"A Certain Type of Man": A Colonial Absence in Latinx Men's Antiviolence Education

• In Event: Decolonizing Academic Spaces: Engaging Intersectionality, Social Identities, Racial Consciousness, and Action Toward an Anticolonial Education

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores how Latinx men collegiate anti-violence educators understand, participate in, and challenge collegiate rape cultures. It is hoped that such a conversation engenders a programmatic framing of sexualized violence that reflexively moves through and beyond a colonial dialectics of violence.

Theoretical Framework
Sexualized violence is not a single issue but a discursive, material regime, a complex weaving of beliefs and practices that are historically embedded in nearly every facet of American society. Within college culture, occurrences of sexualized violence create a climate of fear that prohibits students from successfully pursuing their education. Decolonial theory understands that sexualized violence is a foundational component of the settler state (Deer, 2009; Smith 2005). Concurrently, feminist scholarship documents how sexualized violence is normalized, and sequentially rehearsed, through hegemonic masculinity (Richie, 2012; Davis, 1985).

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 Latinx masculinities and sexualized violence. As a result, scholarship endorses a narrative that characterizes anti-violence education as a predominantly white ontological endeavor and discursively separates sexualized violence from the institutional and interpersonal violence omnipresent in United States society. This potentially alienates Latinx men whom might otherwise do anti-violence work and limits how educators understand and prevent collegiate violence.

Methods/Data
In conversation with Hurtado’s work on Latinx masculinities (2016), this paper analyzes data drawn from grounded, qualitative study conducted with a men’s anti-violence group at a large, public, minority-majority university. 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 consider (Tarrant, 2013). This paper addresses these omissions, detailing how Latinx men once and currently active in anti-violence frame sexualized violence in relation to colonial formations of race, and how they operationalize said frames in their anti-violence work.

Scholarly Significance
This work primarily argues that anti-blackness, settler moves to innocence, and neo liberal economies of necessity, converged in the framings of sexualized violence propagated by Latinx anti-violence educators. 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 racialized men. 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 with an awareness of the historical and contemporary relationships between sexualized violence, white supremacy, and settler colonialism.

Author

• Diego Luna, Highline Community College