Event

Dr. Ispa-Landa analyzes women's sexual assault prevention efforts within historically white Greek life at an elite university. This research highlights how women's strategies for personal safety intersect with their efforts to gain social status within settings that institutionalize gendered power imbalances. As I show, these strategies can paradoxically increase vulnerability to sexual violence, particularly for women in "middle-tier" sororities within a rigid hierarchical system that ranks sorority houses into tiers from highest to lowest status. However, my research also reveals complex patterns in how these same women reject victim-blaming narratives and place the blame for sexual violence on faulty institutional resources, a trend that suggests differences in college women's understandings of sexual violence from studies conducted in earlier decades. Findings indicate both stability and change in how college women understand victim-blaming narratives and university resources like Title IX. Implications for theory and research on elite cultures and femininities, organizational culture, and the policy landscape surrounding campus sexual violence are discussed.