Total Frat Moves: Assessing Enactments of Masculinity on Fraternity Instagram Accounts

Abstract

Society has expectations that dictate “acceptable” gender portrayals for men and women. Societal expectations are often produced and reinforced by the media. Using content analytic methods, the present study examined masculinity as gender performance among fraternity Instagram pages. A total of 393 Instagram posts were analyzed across five dimensions of masculinity. Our results indicated that more than two-thirds of the posts had at least one dimension of hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, there were dimensions of hegemonic masculinity that occurred more frequently than other dimensions. Additionally, there were significant differences between the number of the likes received for posts with specific indicators of masculinity. Future research and theoretical implications regarding these dimensions of masculinity are discussed.

Keywords:

• fraternities
• hegemonic masculinity
• Instagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Our sampling strategy did not a priori filter out fraternities that were not created for White, heterosexual, and cisgender members. Thus, we categorized the fraternities post-hoc based on the dominant identity of membership. Of the 53 fraternities, 7.5% (n = 4) fell outside the bounds of a White, heterosexual, cisgender social fraternity (three were for Black members and one was for Queer members). We examined the frequencies and likes of the sample without the posts from these fraternities, and the results were not meaningfully different. Thus, we used the original, combined sample.

2. To maintain consistency across analyses, we retained the full sample of posts to examine whether the dimensions of hegemonic masculinity predicted likes. However, we separately examined whether dominance over women predicted likes in only the mixed-gender posts; we did not find evidence that dominance predicted likes, $\mathit{B}$ = .170, SE_B = .250, p = .498, 95% CI [−.321, .660].