Hate crimes happen in material spaces attached to particular forms of meaning: the street, the bedroom, the workplace, the yard, the fence, the back of a truck, and the fraternity home.
Recently, an Emory University student was dragged out of a frat house by his neck because an alum at a party thought he was gay. The incident has created a public outcry, having been taken up by Gawker, Perez Hilton, and several news agencies. And it isn't isolated--the homophobic actions of some have had real and high profile consequences for queer teens in the last few months. While these incidents do not surprise us, having lived through the death of Matthew Shepard and other hate crimes in recent decades against queer folk, we can still wonder about the relationship between access to space and the sanctity of life in this country, decades after desegregation.
The civil rights movements of the 1970's are often remembered for the court decisions and legislation they precipitated: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sexual harassment law, and civil rights protections for persons with disabilities. What is not often remembered, outside of the racial desegregation context, is that the demand for access to space was a paramount concern for all of these movements. That is, ending the preclusion of marginalized communities from privileged or excluded spaces was both a symbolic and material gesture that dominant groups could no longer commit institutional or structural violence against them. Access to space, in this context, served and continues to serve both a real and figurative function as a measure of social justice. More contemporaneously, access for persons with disabilities has become a legal mandate, but many of the same demands were made by feminists in the 1970's who wanted improved living and childcare facilities, curb cuts, health care, and protections in the workplace as part of a comprehensive civil rights package.
Access to space for marginalized groups is far from perfect or complete. Indeed, exclusion serves as an important and powerful marker of just how undesirable certain types of human variation are to those who control the boundaries of space. And while it is illegal to exclude formally someone from a fraternity, an atmosphere of hatred in any context is enough to make someone feel unwelcome to the point of not partaking in activities that they otherwise may choose to. Sometimes, marginalized people establish parallel structures and spaces of inclusion, as with black fraternities and sororities. But when the space of the frat house serves as a meeting place for both members and non-members alike, it is not the ability to establish these outside spaces that is important, but how members of a community are treated within the bounds of a public space.
Without getting into personal blame, name calling, or the debates that have been occurring around the event at Emory this weekend, it is significant to note that many of the defenses of the alum who physically dragged another student out of the frat house claim that this was a "private" party, and that expelling the gay student was of no consequence. This is an interesting understanding of the word "private," particularly because fraternity houses occupy a particular historical and contemporary set of meanings about space. At Emory, the frat houses are owned by the university and run by the same division of Campus Life that runs the dorms for other students.
Unlike other dorms, however, where common rooms are not used for keggers and where entrance is limited to residents and their guests, frat houses are public spaces by virtue of how frequently they are entered by non-residents. Their architecture and layout not only lends them towards this kind of use of space, but supplants their function as party spaces with wide open areas in which hundreds of undergraduate bodies can smoosh together on weekends. Given that anyone can come in and out of these spaces, is there a reasonable expectation upon entering that a gay student in a Wizard hat will be allowed inside? There does not seem to be a reasonable justification for expecting any kind of danger or violence, unless one looks to the social context of fraternities, which are arguably spaces in which certain types of masculine behavior get privileged over behavior deemed feminine or abnormal.
It is in these spaces that the codes of masculinity and femininity get pronounced in certain ways on a college campus. Emory fraternities, in fact, have a history of being sites of violence. Even when queer students are anecdotally mentioned in relation to Greek life, one wonders why they do not exist in greater numbers if the culture is, in fact, so open to diversity. This isn't a call to include people in hostile spaces. But it is important to think about what spaces tell us about who is socially valued or de-valued. Dragging a student out of a house by his neck is not just a physically violent gesture--it is a metaphor for the violence of exclusion that happens in social contexts every day toward many people. Forcing someone to evacuate a space by crossing a threshold is not unlike a water fountain with a sign reading "WHITES ONLY." In fact, it is more like a segregated water fountain with a fence around it secured by a padlock.
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