Shaming Jane: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis of How College Students Employ the Sexual Double Standard in Peer Interventions

Through dual quantitative and critical-interpretive (feminist Foucauldian) analyses, we examine how college students frame risk when trying to prevent a close friend from hooking up while drunk. Our analysis of participants’ (N = 539) open-ended responses to a hypothetical scenario revealed five discursive strategies of corporeal control: diseased body, dangerous body, marked body, gross body, and remorseful body. We argue that these strategies both reflect and reinforce the sexual double standard, serving as complex dimensions of the sexual double standard in hooking up culture as it affects heterosexual women and men. Through Foucauldian theory, we position the sexual double standard as a technology of self and of power, serving a larger ethic of care for college students.