Respectability and Responsibility: HBCU Women’s Gender Strategies for Heterosexuality

Abstract

Collegiate environments are racialized and classed locations accompanied by both cultural rules for sex and romance and institutional support that make idealized experiences viable. While historically Black colleges/universities (HBCUs) endorse a racialized contract for heterosexual monogamy that upholds broader institutional commitments to respectable middle-class Black gender, these environments often cannot reliably support the sexual arrangements they compel. Using interviews with 30 cisgender heterosexual Black undergraduate women at an HBCU, I identified three gender strategies they used to navigate their romantic and sexual lives within these conditions. This research contributes to scholarship on gender strategies as interactional processes that are informed by race and class. Moreover, I demonstrate how institutional contexts facilitate or inhibit idealized sexual experiences for the accomplishment of heteronormative gender. As cishet HBCU women attempted to resolve cultural and structural constraints on their heterosexual lives within and beyond their campus, the dilemmas they faced revealed how racial, class, and gender structures make negotiations of heterosexual interaction particularly perplexing for middle-class aspirant Black women and the limitations of respectable middle-class Black womanhood to mitigate social and sexual vulnerabilities.