Race Relations and Racial Inequality in Hookup Culture

University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Comparing Intimacies: Race Relations and Racial Inequality in Hookup Culture Sarah A. Spell University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Spell, Sarah A., "Comparing Intimacies: Race Relations and Racial Inequality in Hookup Culture" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2033. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2033 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2033 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Comparing Intimacies: Race Relations and Racial Inequality in Hookup Culture Abstract Racial inequality extends beyond socioeconomic measures: it shapes social interactions. With the shift in sexual scripts (i.e., the normative means to obtain sex) for young Americans from steady dating toward hooking up, recent scholarship has identified how hookups er veal gender and class inequality. However, research has not yet sufficiently investigated racial inequality. Because hookups are by their nature non- committal, they have arguably fewer barriers (e.g., disapproval by family) than more committed relationships. While this indicates that hooking up is a personal choice, broader research suggests that race/ethnicity and gender intersect in ways shaping participation in hookup culture and the interactions across racial lines. This three article dissertation explores how race/ethnicity and gender structure the opportunities to hook up and social distance between racial groups. Using data from the Online College Social Life Survey (n = 18,347), this dissertation identifies acial/ethnicr differences within gender in participation in hookup culture. While Asian men and non-White women are less likely to participate, they are more likely to desire opportunities to hook up suggesting that they are excluded from hookup culture rather than opting-out. Rates of interracial hookups additionally suggest that non-White students are less likely to hook up with a partner of another race/ethnicity than are White students so they have fewer potential partners. Social distance is further revealed by two measures of interaction. Women who report interracial hookups are less likely than those who report same-race hookups to be familiar with their partner before the hookup, and men in interracial hookups are less likely to communicate after the hookup. Survey findings are supplemented with self-collected interview and focus group data (n = 69), which reveal how minority students feel vulnerable to negative social consequences because of their small group size. Additionally, they are more likely to feel ignored or sexualized by other racial/ethnic groups than are White students. Overall, minority students have fewer opportunities to hook up, especially outside their race. This dissertation builds on extant research detailing how racial inequality shapes the college experience by revealing the opportunity structure of hookup culture and that interracial hookups reflect and einforr ce social distance. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Sociology First Advisor Camille Charles Keywords College, Gender, Hookup, Race relations, Racial inequality Subject Categories Sociology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2033 COMPARING INTIMACIES: RACE RELATIONS AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IN HOOKUP CULTURE Sarah A. Spell A DISSERTATION in Sociology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation _______________________ Camille Charles Professor of Sociology Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ David Grazian, Associate Professor of Sociology Dissertation Committee Kristen Harknett, Associate Professor of Sociology Hyunjoon Park, Associate Professor of Sociology COMPARING INTIMACIES: RACE RELATIONS AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IN HOOKUP CULTURE COPYRIGHT 2016 Sarah Anne Spell iii Dedication To my mother, Janice Cheney, who taught me strength, perseverance, and priorities. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my committee members, Camille Charles, Hyunjoon Park, and Kristen Harknett, all of whom brought different strengths to this dissertation process. To my chair, Camille, you are the strong academic role model that every female graduate student needs. More than support, you continually reminded me of the bigger picture of my research and helped me to keep my priorities straight, often without having to verbally tell me. I am so happy that you took me under your wing! To Hyunjoon, your support and enthusiasm was contagious. It is so evident that you have a student’s interests at heart—the hours you met with me concerning my research; the opportunities you provided to present my research; and the introductions you gave to meet other researchers helped to round me out as a researcher. I could not have done this without you! To Kristen, it always surprised me how much clarity and knowledge you could give me in a 10 minute meeting. Your patience and gentle guidance is often just what I needed to get to the next step in the research process without going crazy. It meant so much to me that I could always count on you to meet, even when you were on the other side of the country! Thank you, Teya Campbell, Audra Rodgers, Aline Rowens, and Marcus T. Wright. You all helped me with so many technical and logistic details, but, more importantly, always had a smile for me when I entered the office and brightened my day. v I would like to thank numerous family members and friends, and to some very special peers: Charlene Cruz-Cerdas, Hyejeong Jo, Radha Modi, and Joanna Pinto-Coelho, without whom my writing would be worse; my thoughts on race, class, and gender would be less developed; and my life during graduate school would not have been filled with so much laughter. You each inspire me in different ways, and I cannot thank you enough. Thank you especially, Charlene: the numerous conversations we had while breaking from TA work became the motivation for this dissertation research. Thank you, Doga Kerestecioğlu and Chris Reece, for answering statistics questions along the way and challenging my views on research methodologies over drinks at Local 44. To The Rev. Marissa Rohrbach, you probably didn’t know it at the time, but your words motivated me to press on even when I was at my most frustrated and pessimistic, and I couldn’t see the end in sight. Thank you Farrah Parkes and Brad Linder for feeding me dinner and giving me a reality check every Friday night. vi ABSTRACT COMPARING INTIMACIES: RACE RELATIONS AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IN HOOKUP CULTURE Sarah A. Spell Camille Charles Racial inequality extends beyond socioeconomic measures: it shapes social interactions. With the shift in sexual scripts (i.e., the normative means to obtain sex) for young Americans from steady dating toward hooking up, recent scholarship has identified how hookups reveal gender and class inequality. However, research has not yet sufficiently investigated racial inequality. Because hookups are by their nature non- committal, they have arguably fewer barriers (e.g., disapproval by family) than more committed relationships. While this indicates that hooking up is a personal choice, broader research suggests that race/ethnicity and gender intersect in ways shaping participation in hookup culture and the interactions across racial lines. This three article dissertation explores how race/ethnicity and gender structure the opportunities to hook up and social distance between racial groups. Using data from the Online College Social Life Survey (n = 18,347), this dissertation identifies racial/ethnic differences within gender in participation in hookup culture. While Asian men and non-White women are less likely to participate, they are more likely to desire opportunities to hook up suggesting that they are excluded from hookup culture rather than opting-out. Rates of interracial hookups additionally suggest that non-White students are less likely to hook up with a partner of another race/ethnicity than are White students so they have fewer vii potential partners. Social distance is further revealed by two measures of interaction. Women who report interracial hookups are less likely than those who report same-race hookups to be familiar with their partner before the hookup, and men in interracial hookups are less likely to communicate after the hookup. Survey findings are supplemented with self-collected interview and focus group data (n = 69), which reveal how minority students feel vulnerable to negative social consequences because of their small group size. Additionally, they are more likely to feel ignored or sexualized by other racial/ethnic groups than are White students. Overall, minority students have fewer opportunities to hook up, especially outside their race. This dissertation builds on extant research detailing how racial inequality shapes the college experience by revealing the opportunity structure of hookup culture and that interracial hookups reflect and reinforce social distance. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IV ABSTRACT VI TABLE OF CONTENTS VIII LIST OF TABLES X LIST OF FIGURES XI INTRODUCTION 1 IS THERE A HOOKUP CULTURE? 4 WHY STUDY HOOKUPS? 7 DISSERTATION PLAN

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