Intersectional Masculinities and Antiviolence Activism: Confronting Sexualized Violence

• In Event: 44.019 - College Communities in the New Era of Title IX: Confronting Sexualized Violence

Abstract

If every 2015 sexualized violence survivor were in one place they would fill the Alamodome four times over. Decolonial theory understands that sexualized violence is a foundational component of systematic racism (Smith, 2005; Richie, 2012). Concurrently, feminist scholarship documents how sexualized violence is normalized, and sequentially rehearsed, through hegemonic masculinity (Katz, 2006). Within college culture, sexualized violence creates a climate of fear that prohibits students from successfully pursuing their education (Freedman, 2013).

Men, as the primary perpetrators of sexualized violence and the assumed, though not universally realized, beneficiaries of the heteropatriarchal system that normalizes sexualized violence, have an instrumental role to play in anti-violence movement. However, little work has been done that examines the discursive and experiential relationships between collegiate masculinities of color and sexualized violence. As a result, scholarship endorses a narrative that characterizes anti-violence education as a predominantly white ontological endeavor and discursively separates collegiate sexualized violence from the institutional and interpersonal violence omnipresent in United States society. This potentially alienates men of color whom might otherwise do anti-violence work and limits how educators understand and prevent collegiate violence.

This paper engages a grounded, qualitative study conducted at a large, public, minority-majority university to better understand the experiences of men of color in peer-to-peer anti-violence college organizations. Male privilege benefits all men, yet this privilege is mitigated and/or augmented by numerous factors – including but not limited to gender performance, race, citizen status, sexuality, and class - that whitestream curriculums rarely take into account (Tarrant, 2013). This paper addresses these omissions, detailing how collegiate men of color once and currently active in anti-violence work understand, participate in, and challenge college rape culture.

While in conversation with research that documents the criminalization of men of color and the corollary racial micro-aggressions they endure within higher education (Rios, 2011), this work primarily rests on the finding that men of color anti-violence educators contest and internalize hegemonic masculinity as apart of a strategic shifting of identity. In addition, the participant’s stories suggest that a diversity additive approach to collegiate anti-violence work is not enough. Rather, anti-violence curriculum should engage the experiential knowledges of men of color. Collegiate sexualized violence is a phenomenon intertwined with the sociopolitical cleavages in United States society, and if college campus violence is to be curbed nationwide educative models that challenge it need to do so intersectionally.

Author

• Diego Luna, Highline Community College