Open to More: Queer Hookups, Temporalities, and Life Courses

Abstract

Research on hookups established that they are facilitated by alcohol consumption, interpreted as meaningless fun, and couched in ambiguous communication to avoid intimacy. In the United States, hookup culture is associated with a life course stage called “emerging adulthood.” This stage allows college students to suspend longer term relationships, parenthood, and the dictates of domesticity that will organize normative adult lives while establishing the careers that will help fund such goals. Hookups allow a mode of sexual engagement that buffers them from the burdens of serious intimacy and normative life course milestones. Scholars examined how the hookup scripts differ for queer hookups and the centrality of heternormativity in the enactment of hookup culture (e.g., Lamont et al. 2018). Less has been said about differences between straight and queer hookups from a life course perspective; this paper takes up this perspective, drawing on 28 interviews with queer participants about their college hookups. Participants' expectations about post‐college intimacy, love, and sex are less fixed, and they are therefore open to more expansive possibilities of intimacy in college than their straight peers. By taking a life course perspective, this paper shows how queer temporalities reveal and challenge the heteronormativity that governs hookup culture.