Fraternal Masculinities: Dancing, Performing, and Queering Brotherhoods

Abstract

Fraternal Masculinities: Dancing, Performing, and Queering Brotherhoods looks at the shared experiences of eight male students of color between 2017 and 2019 as they established a newly formed chapter of the Fi Iota Alpha Fraternity, Inc.—a Latino fraternity on the University of Michigan campus. In an effort to establish a “different fraternity” from the ones that were on campus, these students developed a culture of public performances. By singing, dancing, and performing improvisational theatre in public, the group challenged the intellectual, emotional, and physical limitations that they felt intergenerational masculinities had placed on them as men of color. In intimate and private spaces, they practiced a culture of care, nurture, and love that allowed them to be open about their feelings, share their traumas, embody effeminate choreographies, and develop a culture of unity that lasted even beyond graduation. Through this culture of performance and love, they were able to volunteer as facilitators in theatre workshops in various prisons in the state of Michigan. Fraternal Masculinities offers an outlook to the potential of new masculinities that can be found from within homosocial spaces. Fraternal Masculinities builds on Alfredo Mirandé’s Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture (1997) by continuing to highlight Latino men who do not identify with the problematic stereotypes of machista behaviors and the hypersexualization of men of color’s bodies. This project also works through understanding a feminist centered masculinity among Latino men that Aida Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha allude to in Beyond Machismo: Intersectional Latino Masculinties (2016). This project highlights the use of jotería pedagogies and praxis that allows us to see brotherhoods as spaces where behaviors, men, and community can be radically queered.