“No Pumps Allowed”: The “Problem” With Gender Expression and the Morehouse College “Appropriate Attire Policy”

ABSTRACT

Within higher education literature, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been lauded for their exceptional ability to provide African American students with culturally engaging academic and social environments. While the aforementioned may be true, much of this literature has presented HBCU students and these institutions as monolithic entities, with little regard to the ways social identities (e.g., gender, gender identity, sexual identities) shape students’ undergraduate experiences. This investigation uses critical discourse analysis to explore the media’s coverage and reactions to the Morehouse College appropriate attire policy in order to examine how their campus stakeholders problematized gender expression within this HBCU context. Implications for this research provides insights into how HBCU communities can both recognize and respond to the needs of their diverse queer student populations. This study concludes with highlighting new advancements being made on HBCU campuses that illustrate how they are making their campuses more inclusive of queer students.

KEYWORDS:

• Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)
• LGBTQ issues
• queer
• Black students
• gender expression
• sexual orientation
• respectability politics
• gender norms

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Reginald Blockett, Roderick Carey, Noah D. Drezner, Cindy Ann Kilgo, Joseph Nelson, Z Nicolazzo, and Dian Squire for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

^1. Gender nonconformity is often defined as a gender expression, behavior, identity, or appearance that does not match societal expectations of one’s gender (e.g., men performing, appearing, and dressing in ways that are associated with female behavior). Those who fall within this gender spectrum may not identify as transgender. Gender identity is the gender a person feels and that explains their chosen lived experience. Gender expression is how a person signals their gender identity to the world—for example, the clothes they wear or mannerisms they use (Dowshen et al., 2015; Majied, 2010; McCready, 2004).

^2. We chose to use queer in this study because of its power to function as an identity marker that challenges and confronts widely held heteronormative ideals of gender and sexuality. “Deployed as a politic, queer moves beyond the boundaries of an identity marker, making the term useful in examining one’s social location to power and key state interest. Queer centers non-normative sexual and gendered behaviors, expressions, and discourses from the margins, giving the term potential to deconstruct heteronormativity” (Blockett, 2017, p. 814). Ultimately, queer is used within this work to underscore and highlight gender and sexual identities that have been and are often deemed deviant in larger societal contexts.

^3. We use historically White institutions instead of predominately White institutions to acknowledge that the exact number or percentage of White students who have and continue to matriculate on these campuses has less to do with the lack of structural diversity present than the historical and contemporary racial infrastructures that are in place that still overwhelmingly advantage Whites at the expense of communities of color who attend these institutions (Mobley, 2017; Smith, Yosso, & Solórzano, 2006).

^4. One of the most powerful examples of malicious HBCU research is the 1967 study titled “The American Negro College” by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in Harvard Educational Review. In their work, they harshly condemned Black colleges and deemed them “academic disaster areas.” The study received national attention and was perceived as “truth.” Unfortunately, the article is still referenced today and even used in contemporary media as “fact.” HBCU communities are still experiencing the effects of this ill-informed work (Gasman, 2006).