UC Davis

Amidst increased public attention towards sexual assault in Greek life, colleges and universities across the United States have constructed policy, developed trainings, and established survivor support services in an attempt to prevent and respond to sexual violence and sexual harassment. Additionally, students in Greek life, predominantly women, have issued calls for cultural change within their student communities. This dissertation utilizes interviews from 47 Greek life members on the UC Davis campus to examine the socio-cultural and structural conditions within Greek life that enable sexual harm to persist, and to identify constraints community members confront when attempting to advocate for change. I examine gendered subjectivity in relation to sexual harm, illustrating how women and men position themselves in proximity to sexual harm, as potential victims and bystanders, respectively, and the strategies they undertake to manage risk. Although most women, and some men, understand sexual harm as a social problem undergirded by structural inequality, institutional imperatives of the university and Greek life more broadly fail to support structural interrogations into harm and inequality. In the absence of larger structural changes, students rely on individual strategies and adaptations to manage the threat of sexual harm.