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INTRODUCTION
There is a popular view that men are unemotional, inexpressive, and impersonal. Yet men clearly form friendships and larger friendship groups, and must therefore manage to "connect" with one another personally and emotionally. In fact, male solidarity - the "old boys club" - plays a role in the maintenance of men's power. However, beyond the claim that men connect with one another in the context of competition (see, e.g., Labov 1972, Tannen 1990, 1998), little work has been done that shows how men operating in a masculine cultural discourse of dominance create and display homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire. How do men use language to "do friendship" in a heterosexist atmosphere? How do they talk in a way to make themselves attractive to other men? How do cultural discourses of masculinity structure the men's desires, and thus who they find most attractive, or "cool"? Ultimately, how does the way men create their relationships re-create patterns of dominance - how do their everyday conversations re-create wider cultural discourses? These are the questions I address in this article, using ethnographic talk-in-interaction data from a men's social club, a fraternity, at an American university. I argue that the men's talk - and the existence of the fraternity itself - responds to and re-creates four American cultural discourses of masculinity. These cultural discourses describe the idealized forms of masculinity that men in American society should display (even though few if any actually succeed). These discourses are reflected in, and created by, these men's performances, and in widely shared cultural performances such as literature and film. The discourses are an unpacking of what "hegemonic masculinity" was in North America in the late twentieth century, when the observations in this article were made.
Cultural discourses refer to widely shared "background" assumptions, or "truths," about how the world works. Cultural discourses of masculinity thus refer to the ways that men are assumed by the majority of society to act, talk, and feel. In the dominant social group in North America, these cultural discourses of masculinity include gender difference, heterosexism, dominance, and male solidarity. Gender difference is a discourse that sees men and women as naturally and categorically different in biology and behavior. Heterosexism is the definition of masculinity as...