Books and Boys: Heterosexual Black Women’s Class Projects and the Positioning of Collegiate Romance

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Intimacy, Romance, and Relationships

Abstract

The present research draws on Hamiliton and Armstrong’s (2021) “class projects” to examine how cisgender heterosexual Black collegiate women position and approach romantic relationships as they pursue their desired economic existence through a professional pathway. This work uses 68 interviews and 28 participant journals from 39 participants’ first year at four-year colleges or universities. The classed futures to which participants oriented themselves and their romantic lives were informed by historical and contemporary contexts where anti-Black racism and racialized gender oppression shape economic, cultural, and social resources for realizing their desired class location. Black collegiate women saw their educational credentialing and professional success as their primary, if not only, path for class mobility for some and class reproduction for others. They and their families were committed to their academic achievement for future professional success and used the resources available to them to get women to college in pursuit of their desired careers. Moreover, the position expectations to achieve were foundational to women’s constructions of Black womanhood and what it means to be a Black woman in college. However, they engaged racialized gendered messages that problematized their heterosexualities and, by extension, gendered relationship formation. For Black collegiate women, this contributed to an underlying logic that positioned romance as positive when future-oriented but potentially detrimental during degree-seeking. I explored how some women’s investments in academics and future professional success contributed to romantic deprivation for some women, while other women sought conditions under which collegiate romance could coincide and support their class projects.

Author

• Mercedez D. Dunn-Gallier, University of Maryland-Baltimore County