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Greek life in American colleges and universities is characterized by white hetero-masculine dominance. A large scholarship has documented Greek life’s association with women’s sexual violence, yet much less is known about how men—who are ostensibly privileged in these settings—experience sexual harassment and assault. Using 15 interviews with fraternity members attending an elite, midwestern university, we examine men’s experiences of intra-fraternal sexual violence. We describe fraternity members creating and deploying a white hetero-masculine discourse of “brotherhood” that institutionalizes intra-fraternal sexual violence, makes it illegible, and gives its perpetrators impunity. We also show how the brotherhood discourse differentially deploys resources and power to fraternity brothers based on their intersectional location and relationship to intra-fraternal sexual violence. Future applications of the brotherhood discourse in fraternities and other institutional contexts can help us better understand how such organizations reinscribe intersectional power hierarchies.
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Buddy Watch: Care and Constraint Under the Watchful Eye of Military Suicide Risk Management in War
Abstract Officially referred to as “unit watch” and more colloquially as “buddy watch,” the use of continuous direct observation and restrictive measures enforced by peers is a widely used, though controversial, tool in the US Army's suicide prevention efforts. Borrowing from the Army concept and system of the battle buddy, the partnering of soldiers who assist each other in and out of combat, the unit watch is simultaneously conceived as a means of “family” concern, treatment, surveillance, restraint, and even mentorship. Drawing on fieldwork among soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I explore what the practice of unit watch reveals about institutional and psychiatric interventions as a form of constraint‐as‐care in settings of global US military power. I emphasize the bodily and affective dimensions of the unit watch and the forms of sociality, including coerced obligation and forced intimacy, that the unit watch can produce. Soldiers’ accounts of being watched and watching others under the sign of unauthorized violence also highlight the tense and ambivalent nature of managing suicide in material, institutional, and geopolitical settings organized for the production of violence.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1851014
- PAR ID:
- 10453249
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ethos
- Volume:
- 48
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0091-2131
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 317-335
- Size(s):
- p. 317-335
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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