Respectability, Responsibility, and Resistance: Heterosexual HBCU Women's Negotiations of Sexuality, Romance, and Sexual Health

This dissertation explores the sexual and romantic experiences of heterosexual undergraduate women enrolled at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) to provide a broader picture of sex, dating, and sexual vulnerability for Black college women. Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty Black heterosexual cisgender women, I uncover how racialization and gendering of sexualities shape emerging middle-class women’s negotiations of sex, romance, and sexual health. This study is guided by three related research questions: (1) In what ways does the sexual landscape of HBCUs inform racialized, classed, and gendered repertoires for sexual practice? (2) How do race, class, and gender inequities shape HBCU women’s sexual experiences and expectations? and (3) In what ways do women’s negotiations of sex, sexual health, and romance resist and reinforce existing inequities in heterosexual encounters? In the first article, “‘We Want Relationships:’ Romantic Aspirations and HBCU Women’s Performances of Race, Class, and Gender,” I explore the pursuit of heterosexual romance and sex as an integral part of the HBCU collegiate experience and elite Black female identity. The women considered committed monogamous relationships the ideal context for fulfilling their sexual and romantic desires during matriculation. However, they faced obstacles to achieving these relationships. Efforts to accomplish a particular heteronormative Black middle-class gender performance in the face of limited access to the aligned relationship structure complicated women’s negotiations of sex and romance. The second article, “In Pursuit of Power Coupling: Heterosexual Women’s Navigations of Sex, Romance, and Sexual Health at HBCUs,” identifies three main strategies HBCU women deployed to navigate this tension within a matrix of domination that shapes sexual and social vulnerabilities. This article considers the possibilities and limitations of sexual agency as both a means to resolve this bind and a force that challenges the ideological constraints of Black middle-class female sexuality. The final article, “‘Keep Your Eyes Open’: HBCU Women’s Peer Sexual Advice and the (Re)production of Vigilance,” reveals how dominant discourses surrounding Black women’s problematized sexualities are taken up, resisted, and reinforced. Through peer sexual advice, HBCU women construct vigilance as central to their sexualities. They explain the responsibility of Black college women to protect themselves from sexual health risk and to establish respectable sexual identities. This study of how HBCU women negotiate their sexuality has implications for understanding racialized class and gender performances more generally. Further, this work highlights the significance of institutional context and racial, classed, and gendered locations for college heterosexuality and sexual health scholarship. I demonstrate the need for public health approaches rooted in Black feminism that focus on the fullness of Black women’s sexual lives and how systems of power impact it. Lastly, HBCUs are centered as a critical site for the study of Black collegiate life and addressing intersectional inequities.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170063/1/mddunn_1.pd