Ashley Spalding, University of South Carolina
ASpal84583@aol.com

So many people helped me throughout this project, and although I have tried to express my gratitude to them individually, I would also like to acknowledge them here. My entire thesis committee - Ann Kingsolver, Laura Ahearn, and Lynn Weber - was unbelievably supportive throughout my writing process. They offered sound advice and well-chosen words of encouragement. I would like to thank Ann Kingsolver for all of the hours she put into directing my thesis. From responding to my e-mails while I was at Twin Oaks to meeting with me time and time again to help me talk through what it was I was trying to express in writing, she really went out of her way to support me. Laura Ahearn somehow motivated me to begin the difficult process of first writing on paper what was in my head, and then worked with me closely on revisions. Lynn Weber always had excellent suggestions about how to make my thesis more readable; I really appreciated her interdisciplinary perspective as a sociologist and a women's studies scholar.

Outside of my committee, I remain very grateful to Twin Oaks Community for allowing me to live with them, learn from them, and write about them. I would like to thank Michael Barnes for providing constant support and good advice from the very beginning stages of my research. He was also working on an ethnographic project and encouraged me to get on tape as much as I could, advice I found invaluable. I also want to acknowledge Lee Bauknight at USC's Writing Center for providing an important weekly dialogue as my thesis first began to take shape.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Introduction to the Community
History
A Tour of the Community
My Introduction to the Community
Feminist Theory and Method
Feminist Writing
The Organization of this Thesis

Chapter 2: Gendered Social and Spatial Boundaries
The Meetings
Gender-Balanced Population
Women's Space
Sexism
Feminism and Profeminism
Wolfing

Chapter 3: Gender and Work
Community Efforts to Promote Equality in Work
Working at Twin Oaks
Members' Perspectives on Nontraditional Work
Clashes Between Official and Unofficial Values of Work

Chapter 4: Reenvisioning Family
The Children's Program
Twin Oaks Families Versus the Nuclear Family
Less Isolation
Economics
Flexibility in Organizing Family
Balancing Work and Childcare
Less Control
Socialization

Chapter 5: Fluid Identities: Gender Roles and Sexuality
Gender Roles
Sexuality

Chapter 6: The Outside World
Twin Oaks and The Outside World
Articulating Privilege
Gendered Social and Spatial Boundaries
Gender and Work
ReenvisioningFamily
Gender Roles and Sexuality

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix

Bibliography

Chapter I: Introduction

On my first morning at Twin Oaks, eight other visitors to the community and I were given a tour by Nate, a community member for over twenty years. It was late May, and at around 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning in Virginia the weather was already quite hot. As we walked down a main path of the community, past a field of asparagus and an outdoor volleyball court, I fully took in the community’s beautiful landscape that, when I first arrived the evening before, had been secondary to getting settled into the visitor cottage and finding the dining hall for my first visitor orientation. Listening to Nate’s commentary and looking around at the community’s lush fields, trees, and rustic buildings, I paid very little attention to Ren, a male visitor, taking his shirt off in order to adjust to the heat. Nate had been telling us the history of each building we passed and pointing out landmarks and property lines, but when he noticed that Ren was no longer wearing a shirt, he stopped our group abruptly in the middle of the path. Nate firmly suggested that Ren put his shirt back on as this was an area where women are not allowed to take off their shirts, and they would not appreciate Ren taking off his. Ren complied, and while I am sure everyone in our group noted the incident, I was especially intrigued. This was my first indication that gender roles really were constructed differently at Twin Oaks. In all of the United States social contexts I had ever been in, women always kept their breasts covered, and, conversely, it was acceptable for men to go shirtless in many contexts.

I had long been interested in issues of social inequality in the US, and I thought it would be especially significant to look at gender in an intentional community in which there is a deliberate attempt to create an egalitarian society, in terms of gender as well as other social arenas. I was interested in how a community intentionally organized around egalitarian values—as Twin Oaks is—could create and maintain constructions of gender alternative to the dominant culture of the United States. I saw Twin Oaks’ transformation of gendered nudity norms as an example of one such attempt. But I continued to ask questions about the ways that the community’s alternative social norms were superficial changes in terms of gender and the ways that the community actually creates alternative constructions of gender.

Through my research at Twin Oaks, I wanted to find out how the community’s gender constructions are alternative to those of dominant US society and in what ways they remain embedded in the dominant culture. I was also interested in how Twin Oaks’ gender constructions had changed over time. In this chapter, I will introduce the community itself—historically, ideologically, and spatially, and discuss my own introduction to Twin Oaks, and the theories that inform my research question, methodology, and the writing of this thesis.

History

Twin Oaks is located in rural Virginia on approximately 450 acres of farm and forestland. Founded by eight original members in 1967, at one point the community grew to eighty-five adult community members—although during my stay there were only around seventy. Twin Oaks supports itself by primarily by producing hammocks, which are bought and then sold by Pier 1 Imports; running a small organic tofu business; and indexing books, mostly for academic presses. While the community struggled financially for many years, it is now unofficially known in the Communities Movement as one of the most financially successful intentional communities in North America. Partly due to its financial success, while most of the other communities founded in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s failed after a few years, Twin Oaks has managed to survive for over thirty.

Twin Oaks considers itself a "diverse community." The community’s members hold in common no religious, spiritual, or political beliefs, but in terms of "race," class, and even sexuality, Twin Oaks’ membership is nearly homogeneous. During my stay, one full-time member and another part-time member who spends half the year at another community—both African American women—were the only "non-white" adults at Twin Oaks. Additionally, I learned that very few members are from working-class backgrounds; while several are from very privileged backgrounds, most members are middle-class. In terms of sexual orientation, although one man identified as gay, another as bisexual, and several women had been in lesbian relationships, most members were heterosexual.

Twin Oaks was originally founded as an incarnation of the utopian society described in behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner’s science fiction novel Walden II (1948). Skinner believed that behavior could be controlled by positive reinforcement, and society

should, therefore, stop using punitive mechanisms of control. This belief was developed in his novel and guided much of Twin Oaks’ beginnings. An article in an issue of Communities: Journal of Cooperative Living devoted to Walden Two communities reports: "They [the founders of Twin Oaks] had very little background in the science of behavior but plenty of faith in Walden Two. After the first excitement of being on a farm had worn off, they sat down and literally extracted from the novel everything they could use" (Kuhlmann 1999:37). Twin Oaks’ original members all came from non-farm backgrounds.

Twin Oaks specifically adopted several of Walden Two’s structural innovations and modified them over time. The community experimented with Skinner’s "labor credit system," a system of internal currency that awards labor credits for hours of labor done, toward a quota of credits required of each member each week. Skinner’s novel described a labor system where different types of work were rewarded differently so that all jobs would be equally desirable; a community member working in the sewers would receive more labor credits than a member planting flowers, for instance. After Twin Oaks had experimented with what they termed the "variable credit" system for five years, the community finally standardized labor credits; one hour of any type of work receives one labor credit (Kinkade 1994:30-32). Similarly, the Planner-Manager system of government was adopted from Skinner’s novel and then modified. Planners are a board of three members appointed by the community to serve eighteen-month staggered terms. While serving as planners, members make long-range policy, control and dispense resources, and generally take care of the overall well-being of the community. Managers

are the individuals in charge of various specific areas of work or authority. A member becomes a manager by signing up when there is a vacancy, and then a group of related managers interviews candidates and chooses one (Kinkade 1994:17-18). In her article, "Walden Two Communities: What Were They All About?," Hilke Kuhlmann reports that as some community members resented the authority of the planners, Twin Oaks modified the planner-manager system from that described in Walden Two: "By the early seventies, the role envisioned for the planners had shifted from omnipotent decision-makers to facilitators" (1999:37).

In terms of gender, Skinner’s novel focused primarily on transforming work and family in order to create a community alternative to that of the dominant US society, many aspects of which Twin Oaks adopted. Skinner described the formal recognition of domestic jobs as work. In one scene in Walden II, Frazier, the founder of Walden II—the fictional utopian community described in the novel—is giving a tour of the community to a group of visitors. In the kitchen, where two community members are washing dishes using an efficient industrialized dishwashing machine, one of the visitors remarks: "All your dishwashing seems to be done by two people." Frazier says in response, "And with four or five shifts a day you can say eight or ten people at most…Compare that with two hundred and fifty housewives washing two hundred and fifty sets of miscellaneous dishes three times a day and you will see what we gain by industrializing housewifery" (1948:43). Skinner also suggested that women in dominant US society were trapped in their sole roles as mothers, and his novel transferred the responsibility of childcare to the entire community; in Skinner’s novel, children are raised communally by professionally trained childcare workers, and women work at jobs other than being a housewife and/or mother. Additionally, although couples are legally married in Walden II, a husband and a wife have separate bedrooms in order to encourage their individuality. At one point in the novel, Skinner’s protagonist Frazier remarks: "A man’s room in his castle. And a woman’s too" (1948:128). In keeping with their initial Walden II focus, Twin Oaks formally implemented the recognition of housework as labor, communal childcare, and the assignment of separate rooms for husbands and wives—and other types of partners. All of these arrangements continue to exist in the community, except Twin Oaks’ communal childcare program.

Although some of the structures of Walden II remain, Twin Oaks no longer follows Skinnerian thought so closely. After Twin Oaks left behind its identification with behaviorism in the 1970’s, the community ideologically aligned itself with egalitarianism and is a member community of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, a network of six communities that strive to be models of cooperative, nonviolent, egalitarian lifestyles. FEC communities, of which Twin Oaks remains a member today, share the following fundamental practices and values: land, labor and other resources are held in common; products of members’ labor and all other goods are distributed equally or according to need; nonviolence; participatory government; nondiscrimination; environmental responsibility; and healthy interpersonal relationships (Sharing the Dream nd: no pagination). Twin Oaks also identified itself as a feminist community for a period in the 1980’s, but currently this association is not collectively shared by the community.

A Tour of the Community

There are a number of ways I could give a tour of Twin Oaks. I might describe each building and social space in detail or map out what a typical day is like. Instead, keeping with the focus of my research, I will describe how I learned about gender in different spaces in the community, referring to a rough map of the community that was

included in the visitor handbook ("Not Utopia Yet: Three Week Visitor Orientation Guide To the Twin Oaks Community" ND: no pagination). Those interested in an account of everyday life at Twin Oaks should read Kat Kinkade’s book Is It Utopia Yet: An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community in its 26^th Year (1994), which includes many descriptions of everyday life at Twin Oaks over the years, in addition to descriptions of community structures and history.

As the scene I described at the beginning of this chapter reflects, gendered physical spaces were one of the first ways I learned about gender at Twin Oaks. In addition to areas of the community being specifically mapped out in terms of expectations of nudity for men and women (A), Twin Oaks maintains what they call "women’s space," areas of the community that, during specified times, are off limits to men. All-male spaces, bathrooms, and work sites are other gendered spaces through which I initially began to learn about gender at Twin Oaks.

On my first tour of the community, Nate described Downstairs Oneida (B) as the "women’s residence." He told us that only women live there, and no men are allowed after 6 pm. My second week at Twin Oaks, I encountered another women’s social space, "women’s tea." This was an optional part of my orientation as a visitor, but I felt it might be very important to my understanding of gender, especially gendered spaces, at Twin Oaks. I was the only "visitor woman" who attended. Two member women and a woman who was formerly a member at Twin Oaks (and currently a member of another intentional community), and I sat in chairs under a shady tree near the women’s residence and ate pieces of carrot cake and drank iced herbal tea. One of the women told me that the women’s tea had been happening since the 1980’s and had been organized as an opportunity for female members to interact with female visitors, as there is not much interaction between the two groups otherwise. We talked about what my research interests were and several women answered questions I had about the community’s history, so it did serve the purpose of a visitor woman getting to know community women better.

I had begun to get the idea that gender separatist activities were important at Twin Oaks, and I looked for other examples in the community. I observed that once a week a note went up in the dining hall advertising "Men’s Movie Night," and during my first weeks at Twin Oaks, I learned a bit about the weekly event. Each week a group of men—varying in number from week to week—got together to watch a movie in Degania (C), a space in what used to be the children’s building that is now used by members to watch videos other than those that are collectively selected by the community and shown in a public area—the Bijou—on weekends. Supposedly, the movies shown at men’s movie night tended to be more violent and/or "sexy" than those shown in the Bijou. I learned that men, as well as women, construct gender separatist spaces at Twin Oaks.

Other spaces in the community provided an even greater contrast to my experience in dominant US society. Unlike most public restrooms in the US, which are segregated by sex, at Twin Oaks all bathrooms are unisex. Additionally, in most residences—all of which house both men and women, except Downstairs Oneida—one person might be taking a shower, another person brushing his/her teeth, and another person using the toilet, all in the same bathroom at the same time, in order to be more efficient. As a visitor living in Aurora, we maintained a norm of one person in the bathroom at a time, unless you knocked first and were given approval to enter. One night while I was still a visitor in the community, I was socializing with some members in Tupelo (D), and I went to use a bathroom in the residence. The door to the bathroom was open, so I was startled when I entered and a woman was brushing her teeth, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. I felt even more awkward when she told me I could come on in and use the toilet; I asked her where another bathroom was, and she laughed and directed me to a half bathroom on another floor of the residence.

Work was another site that contrasted considerably with my experiences outside of Twin Oaks, especially in terms of gender. My first week at Twin Oaks, I received a work assignment to box hammocks in the Emerald City Warehouse (E) with several other visitors and members: another female visitor, me, two male visitors, one female member, and three male members, one of whom directed the project. The goal was to take hammocks that had already been rolled up and placed in plastic bags, price them using a price gun, put together boxes and staple them all on one end with an electric staple gun, place the priced hammocks in the boxes, and staple the boxes closed. I had never used an electric staple gun and did not think of myself as being very physically strong, so I began pricing hammocks at first and then began helping carry the priced hammocks to a pile from which they could be more easily picked up and put into boxes. At one point, the male member who was in charge said that as I was interested in gender, I should observe how all of the men had gravitated toward the staple guns. All of the male visitors and male members were working at hoisting the hammocks into boxes and stapling them closed—and most of them were working with their shirts off; the female member was also boxing and stapling, and the other female visitor and I were pricing the hammocks. After a while, the female member said it was ridiculous only men were stapling, and she taught me how to use the electric staple gun; after a while I got the hang of it. Making sure women have opportunities to learn new skills and engage in work traditionally done by men is frequently not a concern of work places in dominant US society.

My Introduction to the Community

I first became interested in intentional communities my senior year in college. I was a "white," middle-class woman attending a very conservative "white," middle-class university, and I was looking for an alternative to the lifestyles I had lived and seen others around me living. I began searching the Internet and stumbled upon the Federation of Intentional Communities web site—www.ic.org—where I was surprised to read that there were currently hundreds of alternative communities in the United States alone. Immediately I ordered the most current issue of the Communities Directory: A Guide to Cooperative Living (1996), which lists hundreds of entries describing communities—mostly in the US but international communities as well—and how to visit or join them.

Upon entering the Master’s program in anthropology at the University of South Carolina in 1998, I decided to combine my personal interest in intentional communities with an academic one; I would write my Master’s thesis in cultural anthropology about intentional communities. I specifically became interested in Twin Oaks Community when I attended a discussion at USC held by two Twin Oakers who had been invited to the university to talk about their community. I was intrigued by Twin Oaks’ espoused egalitarian values and established "student residency program" that enables scholars to live and conduct research in the community in exchange for work, and I began seriously planning a research project specific to Twin Oaks. As background research, I read about the community in two books about Twin Oaks by Kat Kinkade one of the community’s founding members, the Communities Directory (1996), and a sensationalistic Washington Post article (Jones 1998). I then began communicating with Twin Oaks about becoming a student resident, developing a research question, and planning a possible research project.

From reading about Twin Oaks I knew the community identified as egalitarian and had at some point in the past considered itself a feminist community. I had read that members actively used the word "co" as a gender-neutral pronoun, that there had been a form of gender-based affirmative action in certain Twin Oaks work sites in the 1980’s,

and that some members practiced polyamory, or open relationships. But I also knew that the community was predominantly "white" and middle-class. I was interested in learning how gender at Twin Oaks had been reconfigured from the dominant culture of the United States—what members refer to as "the outside world"—specifically from the "white" middle-class gender norms of the members’ backgrounds, in the contexts of social relations, work, family, and sexual relationships.

In order to be considered by the community for student residency, I first became a "visitor." A letter of introduction detailing my personal and work backgrounds, as well as my research intentions, gained me a space in an early summer visitor program as well as driving directions to the rural Virginian community, intentionally not posted on their web site or detailed in their literature. The visitor program lasts three weeks and includes structured orientations on living and working at Twin Oaks as well as full-time work assignments—43 hours per week—typical of life at Twin Oaks. During the three weeks, visitors who wish to be considered for membership or residency (a status separate from membership in that it is officially temporary and therein has different legal requirements than membership) each undergo a membership interview. At the end of the visitor period, membership and residency applicants each write a letter to the community detailing their experiences over the three weeks and stating their requests to be considered for membership or residency. In the ten days following the visit—during

which time the applicant must absent her/himself from the community—members are then polled concerning these visitors. At the end of the tenth day decisions are made; each applicant is assigned one of the following statuses: a "reject," a "visit again in a year," a "visit again in six months," or an "accept."

Being accepted by the community was a major concern for me. How could I propose this project to my department without a guarantee that I would be allowed to conduct research in the community? On what grounds might I be rejected for student residency? In the months before my visit, I communicated through e-mail with the community’s student resident coordinator, Tim, about my concerns. Although he maintained that there was no way to be accepted for student residency before I completed the visitor program, Tim provided me with a "self test" and predicted that if I could answer the following questions affirmatively, my chances of living at Twin Oaks were in the 90^th percentile:

1. Can you do 43 hours of assigned and self-assigned work for each of the three weeks of your visitor period?
2. Can you generally be helpful and friendly, even with people who you don’t know, some of whom are a bit odd?
3. Do you find the idea of egalitarianism intellectually attractive?
4. Can you share?

I mentally answered "yes" to the four questions and continued planning my research.

I began my visitor program on May 28, 1999. As a "visitor," I stayed in Aurora, the visitor cottage (F on the map), with the eight other visitors. Although officially visitors are allowed access to most areas of the community, in many ways they are subtly isolated from the rest of the community, geographically and socially. I remember it seemed to me like all of the "real" Twin Oakers (members) disappeared after dinner; members would retire to their residences, which were technically public spaces although to a visitor they felt, and often were, very private. Visitors have a somewhat marginal status in the community; although they are valued for their labor and membership potential, many members understandably resent their private lives being invaded by visitor groups year-round. Toward the end of the three weeks, I had developed casual friendships with members and was often invited to spend time in members’ residences, but I still felt my status as "visitor" to be precarious and temporary.

Ten days after I left Twin Oaks as a visitor, I received the good news that I had been accepted for student residency; eleven people had voted "yes" and zero had voted "no." When I returned to the community for six more weeks, I was a "student resident," and I felt myself embraced by the community in a way that as a visitor I could not have imagined. Several members who never even acknowledged me as a visitor, sought me out and welcomed me "home." I remember being introduced to the new visitor group as the "newest member," and throughout the summer the difference between member and resident was often blurred in this way. I was also paid the same monthly allowance of $60 that members receive. Additionally, I moved into a residence with community members and began conducting my everyday activities in much closer proximity to members; I finally found out what the Twin Oakers did when they "disappeared" after dinner. My participation in the community intensified as I became a full participant in my residence and a regular worker at specific work sites. As a visitor, my labor was spread among many different work areas, but as a resident I worked primarily at weaving hammocks, shipping hammocks, and "moving milk"—transporting milk from the dairy to the community’s kitchens several times a week.

Although as a resident I gained closer relationships with community members, my position as a temporary resident, a woman, and the youngest adult in the community, among other personal characteristics, enabled me greater access to some areas and individuals and less to others. I may have isolated myself somewhat from other, older social contexts, although I certainly interacted on an individual level with many members outside of my residence. Twin Oaks fathers are another "group" of members underrepresented in my set of interviews.

Many social groupings seemed difficult to join, especially in a six-week period. Additionally, members had the option of avoiding interacting with me in order to not participate in my project, and I was told that several Twin Oakers are extremely private in this way. Without going to the extreme of only talking to members who specifically approached me, I tried to respect members’ privacy by not seeking out individuals with whom I never found myself interacting through work or a social situation.

For instance, I did not ever feel comfortable approaching a small group of middle-aged women whom I frequently spotted sitting together at meals. In the dining area, a couple of tables are designated as "fun tables" which means that anyone can sit there without asking those already sitting at the table if it is all right. For all other tables, it is expected that you ask the group if it is OK if you sit there. Additionally, there are certain tables where it is known that members sit when they want to be alone or have a private lunch or dinner with others; generally, anyone sitting at these tables would not be approached by other members. The women I observed who ate meals together usually sat at a table where I would have needed to ask to join them, and as my stay in the community was brief and I had given members the option of avoiding me so as not to be included in my project, I felt very awkward about approaching the more private tables. Instead, I usually ate at the "fun tables" where I was sure I was welcome.

My choice of residence also positioned me very specifically in the community. I chose to live in Tupelo because it was a male/female residence, child-friendly, and known to frequently organize its own social events; I wanted to make sure I could observe men and women and families interacting socially. But the residence, D on the map, is geographically located a fair distance from other residences and the community’s central buildings; is rather known for housing a majority of the younger Twin Oakers—ages 5 through 42; and, perhaps more than other residences, has its own social scene. When I returned as a student resident and began setting up my room in Tupelo, several members commented on my choice of residence. A couple of members suggested that I be careful not to isolate myself from the perspectives of those who did not live at Tupelo, as those who lived in the residence often seemed to socialize exclusively with others in the residence. Perhaps in response to these members’ concerns, I made a real effort to seek out a wide range of perspectives; I ended up interviewing members from almost every residence in the community.

I have been discussing how my situation in the community influenced what I learned about gender at Twin Oaks. In the next section, I will address the theories that informed my research on gender constructions in the community.

Feminist Theory and Method

In exploring gender at Twin Oaks, I draw from feminist theory that treats gender as a cultural construction, rather than a biological identity (cf. West and Zimmerman 1987; di Leonardo 1991:29-31; Bing and Bergvall 1996). In the field of anthropology specifically, the examination of gender as a cultural construction can be traced back to Margaret Mead’s writings in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Kamala Visweswaran, in her article, "Histories of Feminist Ethnography" states that Mead "was possibly not the first social scientist to develop a distinction between biological sex and sociologically distinct gender roles, but she was certainly the first to use ethnography to do so" (1997:601). In the 1970’s, Gayle Rubin, as Visweswaran mentions, further articulated how gender is separate from biology by importantly defining the "sex/gender system," (Rubin 1975:28) although she and her contemporaries were later critiqued for universalizing, and therefore essentializing, the category of gender. Since the 1980’s, feminist ethnographers have begun to challenge essentialist ideas about gender, and in her article’s conclusion, Visweswaran suggests specific directions for feminist ethnography:

I have positioned my research at Twin Oaks in relation to Visweswaran’s challenge by using gender as an entry point rather than an endpoint.

Further influenced by feminist theorists who elucidate the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality (Collins:1990; Collins:1998; West and Fenstermaker:1995; Weber 2000), I discuss gender in relation to these other identities. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins states that Black feminist thought rejects "additive approaches to oppression": "Instead of starting with gender and then adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination" (1990:222). The "matrix of domination" Collins describes is the intersection of oppression by race, class, and gender, experienced simultaneously by African American women. Lynn Weber adds sexuality to race, class, and gender in her review of scholarship on these interlocking identities and axes of oppression (Weber 1998). In addition, she discusses oppression and privilege as relational (Weber 2000:101). In this thesis I discuss how Twin Oakers privileged situation in these systems—most members are "white," middle-class, and heterosexual—influences their alternative constructions of gender.

Feminist theory also informs my research methodology. In order to address the

power relations involved in producing ethnography, my research at Twin Oaks was in many ways what Visweswaran has termed "homework" (Visweswaran:1994). Visweswaran sees homework as an important part of decolonizing anthropology, viewing "fieldwork" (involving departure and return which, according to Visweswaran is the "product of institutional mechanisms of power" (1994:105) and closely tied to colonialism) instead as "homework," which involves speaking from one’s own location. I consider my work at Twin Oaks homework. Although when I began my research at Twin Oaks I was an outsider to the community, I was conducting "insider research" (Aguilar 1981) from my social location as "white," middle-class, and heterosexual. I was simultaneously away from home, participating in a culture very new to me and an anthropologist "at home" (Messerschmidt 1981) in the United States. Most significantly, I am very much speaking from my "home" location along the axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States, which is very much like the positionings of most Twin Oakers.

Feminist researchers are concerned with the power relations that exist between the researcher and her subjects (Malson, O’Barr, Westphal-Wihl, Wyer 1989; DI Leonardo 1991). In order to address these issues, I deliberately considered power within every aspect of my research. I encouraged members to offer their advice on my research questions as well as my research methods. I was completely explicit with the community about my research questions and methodology, and members had the power to reject me after a trial "visitor period," deny me access to any data they wished, and withdraw data

from my project until August 17, 1999, a week after I left the community. And there was reciprocity between Twin Oakers’ participation in my research project and my working in their community.

One of my primary methods was extensive semi-structured interviewing. As soon as I returned to the community as a resident, having been formally accepted by the community to conduct my research, I began my first formal interviews. I primarily interviewed members, although I also had the opportunity to interview a couple of former members who visited the community as guests during my residency. I used a snowball sampling method that provided me with a strongly diverse series of interviews. Additionally, several members specifically requested to be interviewed. In each interview, I posed a number of general questions related to gender at Twin Oaks and

changes in constructions of gender in the community so that issues important to members would surface, rather than imposing my own ideas about what was important "data." I also asked broadly about what members’ backgrounds were before they came to Twin Oaks and what brought them to live at Twin Oaks. Altogether, I conducted twenty interviews.

During my stay in the community, I attempted to involve members in my research project in various ways. One member encouraged me to hold a community discussion on the topic of gender at Twin Oaks and offered to facilitate. I organized this event and over twenty people attended; with the group’s permission, I tape-recorded the meeting using an external microphone. A couple of weeks later, at the request of several members, I held a second discussion to which more than ten people came; I also tape-recorded this discussion. In order to further broaden my understanding of the community, at the end of my stay, I posted a sign-up sheet in order to solicit interviews from any other members who wished to be a part of my project; quite a few members responded, and my data was immensely enriched.

With the community’s permission, I reviewed and gathered current documents constantly generated by the community for its own purposes. A major means of communication among community members is the O & I—Opinions and Ideas—Board. Located in the dining hall, this board is hung with rows of clipboards where members post a variety of "papers." These include analyses of political situations within the community, notes from community meetings, and letters from visitors and ex-members; a stack of blank paper is included underneath each O & I paper to hold comments from community members, enabling a continuous written dialogue. Keeping up with these papers and their comments remains central to understanding current issues and political situations within the community. The community’s written bylaws and 6 ½ inch thick policy notebook are additional written sources that I used as sources in my research. Other significant documents include the community’s quarterly newsletter "The Leaves of Twin Oaks," the three-week visitor orientation guide "Not Utopia Yet," the new member handbook titled "Living the Reality: The New Member Survival Handbook," and community memos and surveys.

As a visitor, I had begun archival research in the community archives housed in a room in one of the residences, and as a resident I continued this research and photocopied numerous documents. One document I uncovered was a Master’s thesis on the topic of gender at Twin Oaks, Female Cultural Dominance at Twin Oaks Community (1988), written by Zena Goldenberg, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Illinois who had visited the community twelve summers before I arrived. Many of the community’s O&I papers are saved in the archives, and I reviewed and documented many pertaining to my research. I also looked over some of the community’s older archival materials that are housed in the University of Virginia’s special collections library. Additional documentary resources I draw from in this thesis include two books written by one of the community’s founder’s, Kat Kinkade: A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (Kinkade 1972) and Is It Utopia Yet?: An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community In Its 26^th Year (Kinkade 1994). I also bought, in the Twin Oaks gift shop, a collection of the community’s newsletters, "The Leaves of Twin Oaks," edited by Kinkade in 1987; that collection covered the years 1972-1974.

I consistently informed the community at every step of my research process. Even in my very initial contacts with Twin Oaks, I stated my research intentions, and I further indicated them in my letter of introduction. When I arrived at Twin Oaks for my visitor period, within the first few days I posted a research statement to the community on their O & I board. I wrote that I was applying for student residency as I wanted to conduct research at Twin Oaks and would be taking notes on my informal experiences during my visitor period, so that anyone who did not want to participate could avoid me. I also proposed that I would be interested in talking to members about topics related to my interests—which I stated—but that I would not mind at all if anyone did not wish to participate. At the end of my visitor period, in the letter stating my application for student residency, I reiterated my research proposal. I also verbally informed members of my research interests when I was asked on an individual basis about my intentions to live at Twin Oaks, in case they had not read my letters. When I actually began conducting formal interviews, I used consent forms. I have consistently used pseudonyms in my thesis in order to protect the identities of individuals, although I have not changed the name "Twin Oaks" as it seems unnecessary; there are a large number of publications—a few academic articles and also articles in newspapers and magazines—that refer to Twin Oaks by name, and many members feel this sort of publicity is positive.

Giving back to the community was very important to me. In order to reimburse Twin Oaks for allowing me to live in the community and conduct my research, I provided them with my labor. This form of reciprocity is actually built into the community’s student residency program. Twin Oaks expects a student resident to work in the community approximately thirty-five hours a week in exchange for the opportunity to live in the community and conduct research; this is eight hours under members’ forty-three hour weekly labor quota, so a student resident accounts for the remaining eight hours as research. During my stay at Twin Oaks, the community was at low population—and many members also take vacations during the summer—and therefore badly in need of additional workers, even if they were temporary, as I was. Workers were especially needed for weaving hammocks, and luckily I managed to learn this skill adequately. Additionally, it worked out that several members were able to work while being interviewed, instead of having to take time away from work to talk to me. Usually this happened while members were weaving hammocks, although one man chose a basement where he was shoveling gravel as his interview site.

Feminist Writing

Feminist theory also informs the way I have written this thesis. In addition to addressing power relations in their methodologies, feminist researchers are also concerned with the representation of subjects in the final write-up (cf. Visweswaran 1994). I address power relations in my reflexive approach to ethnography as well as by incorporating members’ own representations of themselves and Twin Oaks with my own representation of the community. Writing my thesis "at home," I have attempted to reflexively provide readers with information about my learning process during my stay, my situation within the community, and how my own race, class, gender, and sexuality positioning influences my analysis.

In this thesis I include many excerpts of transcripts I typed up from tapes of the gender discussions and portions of quite a few interviews. Regarding these transcripts, I agree with Alessandro Duranti’s discussion of transcription as theory in From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village: "[W]e become aware of the fact that what we decide—consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly—to first hear and then transcribe is the product of systems of choices due to a mixture of conventional orthographic systems and theoretical assumptions about what constitutes relevant data" (1994:40). Many of the choices I have made in the transcripts I include in this text have to do with representation. None of us is as eloquent in conversations as we might be in practiced speech or written communication, so in transforming members’ conversations into texts, I have omitted utterances such as "um," "uh," and some repeated words. I have also omitted many of my own affirmative responses in transcribed portions of interviews. Other choices I have made relate to my research focus. As I was primarily interested in members’ narratives and dialogues with other members, I have not included pauses or latching, which someone interested in a more linguistic analysis might include. Like Duranti I also believe that "[t]ranscripts, like translations, are never final" (1994:43). See the Appendix for the transcription conventions I use throughout my thesis.

Full transcripts of the gender discussions have been given to the Twin Oaks community and should be available in the archives there. I also left copies of the tapes in the community’s hammock-shop tape collection.

I have organized this thesis around significant issues that arose in both the gender discussions I held and my interviews with members. In Chapters 2-5 I relate the ways Twin Oakers described how community constructions of gender are alternative to those of the dominant United States society. Chapter 2 draws primarily on the two gender discussions I held and analyzes how the community negotiates gendered social and spatial boundaries in opposition to dominant US gender constructions. In this chapter, I expand my discussion of some of the gendered spaces I have mentioned in the Introduction. In Chapter 3, I examine work as a site of gendered change in the community, and in Chapter 4 I discuss the family as such a site. In Chapter 5, I consider gender roles and sexuality as fluid identities, in contrast to dominant US constructions. Finally, in Chapter 6, I deal with the embeddedness of Twin Oaks’ alternative constructions of gender in what members call "the outside world"—the dominant culture of the United States—by discussing ways that members articulated the dominant society’s influence on Twin Oaks’ gender constructions, as well as community silences around race and class in these constructions.

Although gendered social and spatial boundaries are obvious in so many Twin Oaks locations and contexts, I have chosen to focus on two community discussions held for the purposes of my research in which the negotiation of these boundaries in relation to "the outside world" was especially salient. Within these two discussions, community members actively worked to define what it means to have a gender-balanced population and women’s space; what constitutes sexist behavior and feminist and/or profeminist behavior; whether or not Twin Oaks is a feminist/profeminist community; what relationships are appropriate between members and visitors, especially male members and female visitors; and the changing meanings of these social and spatial boundaries over time.

The Meetings

Throughout my stay in the community, several members suggested events and topics I might want to focus on in my research, members I should interview, and possible methods I could use. During my visitor period, one long-term member, Catherine, advised that I hold a "fishbowl" discussion on gender at Twin Oaks and offered to facilitate. I later learned she also facilitates many of the community business meetings. Soon after I returned to the community as a student resident, we began making arrangements. I was entirely unfamiliar with the fishbowl format and the community’s

ways of doing things, so I followed Catherine’s lead to a large extent. She explained to me that a fishbowl discussion meant that within the gathered group of people, several volunteers would sit separately from the rest of the group and talk about a specific topic, and then when individuals in this "fishbowl" grew tired of talking or had finished making particular points, they could switch out with others who wished to talk, perhaps on another topic. While early on in my research plan I had considered conducting small group interviews, I now found myself organizing a community discussion for around twenty people in which another community member would act as the "facilitator" instead of me. My role was to make homemade ice cream and beverages, customary for community meetings, and to be prepared with a list of topics to introduce if the conversation lulled. Catherine undertook the responsibility of advertising the meeting, hanging up a colorful flyer encouraging members to come and share their "piece" concerning "gender roles," and of guiding the discussion, a role I did not end up envying.

Catherine’s facilitation of the discussion actually worked well for a number of reasons. First of all, I learned that "facilitation" is not the same as conducting a very large group interview; in addition to leading the discussion, it also involves handling conflicts—and there were a few. I believe that if I had tried to facilitate the meeting, I would have become accidentally intertwined in community politics in ways Catherine probably foresaw. Thinking back, I realize that she even suggested she hang up the flyer instead of me, because, she said, someone in the community is always going to have a problem with the way you do things. Another positive aspect of Catherine’s facilitating the meeting was that the discussion seemed to serve a real purpose for the members who attended. After the first discussion, quite a few members told me they were glad that I had created such a forum for discussion on the topic of gender; the meeting enabled me to let issues important to community members emerge from the discussions instead of imposing my own questions on those attending. I held a follow-up discussion about a week later and utilized the same format; we used the fishbowl format to get things started and then abandoned it after the first half an hour in both discussions. I asked another long-term member, Sunny, to facilitate and around ten people came to the second discussion. Both conversations were tape-recorded for audio.

Many members who attended these discussions found themselves actively and reflexively engaged in coming to terms with the meanings of various gendered aspects of Twin Oaks community culture. Some members came to the meetings out of curiosity, and others for the ice-cream; many people brought their "piece" to share (as Catherine suggested in her flyer), and a few found themselves unexpectedly challenged by the conversations. I hope to represent how, within these discussions, members confronted the often nebulous definitions and meanings of a gender-balanced population, women’s space, sexism, feminism and profeminism, and "wolfing," in the history of their community. It was fascinating for me to observe how members negotiated boundaries for appropriate behaviors, the meanings of certain community structures, and the community’s history. As a newcomer to the community I had assumed that, to a large extent, these definitions were fixed and obvious.

Gender-Balanced Population

In the first discussion, I encouraged members to talk about how gender at Twin Oaks is both similar to and different from gender in dominant United States society, perhaps by drawing on their own experiences in both contexts. After we had discussed work, relationships, and sexuality—all of which I will return to in subsequent chapters—Catherine brought up that Twin Oaks has a 60:40 gender ratio policy; she had told me ahead of time that she hoped members would discuss this issue. The policy requires that the population be no more than sixty percent male or female at any time; if the community gets close to becoming more than sixty percent male or female, then no more new members of that gender will be accepted until it becomes more balanced. Catherine asked the group, "Why do we have it? What does it mean that we try to keep it balanced? Because I mean every time we get close to it and talk about it, we come up with well what does it mean? How do we count gays and lesbians?" The discussion that followed, which I will recount here, reveals how a fixed community structure can be interpreted in many ways, and members can be seen to negotiate among the multiple meanings, including historical ones. The history that the members constructed around the gender ratio was that in the 1980s, Twin Oaks, having seen the community’s high population of men, set its gender limit. The meanings constructed concerning the gender ratio were primarily about the availability of partners and balancing male and female "energy." This ratio, although it technically limits both the number of men as well as the number of women, seems to have more to do with restricting the "macho" element that exists in so many "outside world" contexts, to use a term from the discussion.

The following dialogue is from the first discussion I taped. The following contextual information situates the participants whose words are included here: Tatiana has been a member of Twin Oaks for over a year; Jesse, a male, and Lilith are long-term members; Wes has been a member of Twin Oaks for just over a year but lived in another community, East Wind, for over ten years; Forrest is a long-term male member. Nate is a long-term member of over twenty years and therefore provides a unique historical perspective; and Sunny is a woman who has lived at Twin Oaks for over five years. I pick up the conversation where Catherine has posed her question concerning the gender ratio.

Catherine: What’s the idea of having this ratio?

Tatiana: Oh I see, like is it about available partners?

Catherine: Yeah.?: Right.

Tatiana: I see.

Jesse: That’s what I’ve heard.

Lilith: [Really?]

Tatiana: [How] interesting. [[I never thought of if that way.]]

Lilith: [[/?/ more just about like vibe]]?: Yeah.?: Uh-huh.

Lilith: /Like/ not having an overabundance of female energy or an overabundance of male energy.

Catherine tries to get the group to define what "energy" is, and Wes begins explaining how it felt to have so many men living at East Wind. I pick the conversation up where Lilith further articulates how that plays out.

Lilith and Sunny begin discussing the current gender ratio, but Nate continues to reflect on its history: "In either case it was discriminating against some gender and there were people who said ‘Well but we’re supposed to be nonsexist.’" Catherine, Sunny,

Tatiana, and Frank decide that currently there are more men than women at Twin Oaks."

Yeah I think there are more men," Frank concludes; Catherine agrees.

The group agrees that a balance of gender and gendered energy is important. East Wind is determined worse off than Twin Oaks by not requiring more of a gender balance. Although members allude to an overabundance of "male energy" as more negative than an overabundance of "female energy," the topic is never directly addressed.

Women’s Space

"Women’s space" exists at Twin Oaks in the form of an all women’s residence, a women’s tea that is organized once every visitor group, occasional women’s dinners, and an annual women’s gathering held at Twin Oaks and organized by Twin Oaks women for women outside the community; the summer of 1999 was the 16^th Twin Oaks women’s gathering. During the summer, the women’s teas were held near the women’s residence, which is located in a cluster of other residences, and the women’s dinners were held at a private table in the public dining area. The women’s gathering is held at the community’s conference site about a mile away from the central areas of the community. "Women’s space" then is often temporary and more socially constructed than physically.

When I first came to Twin Oaks, I knew nothing about women’s space there. I remember being asked in my membership interview a couple of weeks after I arrived how I felt about these spaces; from that particular framing of the issue, I made a general assumption that women’s separatist activities were encouraged by the community and answered that I approved of these spaces. As I stated in the introduction, I attended the women’s tea as a visitor that, I was told, is held so Twin Oaks women can get to know visitor women. An informal women’s dinner held during my visitor period served a similar purpose. Neither was particularly well attended by either visitor or member women. I accepted the existence of these women’s spaces as positive and highly valued by the community, without probing further into the significance of these spaces for members. When I held that first gender discussion, I had been back at Twin Oaks as a resident only a week and a half. The perceived purposes of women’s space and its history in the community were not at all obvious to me, but the meaning of women’s space seemed to be implicitly understood by community members. At that point I hadn’t asked many questions. I was fascinated, within the first discussion, by the way members brought together multiple perspectives (where I had thought there was only one, which I hoped to uncover) and collaboratively constructed the meaning of past and present women’s space.

After the discussion of the 60:40 gender ratio, Jesse, a man who has lived at Twin Oaks for around eleven years, brought up Twin Oaks’ maintenance of a women’s Small Living Group. Downstairs Oneida, the women’s SLG, has several bedrooms, a comfortable living room, and a women’s library. The public spaces are accessible to anyone during the day but only to women after 6:00 PM, although the spaces are not limited to women who live there. In the discussion, several members collaboratively constructed the history and contexts of the creation of the women’s SLG. In this excerpt, Kara is a brand new member.

I then asked about changes in these spaces: what the purpose of women’s space was originally and how it functions now. In the excerpt of the discussion that follows, Becca has been a member of Twin Oaks for several months; Eric has been a member for over a year.

From these members’ negotiations of the meanings of "women’s space," it seems that what was once a structure very much connected to women’s "recovery" from the oppression of the "outside world" has waned in importance, although it still exists at Twin Oaks. Zena Goldenberg’s MA thesis documents the occurrence of twelve separate women’s groups, activities, and spaces during her stay at Twin Oaks in the summer of 1987, including a feminist theory group, a weekly women’s tea, and a women’s dinner. From her observations, between six and twenty women attended the women’s tea each week, and around thirty attended the one women’s dinner that was held during her stay. During my stay at Twin Oaks, I observed fewer women’s only events, and those that were held were not very well attended.

Although it was somewhat difficult for them to articulate, several women in the meeting constructed meanings of women’s space. Currently, according to this discussion of its significance by several women, women’s space seems to function as a relief from behavior performed by women for men: paying attention to what they look like, "taking care of men," and communicating differently when men are around. Women’s space works to counterbalance these behaviors by providing a "celebratory safe space, kind of healing" and feeling "as much comfortable in ourselves and each other as possible." One woman brought up the issue of safety. Although she maintained that she did not feel "literally threatened" by the most men living in the community, she felt "REALLY safe" living in the women’s SLG.

It is interested to note that the first members to attempt to define women’s space were men, Nate and Jesse. They seemed to focus on the rules and exact functions of the spaces, while the women suggested that they were more generally positive spaces specifically for women than actually formed for the purpose of addressing oppression or any other particular goal. In my experience attending the women’s gathering, for which I returned to the community in August, women’s space did not seem to have a specific purpose other than to create positive spaces for women. The women’s gathering offered workshops on subjects ranging from drumming to herbal tincture-making to drama. It really seemed to follow Catherine’s description of generally having a group of women organize what they want to do for a weekend.

In an interview, Lilith told me that women’s space is about having a respite from the patriarchy and healing from the wounds of oppression with people who understand. But currently women seem to be saying that at Twin Oaks, being in a group of all-women is more of a "pleasurable choice" or a "nice thing" as it is not necessary to heal wounds at this point. In the 1980’s, the feminist theory group that met addressed issues of oppression, but currently no such forum exists. It seems that Twin Oaks women are still addressing oppression, but instead of focusing on patriarchal societal arrangements, they are creating positive spaces to balance out spaces that are often hard on them as women.

Sexism

The issue of sexism came up in this first discussion and dominated a great deal of discussion time, primarily in terms of "men’s movie night," an evening once a week when a group of men had been getting together to watch videos for about a year. While there are several all-male support groups in the community, and Twin Oaks is supportive of similar all-male activities, quite a few members felt uneasy about a group of men

getting together to watch movies whose content was often sexual and/or violent. Several women and a couple of men in the group gathered for discussion expressed concerns over whether or not the men used men’s movie night as an opportunity to make derogatory comments about women, as sexism goes against the community’s bylaws. Jeremy in this excerpt is a guest of one of the members.

There is then some confusion about who should talk next between Eric and Becca; then Becca begins speaking. Seth, in the following excerpt, is a long-term member of Twin Oaks. Shawna is a visitor.

To many of the men who attended these movies, this was the first they had heard about concerns from community members. It seems the group as a whole was trying to define whether or not the movie group would be considered "sexist," a slippery task as Twin Oaks’ bylaws allow for a great deal of personal interpretation. The community’s bylaws, Article I, "[Community] Definitions and Purpose," paragraph two, "Purpose" states: "together our aim is to perpetuate and expand a society based on cooperation, sharing and equality"; item "D" continues: "which in the behavior of individuals and of the Community strives to eliminate the attitudes and results of sexism, racism, ageism, and competitiveness." Paragraph Three, "Implementation," item "H" requires "an insistence on the non-involvement by all members in acts which are defined by the Community as conflicting with the purposes and policies set forth in this Article." No specific community boundaries are described in this document, or any other official community document, regarding what is considered "sexist" behavior.

The conversation continued to explore what constituted "men’s movie night" and in what ways this group of men participated in "sexist" behavior. Several female members also challenged the men with having engaged in conversations—outside of men’s movie night—that reflected sexist attitudes. While several members, both male and female, seemed very concerned about the attitudes and behaviors of these men, other members contested their being challenged to account for themselves and reminded the group gathered for discussion that the men’s movie night group did not act or think in one specific way but rather as individuals. In the following excerpt, several members discuss the issue of some community women’s opposition to activities like men’s movie night:

As the discussion progressed further on this topic, violence in the films also emerged as an issue. Tatiana talked about feeling threatened if indeed the group’s weekly meeting consisted of, she said, a bunch of guys watching violent movies; she also mentioned that this behavior could be understood to go against the community’s self-definition as a nonviolent community.

Although the conversation about men’s movie night grew extremely intense at times, the gender discussion ended on primarily a positive note. Several members stayed for a few minutes afterwards and reflected on the discussion. A couple of members thanked me for having held the discussion. One woman said: "I think it was good to have this." I will also add here that several male members later told me that the discussion was very uncomfortable and/or frustrating for them, especially around the issue of men’s movie night, for various reasons.

Feminism and Profeminism

Community definitions of profeminist behavior, as well as definitions of Twin Oaks as a feminist and/or profeminist community, arose in the second meeting I helped organize on the topic of gender, which I held at the request of quite a few members who had attended the first discussion. I publicized it as "Another Gender Discussion," to follow up the first, and members’ comments at the end of the meeting were similar to those at the first discussion. While most members appreciated the opportunity to talk about the issues that came up, a few left frustrated.

In this meeting, Jesse brought up his struggle with trying to practice "profeminist" behavior at Twin Oaks, and the group discussed what community expectations of profeminism exist. According to this discussion, there were stricter expectations of feminist/profeminist behavior in the past. Nudity solidarity—men leaving their shirts on where women are not allowed to go shirtless—and equality in language were defined as profeminist behavior in this discussion, and as behavior that is unusual in the context of the outside world. To introduce the speakers in the excerpt that follows, Tim has been a member of Twin Oaks for over a year, and Callie and Tamara are long-term members.

The existence of multiple definitions of feminism and profeminist behavior then emerged in the discussion:

After this discussion of variance in members’ definitions of feminism, Tim brought up the community’s definition of itself in terms of feminism and profeminism, which has never been formalized, and how that comes up for him as a member of the recruitment team (recruiting members involves placing advertisements, giving public talks, etc.). The history of community identification in these ways was then negotiated. While the community once explicitly defined itself as a feminist/profeminist community, such definitions seem to gradually have been abandoned, in some ways making the boundaries between Twin Oaks and the "outside" less obvious.

Although Twin Oaks is currently negotiating its identification with feminism, members continue to address issues of empowerment in many community practices. The utilization of feminist facilitation techniques for community discussions, the equalization of standards of nudity for men and women, and the practice of gender equality in language by many members, all work to equalize power. But as members articulated in the previous excerpt of dialogue, although they feel they are "in a great place" in terms of addressing these issues, they are still "not there." For instance, maintaining a norm against wolfing is constantly a struggle in the community. Members are specifically concerned with male members becoming romantically involved with female visitors, due to a gendered imbalance in power that may already exist; wolfing by females is less common and is not perceived by most community members as an abuse of power in the same way.

Wolfing

The issue of "wolfing," members becoming romantically involved with visitors (usually male members with female visitors), is a sensitive topic and while the discussion had come close to the issue several times, it wasn’t until Tim brought it up directly that the group gathered for discussion examined the practice in-depth. The following excerpt of discussion illustrates individuals’ expectations, as well as expectations of the community as a whole, concerning the relationships between members and visitors, and a consideration of whether or not these expectations have changed over time. Members suggest that wolfing has perhaps become more acceptable to the community in recent years. In the conversation that follows, Sandy is a female guest who is thinking about becoming a member; Rusty is a male member of several years; and Constance is a brand new member.