During the 1960s North American society was entering a sexual, medical, and cultural renaissance that came to be defined in later periods as “the swinging sixties” or simply “the sixties”. This is because of a major collapse of social mores (more, pronounced MOOR-AY, is a sociological term meaning strict rule, such as a traffic light that is red. If you’re driving your car and don’t stop, you could face serious sanctioning, such as a traffic ticket).

Such social mores in North America I am referring to include the regulation of women’s (and men’s for that matter) sexual lives, identities, and the socially acceptable ways they were able to express themselves. This was the era of the birth of music festivals, marijuana smoking, LSD, and a growing ideological intergenerational gap characterized by varying conceptions of what words like “freedom” and “free time” and “future” meant. Eventually, during the later years of the decade, even the most radical themes of this cultural shift persisted in every corner of American society in some form, whether it be design and colour palettes for houses and room decor, popular television and media, or music itself. Take a look at this Youtube clip from the show Mad Men, where Don’s new wife sings him a song at a party to get a better understanding of what I mean.

How did you feel watching this clip? How can we understand expression of this kind from an identity construction framework?

Recently, I attended a Chinese Varsity Club event. It was one of their recruiting events, involving a lot of games and competitions and stuff of that sort. It took me back to the days of summer camp sometimes, because it felt like there were lots of friendly, outgoing people in leadership roles with high energy, wanting to make everyone feel excited and included. I have heard accusations about this club, saying that they are not inclusive toward people of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, however this was not my experience at this event. There must have been about 200 people participating in the event in some form, because we were in one of those huge theatres on campus. I arrived late, while others were completing a scavenger hunt of some kind. We were put into groups of about 15 people with an executive team leader assigned to us, and were supposed to cheer with all the other groups. There must have been about 15-20 groups of people by the time everyone came back. Most of the cheers were pretty innocent and cute, but some were rather sexualized and the word “erotic” seems like the best word to describe them. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, I am not pointing this out as a moral issue of some kind. I cannot stress enough that I saw nothing but inclusivity and friendliness from executives and participants at this event. In fact, many leaders told us we should interview for executive positions when we were leaving the event.

In trying to understand these vivid sexual expressions exhibited by mostly men in this case, of Asian heritage from a very superficial measurement (their appearance), I believe there is something to be said about a cultural factor. If you ask my parents what they were doing in the 1960s or 70s after school, they might mention (as they once did to me) the sheer volume of alcohol consumed at parties (“enough to fill a swimming pool, I’m sure”). If you ask someone who’s parents are from Mainland China what they were doing after school in the 1960s period under Mao, it would probably sound a little bit different to say the least. I am not an expert in Chinese history, nor am I an expert in history of any kind for that matter, however, I don’t think you need a PHD in cultural studies to know that the sexual, liberal renaissance that erupted in North American culture in the 1960s was certainly not something experienced in China at the same time.

Different cultural memories can help to explain different expressions of different cultural contexts. In attempting to understand what I observed, I am hypothesizing that this difference in cultural history plays a key role. Writing in 1961, just as North American society was entering the period I described above, Erving Goffman published his seminal work on Asylums as institutions and how they socialize, erase, maintain, and create new identities. In it, he talks of something he calls “secondary adjustments”, which basically refers to the coping mechanisms individuals were observed or theorized to use to adjust to their new home in an institution. While Political Scientists tend to understand institutions as the presence of formalized rules determining how decisions are arrived at and negotiated, Sociologists tend to understand institutions as the actors or organizations and processes which empower those actors to formalize those decisions. UBC, under this perspective, is a kind of institution because it has formalized procedures for determining the rules (which students can negotiate) shaping how and when students are able to attain their university degrees.

Such rules, to varying degrees for students depending on their social location, are constraining. According to Goffman, “one of these types of secondary adjustment is ‘removal activities’, namely, undertakings that provide something for the individual to lose himself in… in much the same way that college students are able to survive their studies by looking forward to the new dates that may be found in their extracurricular activities.” It doesn’t have to be so deep or complicated, in the sense that I think this was a form of expression that is simply not available to students within the day-to-day reality of our lives as students at UBC. If you were to take off your shirt and pants and twerk it on the steps of Buchanan, you might be reported for indecent exposure to the university. It is also a form of power, considering that everyone doing the dirty moves at the event was, in the most loose and popular understanding of the term, good looking, relatively well defined and fit. This is an opportunity to gain some human agency within the comfort of a group of people of the same generational ideological or cultural context, in a college setting. I also agree with Goffman when he explains that identity is constructed negatively- that is you see what other people talk about and identify as, and this helps you to understand who you are by your negative reactions toward things that do not correlate to your identity. Since sociological perspectives on group behaviour say that there is a significant connection between the symbols we are surrounded with and the meanings we attach to behaviours, I believe that human sexuality is one of the most fascinating ways we can explore identity. I think that these raunchy movements, cheers, and if you take it a step further- attitudes exhibited at the event were also a product of group behaviour in negatively defining and redefining identity. That is, a social permission to “act out” or in ways that would transgress stark mores or even moral lines in their home life and day-to-day life. These expressive acts are in some ways validating, in others an outlet, but in many ways “safe” as well because while they are not socially permissible in most day-to-day public settings, they are still following strict masculine and feminine norms and demarcations of gender-based behaviour.

There are many Sociology and other disciplines-based approaches to the topic of gender. One of these is West and Zimmerman’s groundwork for describing femininity and masculine performance in the everyday . We know the common tropes- “active masculinity” and “passive femininity”, well in accordance with what I saw at the event. However, it wasn’t a seemingly conscious or power-driven behaviour. These sexually-frosted communications, body movements, dances, and cheers sugar coated just about every element of the event. This was performance at its best, and West and Zimmerman do a great job of showing how these displays are very much informed by popular culture. According to them, “popular culture abounds with books and magazines that compile idealized depictions of relations between men and women” (135). They continue, “however, the use of any such source as a manual of procedure requires the assumption that doing gender merely involves use of discrete, well-defined bundles of behaviour that can simply be plugged into interactional situations to produce recognizable enactments of femininity and masculinity” (135). As West and Zimmerman argue, popularly mediated conceptions of masculinity and femininity are not all created equal. They are perceived differently based on social location, I believe, and therefore you will see inherently different reactions, responses, and perhaps even performances according to cultural differences. In the case of my experiences at a Chinese Varsity Club event, these incredibly active male performances were explained by an institutional and socially mediated space on campus, a place in the life course understood to be as a socially mandated area of life transition, especially in the North American setting. The cultural memories of those from North American backgrounds will be quick to connect the historical period of the 1960s to sexual expression and experimentation on campus. I argue that this was an element explaining a more liberal regard to “socially lubricating” an event with sexualized expressions.

* Citation for West and Zimmerman: West, Candace and Don Zimmerman (1987). “Doing Gender” in Gender and Society 1(2): pp 125-51