By Mercedez Dunn-Gallier
At Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the emerging Black middle class is schooled in respectability. These are codes of conduct for “acceptable” behavior that HBCUs expect of their students to signal normalcy, disprove negative racial beliefs, and distinguish themselves, as one handbook puts it, “a particular people, set apart for excellence” (Bennett College N.D.: 51). HBCU women, in particular, are taught to embody a Black femininity that is polished and controlled—including how they dress, speak, and engage in sex and dating.
On the surface, the instructions seem simple: HBCU girl meets a suitable HBCU boy on the Quad (or insert some other campus meet-cute scenario), they fall in love, graduate, and enter the ranks of the educated Black middle-class as a married couple. Their sex lives should be heteronormative, respectable, and responsible. After all, intimate involvements are more than a social expectation of collegiate life for them. They matter for women’s social status and the advancement of Black people more broadly. But what happens when this path to respectable Black womanhood isn’t straightforward?
In my research with 30 cisgender heterosexual undergraduate women, I uncover how HBCU women navigate a sexual contract shaped by race, gender, and aspirant class. Their experiences revealed the contradictions and challenges of accomplishing Black respectability through collegiate sex and romance within this distinct yet understudied context.
Despite being told the kind of sexual experiences they should want, HBCU campus life didn’t necessarily make these experiences easy to access. Cishet women outnumbered men, the community was watching their every move, men seemed less invested in the expectations promoted by the HBCU, and partnerships with these men weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Women in my study devised what Hochschild and Machung (1989) call “gender strategies” to reconcile these conflicts. They used cultural ideas around race, class, femininity, and heterosexuality to make sense of and pursue sex, romance, and sexual health through three strategies: (1) opting out, (2) paying to play, and (3) calling the shots.
The first strategy, opting out, was the most popular. Women exited their HBCU’s sexual scene, but they didn’t abandon sex and romance altogether. Most became involved with Black, twenty-something, and recently or soon-to-be degreed men at other universities and around the city. This was one way women remained invested in respectable middle-class Black womanhood even though their HBCU didn’t provide the romantic and sexual opportunities for it.
With the second strategy, paying to play, women rolled with the institutional norms and cultural expectations of respectable middle-class Black gender while involved with on-campus men. Following the rules seemed to keep some study participants safe from sexual and social risks and signaled that they accomplished respectability. More often though, playing along with their HBCU’s sexual contract and respectable Black womanhood came at women’s expense when men didn’t uphold their end of the arrangement. As a result, these women faced unfulfilling sexual and romantic involvements, sexual coercion, and minimization of autonomy.
Through the final strategy, calling the shots, women expanded the parameters of conventional respectable middle-class Black womanhood to act with more autonomy on their HBCU’s sexual scene. Study participants stuck to their own expectations, even though on-campus men often challenged them. Ultimately, women who called the shots relied on themselves and their individual choices to protect themselves in the face of intersecting power systems. And when things went “wrong,” in their sexual lives, they blamed themselves, even if the fault wasn’t necessarily theirs.
While there were some glimmers of satisfying sexual and romantic involvements on women’s terms, no strategy reliably resolved women’s woes. The structural and ideological entanglements of race, class, gender, and heterosexuality contributed to women’s dilemmas, and individual-level solutions to reconcile these were insufficient. Nonetheless, HBCU women grappled with these systems as they played out in their lives while attempting to be the “right” kind of Black women –promoting their social status and confronting anti-Black racism. But such narrow definitions of appropriate Black womanhood left many stuck between their HBCU’s expectations, their own interests, and gender power struggles.
This study draws on participants’ wisdom and action to reveal the potential and limitations of interactional processes, such as gender strategies, for (re)scripting, expanding, and updating norms and expectations surrounding Black gender and sexuality. Significant constraints made it difficult for women to effectively navigate their sexual lives. Black women need more expansive frameworks to imagine and pursue sex and gender that are rooted in self-definition, rather than expectations for them to contort themselves to fit tight boxes created by race, class, and gender rules. As crucial sites for positive Black identity and resistance, it is vital that HBCUs interrogate their commitment to Black respectability. What’s the value in racial uplift when Black women’s autonomy is dropped?
Reference:
Bennett College. n.d. Bennett belle book 2015–2017: Student handbook. Greensboro, NC: Bennett College. https://www.bennett.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Bennett_Belle_Handbook_2015-2017.pdf.
Mercedez Dunn-Gallier is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health. Her research engages Black feminist and intersectional approaches to expand sociological understandings of Black gender, sexuality, and sexual health.