The Friend Zone: Addressing Institutionalization, Systemic Domination, and Intimacy

• In Event: The Precarity of Amity: Women’s Friendships in Theory and Practice

Abstract

This paper discusses the possibilities for theorizing friendship through the site of a college course focused on the relationship between gender, friendship, and popular culture. I illustrate the importance of articulating the erasure of friendship relationships from social institutions coupled with the relationship between these kinship formations, their popular culture representations, and systems of oppression. Through an intersectional feminist framework, this Gender Studies course not only interrogates the classed, racialized, gendered, and sexualized expectations that undergird friendships, but also encourages students to deconstruct their own internalized hegemonic ideologies about and complicity in systemic domination.

Presenter

• Jocelyne Scott, Indiana University