The social organization of masculine violence in nighttime leisure scenes

Abstract

Recent scholarship on masculinity and crime suggests that men who have difficulty asserting their masculine status due to social marginalization (across age, class, and racial lines) have a higher likelihood of engaging in violent behavior to offset their lack of social power in other areas. While marginalization can abet the development of masculine violence, in this article I suggest more attention to the mitigating effects of structural changes and cultural contexts is necessary for a richer understanding of how masculine violence plays out. Drawing on multi-method ethnographic data from a case of one major US city with a thriving nighttime cultural economy, I aim to show how the structural characteristics of nighttime leisure scenes create situations for the enactment of particular forms of violence that reflect a number of subterranean convergences with the masculinization of the cultural economy.

Keywords:

• violence
• fighting
• masculinity
• gender
• nightlife
• qualitative methods

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Tammy Anderson, Richard Tewksbury, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rape and sexual assault constitute one notable exception. National crime data routinely indicate that sexual assault is the only crime category where women are more likely to be victimized, at between 5 and 18 times the rate for men (Berzofsky, Krebs, Langton, Planty, & Smiley-McDonald, 2013).

2. Table 1 was compiled from Sean O’Neal’s ‘DJ Nights’ column in the Philadelphia City Paper. It is a weekly listing of nightlife events, specifying genres and performers at specific venues within the city. For this table, the second week in May was selected for a sample annual comparison.

3. Enacted federally in 2003, The RAVE (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act prohibits ‘an individual from knowingly opening, maintaining, managing, controlling, renting, leasing, making available for use, or profiting from any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance, and for other purposes.’ The law thus discourages EDM event promoters from furnishing health services to sick or dehydrated attendees, as doing so may be interpreted as tacit knowledge of illegal drug use at such events.

4. Prior research has distinguished between incidents and accounts (Kavanaugh, 2013) and that distinction informs Table 3 as well. While incidents reflect simple counts of involvement in assault, accounts reflect incidents discussed in enough detail to provide additional contextual and behavioral information. Some in the sample believed too much time had passed since the assault occurred or were too intoxicated at the time of the incident to recall details and opted not to elaborate (N = 3). Most accounts elaborated on incidents that occurred within the past year (N = 15).

5. During interviews respondents were asked about the type of nightlife events and venues they had frequented in the past five years. In discussing violent experiences, they were asked to specify the event or venue where the incident occurred. These were then classified as either commercial or underground based on either direct observations performed at that particular event or venue, or the respondent characterization of the event or venue.

6. Thornton (1996) has challenged the utility of the commercial-underground dichotomy, noting that with growing popularity and commercial success, all nightlife scenes became more sexualized, EDM scenes certainly being no exception. Anderson (2009), however, suggests that American nightlife events can be classified on a continuum and are anchored somewhere between ‘authentic’ underground types and those that conform more rigidly to aspects of commercial nightclub and bar culture, with an emphasis on hooking up and heavy episodic alcohol use.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Justice [grant number 2004-IJ-CX-0040], [grant number 2008-IJ-CX-0004].