Navigating Campus Hookup Culture: LGBTQ Students and College Hookups

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Doing Sexuality

Abstract

Research on the college hookup scene consistently shows it to be heavily gendered and heteronormative. In spite of the extensive research on hookup culture in general, there is limited data on how LGBTQ students navigate hookups on college campuses. Yet queer hookups potentially provide a space for students to challenge the dominant understandings of gender and sexuality that permeate the college hookup scene, creating alternative visions for how hookups, and sexual relationships in general, may proceed. Drawing on interviews with 24 LGBTQ college students at a regional university in the southeastern United States, this research investigates how LGBTQ college students negotiate the hookup scene on college campuses. As we show, LGBTQ students are sharply critical of dominant hook up culture and aim to challenge heteronormative practices by deconstructing gendered patterns of behavior, emphasizing communication and consent during sexual encounters, and queering standards of pleasure. But, in spite of their stated aims, many respondents uncritically replicated gendered practices in their hookups, limiting the transformative potential of queer hookups. Thus, this study indicates that while LGBTQ students are actively working to remake hookup culture, and, in some ways, are succeeding, they continue to struggle with particular gendered practices and assumptions, indicating that barriers to a more just hookup culture remain, even amongst those who have made the most progress.

Authors

• Ellen Lamont, Appalachian State University

• Teresa Roach, Florida State University

• Sope Kahn, Appalachian State University