[EMBARGOED UNTIL 6/1/2023] This dissertation centers Black collegiate women's intersectional experiences of navigating dating and hookup culture at a large historically predominantly white university in the Midwest. Using a qualitative approach, I found that the structural politics of space, race, gender, sexuality, and class affect how Black students navigate racially segregated campus social life, which informs dating and hooking up strategies. This belies extant studies that continue to privilege middle-class white students' perspectives and maintain that students of color are less likely to engage in hooking up practices. I argue that the predominantly white university operates as a white spatial imaginary in which white students create racial boundaries around the dominant social and hookup culture on campus through racially exclusive behaviors, intensifying Black women's aversion to interracial coupling. In response, Black students establish a Black spatial imaginary grounded in racial solidarity and support through the creation of an informal social system with separate cultural spaces. Within these spaces, engagement with Black-oriented social media becomes a preeminent mechanism through which Black students initiate romantic or sexual interest. Contemporary politics of Black sexuality aid in the facilitation of a complex Black heteropatriarchal structure that shapes how students date and hook up according to the intersections of their racial authenticity, gender conformity, class status, and sexual orientation.
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