The Maintenance of Untenable Values: An Ethnography of an Undergraduate LGBT Group

• In Event: 243 - Regular Session. Microsociologies: Values and Evaluations in Social Interaction

Abstract

This ethnographic study utilizes participant observation and in-depth interviews to examine dynamics and values systems within two iterations of an undergraduate LGBT support group. The group holds nonjudgment and acceptance of all people, beliefs, and preferences as its primary values. Under ideal and consistent application, this premium that is placed on nonjudgment and acceptance of all people, beliefs, and preferences is actually best understood as a preference for valuelessness. The author argues here that this value of valuelessness is untenable because values systems require preferences for some states over others, by their very definition (Schlenker, 2012). When members of the group are confronted with situations wherein they have preferences and values, but are simultaneously required to espouse valuelessness (as consistent with the group’s professed value of nonjudgment), there is a dissonance that’s created. In order for the group to manage the untenable value of valuelessness, the group has developed somewhat sophisticated, reliable, and institutionalized means of managing this dissonance. These mechanisms of dissonance management have become incorporated into the group culture and play an essential role in allowing the group to maintain its professed value of valuelessness, while also having hierarchically organized systems of preferences. Using a group-level conception (Matz and Wood, 2005) of Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory alongside an idiocultural (Fine, 2010) interpretation, I argue that means of dissonance management allow contradictory values to be held while simultaneously allowing the group to move more easily past instances of contradiction and direct violation of the value of valuelessness.

Author

• Rebecca Durkee, University of Iowa