 Ibid . Pg. XV. wherein the legislative , judicial apparatus is perceived as the only defense and deterrent for sexual violence. This means that, rather than attributing violence to the patriarchal systems that continually situate women and other marginalized groups as inferior, the socio-political response remains mired in bureaucratic inaction. Responsibility is then attributed locally as the failure of smaller and more nuanced systems of neoliberal surveillance, until the "root cause" of issues is often identified miles away from its actual rhetorical origin. Federal legislation has resulted in the formation of disciplinary regimes specific to college campuses, which are enforced by administrators, staff, student leaders like RAs or JAs (Junior Advisors), and in turn by students themselves. The intent , as articulated by Bumiller, is for neoliberal structures and institutions to avoid responsibility, but without the resources to properly support survivors these smaller structures of authority do more harm than good .73 Much like the responsibilities ascribed to other marginalized students, students impacted by sexual violence are provided with too many choices that threaten to impact their lives, happiness, and capacities for intimacy, and too often they choose to do nothing at all. Of the twenty students interviewed , only one correspondent chose to discuss her experience with sexual violence. Amanda had woken up in a man's bed the previous year, with no memory of the night before, and was informed that they had engaged in unprotected vaginal sex. An assertive, "awkward, disabled , woman of color from the 73 Bumiller , Kristin. In an Abusive state: How Neoliberali sm Appropriated the Femini st Movement Against Sexual Violence. Pg. 7. South"74, she ended her unemotional account with the following statement: I just don't like the binary between intentional, malicious rape and perfectly fine consensual sex where everyone 's happy. I think that so much happens in the middle ...!just don't want to justify it to them [friends, peers, administration], and then I don't want to feel like maybe I've ruined someone's life [by reporting] .75 Amanda spoke frankly about her discomfort with the repo1ting process and the ways in which sexual violence was discussed at Williams. Refuting the title of "survivor", she attempted to navigate a narrative fluidity in her story; asserting that she "didn't always know how to feel about it", or that these sentiments "changed" each day. Her avoidance of the normative title of "survivor" codifies a discomfort with the universalism of the sexual assault movement. By this I mean to suggest that , while college campuses represent a unique oppo1tunity to engage with and combat violence against women, in practice these efforts fall victim yet again to neoliberal judiciary or administrative paradigms, suffocating tolerance, and syncope between a woman's personal experience and her ability to participate in political movements. The ''Take Back the Night" (TBTN) anti-violence demonstrations- increasingly popular in recent decades -can serve as example. While contemporary versions aim for inclusivity, the origins of the programming date back to Susan Brownmiller and the Women Against Pornography movement 76 : an initiative that would have definitively polarized many of tho se participating in TBTN today. Similarly, by attempting to maintain fluidity in her day-to-day thinking, Amanda 74 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 24. 75 Ibid. Pg. 6. 76 Brownmiller, Susan. "Let's Put Pornography Back in the Closet." In Take Ba ck the Night: Women On Pornography. NY: William Morrow and Company , 1980. is excluded from the most prominent feminist debate on campus because she refuses to identify as wholly broken or wholly victorious in her experience of sexual violence. Contrary to Angela Davis' recommendation to respect the relationality between personal experiences like sexual violence and a political engagement with their prevention, Amanda described her experience of the heavily emotive TBTN event as "alienating". She reiterated the sense that her uncertainty surrounding reporting made her feel as though she "couldn't talk about" her experience because it did not fit the accepted narrative. In this sense, her story becomes imprisoned within the liminality of syncope, neither personally satisfying nor politically acceptable . RACIAL AND ETHNIC MOVEMENTS Unlike the widely curated histories of LGBTQ and feminist Ephs above, the history of race and ethnicity at the college is lacking in accessibility. Though the legacy of student s of color is often referenced in administrative and especially admissions materials, it is substantially more difficult to obtain than other points of reference included in this chapter. The aforementioned movements in queer and women's activism, for instance, have been painstakingly grafted onto various online forums, such as the Women 's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Davis Center web pages. A comprehensive history ofrace or ethnicity-based activism, however , is limited to physical archives. Surprisingly , one of the most immediate sources of information is a Record article from December 7th, 2011, published in the wake of a hate crime in which the words "All ni ***rs must die" was written on a dormitory door. The then-editor-in-chief Matt Piltch and features editor Sarah Rosenberg, both white students, stepped back from what quickly became a furious debate to provide an objective articulation of the history of race relations at the college. In conversation with this piece, this final section of the chapter seeks to examine how race and/or ethnicity has changed at the college, and how these developments inform what has become one of the most consistent and difficult debates during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 school years. Fittingly, Piltch and Rosenberg contextualize their work through the lens of activism at the college, suggesting that that the most substantive change has been the result of student efforts rather than independent administrative action. They begin by citing the Grinnell petition, or the beginnings of the internal dissolution of fraternities at Williams during the 1960s.77 Notably, the authors take care to include that the impetus for Bruce Grinnell '62 to file the petition concerned the rejection of an Asian student, Myong-Ku Ahn '63, from his fraternity. While remaining objective, featuring this detail allowed the authors to interrupt the black-white binary that had erupted across campus, thereby re-contextualizing the college's history within a broader dynamic of racial and ethnic tension. Next, the two note the 1969 occupation of Hopkins Hall, which led- among other successes - to the bolstering and expansion of the Afro-American Studies Program. Piltch and Rosenberg go on to include another landmark incident- the burning of a cross and threats from the Ku Klux Klan during Homecoming 1980 - as well as similar hate crimes over the past twenty years, ending the article with a reflection by Lili Rodriguez '01, director of the former Multicultural Center (MCC) . Rodriquez stated that she hoped the incident had relit the activist flame, since her work that year at the MCC 77 Piltch, Matthew, and Sarah Rosenberg. "Racism, Activism Pervade College History." The Williams Record RSS. December 7, 2011. Accessed May 13, 2015. had felt largely static due to students' reluctance to acts. The ending of this article is particularly significant, as it points to more contemporary problems surrounding race, ethnicity, and activism at Williams since its publication. Having traced the history of racial inclusion at the college, Piltch and Rosenberg seem to end on a note of invocation, citing Rodriguez among other leaders as resources for navigating a newly incendiary campus climate. As noted above, the 2014 - 15 school year in particular has been particularly fraught with regard to race and ethnicity. From Chance the Rapper to the ''Taco Six" to Ferguson and Baltimore, the student body has been fervently engaged in debate.78 Four years after the hate crime analyzed above, my classmates in the class of' 15 are at the forefront of these conversations, events, and protests; attempting, as professor D .L. Smith is eloquently quoted in the article, to respond to a seemingly endless and increasingly invisible form of bigotry. Smith states, "'It's hard to evolve [as an activist] when the subject you're responding to is stuck in the remote past. "'79 What are we to make, then, of the fact that students today are refighting the battles that tolerance has forgotten? 78 1. In spring 2013, Chance the Rapper, a musician, was selected to perform at the college's Spring Fling concert. Shortly thereafter, a discussion arose surrounding his use of homophobic and racist lyrics. Following these debates, a group of students independent of any students clubs or organizations posted flyers around campus suggesting that racism had become secondary to the LGBTQ aspects of these discussions, provoking vehement debate about race relations at the college. 2. The ''Taco Six" refers to an image published fall 2014 on social media and brought to the attention of the administration that featured six white students dressed in a mockery of traditional Mexican hats and linens for Halloween. This incident expanded ongoing debates about race on campus to similarly analyze the treatment of ethnicity by the college. 3. In 2014- 2014, the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray in Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, MD as victims of police brutality fueled ongoing national and campus discourse about the treatment, protection, and acknowledgement of bodies of color, and black bodies in articular. 9 Piltch, Matthew, and Sarah Rosenberg. "Racism, Activism Pervade College History." The Williams Record RSS. December 7, 2011. Accessed May 13, 2015. ACTIVISM NOW While I would attest that there is an admirable amount of activity, discourse, and awareness that has occurred during my time at the college, I would not liken it to the foundation-shaking efforts of our predecessors in the LGBTQ, feminist, and Civil Rights movements. Rather, today' s form of engagement can seem at times more exhaustive and cumulatively harmful than productive, both for individual students and for the ideas they pursue . In brief, today' s engagement with activism echoes those syncopated pressures ah·eady placed upon marginalized students: either educate your peers, often to little avail, or suffer continual marginalization and microaggression. In accepting an activist role, students are expected to construct a universally inclusive space for fellow advocates, while also attempting to hold majoritarian parties accountable . Muddied by discourse, this duality becomes a slippery slope of subjective equivocations, since in the vacuum of systemic context accused parties are able to use rejoinders like "reverse discrimination" in response to social justice arguments . Put simply, the effort to bring everyone into the fold necessitates the use of tolerant rhetoric, and in the ensuing broadness of discourse and action social justice initiatives are almost immediately weakened. Michael, a misanthropic senior with the hipster sweater and slouch to match, succinctly described the above dynamic. Identifying as largely peripheral to most social groups at the college, he understood himself as a unique observer of student affairs as well as a critic of interpersonal conduct: In the same way that people seem to me to have such superficial relationships, they expect problems to go away instantaneously. There are a lot of complicated issues at play, right, that will take time to get addressed sufficiently, just by the nature of how things work. And in the same way that any relationship takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of hours spent listening, a lot of hours spent sharing - a good conversation can't take twenty minutes. It has to take a couple hours. So I guess what I'm saying is, yes, [these incidents and hate crimes] are indicative of Williams and how people deal with intimacy: in sort of a shallow way. These things we're talking about- they're treated on a surface level by many people, on lots of sides. People want to blame the administration, but they don't want to talk about the underlying social issues involved. 80 As such, Michael gestures to the impact of syncope in activism, wherein students are hobbled by tolerance as the expected medium of neoliberal governance. Incapable of unifying limitless subjectivities and identifications, otherwise sympathetic students are prone to infighting. Simultaneously, their normative peers are endowed with an ambiguous and untraceable political platform, employing identical vocabularies and concepts in defense of the status quo. As a result, it is often only movements comprised of homogenous advocates that succeed, which poses an inherent problem to smaller marginalized groups on campus. CONCLUSIONS: WHOSE STORIES ARE TOLD? Syncope demarcates these missing com1ections between students, not only with regard to topical political projects, but also within the social project of intimacy. When students are unable to understand and critique themselves as neoliberal subjects, they fall prey to self-defeating practices. Though most interview correspondents expressed the belief that intimacy- both sexual and social- could not be remedied by the college administration, the evidence and suggestions they provided consistently put the onus on Williams as institution (rather than social cormnunity) to enact change. 80 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 5. so By denying this responsibility for the environment that surrounds them, students are able to maintain individuated narratives of people, social practices, or experiences that "don't work" for them. In doing so, they also deny themselves the opportunity to support commonality and create change. Intimacy exists as a state of cognizant connectivity where people feel recognized, respected, and cared for, but in the disjunctive space of syncope these connections are, at best, commodified or faked, and at worst entirely absent. In certain moments , however, students seemed to recognize the inadequacy of both of these tactics, venting their frustration with the distance they felt between themselves and the administration. Rather than ascribing these tensions to the larger structures of neoliberalism and tolerance, however, many students situated their origin within the academic culture of the college. Amongst other explorations of contemporary intimacy, the chapter to follow will further articulate this alignment between students and study, academia and intimacy, and will aim to elucidate why, when faced with personal or interpersonal trouble, students instinctively retreat to their intellectual roles. TWO: FROM RELATIONS TO RELATIONSHIPS This deceptive appeal of the average remains heteronormative [hegemonic], measuring deviance .from the mass. It can also be consoling, an expression of a utopian desire for unconflicted personhood. But this desire cannot be satisfied in the current conditions of privacy. People feel that the price they must pay .for social membership and a relation to the future is identification with the heterosexual life narrative [fairytale fantasy]; that they are individually responsible for rages, instabilities, ambivalences, and failures they experience in their intimate lives, while the fractures of the contemporary United States shame and sabotage them everywhere. -"Sex in Public", Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner 81 * Each year, during the first weeks of April, Williams College hosts a "Previews" event for accepted students. Arriving from all over the country (and the world), some with parents in tow, some without, flocks of eighteen-year olds descend. Over two to three days, they have the opportunity to stay with freshmen hosts, get the lay of the land, attend classes, hear from administrators, and - the admissions office hopes - to matriculate. While the event is intended as the beginning of an illustrious Williams career, it more often results in disaster: with expectations either too high or too low, students often experience an inaccurate view of the college. For some, the extra resources presented (specialized discussions for first-gen students, queer-identified pre-frosh82 mixers, etc.) make the college seem more accepting than what they will actually experience in the everyday. One freshmen said simply; "People were just not nice in the fall: I felt really stupid, like everyone had been faking and I just couldn't tell."83 For others, the structured inclusivity is simply overwhelming. Said a sophomore: "I was sleeping on a common room floor with, like, five other girls, and I just remember really 81 Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex In Public." Critical Inquiry (1998): 557. 82 Colloquialism: "pre-freshman". Either students touring the college with the intent of applying, or already accepted students who may or may not have already matriculated. 83 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. not liking any of them. I enjoyed the classes I went to and some of the talks, but I just wasn't interested in hanging out with those people." 84 These difficult beginnings, in turn, aggravate syncope. As noted in the previous chapter, tolerance is particularly dangerous in its ability to obscure real, damaging social divisions in a veil of rhetoric, turning even proactive students against one another and perpetuating stasis. Fantasy and expectation, however, play an impmtant role in this dynamic. Much as students rely upon neoliberal and tolerant ideologies to keep from acknowledging their place within the system, they employ fantasy narratives to explain systemic controls on their personal lives. This chapter seeks to further explore these imaginings, suggesting that the need for fantasy reflects a frustration with life at the college and a response to the disingenuous "community" of Williams. Seeking to avoid this syncopatic gap between the college's portrayal of itself and lived realities, students create atemporal projections of desire, allowing intimate scenarios to occur only in far away futures, the predictability of classroom life, or in the fleeting sphere of momentary encounters. In doing so, however, students miss out on opportunities for intimate growth and development in the here and now, and further ensnare themselves in the very narratives of disappointment and dissatisfaction they hope to avoid within fantasy. THE FAIRYTALE Of these collective dreams, the most prominent is the marriage fairytale: one part urban legend and the other inaccurate reporting , this narrative suggests that most serious 84 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. couples on the Williams campus will soon be married, or that an outlandish amount of students meet and marry fellow Ephs as a product of reunions. Elissa, a happy-go-lucky senior from DC, echoed this philosophy exactly in her interview. Having explained that she had been consistently disappointed by both hookups and attempted relationships while at Williams, she nonetheless shared the following without irony: This is my theory- I have a whole theory about this. People graduate from Williams, go out into the real world and a few things happen. One, they see a more normal way of dating and approaching relationships than what exists at Williams, a more mature one that involves more emotional intimacy than existed here. And two, they realize how lucky we truly all are here in terms of- like think about it: at Williams, anyone you meet you have an automatic intelligence standard built in. Like, this person is probably going to be smart enough to interest me as a person and theoretically date. Which in the real world? Uhhhh, that's gone! So I think we're going to realize how lucky we are to have been here and everyone we left is going to look a lot nicer in comparison to the people we're meeting in the real world. And then, five year reunion comes around, and everyone's more mature, more grown up, you've got that quality control thing built back in and then they get married! 85 While other correspondents typically laughed off my inquiries as to whether they planned on being "Williams married", the narrative had two consistent and interesting features: first, it revealed a surprising number of students (a firm majority, with several correspondents undecided) who wanted to get traditionally married. Second, and more importantly, it revealed a superstructure of marital or romantic fantasy in general; unsatisfied by personal relationships at Williams but nevertheless surrounded by an intelligent, attractive student body, students employed the marriage narrative in order to distance themselves from present expectations. 85 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 34. While multiple problems might arise from this predilection for futuristic fantasy, the most damaging is its combination with the rhetoric of tolerance and social neoliberalism. By pairing two sets of nebulous desires and non-specific vocabularies with sex and intimacy, students complicate ah·eady tenuous relations to the point of guaranteed collapse. Neoliberalism teaches them to expect complete independence, convenience, and control. Met with the impossibility of this in actual relationships, no matter how fleeting, students create commitment narratives that project failure of any degree onto their partners: these people become "too needy", "too pushy", or "didn't text back quickly enough". Instead of pausing to examine and learn from their mistakes, students are therefore able to enter into narratives of "waiting" for the right person, for graduation, etc., and avoid self-criticism in the process. CRUEL OPTIMISM One correspondent, for instance, similarly identified this projection of blame in the conduct of his female fTiends. Jonathan, a senior English major and writer, noted in several moments during his interview a frustration with women-identified friends- "definite feminists" - who nonetheless expected men to "make the first move" in sexual scenarios. Described as self-sufficient, intelligent, and quick to stand up for themselves in the classroom and elsewhere, Jonathan's companions were still "reduced" by an unreturned text message or unrealized solicitation. 86 Social theorist Lauren Berlant provides a helpful framework for articulating this affect in her book Cruel Optimism. The author states: 86 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 33. A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of a good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought it to you initially. 87 In the marriage fantasy, the anticipation of a future, effortless happiness perpetuates the ability to negate fulfillment, opportunity, and satisfaction in the present. More broadly, the cruel optimism of intimacy at the college is this: students want more, but refuse to admit it. In the twenty students interviewed, none were content with what they described as the dominant intimate culture, and yet none felt as though it was within their power to change it. Instead, many were stuck in a cycle of dreaming and waiting, disappointed that they were without prescribed avenues for pursuing partners, and generally looking ahead to "something else". In the gap created by this dissatisfied malaise, the social dynamic at Williams exists as a bad fit for most students. CURATED ENNUI Even more egregiously, students feel that they must conceal any desire for more substantive affection. Opposite of the strangely acceptable marriage myth, in other words, is a carefully curated ambivalence. James, a "charming class clown" and member of the Men for Consent community group, comically described this hypocrisy. Deriding the mockery and skepticism surrounding intimacy or publically affectionate couples on campus, he goes on to situate the critique as a broader evaluation of Williams social attitudes, suggesting that this ennui originates from a privileged, protected worldview: 87 Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pg. 1. You know, I don't like the Record, but if you think about it, when they did try to do an article about couples on campus everyone was like 'oh, that's fluff, I don't want to hear about that, about somebody else's happiness' because they don't have that. It's just this really sort of self-centered jealousy. And I think that, Williams- not as an institution but Williams people- if there really is something nice and warm and fuzzy they'll just bring that down. Like, misery loves company. And miserable Williams students love miserableness ...And a lot of students here just can't deal with life on life's terms. And they've been coddled, and they've been told that they're the best at everything, and there's just been so much that's happened that makes it seem like you should get everything you want. And I totally buy into that a little bit- like, I think it's a travesty that we have one-ply toilet paper here ...but if that's the biggest problem you have? Like, come on.88 Beyond his general wittiness, James' comments gesture to a larger and more significant reality of the college. In his evaluation of students' self-centeredness, he implicates both fiscal and intellectual coddling as contributing to the social dynamic. Students' need for intimacy is therefore sublimated not only by their political subjectivities, but also the mediums through which they are required to present their personal selves, including the classroom. In the performative sphere of social engagement, I suggest that the lack or absence created by syncope leaves students scrambling to narrate identities that are both publicly acceptable and personally fulfilling, leaving no alternative besides the fantasy structmes articulated herein. "WHERE AM I?"- PURPLE VALLEY BEGINNINGS The terror of first aniving at Williams was one shared by many interviewees. One day, they are in a certain type of community, have a certain sense of self, and the next they have "become" an Eph. They say goodbye to their families, shake hands with 88 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ gregarious upperclassmen, and fake a smile as some massive, couldn't-possibly-be-only- twenty football player offers to carry their luggage upstairs. On some level, this boils down to a general terror of the unknown: no matter how well-adjusted, leaving home is trying for most students. At Williams, however - in the commodified, neoliberal world of contemporary education institutions - attendance does not only demarcate a spatial subjectivity , but also a mental-emotional one. This relationship amounts to the grooming of each incoming student as a neoliberal subject, attaching their educational and social experience to the institution itself rather than to purely academic or interactive spaces, and thereby extending the normative reach of the tolerant "community". From the beginning , it is not enough to "go" to Williams; you have to "be" an Eph. While there is much to made of correspondents' first financial aid sessions, advisory meetings, and other institutional interactions, I want to focus on one of the strangest facets of introduction to the college: the entry. "Entries" at Williams emerged during college president Harry Augustus Garfield's tenure in 1925. Part of a massive restructuring of campus housing, Garfield's twenty-five person arrangements were meant to provide living environments of greater intellectual substance and camaraderie for first years. 89 From the beginning, Junior Advisors were unpaid moral arbiters of the institution: originally, the older students were tasked with arranging for refreshments and visits from college professors on Sunday evenings, as well as the mentoring role that is more typical today. These talks were intended to continue more formal learning in a personalized setting, encouraging students to apply class material directly to their own 89 "History of Junior Advisors and Entries." Dean of the College. Accessed May 13, 2015. lives. Today, these meetings have transformed into "snacks": every Sunday, freshmen are expected to meet within their entry for structured socializing. They eat, listen to announcements, perhaps share "highs and lows" of the week, and depart back to homework after an hour or so. At best, these gatherings have become "fun" time (within entries that "click"); at worst, especially for students who do not identify with the group they have been assigned, they represent designated discomfort. In fact, the fabricated intimacy of the entry was often at the top of the list when students were asked to identify systemic issues on campus. While other forms of regulation were harder to see or admit to , the reaction to being "handed twenty-five instant friends" (a standard tour guide phrasing) was unanimously negative. While many conespondents explained that they had "ended up" with a positive entry experience, the monumental expectations of the first few weeks were overwhelming for several reasons. First , there are the general social pressures of a new space: returned from their smaller orientation programs during First Days, students revert back to a different type of performance. Isolated from the rest of the campus body , freshman are constantly anticipating the accepted form of response, discourse, dress, etc. While social embarrassment is not unusual , one correspondent gracefully summed up the result of this anxiety : "[Freshmen] learn to slightly morph themselves when they get here- because they're all sort of looking at each other but no one really knows what to do."90 As a result of this, she added, some of the more dominant personalities end up "ruling" a given class, at least initially, and this can increase feelings of isolation. 90 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ PART OF THE "FAMILY" Correspondents also noted their frustration with the filial element of the entry system. Upon introduction, incoming students are told to treat entrymates as their brothers and sisters and their JAs as mother and father, meaning that sexual chemistry as a result of close living spaces becomes a shameful (and sometimes shamed) experience. Due to this boundary, several students asserted, entry spaces are often oddly predicated on the exchange of sexual information, the details of each weekend offered as a means of cementing bonds and asserting social dominance, as might happen in gender-neutral spaces, amongst siblings, or in other desexualized realms. One correspondent, a Latina woman from Florida and club athlete, described her experience of the entry from within a long distance relationship. While Sofia and her boyfriend remained committed for the entirety of her freshman year, they experimented with "opening" their relationship and granting one another the ability to take different partners. Though Sophia had felt largely dismissed by entrymates (because her long- distance commitment was presumed to be infantile and caused her to "miss out" on college life), the altered dynamic between her and her boyfriend led to more invested interactions. She stated: There's definitely social value placed on that. Like, I'm a more interesting person now that I'm a viable sexual candidate. So even if I am not going to have sex with you, just the fact that I am going to be trying to have sex with other people makes you more interested in my life and what I think and all this stuff [as opposed to being in a static relationship]. 9 1 9 1 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 35. She went on to suggest that another entrymate was similarly pressured , dropping initial hopes to meet a long-term partner when it seemed there was no room to do so within the typical freshman experience: Thinking back on it, I know for sure of one person who seemed then like they were interested in more long-term things. But as they saw that that was not as viable and as they saw people around them hooking up they started doing more random hookups ...And I had a hard time when I first got here like, bonding with girls because all they wanted to talk about was which boys were cute and who they wanted to hook up with or talk to and fifteen minutes spent on sending a 'hello' text and I'm like- I have no patience for that.92 Discouraged from actually engaging in sex or have mature discussions about it in the entry, freshmen are therefore left with limited avenues to get the advice and influence they might need. Coupled with the insularity of feminist or other sex-positive groups (as described in the last chapter), the relative unavailability and bias of Health Center resources had discouraged students early on.93 More importantly, however, the filial dynamic of the entry recreated for them a space of sexual shame and embarrassment mimicking the actual home, contradicting media narratives of "free" collegiate sex practice and leaving younger students even more disoriented and determined to "perform" in ways affirmed by the dominant culture. SPEAK ABOUT WHAT? Orientation programming itself also serves to exacerbate this sense of social claustrophobia within the "family". Rather than allowing students to navigate events on their own, JAs shepherd freshman to various presentations. While outwardly it may only 92 Ibid. 93 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. Several female correspondents had extremely negative experiences procuring prophylactics or STI screenings from the Health Center. appear to be annoying, this hand holding was cited by multiple interviewees as particularly damaging because it made them feel unusual to the group they were intended to fit within. Many, in fact, shared an experience identical to my own freshman year: exiting a general event, our JAs called out instructions, and about half of our entry continued to the financial aid meeting while the rest walked "home". Had we been permitted to escort ourselves, there would not have been such a clear division in the group, and yet it was something my entry among others never managed to forget. I share this episode in particular because it echoes the commodification of intimacy perpetuated by the structure of the entry. While the system generally aims to support inclusivity, it nonetheless suggests to students that relationships can and should be demarcated by convenience, that some of their "closest friends" will be those assigned to live near them. Finally, there are the explicitly sexual orientation programs. Beginning with the performance "Speak About It" freshman are walked through parodied consent practices and means of "just saying no" to a variety of substances and actions. Afterwards, they have discussions amongst entries (mediated by JAs), and more formal meetings with the peer-led Rape and Sexual Assault Network (RASAN) . While all of these efforts have been revised and improved over the years, many students confirmed that they were largely uncomfortable and frightening rather than informative . For some, like Sarah- a religiously conservative woman who planned on abstinence before marriage - the conversation was too specific. Blushing as she remembered, she stated: "I guess I was on one end of the spectrum- really just not thinking about having sex at all, and then having to explain myself immediately in those groups. People were very focused on my religion rather than my choices - it was not a good experience in the first few days."94 For others, the orientation itself sets an uncomfortable precedent, as with the following student. White, wealthy, and highly educated, Peter identified as queer and "very socially distinct", describing his freshman impressions as follows: ''The hookup talk ...it makes it sort of the default option. I think that is harmful. Obviously not the idea that people can hook up with each other, but that that is what is expected of them. "95 Sarah and Peter's sentiments were echoed by all twenty interviewees. Coming to the college from different states and backgrounds, each responded to the programming from a different plane of personal experience and, more importantly, sex education. It seems backwards to teach students about consent before they fully comprehend the nuts and bolts of various sexual encounters, and yet Williams does exactly that. Though "Speak About It" was initially started at Bowdoin College as a performance piece not unlike my own- written, directed, and performed by students - it has distinctly lost something in translation. In attempting to appeal to a broader variety of small colleges , the most important messages of the show- respect, communication, pleasure, attention- are lost in a blur of slapstick humor. Even more egregious is the title itself: students are encouraged to talk about "it", when they should be learning, speaking, and asking questions explicitly and intentionally about sex. 94 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 4. 95 Ibid. Pg. 5. INSTITUTIONAL ADVISING Trish, a spunky sophomore who described herself as "a secret science geek" who "loves partying in crop tops"96 , also noted a more sinister aspect of the performance's flippant texture: a lack of consequences. She pointed out that more serious discussions, the ones in which people were held accountable, generally occurred in the aftermath of assault, rather than as a preventative conversation. In these, she was careful to note, those assigning blame or responsibility for change were often figures like Dean Bolton; well- meaning, but not an immediate influence on young students: I think it's important to have people who get it running these meetings. In terms of guy's opinions on these things , especially, it kinda helps to have someone who they would view sexually- it could be another guy, even. But a peer. ..Because when I'm talking about changing people's opinions on it- there's this sense of getting in trouble as a deterrent. But I think that sucks as a deterrent because it doesn't change the way people see things- it just changes the way people act, which means they will still do bad things if they think they won't get caught. And I think when you change people's opinion is when you get people that they understand and know and that they would view sexually...but just not someone that they would see as lame or just asexual. 97 In this sense, Trish advocated for a type of performance closer to the original intent of "Speak About It". She recognized that much of her personal development and the maturity of her friends was a result of peer examples and accountability in her friend group, and very earnestly recommended that both freshmen events and follow-up programming like "Sophmoreientation" remain relevant. From a theatrical perspective, I was also interested in her reaction to the program's lack of specificity: had the young actors - many of them students from Bowdoin or recent grads from other small schools - actually gone to Williams, she suggested, she might have been more inclined to take their 96 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. 97 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 29. 64 advice seriously. "It's just very different when you actually run into someone like that at a party, and they're actually doing what they say you should," she said, "and on a small campus like this that could actually happen."98 Much of the freshman experience is therefore influenced by the atmosphere of prescribed social relationships inside both the entry and the institution. Many students, it must be acknowledged, succeed in these spaces, but those that fall through the cracks are most often the same individuals most silenced and impacted by tolerant rhetoric. Discontented and uncomfortable within the college-constructed "family", marginalized or otherwise nom1ormative students become not only excluded but pitied by those who are content with dominant practice, and repeatedly asked to sublimate themselves into the accepted set of identities, ideas, and habits in order to alleviate general hegemonic discomfort. While this dynamic has broader consequences, it is particularly damaging to intimacy. When pursuing ease, indulging in fantasy, and being generally constrained and misinformed, students "grow up" as Ephs with a distorted view of what is acceptable, advisable, and even possible. Regularly broken in a social or emotional capacity by the demands of hookup culture, they nevertheless fear alternatives because these have been connoted as something uninspired and otherwise weak. In this fractured narrative, students even deny themselves credit for the successful creation of intimacy: when Lindsey, a sophomore, described her current "arrangement" with a partner, she explained that they had been exclusively having sex with each other for several months, often slept in the same bed, and hung out outside of sexual interactions. I call this casual dating: two people sharing physical pleasure, enjoying time spent together, but not looking for a deep emotional bond . The title she provided for these relations? "An extended hookup, I guess, but with my own twist."99 EXCEPTIONALISM- ARE EPHS "SPECIAL" OR "DIFFERENT"? Coming into the college, the freshmen experience is therefore defined by an attempt to navigate institutional and social paradigms like drinking, hooking up, and "being" an Eph. Importantly, however, it is also characterized by a reassertion of the self, as seen above. Unwilling to admit that they are functioning within a system (rather than controlling their own lives), multiple students cited instances of "growing up" over fTeshmen year that amounted to a self-protective distancing. Betrayed by their mediatized expectations of college life as well as the reality, students fall back on bildungsroman narratives of rebuilding in the face of adversity- unfortunately, this often occurs before identifying the nature of their adversary, and the result is often a circling back to the same fantasies with which they began. Many such anecdotes were characterized by an initial rejection and re- development, as with the quote below. Charlie, a self-conscious, soft-spoken man from New York City, had become a Junior Advisor, and much of his interview was characterized by comparisons between his own freshman experience and perceptions of 99 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 30. his "frosh."10° Comparing his methods of hooking up then and now, he shared the following: [Coming in] a girlfriend was something I really wanted, as opposed to totally just sleeping around ...So to fast-forward the story, she said yes [to a date] and then changed her mind ...That was a blow. So after that my outlook on relationships- in general, but also here- really changed. It changed from just thinking of it in a social sense of having it on Facebook or being known to have a girlfriend ...And I've just gotten further and further away from that freshman fall me. 101 Asked to trace his path "away" from his freshman self, Charlie cited a trajectory echoed by other corr-espondents. After engaging with hookups and the typical scene (heavy drinking, arriving at a dance around midnight, attempting to take someone home and/or leaving within the hour), he experimented with the above scenario. Discouraged by his rejection, Charlie refocused his efforts sophomore year on putting a "personal spin" on his intimate practices. Namely, he attempted to create hookup scenarios with friends or acquaintances, mostly within the extracurricular groups he occupied, and to use existing social foundations to both initiate and withdraw fTom sexual partnerships. He suggested, in other words, that it was safer for him to return to a pre-established "just friends" than to navigate relationships that had only ever been sexual. In one sense, this approach could be viewed as a creative re-negotiation of sexual scripts. Avoiding a heteronormative, static, and traditional relationship, Charlie's strategy can be understood as circumventing social expectations in favor of polyamorous relationships with friends. When I inquired as to the success of these tactics, however, the interviewee acknowledged he was unsatisfied. Though he had grown more confident and 10° Colloquialism. Shortening of "freshmen". Used affectionately but patronizingly, or in mockery of younger students . comfortable approaching friends about hooking up, it never ended as cleanly as he would have liked, and typically resulted in at least one of the two patties involved feeling hurt. He admitted that, as an upperclassman, he was envious of those in committed relationships, but afraid of attempting one. When I asked him to clarify, he again referenced his one-time failure freshman year, but also cited three major anxieties regarding alternative intimate or sexual com1ections (exterior to hookups): overestimation, social boundaries, and "time". COLD FEET FOR CONNECTION When citing instances of overestimation, students generally resorted to the language of "everyone": "You feel like everyone is hooking up except you", etc. One senior, a burly athlete named Troy, described the dynamic as "group think" among the performative male spaces he occupied, a necessity which had faded as he became an upperclassman and had left him feeling more mature but also discontented with a new, more complicated method of finding partners: A lot of my conversations about sex with friends have gotten a lot more mature [senior year]. Like I remember sophomore year looking on Facebook and WSO at the incoming freshman and just trying to pick, like 'she's really hot, she's really hot, she's not' and just a bunch of us sitting on a couch just talking like that for two hours. And it feels like I don't have to do that anymore . And reflecting on that it's like, was I really invested in it? No, but was I performing this horndog­ ness? Yeah . Did I think that that was what other guys wanted to see? Yes. And I have a feeling that this group of friends - I can't speak for them- but I have a feeling that they were going through the same thing of was that really what we wanted to be doing? No. But was it the bro-y cool thing to do? Yeah. I mean, amon st guys here you get a lot of group think, a lot of time to the detriment of them. 02 102 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 33. More surprising, however, was the prevalence of assumptions about participation and experience across class years. Around the middle of the interview, I would often give conespondents a break from more detailed material by clarifying whether or not they themselves were currently hooking up. Outside of a few students who were cunently in relationships, most interviewees responded that they were a) going through a dry spell and "focusing on other things"; b) hooking up, but with their own "spin", as with the individuals above, which generally meant doing so with friends rather than strangers; or c) waiting until after graduation, which was especially common among those in the senior class. Of the twenty people interviewed, including first-years, no one was "hooking up" in the way they felt was normative on the Williams campus, nor were their friends. When I informed people of this, the general reaction was a sheepish laugh, but no one seemed entirely surprised. Why, then, does the rhetoric of "everyone" remain in regard to hookup culture, and what is its function? NO ONE LIKES EVERYONE Much like the figure of the "average" Williams student (white, athletic, wealthy, etc.), the narrative of a dominant hookup culture prevails because it obscures a more difficult reality: that connections between people are not merely determined by personal preference, but also by systemic boundaries informed by how a person looks, thinks, and functions in society. When students decline to acknowledge their part within this system, they arrive at the ambiguous "everyone", a means of citing individual members of campus and their sexual/social conduct as the root of the "problem". With "those people" to blame, students can adapt or excuse themselves from hookup culture without engaging critically with why it isn't working for them. One student, a self-identified "not so skinny" African-American woman and upperclassman, eloquently summarized this dynamic: I was having a conversation last year during Winter Study with one of my friends, and we were just thinking about what it means to be a black woman at Williams College trying to find . ..someone else. Like, what does that mean? And are people defining you as that? And does that influence their decision between you as just a friend or you as a potential for an actual relationship? ...Ideally, I would think that race isn't what's happening when things don't work out, that it's just 'I'm not interested in this person', but I don't know ...I feel like because of that there's this label of being a black woman at Williams College, and from there it becomes who are you supposed to look for? 103 The woman quoted above gracefully links the silencing power of tolerance to intimacy. While other participants might barely note the privileges they enjoy in coping with hookup culture from a solely emotional perspective, participants who identified as queer, of color, or in other ways exterior to the dominant norm were much deeper in their thinking during interviews. Unable to enjoy the invisibility of whiteness, heterosexuality, and other forms of privilege, they had always been constructed as exterior to the general "scene", never so much a part of it to believe that it could be a solution to a want of intimacy. In keeping with my earlier conclusions, these individuals suffered more directly from the disjunctive affect of syncope in their personal and sexual lives. While the concept of finding only those one is "supposed" to date seems somewhat archaic, it has taken on new meaning in the neoliberal college environment. Consider, for instance, the institutionalized "community" of the college and entry "family" introduced prior. Two immediate, regulatory features of the college, these 103 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 11. structures also help to delineate what social boundaries are acceptable to transgress. On paper, the college community includes everyone, but in reality it is reduced to a handful of clique-y groups. Pressured to create a sustainable "community", students must invest their time and energy almost exclusively within these groups, and intimate relationships exterior to them often suffer as a result. This informs a similar preoccupation with and protectiveness of "time". Just as "everyone" is substituted for systemic limitations, "time" is used as a means for excusing the commodification of intimacy. Employing this device, students decline to engage with the fact that they short-change personal relationships in favor of more linear immediate rewards by blaming professors for working them too hard. This leads to yet another facet of syncope: as students fail to look beyond academic expectations for the source of their unfulfilling relationships, they engage in false narratives of boringness, superficiality, or worthlessness in their peers. At a college full of noteworthy intelligence and talent, individuals succumb to "the grass is greener" fantasies, particularly of post-grad life, and ascribe unsatisfactory friendships, partners, or relationships to a non-specific lack of character rather than the faulty social system in which they themselves participate. In a seemingly contradictory fashion, then, Williams students may be understood to both resent the hookup culture that surrounds them and police those exterior to it. To borrow the poignant phrasing of the above quote, Ephs do not know what they are "looking" for, and yet they punish those who would suggest they are on the wrong path altogether. Unwilling to critique hookup culture beyond individual opinion or personal encounters - unwilling, in other words, to discuss it as a system- students create a variety of explanations for their need of it. MORE FANTASIES- "UNCOMFORTABLE LEARNING" These failed expectations lead, in turn, to escapism. In nearly all upperclassmen interviewed, and even in many younger students, the desire to "get away" from Williams (its workload, its smallness, its people) was incredibly strong, whether this escape represented a summer, a semester, or eternity. Candace, a disenchanted junior from the West Coast, noted that the tamest form of this urge to leave occurred each Friday, when students exploded from studious intellectuals into weekend warriors. Exhausted by this "work hard, play hard" atmosphere, Candace said that she had largely "retired" from the festivities her friends still attended: "Compared to other schools I think we're just smaller and working a lot harder than most, and most other schools seem to have more time for socializing so they don't have to socialize as intensely or with so much alcohol when they do.'' 104 I have gestured to the problem of alcohol culture at the college prior, but why put it in opposition to the quality or difficulty of academic work? Why is it, in other words, that Candace (among others) cited "work hard, play hard" not merely as a slogan but also a campus identity? DEBT AND STUDY While my thesis focuses on the social lives of Williams students, their intellectualism cannot be separated from this, and at hemt most students at the college are highly invested in being (or at least appearing) extremely smart. Since understandings of themselves as the "best of the best" pervade student discourse, classroom performance 104 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 34. remains a high-stakes and personal reflection, and function as another means for escape. The Department of Commerce describes the millennia! generation as highly transactional in the ways in which they conceive of education, particularly post-secondary. We understand degrees as tools rather than explorations, are incredibly self-oriented in the classroom, and ask for special treatment, extra preparation, to be entertained by professors, and to have a say if we believe that we have been evaluated unfairly. 105 Comparatively, in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put fmth a complex, poetic dialogue about the nature of debt and study. Loosely, they discuss what we "owe" society, for better or worse, and how we might learn more about it. In one essay, the authors suggest that, "the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one." 106 Why, we might ask? "As Frederick Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon 'Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning and development. '"107 Suffocated by the structures of neoliberal and tolerant enlightenment and yet forced to extoll the virtues of education, the authors paint a portrait of "the undercmmnons"; a society of thieves, renegades, and rejects of society and the academy, applying dominant ideas to alternative ends. From this netherworld, subjects might be invited back into the fold, but the project of avoiding hegemony requires them always to hide: And [these intellectual refugees] may be given one last chance to be pragmatic­ why steal when you can have it all, they [the majority] will ask. But if one hides 105 "The Millennia! Generation Research Review." U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. November 14, 2012. 106 Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York, New York : Autonomedia, 2013. Pg. 26. 107 Ibid. Pg. 28. from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees, but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons -this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act. 108 In this excerpt, Moten and Harney gesture to the pressures of syncope in relation to the academy. Sensing and wanting to escape systemic influences, students are nevertheless repeatedly drawn back into the familiar fold of their interpellated role as academics. Even worse, this makes sense: in a constantly shifting world in which the security and independence promised by neoliberalism is impossible, the identity and role of student becomes comfortingly concrete. Similarly aware of this coping mechanism, students obfuscate the control of the academy by internalizing it, and thereby end up performing a love of "work" that has nothing to do with intellectual passion. In keeping with this theoretical concept, Billy, a white, Jewish senior and prominent member of an activist group, evaluated his classmates unforgivingly. A snarky, witty individual, he nonetheless described himself as a part of the navel-gazing below: I think being so smart and having Williams validate that makes people incredibly self-centered . I think being incredibly smart makes you inherently incredibly narcissistic, because you've achieved success through a systematic processing of how other people will perceive what you are about to say. Or by understanding what you're reading and being able to espouse that to people. So people can be most comfortable in the classroom because the stakes are relatively low. Let's say you say something dumb, you're going to be able to redeem that the next day, etc ...You put that same scenario in a social situation where the stakes are 'am I sleeping with this person?' and things look very different.. .Whatever happens, it's going to be known or you're going to be accountable in a social way if you totally embarrass yourself. 109 108 Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Pg. 26. 109 Anonymous . "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 33. In this sense, the controlled space of the classroom becomes a tolerant utopia. Able to provide a) a "correct" answer, orb) assert the righteousness of their own subjectivity in a classroom, students are rarely allowed to fail. Other students or a professor may not pursue their vein of conversation , perhaps, but for the most part the stakes at Williams are to participate when and where one feels most comfortable. There is no shaming, little accountability, and more often then not engaging in aggressive debate is looked down upon by peers as "trying too hard". In this sense, the optimistic fantasy of the classroom becomes the foundation of the "best self'; the belief that the successful, articulate people we are able to perform as students are our real selves, our true selves, and not the crying, fighting, shallow, uncertain, embarrassed, sexual personalities we are forced to inhabit all other hours of the day. Most importantly, the appealing neutrality of an intellectual self extends to intimate cultures on campus. In multiple instances , students used the valorization and impersonal connotation of academica to further social and sexual connections. Rather than the traditional, low-expectation coffee date, students now go on "homework dates" with sexual or friend-based crushes. Thomas, a white, lower middleclass football player, described the tactic as follows: 'Date' just has so many different connotations. I think people - when they hear 'date' they think, 'I wanna take you to Sushi Thai 110, and I'm going to wear a suit' ...When I'm like 'Let me walk to Mission 111 and I can meet you and we'll eat dinner.' I wish that was more acceptable. The way I've moved around that is just asking people to do homework- it's just much less pressure. 112 110 A local restaurant, semi-formal. 111 A campus dining hall. 112 Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Pg. 28. Having had multiple encounters where the connotation of "date" scared away partners, Thomas had adopted a slow progression of "study sessions" that waxed later into the evening and occurred in more and more private venues. Sweetly earnest, he confided that his current relationship had begun in this way, and that the term "study" now held romantic and sexual innuendo for him and his girlfriend. Screened by the professionalism and success of their academic careers, therefore, students can more comfortably navigate social scenarios without placing themselves in positions of vulnerability. This, in a sense, allows them to conceal their optimistic expectations so that, in the event of rejection, a break -up, or other trauma , they always have the option of asserting that they were never "actually with so-and-so", just "working". CONCLUSIONS: WHO KNOWS AND TELLS THE STORY? Students at Williams therefore experience both sexual and social intimacy as lacking, problematizing the fantasy structure of intimacy in which the ambiguities and non-committals of hookup culture have allowed them to live "for themselves". Rather than avoiding these negative feelings of entrapment, students double them in viewing both their friendships and romantic prospects as insufficient. Significantly, this awareness is generally expressed only on an individual level. While the hollowness of excuses like "a lack of time" is part of the student consciousness, failed intimacy with peers is a privatized problem that cannot be articulated within tolerant rhetoric. For Ephs to say that they are systemically rather than personally unhappy would be to admit that they have been swayed by institutional formations, and because this threatens understandings of total self-authorship, they refuse to do so. Students are so reluctant to see themselves as formed or influenced by parent s, professors, and especially systems- determined, in other words, to deny their neoliberal subjectivity - that they also end up reinforcing individuality to the point of oversensitivity and anxiety. Gesturing back to the broader perspective of the first chapter , the result of this commonly boils down to two damaged factions: the majority, who refuse to accept responsibility for systemic advantage; and the minority , who are forced to exhaust and isolate themselves in trying to articulate an all-encompassing utopia of difference. Add to this syncope the ah·eady navel-gazing character of intimacy , and it is no wonder that Williams students cannot get what they need: befuddled by conflicting narratives and largely incapable of articulating their situation, we do not even know what we want. How, then, can we arrive at a better means of negotiating intimacy, encompassing not only better sex but better overall connection and civic investment? How do we create a dynamic community that lives at Williams College , but does not have to be it? As Moten and Harney affirm, in the climate of neoliberal and tolerant influence: It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality , to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of- this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the mo dern . . 113 umvers1ty. How then, to become this subversive intellectual? To not only acknowledge systemic influence, but also absorb and disseminate the moral to that story, and to advocate for an "undercommons" of intimacy? 113 Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Pg. 26. THREE: COMMUNITY AS PERFORMANCE PROJECT Utopian performatives describe small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that l fts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like (f every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense. 114 -Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance * In light of the atmosphere explored in previous chapters, I wanted to explore how we might mrive at a better means of negotiating intimacy, encompassing not only better sex but also better overall connection and civic investment at Williams College. Adapting data, analysis, and theoretical processes into a theatrical piece, I sought to accomplish what ethnographer Madison Soyini describes as a central aim of the "dialogic performative", or a performance predicated on both an interlocutor and self-reflexivity. 115 Soyini suggests that a reinvigoration of "dialogue" (so badly overused it has become almost meaningless) through performance can create ethnographies of a higher caliber, as well as an engagement with the how and why of communities and Others that expands the conceptual "caravan" of social critique, or the amount of people who comprehend and support a set of ideas. 116 In my performance, therefore, I sought to encapsulate material, moments, and ideas that would not only comment upon the Williams community, but also mirror it. I wanted students' questions and engagement with the text to bear upon what they saw onstage so that the performance might enter into a dialogue with their own perspectives and open up whatever sublimated "undercommons" they might possess. In the chapter to 114 Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Pg. 5. 115 Madison, D. Soyini. "The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography." Text and Performance Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2006): 320-24. 116 Ibid. follow, therefore, I discuss the full directorial and ensemble-based evolution of the show, as well as its reception within the broader community and its approach to the subject of intimacy and syncope. THEORETICAL CONCEPTS I cited in my proposals the desire to pursue an active "liveness" in performance work that I felt was absent from traditional analysis. I failed to fully appreciate, however, the unique applicability of theatre to discussions of tolerance. Neoliberal tolerance, as concept and pract ice, is predicated on the assumption that words are action: to say "I am not a bigot" excuses one from systemic or literal indications to the contrary. The statement itself is insufficient as evidence, but its utterance puts into motion a larger rhetorical machine that involves more discussion , fluid definitions, circuitous logic, and other defenses of the tolerant arsenal. This form of control is responsible for repeated invocations on the Williams campus to "stop talking" or assertions by students that they are "exhausted" by endless conversation, its power clearly articulated by philosopher J.L. Austin's work on "performatives". Austin's "performative", short for "performative utterance", indicates a statement that has meaning beyond words (ex: "I quit"). 117 Performatives, the author argues, have both grammatical and philosophical importance, functioning not only in usage but also as cultural signifiers. We know, for instance, that the phrase "I do" indicates a pledge of matrimony, binding two people together physically, emotionally, and financially in a formal ceremony. It is part of our linguistic awareness, meaning both something 117 Austin, J. L., J. 0. Urmson, and Marina Sbisa. How To Do Things With Words. Pg. 6. univer sally acknowledged and also specific to the speaker(s). Tolerance takes advantage of this slipperiness, using the ambiguity and imperfection of performative utterances to complicate their applications. Consider, for instance, the example above: "I am not a bigot" is not, by Austin's definition, a performative, but rather a "constantive", or descriptive, utterance. 118 It is an opinion, and can be questioned, evaluated, and interacted with as such. As a process of reasoning, tolerance saddles interlocutors with the responsibility of affirming opinions as fact, perpetuating the ability of those who benefit from systemic inequality to deny its existence. It is not , however an ideology comprised of "doing" words; at best, tolerance denotes feelings of intimacy and inclusion, but does not seek to actuate them beyond description. By engaging with this maskedness through theatre, therefore, there exists an oppmtunity to re-embody false performatives, repeating them onstage in the form of discursive critique and dissembling their incongruities via repetition . Sociologist Erving Goffman 's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life similarly illuminates the ways in which performance can function as a means of addressing tolerance and neoliberal structures. Throughout his text, Goffman denies the assertion of a concrete, essential self- the type of personhood that most Williams students and millennials would believe themselves to possess . Instead, the author argues, we have many constructed selves, assembled based on information received from a given 118 Austin, J. L., J. 0. Urmson, and Marina Sbisa. How To Do Things With Words. Pg. 7. situation: as a visitor, we are "happy", regardless of our internal mood; with coworkers, we are "professional", etc. 1 19 When we fail in these social responsibilities, we become suspect: the person who "tries too hard"- who cannot invisibly switch selves or masks - is ostracized. In portraying these personalities onstage, however, there is the opportunity to comment upon the substance of the "switches" without suspicion . "Actors" are supposed to alter their characters, and by transitioning from a performance of self to a performance of Other/other students, performers are able to comment upon the construction of identity without alienating their audience . This framework, in turn, allows actors to engage with tolerance by restaging systemic problems: looking in the "mirror" onstage and seeing themselves portrayed permits the audience to examine with their social position without having to claim it as theirs. They can, in other words, see the scaffolding of systemic injustice without having to admit to their part in it, because actors have already occupied said role. From this perspective, where their own "personhood" remains unthreatened, students are better able to empathize or interact with those sentiments onstage, and hopefully to learn something in the process . CASTING Several weeks prior to the end of the fall semester, 2014, I began casting the show. Advertising both with performance groups on campus and through more general avenues, I took care to emphasize that acting experience was not a necessity. Due to the 119 Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Pg. 8. realism of the piece, I knew that acting and directorial interpretations were going to be text-based and grounded by the interviewees rather than a predetermined artistic vision. With more highly trained actors, I knew this type of formlessness might , at best, provoke anxiety, and at worse produce dishonest acting: a "misfire", in Austin's phrasing. 1 20 More importantly, the details and arc of the piece would largely be determined by those personalities and experiences that actors could easily access, and therefore required a broader depth of experience than was typically found within the theatre department. Happily , many inexperienced or otherwise untried actors began signing up for slots, and word traveled so successfully that several students even contacted me from abroad. Auditions themselves occurred in a reserved classroom, with only myself in attendance. While I considered having a peer to evaluate potential candidates with, I declined to do so in favor of considering each audition an experiment in character development. I knew that my actors would both have to "be" compelling themselves as well as embodying their peers onstage, and because of this unusual need otherwise competent performers might fall flat. This was not only a theatrical choice, but also a decision with regard to the show as activist work: in his book Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love , Nicolas Ridout suggests that the unpolished approach of the amateur opens up new and more honest spaces for theory and thinking, here referred to as the concept of "leisure": The passionate amateurs of this book's title are those who attempt, "in this sphere" of capitalism , to realize something that looks and feels like the true realm of freedom-not the "free time" of capitalist leisure-but knowing , very often, that in that very attempt, they risk subsuming their labors of love entirely to the demands of the sphere of necessity in which they must make their living. Some, but not all, of these passionate amateurs will be found at work making theatre or 120 Austin , J. L., J. 0. Urmson, and Marina Sbisa. How To Do Things With Words. Pg. 18. trying to make, of the theatre, a fleeting realm of freedom within the realm of necessity and to make it, perhaps paradoxically , endure.121 Coupled with the emphasis on time explored in the chapter prior, this understanding of theatre privileges imperfect spaces over those more closely honed and blended into art. We know how to look at and for traditional art: it is harmonious, complete, and concrete in composition; there exists a set of expectations through which it can be evaluated. In purposefully neglecting to meet these expectations, however, new opportunities arise. By intentionally celebrating the work of the amateur , the missteps and slightly unharmonious performances, Ridout suggests that we have the ability to create for ourselves a world outside of necessity: a world - for the purposes of this show - where conversation and insight should happen, but are not required for entrance. Such a world echoes the unique liminality of syncope itself, as the concept f·unctions much like a missed step on a staircase. The momentary loss of balance causes the recipient to either trudge along, or look up and around at their surroundings . Upon introducing themselves, students performed a "cold reading" (umehearsed interpretation) of a preselected piece of interview material. For these, I chose particularly engaging fragments of roughly two paragraphs in length, and tried to vary the options between amusing, sarcastic, sad, earnest, and angry sentiments. I was consistently surprised by actors' "read" on material: hearing the voice of each interviewee in my head, I envisioned a theatrical delivery as an echo to their own, but another student might understand a serious piece as sarcastic, a moment of tragedy funny, etc. After performing these monologues, prospective actors would spend a few minutes in casual conversation 121 Ridout, Nicholas Peter. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pg. 1. with me, discussing the details of the performance and asking questions. Though this portion was as much for them as for me, in chatting I was looking to move past the professionalism typically expected from auditions in order to actually get to know possible ensemble members, and to weigh how they might mesh together socially. The resulting cast of six- four women and two men- represented those students most responsive to the material and most engaged with the project in general. Both creative and assertive in their interpretation, these individuals were coachable but also quick on their feet, fascinated by and opinionated about the material, and generally shared my enthusiasm. Gathering them together before the end of the semester, I was unsurprised to discover that none of us knew one another well. The addition of two designers and a peer consultant did not disrupt this dynamic, and I started to shape the show around this hodgepodge of personalities. As a truly motley crew, I knew I could bring our diversity of experiences to bear on the performance, creating a piece that was fuller than a projection of solely my own opinions. The arrangement of such a document, however, took several attempts. WRITING PROCESS At the end of my ethnographic research I had over twenty hours of interview material. While certainly not all of the sessions were groundbreaking, each had developed a clear tone and character, and I wanted to preserve the impression of intimate conespondence provided by the recordings. As I composed my first draft over Winter Study, Professor Amy Holzapfel encouraged me to focus on the feel of the piece rather than its separate components . Teasing out one of my ideas during a preparatory meeting, we arrived at the concept of a show that would inspire people to leave "frustrated". This corresponded to some of my original reasons for writing, the most relevant of which was the incessant "conversation" (rather than dialogue) that characterized discussions of intimacy at the college. The show I envisioned, in other words, was not one of feel-good sympathy, but an engaging and sometimes even painful empathy on behalf of ensemble and community. Attempting to both capture this broader concept and highlight unique characters, I arrived at a draft featuring fifteen different "voices", or personalities. These were composed of both composite pieces (using the words of multiple correspondents woven together) and distinct ones, each voice categorized by labels like "alternative", "reflective", and "sarcastic" based on dominant characteristics. In writing, I had both the original interviewees and my ensemble in mind, testing different material that I knew multiple members of the cast might latch on to. Soon after the completion of this draft, however, I realized that I needed another type of voice. An interesting facet of the data had been the inclusion of many different masculine practices and identities: an underexplored facet of the Williams campus. In the two men already cast, however, I had ah·eady seen a certain set of inclinations: they didn't "fit" some of the portrayals of masculinity I felt it was important to include, and to have the women dress in drag- convincingly or not- would be to stray into a different realm of theatricality. Admitting this, I reopened auditions and reached out specifically to men, happening upon a freshman that suited the concept perfectly. With this settled, I scheduled our first table read. The script, in this rendition, included the aforementioned "voices" and a number of "fragments", or tangential scenes. At that moment, I had imagined the show as highly stylized and presentational; Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, but with more movement. Sandwiched between more substantive material, these early fragments predominantly consisted of excerpts from The Williams Record archives: quotations from the first female transfer students, for example . Gathered together, we would pause at the beginning of each scene to have actors select "voices" for themselves, read through the text, and regroup at the beginning of the next section. Within just a few rehearsals, however, it became clear that the fragments in particular were dragging down the movement of the piece, not to mention disrupting its form. These were quickly cut, and the show shifted into a semi-final format of major scenes punctuated by "breaks". It remained, however, extremely presentational, and was aptly described as "stuffy". Due to the heavy stylization, the piece remained without a story-based arc for the majority of the rehearsal process as I explored different frameworks for livening it up. In the end, however - as with many other aspects of the piece- the ensemble and the material eventually determined their own form. This process (a collaboration between cast, crew, and myself) is documented in the following section. PRODUCTION- STAGE, LIGHTING, AND SOUND DESIGN; DIRECTION During our first production meeting, I sat down with lighting designer Russell Maclin and sound designer Sarah Hasselman' 16 to began to sketch major concepts for the show. I explained that we would have limited set pieces and costuming, engaging with these elements only insofar as they were necessary to add variety to a stage picture or to differentiate between characters. Echoing my attachment to a frustrated rather than sympathetic audience response , I particularly emphasized a desire to leave attendees feeling exposed, as though the play they expected to vacation within was actually their (metaphysical) backyard. Russell and Sarah were quickly enamored with this idea, though we discussed the limitations each would be forced to work within. Our production period was a grand total of one month, and we would only be able to occupy the space two weeks prior to opening. Extensive designs were simply impossible, and yet all of us remained mutually committed to a performance that used the baseline light and sound capabilities of the Directing Studio to our advantage. Initially, Sarah's sound design supported the heavily stylistic format of the piece. During movement-based transitions between scenes or monologues, she proposed musical and incidental fillers; church bells, for instance, during what the ensemble referred to as the "marriage scene". Extending this concept, Sarah also began creating recordings of organic campus spaces such as the libraries or Paresky, with the aim of creating a topical feel. We agreed that music was necessary to alleviate the rigid sentiment that the piece still occupied in its early phases, and together we experimented with classical versus contemporary options. Russell, in the meantime, proved to be brilliant at manipulating a constrained light plot. Installing rovers on the floor, he explained, was an easy solution to some of the limitations we would otherwise encounter, and would contribute to the exposed, raw feel I was looking for the piece to emulate. He wanted the lights to be a mix of startling and subtle, putting the audience on edge and keeping them largely illuminated in order to disrupt traditional expectations of darkness. Complimenting this, Sarah also suggested that certain sound elements might mirror social "mistakes"; the effect of someone's laugh or shout ringing out over a dining hall into a random silence. We wanted to somewhat unnerve the audience, once again interrupting the passivity that often characterizes engagement with a performance by undermining the fluid composition of a standard work of theatre. REHEARSALS As the designers worked on the above details, I continued to progress with the cast. Since the script was continually evolving, I had thought that the only reasonable option would be to have actors "on-book" (with scripts in hand) for the performance. Thankfully, they quickly assured me that the material was such that they each would only need to memorize a few pages of text and to learn their blocking, which could be accomplished relatively quickly. A typical week for the ensemble involved 14-18 hours of rehearsal, a large portion of which was spent in collaborative discussion. Though I maintained a loose directorial style in order to heighten the realism of the piece, our methods were largely comprised of Stanislavsky and Meisner techniques. In brief, the Stanislavsky method dictates that an actor's choices and portrayals onstage be largely motivated by personal experience- an obvious choice for this performance. The Meisner technique is more experiential: related to Method acting, wherein an actor researches and models a lived experience, the Meisner technique requires that actors commit to a "4th wall", or a theatrical space that excludes the audience. They engage only with whatever is in front of them, and are intended to believe that nothing else- audience, theatre, school- exists outside of said interface with object or subject. While rehearsals were marked with continued engagement, fun, and animation, it was the former technique that led me to the heart of the piece. In our rehearsal process, I spent time developing the social and professional dynamic of the ensemble, as well as providing one-on-one support for actors, but the overall shape of the play remained flat. After arranging several "stumble-throughs" (rough performances) for my advisors and receiving similar feedback , I cancelled rehearsals for a weekend in order to comb through all of our work thus far. Stepping away from my rehearsal agendas and annotations, I began referencing field notes, former drafts, and journals in an attempt to find what was 1TI1SS111g. Looking over the piece, I saw bright, compelling, emotional transcriptions untethered to any storyline, and it finally clicked: people. One of the gifts, the most interesting facets of ethnography is its unabashed privileging of people, their experiences, stories, sentiments and flaws. My piece, in an effort to incorporate so many perspectives, had shifted too far away from this momentary, human quality, and bringing it back turned out to be as simple as returning the performance to its original guardians: my actors. I redrafted the script so that it modeled one of our own rehearsals, complete with real meta­ commentary as the actors engaged with the text as "themselves". Things moved quickly from there. Expecting some masterwork, the ensemble laughed at the final draft of the script, but agreed that the dramatic arc, conversationality, and liveness of a standard rehearsal suited the depiction of life at Williams with which we were engaged. Doing theatre about theatre, in other words, invited a consideration of education within school, commentary within discourse, and so on. We sat down together to edit the piece, shifting the dialogue and conversations I had pulled from my own journaling about rehearsals, playing with the actual dynamics of the actors' friendships and opinions, and transcribing them onstage. I also added the concept of "breaks", having been fascinated by the instantaneous transition of our ensemble when we shifted from scene work to socializing, and wanting to link this honesty to the performance. Looking for the dramaturgical world of the play, I had found it right where we started: students at Williams, being together. Meeting us in the middle, Sarah purified her original designs, reducing them to musical cues and a low, imperceptible "buzz" that mimicked a fluorescent light. Imperceptibly increasing during the final scene of the performance, wherein actors finally "broke" the fourth wall, her design provided a beautiful moment of sensory syncope: one of those ephemeral gestures that employed absence rather than presence to make a point. Similarly, Russell's design centered on a concept of light following the actors, chasing them around stage and increasing in depth and placement as the show went on, while the audience was left completely exposed by house light until the final scene. Our stage housed only acting blocks and several chairs, the actors dressed in street clothes, and their words, discussions, arguments and evaluations took precedence. The result was a simple, striking piece of an hour in length. EXECUTION- COMMUNITY RECEPTION Finally, it was time to execute the show. In the following section, I explore given "scenes" or thematic sections of the show, using notes from my field journal on the ensemble and the mood of the audience. Since I had so many new or inexperienced actors, I began with small, invited audiences and grew the crowd each night. Our first performance was Wednesday of our tech week, and the audience a small crowd from the Feminist Collective, student theatre cadre, and a few friends. The top of the show began by establishing its frame, as each of the cast members entered the room as "themselves" and began to prepare for "rehearsal". Our first night was the weakest in this respect, as the mostly empty, well-lit room reflected little of the actors' energy. The ensemble expected this initial dullness in our latter performances, however, and carried it off with aplomb. After establishing the arc and content of the show, the ensemble moved into the first "scene", which we thought of as an introduction to hookup culture at Williams. During earlier renditions of the piece, this section was often a weak point, but was much improved by collaborative work. After two actors began arguing over the intent of a monologue, speculating on the sincerity of an interviewee and debating whether to read him as defensive or callous, I saw an opportunity to enliven an otherwise dull moment. Restaging the debate, I used genuine questions about the text to encourage audience members to engage early on, examining the performance not simply as a stylized form of entertainment, but something to be critiqued in the moment. Particularly as the cast gained momentum, this scripted disagreement served as a turning point for audience understanding: most people either laughed or shifted position as the two actors confronted one another, and became more casual in their attitudes. Following this introductory section was the first "break". Originally conceived of as a means of interrupting the seriousness of the piece, allowing for music, and permitting the feeling of casualness in the show, the breaks were an interesting facet of audience engagement. The first night, the small audience behaved as I intended, watching the unstructured movement of the actors as they got water, chatted, and transitioned into the next scene. The second night, however, audience members began to talk under the music, eventually breaking character entirely during these pauses and speaking loudly to their companions. This was not my intent, and was likely due to the length of each break, the volume of the music, and their frequency. It was, however, an interesting opportunity to consider what an audience was "supposed" to be. Williams students are asked to perform or be otherwise "on" during most of their days in class or even with friends, so it was meaningful for all of us to watch one another dissolve this mask and reassume it each time the music turned on and off: an experiment Erving Goffman would be proud of. After the break, the ensemble shifted into a scene we referred to as the "alternatives" section. Collected from students who were queer-identified and otherwise marginalized by campus hookup culture, this piece aimed for a self-referential quality by directly echoing my research methodology. Pairing off, four actors assembled themselves in separate areas of the stage and mimicked the beginning of the interviews, wherein I had students self-identify according to geographic location, race, gender, sexuality, creed, socioeconomic status, and whatever other labels they chose. The two voices of this piece - one a non-binary male and one a queer woman­ were powerful, but also very earnest in the composition of their quotes. Wanting to push this seriousness, I juxtaposed it with tongue-in-cheek dialogue from the actors. As previously mentioned, the ensemble taught me an invaluable lesson in playwrighting by refusing to take seriously everything they were handed: some pieces were sarcastic, some earnest, and some dowmight laughable to them. In finding a balance between the words themselves, my understanding of the original interviewees, and the actors' perceptions, we were able to arrive at interpretations with greater depth and meaning than most of the participants- including myself- could have managed individually. Now widening the scope of the show, I began playing with gendered perceptions. I had two very strong interviewees who were successful athletes and practiced a very traditional masculinity, but their words felt stale and self-congratulatory coming fmm my male-identified actors. Switching the genders, however, something clicked. The power of the interviews was able to shine through, but the words still felt unusual and refreshing when delivered by a woman. This difference was slight in rehearsals, but I was later thrilled to note that it was nonetheless identifiable for the audience, and in particular for men. One male friend and fellow senior, Graham, described the scene as "an out-of­ body experience." 122 Asked to clarify, he explained that it felt extremely odd to hear opinions you hold very close to you- such as the inaccuracy of television depictions of collegiate masculinity- echoed by someone of a different gender. When I asked if he would have liked it coming from one of the male actors, explaining that the original interviewee had been male, he paused to consider, and suggested that "the competition thing" might have gotten in the way. By this he meant to suggest that the traditional bounds and practices of masculinity would have prevented him from empathizing as much with a male, even a male onstage, whereas when a woman spoke about masculinity he felt more comfortable accessing his own emotional responses to the topic. 122 Soule, Melissa. Field Notes. Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2014-2015. Building on this interplay of gender performances, this section also began to introduce both relationship anxiety and the fantasy of the family to the show. Predictably, all audiences seemed responsive to the section on "time", nodding their heads knowingly as an actress suggested that people were not allowed to be a priority for her or her friends. In the following monologue, however, things became more interesting from an ethnographic perspective. Though the "marriage scene", as we referred to it, was framed by dramatic skepticism, it remained a turning point for audiences. I expected this, but envisioned reactions as polarized: people either becoming judgmental of the young marriage or romanticizing it. In the blocking for the piece, I attempted to highlight the expected binary, facing the actors opposite one another and never letting them quite catch up to touch or look each other in the eye. During performances, however, there was a consistent shift in the room. Presented with a scene they were familiar with - the enjoyable tension of a romantic comedy - audiences relaxed into the fantasy instead of truly responding to it: on our rough first night, it was the scene that turned the show around, finally getting a laugh and breathing life into the now-anxious and stiff ensemble. It seemed, in other words, that I had underestimated the pull of the fantasy: much like the breaks ended up as interesting but unintended consequences, the marriage scene served as release from the unusual audience experience rather than a continuation of the show's critique. In the following scene, the actors separated once again into upstage and downstage groups. This piece was arranged around the conceit of "workshopping" monologues, so that one actor would have an opportunity to perform and receive critique not only on their theatrical work, but also the text itself. The masculine set of excerpts covered misanthropy, syncopated tensions within friendships , and the pressure to participate in hookup culture. As the three male actors "worked" on their interpretations and performances, the aim was again to invite the audience to consider my own subjectivity in selecting and interpreting the pieces as director, as well as the doubling of this process by the actors. By this time, audiences were engaged with the scope of the show, appreciating the greater amount of nuance on display and allowing themselves to be more effusive in their responses. As the male actors turned the onstage focus to the female group, the audience witnessed our theatrical "peak". Liz, a sophomore at the college with a savvy, warm, easygoing personality, was a natural choice for the monologue. She has an everyman quality about her, an openness that does not stray too far into pure sweetness or simplicity, and I knew she could carry off what would become our tongue-in-cheek rallying cry. Growing more and more invested until she stood on the central platform to finish her monologue, Liz delivered James' musings on academia and intimacy explored in Chapter Two. Audiences grinned as she ranted about our absurd need to tear down happiness or successful intimacy, to be ironic or ambivalent, and to be coddled: most nights, students even laughed and clapped along with the ensemble. Excluding the final scene, this remained the most presentational part of the performance, and successfully drew attendees together for the more solemn material that followed. In the decrescendo of the performance, or what might have, in a more traditional format, been the infamous fourth act, I placed two of the most important and difficult pieces. Having worked extensively with Paula and Gabrielle, a sophomore and junior who were both wise, witty, and who would be immensely respectful with the materials, I was satisfied with the monologues in rehearsal. I knew, however, that the content they were responsible for, which dealt explicitly with race and sexual violence on campus and presented some of the most polemical opinions of the piece, could become something else in front of a crowd. With the additional energy and pressure of a performance, those words had the power to feel too heavy and real for each actress, and I also worried that including such material would force audience members to revert back to learned performances of empathy rather than the actuated emotion. Happily, both the performances fTOm the women and the audience reception were more than I ever could have hoped for. Paula and Gabrielle definitely felt the words they spoke, but with power rather than fear, and the strength inherent in the performances drew the audience together in a new way. At the beginning of each monologue, audience members would flinch at the paramount word: "woman of color" in the first, "rape" in the second. After the initial shock factor, however, they were encouraged by the quiet, easy readiness of the cast onstage to just listen: to hear the words rather than constantly fear them. In this, I saw a new kind of dynamic filter through the audience: though there was a slight break between this piece and the last, it was always a silent, contemplative, and expectant one. Finally, we came to the last scene of the show. Arrayed in a semi-circle, cast members shared monologues about life after Williams, their dreams and aspirations coming in, fitting themselves into the college mold, and finally the concept of infinity within intimacy: a narrative of giving and receiving that was decidedly non-commodified. Stepping out of the arc to face the audience directly, officially breaking what had been a porous fourth wall throughout the show, Caroline delivered the final monologue evenly, carefully, and genuinely. The strength of her speaking voice and personality is at odds with her petite build, and was one of the first things that drew me to her as an actress: she has an unexpected solemnity to her, and I knew it was what I was looking for in closing out the show. As Caroline encouraged them, the entire cast moved to face out to the audience, engaging in a final moment of outward smiling that went on "longer than comfortable," per my stage directions. As the audience alternately squirmed and giggled under their gaze, the ensemble finally bowed and trouped out, returning to heartfelt applause. CONCLUSION: Q +A's AND A FINAL CONVERSATION Q and A's were an important part of the project, and will remain one of my favorite parts of our performances. In general, substantive and interesting questions were asked, and my primary goal of making the performance legible and accessible for a broad range of academic and personal backgrounds was achieved. Additionally, the cast grew more and more comfortable fielding questions themselves, allowing me to more concretely honor their contributions as an ensemble. After ending this last aspect of the show, the ensemble was generally mobbed by friends, family members, and even interviewees: several times, in fact, I had the privilege of watching as a correspondent confided to an actor that they had been performing his or her words. I had a number of engaging conversations with students and faculty alike in this post-show blur, but one in particular is important to this analysis. On the final night of our performance, I was approached by three women of various class years. They had come to the show to support Gabrielle, who was in another ensemble with them, and were effusive in their praise. I thanked them in kind, and was ready to say goodbye and begin cleaning up the theatre when one woman suggested that I petition the Williams administration to make the performance a part of freshman orientation or "Sophmorientation 123 With trepidation, I explained that my perspective on the show and its content was that Williams students needed to be less reliant on institutional structures, since these failed to provide the independence and nuance necessary for complex intimate connections to form. The three women reacted with defensiveness and resentment, one of them suggesting that I was "cynical" as the conversation wore on. I finally handed them off to Gabrielle and excused myself, going back to cleaning the theatre space but highly unsettled by their reaction . What about the show had inspired the desire to disseminate through the Williams brand? How could these women both recognize their place within the systemic structure and its influence on them - each of them sharing anecdotes about being marginalized as women, as artists - and yet fail to engage with the need to critique it? Was it enough for the performance to elucidate syncope, or should we have explained it as well? In that moment, I became suspicious of all of the positive feedback the show had received thus far, doubting its ability to deliver not only identification but also actionable results from students. After reflection, I now feel that this project was not as superficial as this episode might have indicated, but in reevaluating my own understanding of the play I have also found new and better facets of the work through which to discuss intimacy, syncope, and possible ways forward . t n An abbreviated program occurring sophomore fall that is intended to help students feel prepared for living outside of the entry "family". A particularly important aspect of this analysis is contained in Judith Butler's use of "interpellation"; loosely, the ways in which subjectivities are constituted through the titles provided to them, as defined by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. 124 Troubling Althusser's paradigms of interpellative naming, Butler suggests that the process is not always as agentive as the philosopher originally assumes. She states, If we accept the notion that the linguistic constitution of the subject can take place without that subject's knowing, as when one is constituted out of earshot, as, say, the referent of a third-person discourse, then interpellation can function without the "turning around", without anyone ever saying, "Here I am"...Imagine the quite plausible scene in which one is called by a name and one turns around only to protest the name: "That is not me, you must be mistaken!" And then imagine that the name continues to force itself upon you, to delineate the space you occupy, to construct a social positionality ...Interpellation is an act of speech whose "content" is neither true nor false: it does not have description as its primary task. Its purpose is to indicate and establish a subject in subjection, to pro duce 1. ts socm. l contours m. space and tu. ne. 125 It is in this act of interpellation, then, that students are called upon to perform narratives of Williams , the speech acts of "bleeding purple " or "being an Eph" reproducing the "social contours" of campus life. For this reason, student identity is repeatedly returned to the conceptual site of the institution, struggling to create paths that do not circle back to a collegiate origin of collectivity. This gravitational pull explains the instinct of my critics to resituate something they saw as valuable within institutional paradigms, as well as the general inclination of the student body to return to intellectual identity structures as a form of social insurance and validation. Syncope, in turn, narrates the dread and opportunity of a refusal to turn around, the realm of potentiality between being called and deciding to respond or ignore the act of interpellation. It remains a liminal space, and its portrayal and elucidation within 124 Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politi cs of the P eiformative. Pg. 32. 125 Ibid. Pp. 33-34. theatre does not necessary make clear which path to take. In recontextualizing identification as act, however, explorations of syncopated experience can become capable of illustrating the (often invisible) influence of interpellation, and may lead to clearer, more concrete means of social change and intimate connection. Ambiguous accusations of "we care more, they care less, let's all care together" are able to crystallize into "you forced me to do this through x system/naming/rhetoric", and the non-specificities of neoliberalism and tolerance may be rendered increasingly insufficient. CONCLUSION: INFINITY, MULTIPLICITY For me, what excites me about the prospect of intimacy is the thought of the endlessness -I don't really know how to describe this, but- people are infinite. They have infinite ideas and there's an endlessness of conversations that you could have with a person. So what excites me is the idea of a person that I could have conversations with that never quite ended and never were limited. Because I'm always curious, and I always feel like there's more to know about a person. But I would want someone tofeel that way about me, too. That would make it so much...I think I would really feel that. -Rowan, a second-year correspondent from Michigan; a singer, a thinker, a woman who studied stories and meaning They slipped briskly into an intimacyfrom which they never recovered. - F. Scott Fitzgerald * In the oral defense of this thesis, I organized my arguments using Elinor Fuchs' dramaturgical teaching tool, EF's Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play. Returning to Fuchs' text, this conclusion aims to reiterate those insights included in my presentation, reassessing both analytical and performance work to better describe the "world of the play" as it exists and evolves at Williams College. In doing so, I hope to solidify the governing ideas of previous chapters while also expanding their scope, attempting to answer both my research question and the overarching query of this analysis: 1. What does intimacy at Williams look like? And 2. If theatre can provide us a portrait of intimacy, what should students do with that information? Introducing her essay, Fuchs' cites Philip E. Larson's concept of performance criticism, which proposes to move beyond the evaluation of ephemera in order to explore unseen elements of theatre. Fuchs' "Questions" aim "to light up some of the dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points to. No matter what answers come, the very act of questioning makes an essential contribution to the enterprise of criticism." 1 26 In this sense, Fuchs intends to remove dramatists and dramaturgs from "the immediate (and crippling) leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism ."127 Employing this methodology , I am herein working backwards through the world of Williams, considering all of its broader facets before arriving at an understanding of student life and intimacy. When analyzing theatrical worlds, Fuchs encourages writers to envision theoretical concepts in a physical form, taking a play and squishing it into a handheld orb. Looking into this literalized "sphere", we are able to consider theatre holistically rather than as the sum of its parts. Within this structure, our first dramaturgical concern deals with the "space" of a play. Taken literally, I would argue that the intimate space of Williams is characterized by smallness , the difficulty of leaving campus physically or metaphysically contributing to the friction of syncope. More broadly, however , this concept of space echoes many of the themes of my analysis , including the complicated demand for a core or central identity structure at the college that is enforced through Butler' s interpellation. As suggested in my introduction and throughout this work, syncopated affect exists in the vacuum of a universalized "purple" subjectivity. In an environment shaped by the superstructures of tolerance and neoliberali sm, students are required to maintain the fabricated narrative of an essential Williamsness to which they must unfailingly ascribe. Similarly, Fuchs suggests that "If too tight a focus on language makes it hard to read plays , too tight a focus on character creates the opposite problem: it makes the 1 26 Fuch s, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play." Pg. 4-9. 1 27 Ibid. Pg. 6. reading too easy." 128 In assigning the label of syncope to social disjunction, therefore, it has been my intention to excavate feelings of disillusionment and dissonance from the realm of the subject and consider them in a broader theoretical and systemic context. As argued within this analysis, such a distancing and stretching of perspective is made possible by the atemporality of theatre, the isolation and emphasis of the "missed step" character of syncope allowing for potentiality prior to the enforcement of interpellated identity. In this sense, I consider the theatre of syncope a project substantially motivated by "time" 129 , Fuchs' second element of dramaturgical consideration. In my first chapter, I detailed a rough history of intimacy at the college, demarcated by interpersonal connections within activism. This examination creates a temporal perspective, comparing student identity structures then and now to conclude that student life today is defined by the need to fit within commodified narratives of "community", while former arrangements prioritized a disindentification from institutional structures. As a result, students - particularly those of marginalized identities -become responsible for continuously writing and rewriting themselves into narratives of "Williams" at an age where their parents were making spaces in larger and broader worlds. Within this story, students are tasked with defending a "right to be at" the college, educating peers and educators, and suffering ostracism from both dominant groups and those who have retreated to the periphery. They are forced to defend their selfhoods rather than explore them, and the frustration created by this pressure is expressed through the narrative of "time". Prevented from investing in the long-term satisfaction of personal 128 Fuchs, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play." Pg . 6. development or intimacy, students often retreat to static identities and explanations of their subjectivity. It is here that we see the rhetoric of "time" employed as an explanation for a lack of meaningf-ul social engagement. Students cite classes and assignments as obstacles to their intimate fulfillment, but they actually mean to gesture to the larger systems of success and commodity that must be satisfied in order to fully "benefit" from their tenure at Williams. So what do these benefits and systemic successes look like? In chapter two, I more closely analyzed the personal impact of interpellated subjectivity and syncopated affect, citing in particular the relationship between these concepts and intellectualism at the college, which informs the "climate" 130 of our play. Relying on compensatory narratives of personal growth in order to negate social or sexual failings, students are more often tempted to return to the predictability of commodified engagement with their education . As a "student", they have a secure sense of self that can be maintained by adhering to a strict set of expectations, and as such the relationship between intellect and intimacy at Williams is one of strange correspondences . I compare this reliance on institutional structures with Moten and Harney's concept of an "underc01mnons" of alternative knowledge and practice, suggesting that the understanding of syncope might better instruct students on how to beg, borrow, and steal from Williams while maintaining an independent identity. Also in chapter two, I work to elucidate the "mood"1 31 of the world of Williams, discussing ways in which students recognize, identify, and acknowledge aspects of syncope but fail to engage with it as a broader ethic. Cognizant of their dissatisfaction but 1 3° Fuchs, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play." Pg. 7. 1 3 1 Ibid. unwilling to consider syncopated origins and alternatives, students employ various fantasies in order to cope. While these may alleviate social anxiety in a given moment, they do not produce alterations in campus culture or interpellations, and as a result students must perform a dedication to future marriage and maturity or ambivalence toward the meaninglessness of hookups within greater and greater levels of per sonal denial. Having elucidated these visible - though often faint- superstructures, I focus in chapter three on intangibles of the world of the college- what Fuchs would dub the "unseen". 132 Expanding the scope of syncope , I recontextualize it not only as a moment of potentiality, but of potential action. In this sense, syncope represents the opportunity to transform language into action onstage, and in doing so to inspire a similar embodiment by the audience. Removing the chatter of tolerance and neoliberal arrangements , syncope helps to unearth the "music" of Williams. 1 33 By proving the performativity and construction of the college community, syncope invites students to choose a different or more harmonious system of self-authorship, and to act upon it. It functions as a theatrical mirror 134, reflecting but also refracting the everyday performances of self, scholarship, and belonging, and offering them up for revision. Echoing Fuchs ' latter questions , I have aimed throughout these chapters to consider the play of Williams as a social world, to ask what changes within it, and also to examine myself, "the imaginer of worlds". 135 Recognizing these structures and aiming to take advantage of syncope, however, I have nevertheless been caught up in interpellations 1 32 Fuchs, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play." Pg. 8. 1 33 Ibid. 134 Ibid. of the academy and institution. My insights in this thesis, though personally meaningful to me, have nonetheless arisen from an academic project that may be systemically validated through my degree, my future education, and my career. As Fuchs' might say, my "character fits the pattern". 1 36 How, then , might I make recommendations to reshape the world of Williams? How are we to rewrite the story, reweave the pattern, and reinvent the flawed intimacy of today? Thankfully , Fuchs provides a final recommendation . She declares, "Warning: Don 't permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits 'singularities ,' puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that 'do not fit.' Remember, there is nothing in the world of a play by accident. The pu zz les may hold the key." In the chapters prior, we have seen such singularities in individuals who live within the realm of syncope in order to assert a multiplicity of identifiers and identities. While many might visit or encounter the gap between disparate selves, these intersectional students are defined by it. It is therefore by examining our characters and students that we must look for ways forward . By interviewing and interpolating the stories of those who struggle, who refuse to "fit", who preserve fluidity and multiplicity onto a society of binaries, we might begin in theatre to occupy that space before interpellation, and to act upon it when it is recognized. We might "mean only as [we] inhabit "137, choosing to engage with Williams as a school, not a home , and creating new narratives, families, and origins for our selves . We might see "purple" rather than bleed it, and distance ourselves from commodified understanding s of ease and success. 1 36 Fuchs, E. "EF's Visit To A Small Planet: Some Questions To Ask A Play ." Pg. 9. 1 37 Ibid. Much like the quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rowan that frame this conclusion, we might, in this effort, begin to recover a sense of wonderment and curiosity about our relationships with others, appreciating both a sense of infinity as well as the ability to "slip" into the phases and lessons that can never be entirely planned. We might enter "an intimacy from which [we will] never recover", and consent to an understanding that respect and care for others is not a one-time promise made each fall, but a daily, hourly striving. In the inevitable growth and failures of this new world, we might work, hurt, and finally learn about intimacy: an ongoing project that represents both the greatest triumphs and regrets of the roles I myself have played in the perverse, complex, intricate, and very "purple" world of Williams College. APPENDIX 1. List of Interview Participants 2. Performance Script- Director's Copy SELF- IDENTIFIED DEMOGRAPHICS OF PARTICIPANTS 1. 2017, Florida, heteroflexib le, Latina, female, atheist (grew up conservative Christian) 2. 2015, California, bisexual, male, Asian, spiritual, 151 gen, minority student government, financial aid 3. 2015, Washington DC, straight, Caucasian, female, not religious, JA 4. 2017, Pennsylvania, heterosexual, male, Asian, unassigned religion 5. 2015, Chicago, bisexual, male, Jewish, white, spiritual 6. 2016, New York (city), straight, black, male, Christian, theatre person 7. 2017, Boston, female, "mostly straight", white, non-religious 8. 2016, New York (city), straight-but -not , female, African-American/black, Christian (inactive), "not so skinny", JA 9. 2015, Pennsylvania, gay, male, African-American, athlete, Christian (inactive) 10. 2015, Massachusetts, straight, male, white, Roman Catholic, athlete captain and representative 11. 2017, Michigan, straight , female, Indian, undecided religious identity, singer 12. 2015, New Orleans, multisexual, Creole, woman, Christian, disabled, Southern 13. 2015, New Jersey, white and Asian, female, Unitarian, legacy student 14. 2015, California, queer/"sexually undefined", white, male, "spiritual" 15. 2014, East Africa, female, straight, Chinese-Caucasian, Christian but specific (inclusive, non-denominational church), recent grad 16. 2015, Los Angeles, "mostly straight", white, male, atheist, musician 17. 2015, New York (city), straight, male, African- American, "spiritual", athlete 18. 2015, Portland (Maine), straight, white, female, Christian 19. 2018, Chicago, gay, mixed-race, male (non-binary), Catholic-Buddhist ("mostly secular") 20. 2015, Portland (Oregon), straight, white, male, religiously conservative (Christian) OFF THE RECORD: SEX, INTIMACY, AND DISCOURSE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE A petformance piece researched, created, and directed by Melissa Ayn Soule Cast and Contributing Playwrights: Gabrielle DiBenedetto Caroline McArdle Paula Mejia Elizabeth Gootkind Firas Shennib Jackson Myers Okan Kucuk Creative Consult and Contributing Playwright: Paige Peterkin Designers: Russell Maclin (lights) Sarah Hasselman (sound) Advisors: Professor Gregory Mitchell Professor Amy Holzapfel NOTES: • Italics indicate stage directions . • The ethnographic material has been recorded with an aim to maintaining colloquialisms: the fractured, everyday quality of this speech is intentional and important to the work. • Indicated actors read the heading of each thematic fragment. • Please note the differences between ensemble and interview characters. SET Several boxes arrayed at center stage, two stage left to create height and some variety. PRESHOW House lights out, some theatre lights up. Preshow announcement plays. Full black. The actors enter, flicking on the work lights as they come in. BEGIN. INTRO Ensemble troupes through the main door as themselves, complete with backpacks or other paraphernalia. There is small talk and much clunking of possessions and shoes as they remove them. Everyone has "business" as they chat: introducing themselves, getting settled. GABRIELLE: Hey guys - are we ready? ENSEMBLE: (Ad lib) Yeah/yep/hold on/one sec. (Theyform a ragtag circle) GABRIELLE: So, it's my turn to run rehearsal today, but we're peer directed so obviously I still want a lot of feedback from you guys. I have Jackson's notes from yesterday, and really I'm just trying to keep things moving. We'll be doing a lot of different stuff, but I want it to feel more and more cohesive, ok? ENSEMBLE: Yup/sure/yeah/cooVsounds good. GABRIELLE: Great. Yeah- ok, so, let's go around and introduce ourselves again? I'm bad with names. Let's do your name, your year, and, urn, why you wanted to do the show. So, I'm Gabrielle - (she goes on, making sure to say something clear about intimacy and student interviews; everyone else follows around the circle) GABRIELLE: (After theyfinish) Cool. Ok, well, let's start with a warm-up. LIZ: Can we get some music? GABRIELLE: Yeah! Good idea. (She shades her eyes and looks to the back to the sound board) Hey Sarah - everybody say hi to Sarah (they do), she's our sound designer, and also running lights tonight. Sarah, can we get something upbeat for warmup? (Music starts, G does stretches, ] does speech, L does energy/physicality) GABRIELLE: Great. Ok, let's get going. Urn- PAULA: I'll start. GABRIELLE: Awesome. Where do you want us? PAULA: (Stages them, stands, to ensemble) So, this is a monologue from one of the women I've been working on. Obviously, we're not sure who they are, but this is the sense I have of her thus far. (Gathers herse(f, steps into character) "You know, coming into college I thought, like, 'Dates are a thing!' and 'People get coffee and they eat lunch together, and that's cute!'- but that was not what happened for me freshman year, like, at all. So there was this weird juxtaposition of what I expected out of college versus what it was - I somehow thought that people in college would be a lot more mature and it would be kind of this imitation of what people who were twenty-six or twenty-seven do - which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it, because we were really just a bunch of eighteen-year-olds just out of high school- it's not like we grew up six years and then went to college, right? (Pause, prompting) Right, Firas? FIRAS: (Realizes she's talking to him, jumps up, P gestures for him to go) Right! Um­ yeah. Yeah .. .(Remembers which character he's supposed to perform) "Everyone sort of acknowledges that the experience isn't that unique, too. It's literally like: An unnamed couple were recently spotted leaving Goodrich this past Friday evening. Reports indicate that they made their way to Snack Bar, exchanged numbers and chit chat, and proceeded to go to the female's rooms where they had a mutually fulfilling sexual experience. Though said endeavor did not result in intercourse, it will likely provoke awkward looks exchanged during dining hall encounters in the ensuing days. After weathering this for the duration of the week- having established that they 'don't have time' to speak with their partner (while talking about the 'not talking' with friends for hours)- they will likely decide the following weekend that they do want to be together, at which point the hookup may be completed to overall satisfaction." (Genera/laughter; as himself) But actually- whoever said that is kinda right. JACKSON: (Stands) Yeah, but then there's also people who said stuff like: (Enters character) "You know, though, a girlfriend was something I thought I really wanted, as opposed to just sleeping around. I mean, I liked a girl in my entry, and just had all of these visions of it being totally great, like even though we were in the same entry, it was just meant to be. It would be fine if we dated and wouldn't be awkward or anything. So, fast-forward the story: she said yes and then changed her mind- I just said, 'Do you wanna go on a date?' - no specifics. And she said yes, seemed totally excited, and then when we came back from Winter Break I asked her again and she said she thought it would be better to stay friends ...That was a blow. So after that my outlook on relationships- in general but also here- really changed. And I've just gotten further and further away from that freshman fall me." GABRIELLE: Have you? (Laughter) JACKSON: (Ad lib, end on an "Ok?" to cue G) What? So that guy is full of shit, right? Look, you guys might think that quote is BS but there's something there- it's not just funny, ok? GABRIELLE: Ok maybe yeah- but is he really a different person? Or is he just saying that he does things differently? I've always read that as him performing a little in the interview. LIZ: I like that last thing he said, though. Like that one interview I have where this girl. . .here- (Makes the switch into character) "I feel like- dating, like, it's just not really something- it's just kinda a lot. More of, like, a fTiends who hook up rather than a boyfriend-girlfriend situation is more of how I like to see things. I think it's more of like a- I feel like when I'm in a relationship with someone I feel- like, this is so anti-WGSS but I feel. ..owned . I feel like that person. I don't like that , and I don't feel it deep down, but I feel like there's an expectation of me- that I'm theirs. And the traditional thing of saying, like 'be mine' or 'be my girlfriend' instead of my name just really bothers me. The nicest way I've heard something described was that my friend was hooking up with this guy, and they've ended up dating now, but before they started dating he would call her to his friends 'the Beka' - you know , because her name is Beka. So it wasn't 'my Beka' or 'my girlfriend' it was just this ...person. This specific person. Who I'm hooking up with, and I spend time with. You know?" (As herself) I mean, I think that's pretty good. CAROLINE: It's all pretty good. But that's the thing. Do you say it like there's something amazing there, or do you say it like any student would? PAULA: Meaning what? CAROLINE: Like - just listen to this part: "I had dated in high school, and then I felt just kind of cut off coming in. But, like - it was really exciting to have guys attracted to me, and have that, like, physically manifest in the way guys acted toward me! It was just really really nice to go into First Fridays and, like, a guy would come up and dance with me, and I'd be like, 'Well, he thinks I'm attractive, he's attractive,' -and then I'd make out with him! That was just really really empowering - at least for a while. "But then I came back sophomore year and this group of friends I was living with just seemed further away. I mean- I stmted, like, hiding in my room if they were in the hallway: even if I was going to go out to pee or something , I would wait. And I just remember - this is really vivid - I remember going on break at one point and, like, getting off the bus coming back and being like, ' ...I don't want to be here.' I just felt like a lot of the close people in my life were gone- my best friend was at Mystic, and I felt like I hadn't been a good friend to her that fall because I'd been doing all these other things; I had another friend who left without telling anyone ...it just felt like everyone was going. So, like, I think one of the ways that I tried to reconcile that was by hooking up with people ...but it wasn't as easy! Because I wasn't a freshman, and they weren't as forward- I don't know, probably because they knew me. I feel like it just gets weirder and weirder. I mean- I don't know ...you know?" (She's se?f-effacing with the last line, the ensemble laughs) OKAN: (Imitating) "I don't know. You know?" People do that all the time in class! (Laughter) CAROLINE: See? So, I really like that monologue, I enjoy it doing it, but does the girl (I think it's a girl, but who knows, really) know that what she's saying is interesting? Or is she getting lucky? GABRIELLE: Like that bit about people's "best selves"- that's yours, right, Liz? LIZ: The rejection rant? GABRIELLE: Yeah. It's like that: Are all of these students who were interviewed just brilliant, or are they also bullshitting themselves? (Beat.) ALL: (Ad lib, variations on the theme, loud and emphatic) "Both/Yeah but/No I mean I think it's different than/you know people really aren't/but/nonono/" GABRIELLE: (Shouted over the melee) BREAK! LIZ: (Sound) Sarah, can we have something here- (Music starts) yeah! Perfect. (To lighting op) And that change was nice. Music. Everyone transitions, their conversations maintained as they move. Gabrielle and Okan are on one side of the stage while Paula and Firas balance them on the other. Everyone else is engaged with other material upstage: looking over lines, making notes, etc. Music fades. GABRIELLE: (As herself) Firas, are you ready as the other interviewer? FIRAS: Hold on- my computer isn't recording yet- GABRIELLE: It doesn't have to actually be recording- FIRAS: No but I want it to- GABRIELLE: Yes, but- FIRAS: Got it. Ready? GABRIELLE: Yes. FIRAS: Go. GABRIELLE: (As interviewer) Ok, to start us off: this is just to identify you in the research so I don't have to use names , ok? (Muttering) Class year, hometown- ok . ..How do you identify in terms of race? OKAN: "Mixed." GABRIELLE: Faith or spirituality? OKAN: "Urn, Buddhist Catholic, I guess." (Anyone listening laughs) GABRIELLE: (Deadpan) Ok. Sexuality? OKAN: "Gay. I mean ...yeah, gay." GABRIELLE: Gender? OKAN: "Urn...I identify as male, but a little non-binary , I guess. Like, per sonally, I mean- before I came to Williams I never really thought about it. Like, I grew up in a Catholic environment, so a lot of issues were very foreign to me . So, thinking about it. ..biologically I'm male, but sometimes I feel a little more like, like I can't really relate to a lot of other guys and stuff. I don't know- it's a weird dynamic, but I generally , like - I don't mind passing as male and other people see me as male, but I feel kind of non­ binary. "Back where I'm from, I feel like people are more open and blatant about what they want and stuff. Whereas here people are like- they're very indirect with their intentions. And I don't quite want to say two-faced because it's not really, it 's just looked down upon to be really open about sex and stuff. And that's like what you want actually in bed and also the people that you want to be with- it 's all sort 've from an angle instead of outright. It's just kind of weird . I feel like in the gay scene (but also in general) it's very down low. Like, I'm in QSU and there's not that many guys in it, and the guys that are- I notice that they're almost all of color. Which is interesting because I feel like- like a lot of the gay white men . ..they, like, don't need to feel a sense of community because they're like comfortable with the dynamic of how it works here ...I guess." GABRIELLE: (Surprised that the response was so lengthy) Wow. Cool. PAULA: (Firc1s is similarly interviewing Paula) "Urn, my most recent hookup- I honestly just asked her if she wanted a cup of tea in my room, and we ended up hooking up. It's really simple- but if you tell that to someone here? It's like 'omg, so weird' or 'so romantic!' .. .I think maybe that has to do with that liquid confidence that people are relying on, a sort've solution to what ails them. Like, if they want to get to know someone more intimately , they just give themselve s that sort of enabler and sort've excuse. There's people that- you know, just like when it comes to having sex or talking about sex when you're first coming to college, I mean a lot of people had never drunk before! People here don't know what they're doing, and that would be ok, but God forbid we admit that to ourselves! We can't possibly ask for help. We have to compensate­ usually overcompensate. I wonder if it has to do with the way we form groups ...not just speaking about, like, athlete groups, but also a capella groups or whatever - different cliques. And the dominant way that they all seem to socialize would be through alcohol. So you have young people exploring their sexual lives, and that just combines with the even more dominant way of approaching socializing, which is not just recreational drinking but binge drinking." FIRAS: Why is that important? You're saying that people aren't able to act on what they want without liquid courage? PAULA: "Exactly. I mean, if you try to pursue someone here- it's just perceived as bad, like, desperate. So you're supposed to just bump into someone at a party rather than actually hitting them up on Grindr or Tinder. I don't know- I think it's just a lot of the, like, prep culture: where you're just not very honest and you're trying to seem really well put-together. I feel like a lot of it is just kind of elitism, where you present yourself in the best way you can- I guess so you look more approachable and people feel more comfortable around you. A lot of it just feels like building business connections- I feel like a lot of the social scene here is building connections for the future, not really for the sake of it." OKAN: "Williams is big enough, you know, to have different ecosystems of relationships and people and experiences . It's not just the (pretty vanilla) scene that is generally understood as hookups- you know, heterosexual, inexperienced sex for one or a couple nights . People are coming in here with different outlooks on sex, and maybe not a lot of experience, and for them at least I think it's really difficult to not start badly. It takes having a good experience, and then you can build confidence that way. But the thing is that with the environment here and the easy way that people choose to do things -it gets to be pretty unlikely that you're ever going to have that good experience. So if we made the culture here more accepting, less scared, and just try to be better about just asking for what you want, whether it's "weirder" stuff or just more of a connection, or even just anything different from what you're getting. I mean 'cuz really ...like, waiting for someone else to pick up on that. ..it is not going to work out well most of the time, you know?" ( F and P have broken character, they watch as G and 0finish) FIRAS: Nice. (Looks to Gabrielle) Do we thank them? PAULA: (Teasing) Well, yeah! (Answering the question seriously) No, really, you should: that makes sense. (Gabrielle nods) FIRAS/GABRIELLE: (As interviewers} Thank you/thank you for your time. LIZ: Nice, guys. Ok, I want to work ...the colloquium scene? Let's look at that. (They shuffle and restage) LIZ: (Aside) Are we starting? What? (Nods and looks out to audience) "Recently-" OKAN: (Interrupting loudly) What are you doing? LIZ: What? OKAN: The side-talking thing. Who's over there? LIZ: Oh, it's like, we're giving a presentation and we're not sure when to start- these interviews kind of had that academic tone, so - OKAN: I don't like it. CAROLINE: Well, this isn't your piece. FIRAS: No, really- try it without that bit, it's too- LIZ: Fine! Fine. Just let me do it, ok? (Settles herself, steps into character) "Recently, I was talking to a group of young people- guys, specifically- and sort've getting a gauge of what they thought was the culture, the dating culture, at Williams. And it seemed like most people felt like being in a relationship was the best thing that you can do at Williams. In the sense that it's small and I guess ...so my guy friends talk a lot about this idea that just, like, quantity is important - the more women they get, the cooler they seem, you know? More popular- just sort've- 'getting your numbers up' is a phrase that gets used. And then there's another thing of like, quality, where you're not really looking to get with a lot of different girls but the ones that you do get with is someone that you find attractive and felt a real connection to and- other people would say the same thing, you know? There's validation. And I think, coming into a small school like Williams, the problem is that if your perspective is to get quantity and as many girls as you can possibly get, that becomes an issue in your life. "I mean, when I was coming into college, it totally seemed like people had that sort've expectation that there's going to be, you know, big parties, girls are just going to be throwing themselves at you, and it's going to be this, like, television version of college. And coming to Williams - I mean there was obviously the academic merit of the school, but if you haven't experienced that type of on-campus social life ...you might expect that the TV stuff is a possibility. But when you actually get into it and it's not like that, it kinda changes your mind a bit- those things that you thought might happen just aren't happening. You start to reconsider your decisions. I mean, um ...well it's something to think about." (Looks to Caroline) CAROLINE: "Yeah ...So, my parents met here at the end of freshman year- like, maybe beginning of sophomore year, but we're talking like beginning beginning sophomore year. They basically dated for like three years here. Actually, though, I recently found out that they were kind of on and off during that first year, which really surprised me - I had no idea, I thought they were just coupleycoupleycoupley. But I think they actually had this kind of adjustment period, which was really ...comforting to hear, actually. That people really do mature and grow." PAULA: (Whispers to Okan) Do that many people still get married here? OKAN: Yeah I think there's still a lot- FIRAS: Shh! CAROLINE: (Continues) "Like, my mom talks about how my dad just had no idea what he was doing, which was probably true! I think he did this thing- so, they were dating, but over break (my dad lived in New York) he drove like seventeen hours to Wisconsin to, like, comfort this girl that he knew who was having a hard time, or whatever. And my mom was like 'Uhhhh- what?! Like, why are you driving seventeen hours to hang out with this girl?! I'm your girlfriend!' So, things like that. My first year here I really did expect to meet the person that I was going to marry, but that's no longer the case, and I think that's really, actually ok. It's really ok that I'm not doing everything the same as my parents!'' PAULA: (Loudly) Do you, boo! GABRIELLE: (Glares) "Yeah- going off that. . .I guess I think people talk about 'time' a lot when they're talking about stuff like this -the time it takes to be around someone, which basically we all think we don't have. But I feel like with that people aren't really talking about what they want- they're talking about what they're already doing. You know, Williams students will all tell you that they don't want to be constantly doing work, but we are- we know the end result is (hopefully) gonna be a good thing for us. But when it comes to other people, we're really not as interested in putting in the work when we don't feel like it, and I think that's one of the big reasons things are tough on campus. "It's like- we're working so hard here, and we're learning stuff all the way, and more directly we're going to come out of it with a degree that will allow us to do all of these things! We all sort of have to believe that it's going to be worth the work, the stress. The same is true of relationships: you're always learning, whether or not it ends and you never look back or you're in it for the long haul, right? So with relationships I feel like you're trying to get to that good point, that graduation. But I have a question about that. ..what happens when you get there and the end is not what you were expecting? The 'us' -the marriage, the whatever- is not what you thought it was going to be?" (Beat) OKAN: BREAK! LIZ: I call the next break. Whoever is directing calls the next - PAULA: Well, we need a break. LIZ: (Beat, looks at Paula) BREAK! Music. Transition. Back-to-hack format, but with moments of movement. P and L directing. JACKSON: (As himself) You ready? GABRIELLE: What? Yeah. Yeah go ahead. JACKSON: Well, I mean- I feel like we should synchronize somehow, like- GABRIELLE: Yeah ...I don't know. Let's just- just do it for now and we'lllook at it again later? JACKSON: Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. (Pauses, steps into character) "I think both of us came to college with similar expectations for romantic relationships. So we both saw romantic relationships as- so, I don't want to start by defining something in the negative, but that is the easiest way to define this idea that we shared. And it was that romantic relationships shouldn't be something that were trivially pursued just for the enjoyment or for the- without at least the possibility of something more. But that's not to say we didn't think we couldn't date anyone we weren't going to marry!" GABRIELLE: "I mean, when we first started dating we were both like, 'C'mon. The likelihood of us getting married is extremely slim.' Like, who marries their first boyfriend or girlfriend- it just doesn't happen, especially in this country!" JACKSON: "So I came in as a freshman and there wasn't one specific person in my class that I really connected with. And then the upperclassman just seemed - you know, they were older and doing their own thing and I was just this freshman. But what happened was we realized that we like the same music and think about the world in the same ways- we wrote letters. We intentionally decided to spend more time with each other. So that started in structured ways, became meals and studying, and on my last day on campus she helped me pack up. We went up on Hardy roof and I thought 'Ok, I'm going to lay all my cards on the table, and I'm going to ask her what she thinks about dating.' So I say to her, you know, 'How do you think people should approach romance and relationships and these types of things?' -and I thought I was showing my hand. But in her mind it was a purely academic question! We had a long, very intellectual conversation, and I thought, 'Oh. That's that.'" LIZ: (Indiscriminate judgmental/pitying noise) PAULA: Liz. LIZ: ...Sorry. JACKSON: "Ithink she realized what happened after the fact. So at the start of the summer, she sent me this really big package, which had one of the nicest notes I've ever gotten from anyone, this like seven-page letter with drawings in the margins, and a sticky note flip book! Urn, jokes. Cookie mix, which she made for my siblings to make with me. So I get this package and my mom sees it and she's like 'What is that?! Who is that from?!' So I just grab it and run to my room with it! I think my mom just knew immediately that- that this was something." GABRIELLE: "The rom-com version of the story is that I sat him down- this was in September- and said, y'know, 'School is about to start and our schedules are going to get too busy and the stress will be too much for us to be trying to juggle whatever this is and normal life, so I think we should at least, like, name it." And he said, 'Well, if you'd waited a week then I would have properly asked you out and talked to you about where this will go!' The way that he had planned was with this great picnic and everything ...he took me on the picnic, later. (Laughs) It was really good ... (Beat) "There's this slight. ..shift, in expectations- when you're going to try to be in it for the long haul. You treat the other person a little bit differently- at least we talked about how we wanted that to work. So, like, not letting little things slide, having to deal with every little thing so that it wouldn't stack up and then explode weeks, months, years down the road. Really valuing forgiveness for the same reason. At least every month we would really talk about it, I mean take the time to be like, 'Look, I know this is an awkward conversation to have, but, just so you know, I'm pretty sure that I want to be with you the rest of my life.' And when I say that's the scariest thing in the world- it really is, because you're giving the other person so much power! And that's hard! It's hard feeling so invested, and even harder not knowing what will happen." JACKSON: "When we first decided that we didn't want to wait until after Williams, I just had this need for some kind of sign that we were doing the right thing. But after a while it seemed like ...Ijust realized I wasn't going to get any sort of message beyond that, and that was it, that was just. ..enough. I proposed a week later." GABRIELLE: "When people ask me 'So how's married life?'- and you can kind've gauge the intent behind that question- I really like to bring up the realistic side of things. Especially for- like, for people who support our marriage, but only because they think it's a fairytale ending. Everyone seems to assume 'When I turn 25-30, everything will magically pan out and I will meet the perfect person.' But the reality is that marriage is not finding the perfect person who you're going to be in love with and who will sweep you off your feet constantly for the rest of your life until you die. It's not going to happen." JACKSON: "I first encountered this in prose- in one of those little bathroom flip books that sits on top of a toilet? And I'm trying to remember exactly how it went- something like- it was a really simple quote, just: 'Marriage isn't about finding the right person, it's about being the right person.' And I think there's so much truth in that idea, which we've seen in our marriage and our courtship. I mean, I think compatibility is really important. But. . .I wonder if Williams students- in the way that we 're trained and in some cases maybe even bred to optimize, and kind of fine-tune and control and manipulate so many aspects of our lives to be more productive ...We end up applying that same pattern to courtship, often in destructive ways. We're looking for someone who is ideal instead of someone who will make us better. And becoming a good or better person is really not going to be a fun process all the time." PAULA: (Beat) Please don't get married. GABRIELLE: Hey! PAULA: It'sjust ...You guys are not a convincing married couple. GABRIELLE/JACKSON: (Overlapping, anxious re: the acting) Well, no, but/I mean what are we supposed to?/I could do it/are we too still? We're very still, maybe- PAULA: No, no it's good! GABRIELLE: (Confused) Our fake marriage is good? PAULA: Well, yeah. You're not married- it's like they say in the interview: I don't know if most people our age can actually picture it; they just fantasize. So your fake marriage sort of makes sense. JACKSON: (Mulling it over) Oh. (Beat) FIRAS: Hey, I'm garbage- help me now. (He drags 0 and J over, P and L nod and collect the other women to start working on their pieces; everyone settles in to listen) Ready? (Steps into character) "Personally, I need something to complain about to be happy. I mean, I don't think I would be perfectly happy in any place - I can always find things that are wrong. I just. ..I'm very critical, and that can be a good thing and that can be a bad thing. But I think a place like this is actually better for my mental health than a place that would give me everything I ever wanted. It allows me to construct myself as counter- I don't like to admit to that, but that's totally what I'm going for. "For me, the social scene at Williams seems much more focused on acquaintances than lasting friendships . I don't really fit in with most people, and more than that, I don't feel like I often get the opp01tunity to get to know people really deeply. I think there are few people who really know how to have real conversations. We use that phrase so much, right? 'Having conversations.' 'Things are in conversation with each other.' But that doesn't happen. It just doesn't." OKAN: Well, he's right. FIRAS: Well yeah- I mean , I agree. But does he care? Is he a misanthrope or a cynic? Or just demoralized? OKAN: To be fair, those could all sound pretty similar. But I think if he agreed to interview, he cared. FIRAS: Ok. (Pauses, making some decisions about his delivery, turning over the speech in his head.) Ok ... "It's a feeling I've experienced a lot, of not wanting to be the guy who wants you to be accountable- who is understood as the high-maintenance friend. Like, if I've been up front with friends about not liking an opinion they've expressed or something they've done, their attitude toward me is "I don't care what you think." And I think it might be a deeper question as to what friendship here at Williams really constitutes, because friendships here tend to be more of. . .out of convenience- I mean, you're hopefully going to be friends with the people you hang around, but it's more that. . .friendships aren't forged out of a sense of looking out for someone else. It's about you." JACKSON: I liked that. FIRAS: It felt better, I think. JACKSON: Yeah. Mind if I go? (Firas gestures for him to come up, he clears his throat and begins) ''There's a lot of things at Williams that we feel like we have to do- peer pressure is outstanding - and that extends to the realm of intimacy. People need to be reminded that there are lots of ways to do things. Like the whole hookup talk it's like . . .no. If you choose to engage in hookup culture, if you choose to meet people that way, fine- but there's this tacit assumption that that is the case, that hooking up is just what people do. But it makes it seem like the default option . It's like saying 'Well, if you drink at college' -well of course most people are going to drink at college, and it turns it into the same thing! If you choose something else, you're leaving yourself out of the experience in some way : you're missing out." OKAN: I like that- I think that everyone struggles with that. JACKSON: Yeah, but- let me keep going- "In the same way that people seem to have such superficial relationships, they expect problems to go away instantaneously. In the same way that any relationship takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of hours spent listening, a Jot of hours spent sharing ...a good conversation can't take twenty minutes. It has to take a couple hours . So yes, disconnect is indicative of Williams and how people deal with intimacy: in sort of a sha11ow way. These things we're talking about- they're treated on a surface level by many people, on a lot of sides. People want to blame the administration, but they don't want to talk about the underlying social issues involved." FIRAS: Yeah. I think that's getting there. OKAN: Yeah. JACKSON: Dope. (They continue tinkering on their own while the ladies speak, tuning in when Liz gets animated) GABRIELLE: Try it. ..maybe think of it like you're just talking to us as friends, you know? (Stages herself and Paula) LIZ: (Looking at the stage, makes the choice to lie down) Is this ok? Ok, whatever. . .(In character) "At lot of it is so ...swallowed, too. That is the word I would use . People are just so afraid of rejection, and just so self-centered regarding, like, how it will be perceived if they get rejected. And then so many people just don't try. Or they do try, at a party or something, when they just aren't at their best self. Like, the best self that I see in people is probably in class or something . "I think being so smart and having Williams validate that- it makes people incredibly self-centered. I think being incredibly smart makes you inherently incredibly narcissistic, because you've achieved success through a systematic processing of how other people will perceive what you are about to say. Or by understanding what you're reading and being able to espouse that to people. So people can be most comfortable in the classroom because the stakes are relatively low. (Stands, walks center, everyone in ensemble is watching her now) "You know, I don't like the Record, but if you think about it, when they did try to do an article about couples on campus everyone was like 'Oh, that's fluff, I don't want to hear about that, about somebody else's happiness' -because they don't have that! It's just this really sort of self-centered jealousy . And I think that, Williams- not as an institution but Williams people - if there really is something nice and warm and fuzzy they'll just bring that down. Like, misery loves company. And miserable Williams students love miserableness .. .And a lot of students here just can't deal with life on life's terms. They've been coddled, and they've been told that they're the best at everything, and there's just been so much that's happened that makes it seem like they should get everything they want. And I totally buy into that- like, I think it's a travesty that we have one-ply toilet paper here ...but if that's the biggest problem you have? Like, come on." GABRIELLE: (Beat, smiles) Yaaaasssss! (They clap, Liz bows to them ironically) OKAN: BREAK! Transition. Non-speakers are doing their own stuff around the stage, but gradually start to listen. Gabrielle and Paula are in their own heads, really trying to work through the serious content of these pieces, perhaps repeating phrases here and there or pausing to think something over. PAULA: "I was having this conversation last year during Winter Study with one of my friends, and we were just thinking about what it means to be a woman of color at Williams College trying to find .. .someone else. Like, what does that mean? And are people defining you as that? And does that influence their decision between you as just a friend or you as a potential for an actual relationship? Ideally, I would think that race isn't what's happening when things don't work out, that it's just 'I'm not interested in this person' ...but I don't know. I feel like on some sort of subconscious level, there's sort of a, 'This person's just not my type' -you know what I mean? So it's like, 'There's this really great relationship happening between me and Allie, but, you know, she's not my type.' And I don't know if that's about 'She's not of this race' or 'Her body is not this way' or 'Her family doesn't do x' or whatever- but I've felt this sort of gap between that. And I don't know, but I've felt it, and I feel like because of that there's this label of being a minority at Williams College, and from there it becomes who are you supposed to look for? There are these ...demarcations, I guess. "I think Williams has been good, though, in that it just kinda debunked all of the romantic notions that I had in high school- and that's kind of sad, I'll admit it. But it was good in that I came to college and I didn't see people sending flowers and stuff like that- the shit you see on TV. So it was kinda this wakeup call of, like- yeah, that doesn't happen. So, okay, I'll take that with me. Coming out of Williams, I'll be more likely- like, if some weird dude taps me on the shoulder in a bar and is like, "Hey, wanna go home with me?" I'll be like,"...no." Because I learned that that's just a weird thing to do! (Laughs) And since I've learned that these are all the things that I don't want, now I have a clearer picture of what I do want to happen, I guess ." GABRIELLE: "I really don't like the binary between intentional, malicious rape and perfectly fine consensual sex where everyone's happy. I think that. ..so much happens in the middle. And personally, I think that the majority of non-consensual experiences are unintentional. Any of us could be a rapist unless we take measures to prevent it, you know? It should be an act of commitment for everyone. And I really think that's how it should be presented, like, that is exactly how I'm going to present it to my kids- as just another risk with sex. You might get pregnant, you might get an STD, and . ..it might turn out that your partner doesn't really want it. And it's up to you to use condoms, to try and prevent pregnancy, and to really communicate with your partner to make sure that they don't end up traumatized. Because even if someone didn't mean it, their partner is still hurt, and at the end of the day it's your fault, even if it's not convictable ...I think people get caught up in technicalities , like 'Is this rape, is this sexual assault? Should I tell? Will they?' -You . Hurt. Someone. Maybe you could have hurt them worse, maybe you might not have intended it, but we should really just try harder not to hurt each other. "I go back and forth about how I classify. Some days I'm like, 'That was not consensual at all', and then some days I'm like 'Well, it wasn't intentional, it's kinda murky.' I still never know how to start, how to describe it. I feel like I have to tell the whole story, because I don't know if there's a simple way to sum it up. And I don't know what to do about it -like if it's not rape, I'm not sure I want to report it, or even then I don't really know what's going to make me feel better. . .Because that could follow him his whole life, and that's a big decision, a big way that I could change someone's life ...And I want to believe that this isn't going to happen again, because preventing it would be my main reason for reporting. "I decided to get dinner with him soon after, basically to like, guilt trip him. So he would understand the extent of what he did. I told him that I had to go get pregnancy tested, I had to go get tested for STDs- and doing all of this while I'm preparing to go abroad­ and he was really apologetic .. .I thought that getting all that out would make me feel better. And I was away, and I started to feel alright , but coming back on campus I realized that I'm not okay with it, and I wish there was an easy solution- I feel like that's part of the script; like, it happens and then it's always very clear and the person has to report and reporting puts the bad person away and makes everything better ...but so many other things are thrown into that situation." PAULA: (She has begun watching Gabrielle as well) Hey. You ok? GABRIELLE: Hm? Oh, yeah. No I'm fine. (Smiles) This person is, too, I think. And yours. PAULA: They're pissed off. GABRIELLE: They have a right to be . (Beat, realiz ing everyone is watching) Are you guys ok? PAULA : (They all nod, shrug, she's speakingfor the group: warmly) Yeah, we are. GABRIELLE: (Sighing, shaking it off) Ok. Cool-last scene? ENSEMBLE : Yep/cool/sure/yeah . (They shift the blocks, rearrange, speak to one another) SARAH: (Over the moving) Hey, guys? Before you start: See how this works for the ending- I'll just play a clip. (Music, the ensemble listens/reacts, it sets the mood, they nod and go immediately into the following) LIZ: (Deep breath, begins) "Coming into Williams, you put up kind of a fTont, like, the person you want to present yourself as? Or, I think in my case it was more of being kind of afraid to present yourself as you are. Just. ..neutral. "After graduation, I'm working abroad, so I've already kind of decided that it's just going to be an entirely different social experience than college. But I think Williams has been really important in, urn, cultivating in me the ability to listen, and not just, urn ...I feel like, in high school, with friends or peers or anything I would just - my beliefs were always just right here. Like when other people were talking, I would still be trying to figure out whether it fit in with what I thought. And Williams has at least allowed me to stmt hearing other people, which I think is huge. Like, I'm thinking about Peace Corp., and I was talking to an alum about it , and he was saying how he's really glad it 's a two­ year commitment instead of one, because it really took him the first year to get past himself. Like, that tendency to rely on what he thought and his picture of the community and what it needed and to start just relying on those around him to tell him what they needed. If Williams needs something in terms of intimacy, I think it's a part of that -like, this type of listening that I've really just begun to understand, but now I have to leave." OKAN: (Standing) "The question of what I wanted to find here is an interesting one, because it gets at this thought of how much is too much when you're getting to know someone: opening up to someone, which can be emotional and also physical. I've personally always been inclined toward openness, always really valued that, but I think it is possible to be too open with people and certainly that that can happen too quickly. So it's hard to find that balance of sharing things with people and having them share things with me, but at a pace that doesn't intimidate either person, and that builds trust. ..that's what I want. "It's something I'm realizing, though, that is really hard for me to do. It's such a strange inconsistency for someone who thinks that they value openness, but I definitely build friendships on the basis of being open with my mind. And I have a lot of people here that I can do that with, and I would call them all friends ...probably. But I feel most close to the people that I have been able to share my heart with, and that's really just one or two people. So in my romantic life, in the hookups or crushes or both that I've had, I've looked to grow into that- but I'm not sure that that works in the way that I want it to." CAROLINE: (Standing) "I'm thinking now about what norms are here- what things I have to automatically adjust to when I come back. And maybe that's why the first three weeks or so are really hard, because I'm still more fully in that adjustment period- trying to be a normal person ...here. And I think I'm someone who adapts to my environment quickly, and it's because I feel a strong need to fit in, to talk the way I think people do here, or dress similarly. I change the way I dress- slightly, but I think those slight changes make a difference to how I feel. I think everyone sort of changes themselves slightly, coming back. I see that sort of- I'm someone who has a lot of individual relationships- I'm not really part of a group here, in a good way. But I do feel sort of grounded in my role here, in my place here at Williams, because I do act and dress and talk similarly to almost everyone here, and in that way I feel very united with the student body. I think on some level we are all part of that. "I guess for me, what really excites me about that possibility of a relationship is the idea ofthe ...endlessness ...and kind of. . .I can't really find the word to describe this, but­ people are infinite. They have infinite ideas, and you can just- there is an endlessness of conversations that you could have with them. So what excites me is finding someone that you can have conversations with that never quite ended and that never. ..that I always was curious about them, because there's always more to learn about a person. I think that would just make that so much ...I think I would really feel that. (She pauses, steps into the middle of the circle, and walks forward as she speaks, breaking the fourth wall for the first time.) "You know, something I like to do is just smile and wave to people I don't know on campus. And I feel very well received in that. And I think the more people that are receptive to that and offer that on their own, the more people will feel a sense of belonging and love here. Because I don't think that has to come just from friends or a romantic relationship - I think that love is something that everyone can give to everybody else. And just a smile can make people feel that, I think. Pause. Actors take a moment, looking at one another to assure themselves that this is the right choice, looking out nervously into the audience. They smile. It will feel fake and then start tofeel real. It will go on longer than is comfortable. Then, after the audience gets restless: GABRIELLE: (Stage whisper, still sort of smiling) Caroline ...it was a nice idea but this is getting weird! CAROLINE: (Whispers back) I know- what do we do? JACKSON: (Whisper) Just end it! CAROLINE: I don't know how! FIRAS: Just- bow. Bow, bow, bow! (They do, clumsily and awkwardly, and run out) Music. Applause. The cast returns, bows and dances goofily to their Q and A positions. Process can repeat if applause continues. FIN. Melissa enters to begin Q and A. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. (New York: Routledge 2004). Alexander, Bryant Keith. "Archiving Performance/Performance as Archive: A Hybrid Book Review and Performance Commentary on E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea." Text and Performance Quarterly 32 (2009). SI: 269-284. Anonymous. "Thesis Project." Interviews and transcriptions by author. September­ October, 2014. Armstrong, Elizabeth A., England Paula and Fogarty Alison. "Accounting for Women's Orgasm and Sexual Enjoyment in College Hookups and Relationships.' 'American Sociological Review 77(2012): 435-462. Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Laura T. Hamilton, Elizabeth M. Armstrong, and J. Lotus Seeley. '"Good Girls' : Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus." 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