Sexuality Discourses and LGBQ Students’ Interpretations of Campus Climate in the Contemporary US

ABSTRACT

Recent US studies showed that perceptions of campus climate vary considerably across individual LGBQ students, with some students reporting friendly climates and others reporting persistent hostility. Although researchers have identified several factors that contribute to the perceptual variations, they have paid limited attention to the role of sexuality discourses. The present study sought to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing in-depth interviews. The analysis showed that LGBQ students drew on two major discourses to guide their interpretations of campus climate. A majority of students drew on post-closet discourse to celebrate their visibility on campus, LGBQ-friendly courses, and straight classmates’ positive reactions. A smaller number of students drew on queer discourse to question the meaning of LGBQ students’ visibility and criticize heterosexist biases in classrooms. Overall, these results highlighted the importance of the competing discourses, which set LGBQ students’ expectations and guided their interpretations of campus experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Campus climate
• college students
• discourses
• heteronormativity
• LGBTQ
• sexual minorities

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank study participants sharing their stories. We also gratefully acknowledge assistance from TehQuin Forbes, Wayne Rivera Cuadrado, Randi Ingram, Lawrence Stacey, and undergraduate assistants.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We use the phrase LGBQ, instead of LGBTQ, because our sample included only a few non-binary students and no transgender students. Transgender students face unique challenges on college campuses (Garvey et al., 2019) and deserve special attention in future research.

2. The analysis for peer harassment (i.e., the third theme of campus climate) showed similar results that highlighted the presence of the two competing discourses as we reported in another paper (Ueno et al., 2021).

3. We use pseudonyms to anonymize participants. For each quote, we provide information about their age, race, and sexual and gender identities. For those who participated in follow-up interviews, we present information of the respondent when the quote was obtained. Some participants changed how they described their sexual identities between the two interviews.

4. As this example indicates, some participants identified as queer but did not necessarily draw on queer discourse in their interpretations of college climate.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.