It’s Always a Little Awkward: Hooking Up and Committed Relationships on a College Campus

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Hookup Culture

Abstract

Recent social scientific research investigates the sexual regime of hookups on today’s US college campuses. Hookup culture is often seen as the result of male dominance within the sexual arena on campus; it is a masculine standard of sexuality in the college arena. However few research efforts question this understanding of hooking up as ‘guy’s sex’, thereby acknowledging conventional gender ideologies. This research ethnographically explores hookup culture on campus via the subjectivities of male students. It argues that the subjectivities and interactional dynamics of hookup culture are gendered, but that an understanding of casual sex as a men’s standard is incorrect. It also argues that hookup culture is dispersed, ambiguous and contested in the college environment. Hooking up demands relational and emotional labor and is about the performance of specific interaction rituals.

Author

• jitse jonne schuurmans, University of Amsterdam