Signs, Songs, and Dr. Seuss: The Activism of LGBTQ College Students Challenging the Hostile Messages of Campus Preachers

ABSTRACT

LGBTQ youth participation in activism on university campuses helps students to build resiliency and thrive as college students. Campus preachers are a catalyst of such activism among LGBTQ students and their allies. Sociological research has largely overlooked LGBTQ activism aimed at localized conditions such as campuses. Additionally, the phenomenon of campus preachers is largely absent from the social science literature. The current study targets this gap by examining the tactics college students use to contest the anti-LGBTQ messages of campus preachers at their universities. The dataset consists of articles drawn from online student newspapers at four-year, public universities in the United States, published between 2010 and 2020. Centered in the framework of contestation, intentionality, and collective identity, our analysis reveals the LGBTQ students asserted their agency and visibility by challenging the anti-LGBTQ messages of campus preachers through intentionally selected tactics, and in doing so, they often built solidarity with non-LGBTQ students. We conclude that by engaging in such activism aimed at the localized campus culture, LGBTQ students used the visitations of the campus preachers as opportunities to engage the intrapersonal and interpersonal components of thriving, employing agency, creativity, resilience, and social connectedness to counter the messages designed to denigrate and oppress them.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ We draw on Woodford et al. (2018:421–22) to define heterosexism and cisgenderism: “Heterosexism is a cultural ideology that perpetuates sexual stigma by denying and denigrating any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community … . Similarly, cisgenderism is a cultural ideology that perpetuates sexual stigma by denying and denigrating any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community.”

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Notes on contributors

M. N. Barringer

M. N. Barringer (she/her) is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Florida. Her research interests include sexualities, gender, religion, and applied sociology. Her academic articles also cover religiosity, religious identity, and birth cohort attitudes. Her work has been published in journals such as Social Currents, Journal of Homosexuality, and Sociological Inquiry.

B. Savage

B. Savage is an assistant professor of sociology at Louisiana Tech University. Her research interests include race, gender, sexualities, religion, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Her work has been published in Teaching Sociology, Sociological Spectrum, and Sociological Inquiry, among others.

Caroline Howard

Caroline Howard received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of North Florida in 2020. Currently, she works at the University of Florida Health–Jacksonville as a clinical research coordinator. Besides her interest and engagement in the healthcare sector, she also has experience in evaluation research and program analysis, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and data science in general.