Last August, I wrote a piece about Bama Rush and the current fascination with Greek Life, fueled by TikTok and a subgenre of videos known as #Rushtok. In that piece, I hinted that I was working on something much larger about Greek Life at the University of Alabama, which was initially a podcast made with a team of producers and researchers. We spoke to dozens of past and present participants in and around the UA Greek System, and it’s finally settled into this form: a five-part series, all published here on Culture Study, with bonus audio for those who want to go really deep. 

This week, Rush is in full swing at Alabama. Over on Instagram, I’m curating a seemingly endless stream of Rushtoks — but here, we’ll be diving into the past and present of the UA Greek System, from the performance of Southern femininity to the secret society that serves as a political training ground (and has quietly and not-so-quietly worked to control the campus status quo for decades).  

If you weren’t part of Greek Life, some of this is going to seem like stories from a different planet. If you were, some of this will be very “oh well yes, of course we all had to present ourselves to a committee of older women who told us whether our shorts were too short!” But some of it will still surprise you, or make you think more about how practices that are pretty objectively fucked up become normalized through repetition and the narrative of history. There’s something for everyone! 

Finally, if you get to the end of this article and wonder why I didn’t talk about [insert specific aspect of Bama Rush here] — be patient, we’ll get there.