She's Just Not My Type: Queer College Women and the Negotiation of Racial Sexual Profiles
Pham, Barbara Truc
This study strove to identify trends of sexual and romantic racial preference among queer
college aged women and how queer women renegotiated and constructed desirability. It was a
project concerned with how queer women imagined different races of women as potential
partners and imbued them with both physical, emotional, and political characteristics, It was a
study of their negotiations of racial sexual profiles against a backdrop of America's
contemporary racial system and culture, I conducted 13 qualitative interviews and 99 surveys,
Principally, I have found that there is an important distinction between imagined beautiful
partners and imagined desirable partners, Queer women did not necessarily desire or were
willing to date the most beautiful women they could imagine, Rather, they triangulated
desirability with two major criteria,' imagined ability for masculine presentation and perceived
political progressiveness when imagining Black, White, and Asian women Under these criteria,
my research suggests that queer women favor White and Black women over Asian women in the
imagined romantic and sexual marketplace, Further, participants reported that they are very
open to interracial dating While the heterosexual and queer male sexual marketplaces privilege
racialized partner's ability to conform to hegemonic masculinity and femininity, queer women's
market represents a drastic departure, In these ways, queer women differ greatly from every
other demographic group, Further research is crucial to fully understanding how queer women
construct desirability and negotiate racial boundaries,
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