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Leader-queer students at the intersection of social identities

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Leader-queer students at the intersection of social identities

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Content Running head: LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 1

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS AT THE INTERSECTION OF SOCIAL IDENTITIES

by

Rokas Oginskis

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

May 2020

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 2

Abstract
This qualitative study interrogates the possibilities of de-alienation and leadership-
fostering of students at the intersection of LGBTQ and other social identities on the part of
leadership at the postsecondary institutions.
The study is exploratory on two fronts. For one, it juxtaposes discourses of two distinct
groups of participants: the intersectional queer students and campus administrators. In doing so,
the study interrogates the extent to which the two discourses move or can move beyond the
framework of fixed social identities and traditional understandings of leadership. The study also
deploys queer theory and intersectionality in tandem with selected concepts of Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory as well as CHAT and a leadership framework.
The data suggests that the students express their multifaceted identities in strategic ways
on campus. The students are aware of the systemic inequalities in educational and leadership
opportunities. The majoritized students recognize their socio-economic privilege. Campus
administrators want to move away from the pre-intersectional paradigm of campus structures
and management and express the belief that the intersectional campus is relevant to all the
students, including the ones without strictly queer or intersectional identities. The study then
draws the theoretical implications as well as the implications for practice and research.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 3

Acknowledgements
An important note of thanks to my Committee Chair and Advisor Dr. Alan Green, who’s
patient guidance opened so many ways of seeing theoretical and practical complexities of the
phenomena I am deeply interested to continue studying.
Dr. Briana Hinga, thank you for your work to navigate the approach to my work,
academic inquiry in general, and to maintain a critical consciousness in it.
Dr. Trista Beard, thank you for your patient and meticulous approach to reviewing my
work and for many teachable moments how to be a better writer.
To my friends, thank you for the encouragement and for the shoulders in lean on no
matter the circumstances.
To my parents, my partner Jonathan, my children Gabriel, Illana, Joshua, their mom
Malka – thanks to you and to the entire extended family that I found a sense of adventure that
will add this work as a cherished entry into my life’s diaries.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 4

Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………...……………………………………………...…
Acknowledgements ………………………..….………………………………………………..
List of Tables ……………………………………………………………………………………
List of Figures ……………………………..….………………………………………………...
List of Appendices ………………………..….…………………………………………………
Chapter I: Introduction ……………………..….……………………………………………….
Background ……..…………………..…..………………………………………………
Problem Statement ..………………....………………………………………………….
Significance ..……………………………………………………………………………
Research Questions ..……………………………………………………………………
Chapter II: Literature Review ………………..…………………………………………………
Embeddedness in Critical Theory ...……..……………………………………………..
Queer Theory ..…………….…………………..………………………………………..
Intersectionality ..………………………………..….…………………………………..
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) ..…….…..……………………………….
Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory: Selected Concepts ..…..…………………………….
Leadership Framework ..……………………………………..…………………………
Chapter III: Methods .………………………………………….…….…………………………
Setting .……………………………………………….………..………………………..
Participants .…………………………………………….……….……………………...
Data Collection and Instrument Protocols .…………….………….……………………
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Limitations and Delimitations ……………………………….………………………….
Data Analysis …………………………………………………………….……………..
Ethics …………………………………………………………………..………………..
Chapter IV: Findings …..…………………………………………………..……………………
Students’ Ways of Identifying …...………………………………….………………….
Intersectional Queer Students’ Experiences and Critique of Campus Life and Study …
Students’ Ways of Understanding Leadership …………………………….……………
Senior Administrators’ Perceptions of Intersectional Queer Students and Campus
Management Approaches ……………………………………………….………………
Chapter Summary ………….………………………………………….………………..
Chapter V: Discussion ……….…………………………………………………..……………..
Theoretical Implications ……….……………………………………….………………
Implications for Practice ……….………………………………………….……………
Implications for Research ………….…………………………………….……………..
Conclusion ………………………………….………………………………….……………….
References …………………………………….……………………………………..………….
Appendices …………………………………….………………………………………..………

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List of Tables

Table 1: A list of student participants with demographics, ordered by sequence of interviews…41
Table 2: A list of campus administrator participants with functional area of policy-making
authority …………………………………………………………………………………41

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 7

List of Figures

Figure 1: Interaction of CHAT components as conceived by the second generation of CHAT ………… 26

Figure 2: The third generation CHAT with multiple activity domains …………………………. 27

Figure 3: Queering tool of Lacanian psychoanalytic triad ……………………………………………... 30

Figure 4: Four organizational frames with overarching study’s topics by participant group …………... 35

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List of Appendices

Study interview protocol for students …………………………………………………………189
Study interview protocol for senior administrators ……………………………………………192
Study Ad ……………………………………………………………………………………….195

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CHAPTER I: Introduction
The purpose of this study is to interrogate the possibilities of de-alienation and
leadership-fostering of students at the intersection of queer and other social identities on the part
of leadership at the postsecondary institutions. The present chapter first introduces the problem
space for the study, the philosophical approach to it, how it aims to participate in the
methodological conversations of the educational research as it is an integral part of motivation
for undertaking the study. The chapter will end by introducing the research questions that will
guide the inquiry.
The study is methodologically exploratory on two fronts. For one, it juxtaposes
discourses of two distinct groups of participants: the intersectional queer students and campus
administrators. In doing so, the study interrogates the extent to which the two discourses move
beyond the framework of fixed social identities and traditional understandings of leadership. The
study is also exploratory in that it deploys queer theory through the more general lens of critical
theory and in tandem with an established leadership framework and selected concepts of
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as well as the elements of Cultural Historical Activity Theory
(Engeström, 2007). While leadership framework of the four organizational frames (Bolman &
Deal, 1989; 2003) is crucial in grounding the leadership questions in the empirical contexts of
the campus life and its ordering, the CHAT is no less important to map intersectional queer
voices, to minimize their conformist suppression of prevailing ideologies of campus order. The
leadership framework applies directly to campus administrators participating in the study and
CHAT is applicable to the intersectional queer students. CHAT is grounded in exposition of
underlying labor relations and how they are informed by the systemic features of the human
labor, thus allowing to hold both students’ and leadership’s discourses to the standard of
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 10

regulatory idea of emancipation (Badiou, 2008). CHAT is originally grounded in the dialectical
materialism’s mode of thinking about human activity. The Lacanian triad of three registers of
real-imaginary-symbolic (Lacan, 1997) is also dialectical in nature with an ability to queer
traditional view of leadership.
The above theoretical components of the study’s conceptual framework will each be
introduced in overarching terms in the next chapter. Now the study turns to overview its problem
space.
Background
Despite the gradual recognition and proliferation of campus structures and policies to
support the LGBT students (Marine, 2011; Stewart, Renn, & Brazelton, 2015), such students,
particularly with other minoritized identities, to this day continue to disproportionally experience
problems in educational settings such as hostility, abstenteeism, poorer psychological well-being,
lowered educational and achievement expectations (Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, &
Palmer, 2016; Rankin, 2003). A study that focused more specifically on the higher education
contexts (Rankin, 2003), identified several problematic findings: more than one-third of LGBT
undergraduate students experienced harassment; almost 90% of them experienced verbal
harassment and at least 20% feared to be on campus. The above constitutes an oppressive
campus life (Rankin, 2003). It has to be pointed out that many such findings in the current
decade remain less than ideal but show improved climates (Rankin & Associates, 2014; Stewart,
Renn, & Brazelton, 2015) although a lot depends on the range of campuses covered and their
ideological diversity. One campus climate study from the current decade focused on what is
commonly viewed as ideologically liberal campus of a major research university in Los Angeles
(Rankin & Associates, 2014). The study reports improved findings in comparison to similar
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 11

studies in prior decade: 80% of survey respondents felt comfortable with the climate on the
campus the survey was conducted; 68% undergraduate and even larger proportion of graduate
students were satisfied with the experiences. Again, this particular study focused on a campus
commonly viewed as very liberal.
A set of questions arise when considering the above campus climate findings and trends.
Does the postpositivist aim for objective measures of students’ campus experiences do justice to
discourses that may be suppressed precisely because they do not lend themselves to what is
viewed as objective measures in research? Do qualitative inquiries into LGBTQ students deploy
the multifaceted lens in gauging questions of negative vs. positive campus experiences? Related
and crucial to the present study’s problem space is the imperative to understand whether
educational research adequately allows the non-conforming and non-fixed identities to be
accounted for in studying the said group of students. Do prevalent research frameworks account
for minoritized and oppressed experiences of students who have intersecting identity
dimensions?
Problem Statement
Unpacking the above questions is beyond the scope of the present introduction. However,
as early as in the 1990’s, the student-focused research started to question the universality of
import in reducing LGBT student study and campus life experiences to sexual development
theories (McCarn & Fassinger, 1996), which placed such students into the single-identity boxes.
These authors are justified to see the longer-term implications of the sexual development theories
at the tension between individual’s contexts and social systems of oppression: LGBT students’
experiences and their desire for fulfilment of study and life orientations cannot be viewed
separately from development considerations of other oppressed groups, such a racial minorities.
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 12

The application of more than one identity to student development, such as Reynolds and Pope’s
(1991) multidimensional identity model, does not escape the reliance on fixed social identities.
The prevalent view of minoritized students through the lens of fixed identities prevents the
intersectionality research from achieving the full dialectical potential of the leadership efficacy
of the oppressed groups on campuses that have more than one minoritized identity. The related
challenge is to identify the resistance discourses of students with LGBTQ and other minoritized
experiences where identity-based oppression gets placed into forms of socio-economic
inequality. This study is therefore justified to focus on the intersectional students with
minoritized sexual and other identities and to apply a dialectical lens to the notion of social
identities. To highlight the study’s suspicion of fixed social identities, the study will reference
intersectional queer students as the population of focus rather than more traditional LGBT term.
The study’s problem space is also relevant to and requires understanding of how campus
administrators view the students that do not lend themselves to fixed identity paradigms. It can
be supposed that the campus leadership may naturally be inclined to recognize such students
only to the extent it fits the idea of a neat constellation of various student groups and experiences
that are manageable and therefore require to be fixed over time in human activity contexts. The
disciplinary research paradigms are also implicated in this urge to pursue research methodologies
that are easy to operationalize by convention for objectivity, predictability, and generalizability.
In the contemporary marketization and accountability pressures higher education institutions face
(Eckel, 2008; Harbour & Jaquette, 2007), researches find themselves on the conveniently
common ground in giving an almost exclusive emphasis on deriving the evidence-based practice
solely from the numerical measurements. As Kamuf (2007) would point out, this epistemology
and research practice severs the relationship between numbers and narrative necessary to develop
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 13

a more comprehensive understanding of experiences and outcomes associated with being queer
along with other minoritized identities. That is, the study aims to resist falling into the urge to
view the identities as something forever and to be celebrated and coopted without a critical focus
onto the systems of oppression themselves.
While multiple problems for research can be derived from the above context, the study
sets itself to focus on the two-fold view as its problem space to interrogate:
1) In the context of alienating ordering of campus life, it is unknown how queer students
identify in the multifaceted campus life and what educational as much as leadership aspirations
such students have that in their view, educational institutions can recognize, legitimate, and
foster;
2) It is not known to what extent these experiences, practices, educational and leadership
aspirations are recognizable and actionable on part of institutional leaders.
Significance
Expanding the horizon of institutional leadership discourse in which intersectional queer
students can find equitable footing on college campuses to fulfill themselves as leaders is
paramount to maximizing impact of institutional practices in building an equitable higher
education system. More specifically, the study seeks to contribute to the understanding of
students who are minoritized (Harper, 2012) on multiple dimensions. That is, it is an exploratory
effort to understand minoritized students outside of the fixed social identity paradigm without
loosing a sustainable path to participate in the universal human activity, including first and
foremost, in the historical dialectics of emancipation. The study also represents an implicit call
for academic research to constantly engage in critical reflection of academic disciplinary
paradigms that research epitomizes.
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Research Questions
To explore methodological possibilities of gauging the understanding of non-traditional
leadership approaches and leadership fostering of intersectional students by institutional leaders
outside of fixed social identity paradigm, the study poses the following questions:
RQ1: What are the ways in which intersectional queer students identify? Subsequently,
how those ways of identifying critique fixed social identities?
RQ2: How do intersectional queer students critique campus administrators, particularly in
regards to managing campus life and study experiences?
RQ3: How do queer students understand their leadership aspirations?
RQ4: How do campus leaders recognize and view the intersectional queer students? The
last research question will ask the campus administrators participating in the study about how
they understand the intersectional queer students, students’ identity formations and expressions
while on campus, and the extent to which the leaders can place such students on their cognitive
map. The study is also interested to gauge what kind of campus life changes can be adopted to
stimulate development of leadership outlook of intersectional queer students.
It has to be clarified from the outset that the research questions drive a juxtaposition of
two study participant groups. The first three research questions, RQ1 through RQ3, are more
directly relevant to the intersectional queer students. The last one, RQ4, is relevant to
understanding the perceptions of campus administrators. With the guiding aspects of the study
introduced, the study now turns to explore relevant, albeit non-exhaustive, body of scholarship
relevant to its key concepts.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 15

CHAPTER II: Literature Review
The intersection of socio-economic, sexual, and racial identities and group experiences is
understood as mutually constitutive rather than producing aggregation of discrete and sequential
minority experiences in a mutually exclusive manner (Bowleg, 2008; Denzin, 2010; Dhamoon,
2011). These experiences form a discourse that cannot be assessed solely on the basis of the
post-positivistic paradigm where there is “… the evidence out there. Evidence has to be
produced, constructed, represented. Furthermore, the politics of evidence cannot be separated
from the ethics of evidence.” (Morse, 2006, pp. 415-416). Given the above points, it would be
disingenuous not to acknowledge that there is an implied engagement in institutional criticism of
a university in general (Kamuf, 1997; 2007) and educational discipline in particular (Patel,
2016). This is a part of the debate about what counts as legitimate problems of empirical
research, particularly amid widely known marketization and associated accountability schemes
higher education institutions have been facing (Angel & Connelly, 2011; Fish, 2008; Ginsberg,
2011; Harbour & Jaquette, 2007). These aspects, however, are a general call to question the
immutability of academic disciplinary paradigms; they are not directly informing the key goal of
the proposed empirical research and therefore won’t be discussed in detail for the remainder of
the present chapter. It will suffice to indirectly connect the long-term need for institutional
criticism of disciplinary paradigms in academic research and empirical significance of the
present study: if the critical-theoretical perspective implies that practice problems are symptoms
rather than causes of educational inequities, then a “communicative action,” to artificially impose
a Habermasian term, between empirical inquiry and high theory may be of significance for
thinking about the social justice and for theorizing new campus leadership.
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To maintain relevance to the curriculum reform and societal equity clusters of diversity
research (Bennett, 2001) and queering ethics (Meyer, 2007), the study uses de-ontological, or
more specifically, discursive, notions of what constitutes, or potentially constitutes,
institutionally recognizable leadership among the intersectional queer students. The diversity and
leadership studies in this particular inquiry deploys queer theory. This theory allows us to
maintain widening and contentious character of leadership discourse across educational
institutions. The queer theory here is understood as an ongoing questioning of fixed identities,
social ontologies and epistemologies, with the guiding premise that method can be queer only as
the lived method (Gunn & McAllister, 2013). Two frameworks are juxtaposed in the study when
gauging and queering the intersectional students’ and institutional leadership’s discourses: the
framework of the real-imaginary-symbolic orders derived from the Lacanian psychoanalysis
(Lacan, 1997) and Bolman and Deal’s (1984; 2003) concept of four organizational frames.
The Cultural Historical Activity Theory or CHAT (Engeström, 2007) lends itself to
understanding the experiences and struggles of intersectional queer students. Queer, and by
extension, subversive formations of such a discourse may not be meaningful if our leadership-
related questions of the study are limited to the four organizational frames by Bolman and Deal
(1989; 2003). While the four frames framework is important to deploy for the meaningful
campus leadership’s and minoritized students’ interface, the elements of CHAT will be useful in
maintaining the ontological link between the work within the institutional systems and more
regulatory idea of emancipation as the CHAT is based on the dialectics of economic and cultural
human activity.
As indicated in the introductory remarks, the present study embarks in gauging leaderful
traits and leadership potential as well as recognizable experiences of intersectional queer students
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 17

based on sexual orientation, racial minority, and socio-economic status. This is the reason RQ1
on the identity formations of these students required an expansion in the forms of RQ’s 2-4 that
raise leadership-related questions as well as the question of how the students interact with
campus administrators. As already noted, it will be as important to gauge college administrators
to see the extent to which students’ leaderful traits and aspirations are recognized by the
leadership discourse and practice at colleges.
The viability of the above aims would be difficult to project if constrained by the
established methodological-theoretical frameworks. At the same time, it cannot turn into a purely
speculative exercise to produce meaningful themes with discernable implications for practice.
This necessitates queering of fixed identities among study participants and disciplinary
determinations of frameworks informing this qualitative inquiry. As previously referenced, there
are several domains that, in combination, enable relative openness in a qualitative inquiry on the
one hand and anchors the inquiry into a matrix of broad thematic relationships on the other:
• The philosophical paradigm of critical theory in general
• Queer theory
• Intersectionality
• Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
• Lacanian psychoanalytic framework for discourse analysis
• Leadership framework
The multifaceted nature of the methodological-theoretical components of the study
complicates the in-depth view of each but simultaneously requires at least a laconic overview for
understanding the study’s premises and approach.

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Embeddedness in Critical Theory
Critical theory is not a new approach in educational inquiry (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). It
is concerned with ideological and socio-economic structures informed and sustained by power
relations contributing to oppression of individuals and entire groups (Brookfield, 2014;
Kincheloe, McLaren, & Steinberg, 2011). Critical theory and praxis cannot be meaningfully
captured within a single-grouped citation through its Continental (Adorno, 1973; Gramsci, 1971;
Habermas, 1973; Marcuse, 1969) and Postcolonial (Fanon, 2005; Said, 1978; Spivak, 2010)
iterations. It can be provisionally viewed as originating from Marx (1906) and articulated by the
Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, 1972). However, any canonization attempts of specific texts and
historical phases would ostensibly undermine the crucial aspect of critical theory as an
emancipatory praxis in the closely related forms of dialectical materialism (Jordan, 1967; Žižek,
2013) and historical materialism (Benjamin, Arendt, & Zohn, 1968). Dialectical view of the
social identities is going to be key in this study. The components of the theoretical framework
will maintain directional focus on the research questions. The critical theory will be important
for the study to remain aware of and where directly relevant, point out how the workings of
particular theories and the discourses of students and campus administrators rely on or maintain
the existing inequality of economic and power relations on college campus. After all and as
noted from GLSEN (2016) report in the section on problem’s context, the intersectional queer
students find themselves unequal and on inequitable footing on college campuses relative to
majoritized students. Critical theory paradigm is a necessary starting ingredient for initial steps to
disentangle the problem, because as Brookfield (2014) notes, critical theory brings attention to
epistemologies sustaining ideological reproduction of the economic and racial inequities as much
as other forms of discrimination as normal, natural, and seemingly inevitable.
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The introductory chapter referenced a regulatory idea of emancipation (Badiou, 2008),
which is aspirational for the struggle of the intersectional queer students for equity in all aspects
of study life and social existence. The contradictions are inherent in such a Kantian mode of
thinking. CHAT’s and Lacanian theory’s embeddedness in the dialectical mode of thinking is a
viable epistemological combination in seeking to overcome the contradictions inherent in
conceptualizing systemic goals such as emancipation. This is another way of viewing the study’s
theoretical premises to be embedded in Critical Theory’s and its antecedent philosophical
traditions. The present chapter will now turn to the theories constituting study’s conceptual
framework.
Queer Theory
Queer theory is widely assumed to originate from Foucault’s discourse analysis,
especially pertaining to a critique of fixed and clinically derived identities of sexual minority
positions (1979; see also Meyer, 2007). The AIDS epidemic furthered its development into a
sharp critique of immutable identities (Bersani, 2010) relegated to a muted, subaltern, closeted
existence requiring political radicalization (Sedgewick, 1990; Warner, 1993). Queer theory
culminated in the performative theory of gender and sexual roles (Butler, 1990, 1998). Butler’s
contributions are of a special import to the present study. Her later work morphed into
sociologically and politically coded intersubjective and systemic practices: the question of what
and who’s life is recognizable, livable, or even mournable (2004). After all, the study not only
asks similar questions of the intersectional students and institutinal leaders but also the questions
up to and including what and who’s life and experiences are follow-able as leaders.
Before a brief look at the queering research in the higher education contexts, another
general note needs to be made about the queer theory. There is a point of view that does not trace
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 20

queer theory to Foucault exclusively. Tim Dean (2003) argues that its premises are discernable in
the psychoanalysis associated with Jacques Lacan. Even though both Foucault and Lacan are two
most notorious representatives of what is often called French poststructuralism, Dean is
persuasive in drawing one crucial difference: the desire and its social forms of expression and
interaction are not all fatalistically regulated by disciplinary discourse. Lacan ascribes the object
cause of desire to the extra-discursive domain that cannot be captured by discursive process but
produces discursive effects and counter-effects. This object cause is not necessarily a tangible
object producing effects. In strict Lacanian terms, it is produced by a purely formal shift in
perspective, or what Slavoj Žižek has named the parallax view (2006). It is not difficult to see
the dialectical depth and queer application of the parallax view to gender categorizations or any
other socially prescribed identity categorizations. While discursive analysis provides an
alternative to postpositivist hegemony in leadership studies, the utilization of the psychoanalytic
theory is crucial in avoiding pure social constructivism culminating in pan-textual
characterizations of empirical reality attributed to another French poststruturalist Jacques Derrida
(2016). That justifies the selection of the Lacanian framework as a queering tool.
A separate question relative to queer theory to ask is its presence and practice on college
and university campuses. Kristine Renn’s meticulous review of queer research in academic
contexts (2010) observes that the fact of birth of queer theorizing in academia notwithstanding, it
remains bracketed when it comes to its wider utilization in higher education research. It is
sufficient, however, to form several research themes that Renn (2010) proposes, such as visibility
of LGBT people on campuses, campus climate considerations, and changing constructions of
LGBT identities and experiences.
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Indeed, the hitherto hidden LGBT students and queers first found their representative
voice on campuses during the formative decade of queer theory (Bensimon, 1992; Sanlo, Rankin,
& Schoenberg, 2002; Tierney, 1997; Tierney & Dilley, 1998). These and other similar voices
formed the minimal mass necessary for the LGBT and queer student as well as faculty concerns
to be incorporated into climate studies, which, as indicated from the study’s outset, cannot be
disassociated from academic performance and outcomes (Howard & Drukman, 2000; Kosciw,
2004; Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012; Sanlo, Rankin, & Schoenberg,
2002; Vaccaro, 2012, Vaccaro, 2015). Kosciw and colleagues’ is one of the sustained efforts to
quantify, statistically account for LGBT and queer students on campuses. It remains
operationalization and access challenge to queer and trans-spectrum students, given the lack of
inclusion in national datasets and on institutional forms (Rankin & Garvey, 2015). Vaccaro’s
qualitative work (2012) is of particular utility to the study in that it tackles climate as well as
identity through ethnographic inquiry without limiting its lens to a particular organizational
surrounding. It enlarges the LGBT identity considerations into larger professional and
disciplinary groups, thus recognizing the long-term implications of otherwise short-lived college
experiences. There is additional aspect relevant to the study’s embeddedness in critical theory
and its attention to the impact of colonialism that puts many groups in higher education under the
colonial erasure (Patel, 2016). For example, Coloma (2009) sees queer theory to be relevant to
decolonialization undertakings and by extension, intersectionality, to which the study will turn
shortly.
Even though Renn (2010) distinguishes campus climate and identity and experiences
themes in research, the climate impacts the students’ identity and experiences in immediate study
selection, performance, and therefore the future trajectories (Gunn & McAllister, 2013; Jourian,
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 22

2015; Linley & Nguyen, 2015; Misawa, 2010a). The study is grounded in the students’ and their
campus contexts but aims to gauge leadership aspects relevant to campus life and any other
context. From this perspective, even the pointedly empirical LGBT and queer student leadership
study conducted by Renn herself (2007) does not entirely close the gap of leadership studies
among intersectional students, considering its focus on campus and advocacy group leadership.
Along with that and as a preamble to the considerations of intersectionality, it must be noted that
queer theorists admittedly point out how an overwhelming proportion of voiced LGBT identities
and experiences represent White LGBT perspectives (Sullivan, 2003). This concern brings forth
the importance of seeking new approaches of leadership studies among minoritized sexuality
identities (Vaccaro, Russel, & Koob, 2015) and which first must be approached through the
notion of intersectionality.
LGBT student research, not unlike the mainstream LGBT advocacy, has been criticized
for representing White gay men’s perspective as paradigmatic (Marine, 2011; Sullivan, 2003).
Therefore, intersectionality features prominently in the recent scholarship on new approaches to
LGBTQ student research (Stewart, Renn, & Brazelton, 2015). In the proposed new model of
students with minoritized identities of sexuality and gender, or MIoSG (Vaccaro, Russell, &
Kobb, 2015), the emphasis on minoritization processes over the sexual identities can be seen as
intersectionality’s influence in recognizing the universalizing lines of oppression beyond a single
set of minority group’s experiences. This model can also be seen moving in the queer theory’s
direction by consciously seeking to avoid celebratory emphasis of LGBTQ identity spectrum.
Given the above allusion to intersectionality’s importance in tandem to applying queer theory, it
is time to briefly overview the concept of intersectionality.

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Intersectionality
Intersectionality and queer theory share a common core in critical theory that seeks to
discern, de-mask, eventually over-determine, and deconstruct the hegemonic systems of power
and social production, including higher education contexts (Freire, 2015; Gildersleeve, Kuntz,
Pasque, & Carducci, 2010; Walkerdine, 2011). The intersectionality paradigm was developed in
parallel with queer theory, although the intersectionality is more closely associated with critical
legal studies and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1989 & 1991; Davis, 1981; Parent, DeBlaere, &
Moradi, 2013).
Intersectionality in its theoretical formulation as well as empirical studies is concerned
with multiple lines of oppression due to more than one marginalized, or minority, statuses of a
particular group or minority individual that not only proliferate the venues of the oppression but
also form unique combined experiences in coping and seeking to overcome (Anderson &
McCormack, 2010; Bowleg, 2008 & 2013; Hurtado & Sinha, 2008; Misawa, 2010b; Museus &
Griffin, 2011; Vaccaro, 2012; Warner & Shields, 2013). After reviewing multiple theoretical and
empirical works using intersectionality framework, Warner and Shields (2013) identify two key
strains in this line of research: a) concern with the multiple identities in various forms and
expressions relative to the systems of domination and b) a more generalized theory of identity.
Both trends are relevant to the present study. The study aims to identify themes elucidating
unique and not yet considered (i.e., by campus leadership) subversive formations of identity and
identity-related aspirational projections on part of the intersectional students. Queering aspect
will keep the study in check from forming and celebrating fixed identities. As discussed in the
researcher’s positionality topic of the study design, that queering movement is to be assured by
the researcher together with the study participants (McDonald, 2013). However, the concern with
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 24

multiple identities is likewise important to empirically ground the study. Tracing each identity
experience and meaning relative to minority status are what brings forth the themes of qualitative
study (Anderson & McCormack, 2010; Bowleg, 2008 & 2013; Hurtado & Sinha, 2008; Misawa,
2010b). Two studies that included predominantly highly educated intersectional participants
(Bowleg, 2013; Hurtado & Sinha, 2008), their interviews and themes identified did not dwell in
more abstract domains of reflection but rather proceeded by taking into account each identity
experience and coping strategy as well as in their sequence and overlapping combinations.
After highlighting the more relevant aspects of the queer and intersectionality research
domains, the study will discuss the approach to understanding minoritized students’ experiences
through the material and cultural object relations. Although the leadership framework of the four
organizational frames is very well grounded in researching leadership in the higher education
contexts, the study needs additional theoretical tools to maintain a sensitive lens through which
to understand the material, campus, and community relations of the intersectional queer students.
One such theory is Cultural Historical Activity Theory, or CHAT, to which the chapter now
turns.
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
CHAT is widely viewed to originate from the works of Vygotsky (Engeström, 2007;
Leontiev, 1981; Roth & Lee, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978; Wilson, 2014; Yamagata-Lynch, 2010).
Vygostky’s (1978) initial thought was about removing the educational psychology considerations
from its static views of his time. Indeed, if one of the study’s aims is to question the immutable
socio-cultural fixtures that inform students’ identity and relatedness to socio-cognitive
experiences on campus, CHAT’s original premise of a dynamic view of the psychological
processes of individuals within the community and campus structures becomes of import to the
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 25

study. Anticipation of the subversive nature of how intersectional queer students relate to
learning and campus life require anchoring of their discourse and activities in empirical campus
and community contexts with the view of the implicit rules and tools available in such a setting.
CHAT provides precisely that.
It is important to point out that CHAT concerns itself with activity systems or domains
(Engeström, 2007; Leontiev, 1981; Roth & Lee, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978), that of campus life, for
the present study. CHAT provides a framework to study the interface of the campus and
community activity systems, important to understand students’ complex experiences. Based on
the premises of CHAT then, the important step in applying CHAT in research is identifying its
object and subject. Certainly, this study’s subjects are intersectional queer students, and the
study’s objects are questions about students’ ways of identifying and negotiating their
minoritized status on college campuses. Campus leaders can be considered as subjects in the
same activity system or domain of campus life too but viewed as more closely related to object
of managing students. CHAT then considers the interaction of the identified subject and object
through identifying and observing the activity system and how its implicit and explicit rules
impact the activity on the one hand and the division of labor within it on the other hand. The
campus, the learning and living space of the students, is impacted by both. Depending on who
the subjects are, consciously or unconsciously pursing the activity objects, the subjects utilize
and call forth certain tools, some of them practical, some of them cultural-symbolic. Based on
dialectical, rather than dualistic worldview, CHAT pursues identification of contradictions
inherent in the activity system to identify how the system can be improved. Or in the situations
where the activity object is forged against the odds of rules and division of labor, it can subvert
the system and build the contours of radically different activity system. This way of
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 26

understanding CHAT highlights its empirical utility when applying queer-theoretical lens to an
activity system.
Figure 1 below depicts CHAT. While the activity is set to take place in the activity
subject-object ends, they are impacted in multiple and intersecting ways by the community with
its own division of labor, rules, and tools, producing an outcome.

Figure 1. Interaction of CHAT components as conceived by the second generation of CHAT. Adapted
from van Eijck and Roth, 2007.

To give a fuller account of CHAT, it is also important to see how its more contemporary
development by Engeström (2007) allows researchers to consider the intersection of multiple
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 27

activity systems, with potentially contradicting understandings of activity objects, judgements of
particular rules and divisions of labor among various subjects (Engeström, 2001; 2007; Wilson,
2014). Figure 2 represents the third generation of CHAT that shows a relevance of separate
activity domains that may come to overlap with a shared object of activity. That is relevant to the
study in that the students come to the campus community by bringing rules and tools of their
cultural or home communities.

Figure 2. The third generation CHAT with multiple activity domains. Adapted from Engeström,
1996. Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org.
Research focusing on the boundary between or among the activity systems is particularly
fruitful development for CHAT research in educational contexts (Boyd, Baker, Harris, Kynch, &
McVittie, 2006; Daniels, Edwards, Engeström, Gallagher, & Ludvigsen, 2010; Tsui & Law,
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 28

2007). Tsui and Law (2007) identified how different activity subjects like student teachers and
their school mentors operate and then negotiate the boundary between the activity system in
secondary schools and the system of their supervisors from the education school at university.
The attention to the boundary between the activity systems is important to the present study as
well. It is relevant to the study to see not only contradictions in how intersectional queer students
and campus leaders view the implicit campus and community rules and the division of labor
informing campus activity as that division of labor of the larger society cuts through the way
campus life is organized. Could it be that certain counter-discourses of campus community
already build an activity system with the notions of rules and division of labor so subversive that
it starts to form an alternative activity system on campus? Or even to understand the campus life
as it currently is, do the students’ communities intersect with the campus activity system through
the mediating notion of placing students in the social identity boxes?
A cautionary note is also needed about CHAT in the context of the present study. The
above-discussed notion of intersecting activity systems cannot be applied to systems that are a
part of complex and very large social contexts, for example, higher education industry. To put
differently, one cannot combine the activity systems endlessly while at the same time
interrogating large systemic problems in which notions like race, gender and class are lost or
reduced to universalizing notions of such social identities (Hartely, 2009). Maintaining
consistent approach to understanding the multiple activity systems already creates a drive to use
fixed social identities, which is the present study’s anathema. This brings forth the importance to
utilize analytical concepts that are not activity-system dependent. This is where framing of
researching campus life through the formal organizational frames (Bolman & Deal, 1989; 2003)
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 29

and the lens of shifting cognitive registers of the Lacanian concepts (Lacan, 1997) is important to
apply in tandem with CHAT. These frameworks is what the study turns to now.
Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory: Selected Concepts
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory represents a structural and social account of a psyche and
is traced to de Sausure’s structural linguistics (Lacan, 1997; Rumsey, 2013). It is therefore often
summarized by the Lacanian dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan,
1992, p. 14) whereby the subjectivity is accountable for as a response to the failure of
signification and where subjectivity emerges as one signifier’s representation for another
signifier. Springing desires and drives is a response to the initial cut of language into a reality at
the root of social phenomenon’s reification (Žižek, 1989). The social phenomenon in this context
is understood as a simultaneous interplay of the Lacanian triad real-imaginary-symbolic (Lacan,
1997), which is what is borrowed for the present study.
The real in the triad has many valences but its most important feature is its distinction
from reality. One aspect of the real is that it is what resists symbolization and representation and
is graspable only in the effects of symbolization. This interpretation closely resembles the
concept of symptom (Žižek, 1989). But in relation to the symbolic and imaginary registers, it
cannot be said to precede them but is a retroactive product of signification (Shepherdson, 1996).
The imaginary register refers to images that hold together otherwise fragmented aspects of
signification such as real and symbolic but also functions as a veil of hiddenness of meaning and
the meaningful reality where “… beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction”
(Žižek, 2013, p. 4). That is, imaginary produces the effect that there is something hidden from
meaning, which is not to be confused with the feature of the symbolic that refers to a signifier
that obfuscates the fullness of empirical reality or meaningfulness of the real (Žižek, 2013). The
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 30

symbolic register, or what Lacan calls the Big Other (1997) is the reified social domain of
signifiers some of which quilt others to produce effects of fixed identities, ideologies, symbols,
and religious as much as economic theologies (Žižek, 1989). Here the import of the real-
imaginary-symbolic triad to the present study becomes clear, especial when coupled with the
related Lacanian principle that there is no other of the other (Lacan, 1992) whereby some aspect
of empirical reality or discursive principle guarantees existing quilting of the socio-symbolic
order. Ultimately, the discussed triad refers to the psycho-social dynamics that are based on the
fundamental ontological lack with real impact producing desires and drives. Figure 3 shows how
the real-imaginary-symbolic registers are connected in circular twists rather than a continuum or
separate domains with causal impact onto each other.

Figure 3. Queering tool of Lacanian psychoanalytic triad. Adapted from Lacan.com/lacink
REAL
SYMBOLIC IMAGINARY
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 31

The theory is relevant to the study on multiple levels. It views socio-symbolic order to be
based on the negative ontology of lack, thus allowing the study to view social identities of
intersectional queer students as much as campus leadership’s view of organizational frames
dialectically. This will queer the traditional leadership notions, which is directly relevant to
study’s research questions and, as a potential outcome or future direction of the study, a
development of queer leadership theory.
How would the Lacanian concepts contribute to gauging the ways in which intersectional
queer students negotiate their own identity formations, expectations, fit with campus order and
experiences their institutions intend to provide? The campus experiences may start with meeting
a new dormitory roommate, seeking facilitation of study needs from various support offices on
campus, to interaction with faculty and campus administrators. The Lacanian concepts are useful
in creating curricular and co-curricular experiences of students with the potential to subvert
structuring immutability of the prevalent ideological and management arrangements of campus
life. Focusing on partially analogous domain of business experiential learning ethos, Lezaun and
Muniesa (2017) point out the underlying import of stimulating certain meaning-structuring
experience spaces while learning and being socialized into the professional life. Those include
creating spaces distinct from immutable formations of reality as well as decisionism to confront
the reality in order to amplify its ideological fit or lack thereof for asserting students’ own mental
efficacy. The trainees insert their own, even self-referential, principles and ethos into the reality
they are being taught to engage after the learning experience. The intent of applying Lacanian
concepts is not to unearth a hidden real behind the four organizational frames (Bolman & Deal,
1989; 2003) structuring the campus and its management. Rather, it is crucial for being self-aware
about the imaginary and symbolic structures informing campus expectations and peer, faculty,
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 32

administration’s behaviors while at the same time being aware that there is no real-ness to those
externally imposed formations. In turn, it helps students to be aware how the same applies to
their own experiences and the socio-economic outcomes they create or anticipate. If the real can
only be captured in meaning-failures of the symbolic order or imaginary layers to supply the
lasting meaning, the campus ideological and technocratic principles can be seen as a process of
dialectical self-reflection, if we take each organizational frame to have shifting meanings to
students as individuals, groups, and as juridical persons in relation to their faculty mentors and
administrators.
Leadership Framework
As the chapter moves in to the leadership framework, it is important to resituate the
mutual importance for queering an established leadership framework in order to meet study’s
purposes and to apply the above psychoanalytic concepts as queering tool of the leadership
considerations of the study.
This study juxtaposes students’ and leadership’s perspectives as leadership discourse can
be alienating, repressing, shaming, and othering disproportionate number of the intersectional
students, including their potentially leaderful traits, practices, and aspirations. In this
juxtaposition, the important qualification is that it is difficult to deploy queer theory as a research
method, especially considering McDonald’s (2013) as well as Gunn and McAllister’s (2014)
emphasis on queer theory as almost exclusively a lived experience of students navigating on-
campus alienation, heteronormative ordering of learning. The same applies to self-projections
determining the scope of students’ possible selves, more immediate study and socialization
orientations, and ability to influence campus life by positioning themselves for a self-fulfilling
leadership orientation.
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 33

The study is also grounded in the students’ and leadership’s campus contexts but aims to
gauge leadership aspects relevant to campus life and any other professional context. Researching
leaderful queer students is relevant because modeling of minority student leadership
development remains relevant today (Rosch, Collier, & Thompson, 2015; Zhang, LeSavoy,
Lieberman, & Barrett, 2014). Rosch’s and colleagues’ (2015) observation that leadership,
stemming from student’s own group, is a negative predictor of motivation to lead long-term,
stresses a need for queer student’s leadership to be considered outside of LGBT activism alone.
Contemporary leadership theory’s turn towards the de-ontological view of leadership (Collinson,
2014; Kelly, 2013) applies to what we saw to be Lacanian theory’s negative ontology of the
social realm and with it, the dialectical view required to make sense of it. More importantly, any
postulation of new potential grounds for leadership modeling from a qualitative inquiry requires
thinking outside of fixed social identities and ontologies.
Leadership studies in general are undergoing ontological challenges in self-reflection
(Kelly, 2014), and critical theory may yield this area of studies new frameworks for empirical
testing. It is not the same use as in conceptual analyses of leadership models as can be seen in
some existing examples of authentic leadership critiques (Costas, 2012; Ford & Harding, 2011).
The Lacanian triad is used to code discourse on leadership by intersectional students and
university administrators alike against the backdrop of the four organizational frames to which
the study now turns.
The framework of four organizational frames by Bolman and Deal (1984; 2003) is a well-
established model for leadership studies in organizational settings and is widely known among
higher education researchers (Bensimon, 1989) and therefore requires no extensive introduction.
It will suffice to note that Bolman and Deal (1989; 2003) view organizations as forming a
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 34

semiotic square that enables leaders to perceive, monitor, and act in organizations through more
comprehensive lens of all four organizational frames. The first frame is structural frame,
composed of organizational goals, tasks, technology, rules, roles, linkages, differentiation and
integration. In this frame, leadership manifests itself in managing an organization’s relationship
with the environment as well as ensuring clarity and consistency of roles and structure. The
second frame is human resource (HR) frame that includes organizational needs, skills, norms,
interpersonal communicative models, fit of affiliates and other aspects. This frame is activated
when leaders are concerned with people and their needs, motivational approaches, empowerment
and alike. The third frame is political, pertaining to power base, conflict issues, coalition
building, resource distribution, agenda-building, negotiations, catalysts or obstacles for change.
Leaders impact this frame through advocacy, setting arenas for conflicts to surface and
negotiated arrangements to be sought. The fourth frame is the symbolic or cultural frame that
refers to sets of hegemonic culture containing meanings, beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, myths,
stories. Leaders find themselves in this frame when they interpret organizational experiences,
provide vision, discharge charisma and alike.
Figure 4 shows the four organizational frames with the constituting components of each.
The figure also places study-relevant questions to be explored against the background of the
constituting parts of each organizational frame.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 35

HUMAN RESOURCE FRAME
Heart of organization is people
Empowerment
Participation
Skills
POLITICAL FRAME
Partnerships/Coalition
Complexity
Ecosystem
Resource distribution

STRUCTURAL FRAME
Goals
Design
Analysis

SYMBOLIC FRAME
Culture
Values
Vision

Figure 4. Four organizational frames with overarching study’s topics by participant group. Adapted from
Bolman and Deal, 2003.

An example of the above framework’s utilization in the higher education research is
Bensimon’s study (1989) of 32 university presidents. She interviewed the presidents to see to
what degree presidents perceive their respective organizations through multiple frames
simultaneously. The results were mixed despite the importance of multi-frame view for more
effective leadership in complex decision-making carrousels that academic institutions are (Julius,

How do intersectional students queer the four organizational frames?

How do campus administrators perceive and view intersectional/queer students in the
organizational frames?
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 36

Balridge, & Pfeffer, 1999). The present study aims to expand on this approach by simultaneously
interviewing intersectional students as well as campus administrators. The four frames will
maintain empirical relevance of leadership and students’ discourses but will be complicated by
the queering move and by adding counterintuitive layers of the real-imaginary-symbolic triad.
This is deployed in order to arrive at leaderful traits and philosophies that the intersectional
students have and can be recognized and supported by the leadership discourse. To that end, a
concept of institutional agents (Stanton-Salazar, 2011; Bensimon, Dowd, Stanton-Salazar, and
Dávila, 2019) complicates the four frames’ application from the perspectives of students as much
as campus staff and administrators who support them. To clarify, “institutional agent” is
conceived as faculty leaders, faculty, student counselors, advisors. They hold relatively high
authority and influence whereby they “…use their position, status, and authority to act on behalf
of young people to advocate for institutional support…” (Bensimon et al., p. 1695). Institutional
agents utilize their influence, networking capacity, to navigate students through various aspects
of organizational frames within an institution to find that support in meeting their educational
needs. Stanton-Salazar (2011) stresses that the effective “institutional agents” are guided by
critical consciousness rather than limiting their interactions to students to deployment of their
authority or administratively transact what students need. This concept provides a multi-
dimensional perspective of interplay of the frames as the condition for a comprehensive and
effective support of those students who due to their background or lack of resources, do not
know how and where to access support systems, navigate alienating campus space, and alike. In
this regard, the idea of the institutional agents cannot be contained within HR frame alone.
Professionals are required to engage structures, connections, knowledge, and staff-networking
experiences that go well beyond their immediate roles and offices in order to support students
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 37

with advice beyond proscribed channels. For example, the students engaged in subcultural
activities, formations of less formalized support systems on campuses, engaging in protest, they
all require above-described enlisting of all sources of advice and support if the newly forming
intersectional paradigm on campuses, as the study claims, is to take hold in higher education
contexts.
The study will now recap its methodological components and describe the research plan
in the following chapter on methods.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 38

CHAPTER III: Methods
The methodology that bound the study has epistemological and ontological assumptions
underlying the empirical inquiry. This was especially important to keep in mind given this
study’s methodologically exploratory nature implied by the constellation of its theoretical
framework. As this was a qualitative study employing manifold theoretical frames, it drew from
constructivism (Creswell, 2013) with relevance to phenomenology (Husserl, 1913) given strong
assumption of uncovering and drawing from the experiential knowledge, as well as postmodern
(Grbich; 2013) epistemological paradigms.
The study was naturally permeated with the assumptions of how social identities, power
relations, leadership orientations, and numerous other social categories work. With respect to
how studied phenomena was approached, understood, and interpreted, the methodologies of the
study include some explicitly relevant methodologies and some more implicit. The explicitly
deployed methodologies included critical research deriving from previously introduced critical
theory. It stemmed from learning during the study that the intersectional queer students engaged
in critique of the existing power relations that order their campus life and experiences. Then also
related to critical theory, the assumptions of the dialectical materialism (Benjamin, Arendt, &
Zohn, 1968; Žižek, 2013) was implicit. One important aspect of the study was the inquiry into
the extent to which the intersectional queer students critiqued fixed social identities. The
epistemological challenge the study’s methodology needed to be cognizant of what was less the
question of objectivity of the empirical reality the study explored and more every participant’s
inclusion in this reality. Another explicit lens was intersectionality, previously introduced, as the
study solicited a participation of intersectional students, and because intersectionality offered
additional perspectives outside of the paradigm of the fixed identities. Critical race
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 39

methodologies were not directly used by the study, but its key assumptions informing
intersectionality (Huber, 2008) stemmed from the critical race theory and therefore not irrelevant
to studying students and potentially leaders from racially different backgrounds than, for
example, the researcher himself.
In order to interrogate the experiences of the intersectional queer students, the Critical
Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) was drawn from as well. The CHAT anchored students’
discourse in the context of labor relations, economic systems impacting their communities as
much as their relations with other communities they live side by side with while on campus. It
provided an empirical grounding to the dialectical view of students’ social identities as well.
Queer theory was one of study’s key lenses. However, it did not lend itself as a research
method as it cannot be grasped adequately outside of a lived experience and tends towards
ambiguity and consciously aims to elude being explained and firmly positioned (McDonald,
2013; Gunn & McAllister, 2014). The empirical relevance of queer lens to intersectional students
and to the key population category of the underrepresented minorities in the educational research
contexts can be easier established with an implicit view of study participants and their context
from the decolonialization perspective (Coloma, 2009; Patel, 2016).
Leadership methodology is multifaceted as the field of such studies itself (Collinson,
2014; Kelly, 2013) that can include traits-based, processual and several others. The study was
embedded in the de-ontological view of leadership (Kelly, 2013). Even though the study utilized
considerably older and classic framework of Bolman and Deal’s (1984; 2003) organizational
frames, this framework was more schematic, cartographically-driven and could lend itself to de-
ontological view of leadership.
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 40

Psychoanalytic methodology is not only a methodology informing a clinical practice. Its
relevance to critical theory is undeniable in critical theory’s classic (Horkheimer, 1972; Marcuse,
1969) as well as its poststructuralist articulations (Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1979). Lacanian
psychoanalysis, particularly its triad real-imaginary-symbolic were the tools included in the
study as the tool to queer social identity categories of students and to enable robust deontological
view of leadership framework.
Setting
The setting for the study was campus life to the extent campus leadership could affect it
in its curricular, co-curricular affairs, without dismissing related students’ socio-economic
positionalities. Geographically it was bound to Research University’s (RU) campus in Los
Angeles. As described in the discussion of study participants, the study involved hard to reach
populations. The participants were associated with the campus settings that campus leadership
had at least implicit reach to.
Participants
The study participants were eleven queer students with, to the degree possible,
intersecting gender, racial, ethnic, or other minoritized identities. Additional two participants in
senior campus administration positions were also sought as the study proposed to juxtapose
student identities, experiences, and views with the campus administrators. This was done to
explore to what extent the leaders can recognize and situate the intersectional queer students on
higher education campuses. The study uses pseudonyms to refer to student as well as
administrator participants. The same applies to references to their institutional affiliations.
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 41

Table 1 below shows the study’s student participants with their relevant demographics.
The table 2 immediately follows, representing the campus administrator participants with their
functional area of oversight identified along with their management level.
Table 1.
A list of student participants with demographics, ordered by sequence of interviews
Name (Pseudonym) Pronoun Study Level Racial Identity Ethnic Identity
where self-identified

Eren She Undergrad Asian Chinese

Will* He Undergrad Latin-American Latino

Natalie She Grad Asian Chinese

Paraleli They Undergrad Mixed

Sandra They Undergrad Asian Chinese

Jed They Undergrad Caucasian

Boyd He Grad Mixed Latino, Afro-Peruvian

Kagen She Undergrad Asian Chinese

Colty She Grad Caucasian

Rory He Undergrad Caucasian British/English

Huy* He Undergrad Asian American Vietnamese

*First-generation college student

Table 2

A list of campus administrator participants with functional area of policy-making authority

Name (Pseudonym) Pronoun Campus functional area Management level

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 42

Adam He Student Affairs Top Officer

Katie She Equity and Diversity Senior Manager

Campus administrators were recruited based on their relative ability to influence
curricular, co-curricular, and other socio-economic aspects of students’ lives on campus. The
student participants were intersectional (ideally) queer (ideally) LGBT-identifying (minimally)
students, undergraduate and graduate. Students thus defined can be viewed as relatively hard to
reach population and therefore required sensitive yet sustained recruitment efforts and strategies.
Sampling for the study was purposeful to the degree afforded by the difficulty to reach
the populations as noted above. On the one hand, to this day such students often veil such
identity from superiors, family, and peers for a variety of reasons that are beyond this section’s
scope to recount. On the other hand, queer students may consciously evade any specific and
enduring labeling of themselves as far as social identities are concerned. Seeking queer students
to interview involves several considerations, as listed below:
• Contacting known student affairs professionals with access to students of interest. To
maintain purposeful sampling features to this sampling approach, researcher indicated an
interest to connect with queer students who were known to that professional as
identifying LGBTQ and, if possible, with other intersecting social identity or identities;
• Contacting, via e-mail, gatekeepers of the campus center that serves LGBTQ students. It
included introducing the project, distributing flyer, building rapport.
• In study recruitment ads, no identities were explicitly excluded from the participation in
the study but students with intersecting identities were encouraged to participate. While
the study was especially interested in intersectional students with minoritized, and
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 43

particularly, underrepresented minority identities, no multi-level distinctions of the
solicited identities were made in recruitment materials to preclude lack of interest as
driven by overly complex or confusing criterions for the participation.
• A couple of student participants explicitly indicated their intention to remain engaged
with the study after their interviews and speak to their peers about participating in the
study also. In this way, the study’s recruitment process acquired a snowballing feature.
However, the study does not have a track record to identify whether any of the eleven
student participants joint the study through this particular recruitment method. The early
participants were not asked to identify the specific source that solicited their interest to
participate and thus in order to maintain a consistency in the range of questioning of the
students, no such question was asked of the participants who responded to the study later
on. It is only suggestive of the snowballing effect in the participant recruitment from the
fact that more than one student was representing the identical program of study.
Data Collection and Instrument Protocols
Process. The study called for in depth one-on-one interviews. Below is a generalized
description of the process used to recruit and set up data collection with the study participants.
Campus resource centers, particularly those serving students with sensitive identities,
have proper venues to ensure the ethical access and research principles. The researcher contacted
specific center’s gatekeeper who in turn disseminated the inquiry to the students affiliated with
the center with whom the gatekeeper had explicit and role-defined authority to contact. Once
contacts were established, researcher maintained diplomatic communication with the potential
participants to set up interview times. Per interview protocol and before the actual interview
commenced, the researcher provided informed consent forms, including the applicable
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 44

confidential ways to disseminate the data or its findings, de-identifying data in the transcript,
deleting recording after transcription. The approach to finding study participants followed the
principles of deference to autonomy, confidentiality, and voluntary participation of the
participants.
Interviews. Interviews were at the core of study’s data collection methods. Moderately
guided inquiry to gain insight into participants’ lived experiences, experiential knowledge,
semantic and discursive underpinnings can best be captured though the interviews, widely
deployed in qualitative research (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Of three typical qualitative
interview protocols, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), the
study used a semi-structured interview protocol. While number and sequence of questions
structuring the interviews were predetermined, researcher left himself flexibility to insert
prompts to stimulate deeper worded data or follow ups. Interview questions 1 through 6 asked
students about their ways of identifying and how that compared to the way various aspects of
study and campus lives expected them to identify. Interview protocol with the questions is
enclosed in study’s Appendixes. These questions also inquired the students how in that process,
if at all, they critiqued identity expectation of them, including a question about its future
considerations. Interview questions 7 through 11 included questions about students’ leadership
aspirations, how their aspirations and experiences relate to campus leadership now and into the
future. Interview question 12, a request to share thoughts not yet covered during the interview,
was a standard in qualitative interviews (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). A separate protocol was
developed to interview campus leaders consisting of 7 questions.
Document analysis. Document analysis mode was not proactively included in the study
design. One of the senior administrators offered some documents to the researcher to provide his
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 45

campus-wide function’s structure. After a careful analysis, the documents did not yield
significant insight to supplement the findings stemming from that administrator’s interview.
With processual part of the study’s design overviewed, it is a good place to provide contours that
oriented the data analysis, in what follows.
Limitations and Delimitations
Several limitations of the study were applicable. Its geographical area was limited to RU
in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. This limited the study to a region with skewed political
ideology towards liberal politics of campuses, their leadership, and student population. Inquiry
into minoritized students’ experiences in less liberal contexts would be appropriate aims for
follow up studies.
The study recruited queer student participants with intersecting social identities,
rendering it hard to reach populations. It was not known from the outset of the study whether the
cultural center, approached as part of seeking the participants, would be dominated by LGBT
activists celebrating fixed LGBT identities and who in turn had a potential influence in
participant referrals.
Several strategies were deployed to address the above limitations as study’s context and
methods allowed. The study deployed the purposeful sampling to the degree objectively possible.
It included looking for gender non-conforming students. This was how the study negotiated
objectively existing limitations to purposeful sampling of hard to reach populations and to its
limited geographical area. The strong foundation in dialectical thinking of queer theory,
intersectionality, CHAT, were the theoretical elements keeping defaulting of study’s data
interpretations accepting the fixed social identities. The interview protocol questions were
worded in a way that drew a distinction between queer and LGBT ways of identifying without
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judgements of either. The multiplicity of in-depth interviews and its findings did not discernably
limit the insights, scope, and intuitively universal nature of the interview findings to justify self-
imposition of the case study status, especially with the problem space the study aimed to discuss
and without the research problem unique to a single institution.
The issues of researcher’s bias and positionality are discussed in what follows.
Data Analysis
Interview data analysis. The study asked analytical questions as early as sampling
process and throughout data collection as appropriate for qualitative research (Merriam &
Tisdell, 2016). In preparation of the data analysis post-collection, data was organized and a
codebook initiated to prepare for the analysis deploying constant comparative analysis
(Charmaz, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). To create an angle of analysis that speaks to, first and
foremost, answering study’s research questions (RQ’s), analytical questions were developed
(Bogdan & Biklen, 2011). For example and in expecting multifarious ways in how queer
students identify, a research question was expanded and in turn, analytical focus included
looking for how the queer students critique fixed identities. Furthermore, the data was read using
several ways of thinking about it. Key ways to looking at how data answered RQ’s included
looking for patterns and themes in the data that speak to RQ’s as much as checking plausibility
of initial “findings,” clustering for axial and selective codes (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana,
2014). A few other analytic tools were used that yielded richer codes during the analysis: use of
questioning, making comparisons, thinking in metaphors, considering various meanings of a
word, looking at language and words indicating time as much as negative cases (Corbin &
Strauss, 2015). Consistent with the analytic approach, the above-described analytical tools
yielded codes at three levels: open (or empirical), axial, and selective codes that lead to making
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assertions of the findings. As part of keeping the analysis honest, contrasts and comparisons as
well as subsuming particulars into general were applied (Miles et al., 2014) while maintaining
the chain of evidence (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to arrive at evidence-based outcomes of the
analysis. However, additional ways of maintaining study’s integrity were deployed to minimize
threats to its credibility and trustworthiness.
Credibility and trustworthiness. There are several common threats to qualitative
study’s credibility and trustworthiness: the holistic fallacy of jumping to patterns in data that may
not be there, elite bias of treating data sources unevenly (Miles et al., 2014), personal bias of
agenda, particularly given critical-theoretical lens of the researcher, and going native by giving
too much weight to explanations by participants themselves (Miles, et al., 2014). Some strategies
to control for those threats were utilized. Internal validity in qualitative research applies less in
connection to objective representation of reality (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and more to
circumstances of research and its researcher (Maxwell, 2013), acquiring a term of credibility
(Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 2015). Some strategies recommended to maximize a study’s
credibility include triangulation, respondent validation, adequate engagement, researcher’s
positionality, and peer review (Patton, 2015). Peer review was deployed through study
Committee’s review of and feedback at various stages. Diverse perspectives of undergraduate,
graduate, and senior administrators were sought to elicit similarly themed questions from diverse
respondent pool, including seeking out 11 student participants. Interviews’ protocol was kept
semi-structured, which allowed to follow up on interview questions to obtain validations from
respondents. The study participants were asked if they’d be available for respondent validation of
the data, though no such need arose during the data organization and analysis. The beginning of
interviews included notes about researcher’s positionality as an additional measure of credibility.
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Study’s transferability, or applicability to other situations, is reflected through a thick description
of the entire process of the study, so that all methods are clear and as comprehensive as possible,
coupled with a clear audit trail of those methods (Maxwell, 2013). Another transferability
strategy, maximum variation in covering as wide range of data sources and perspectives (Patton,
2015), seemed to be foreseeable based on the actual sampling of distinct student study levels,
intersectional, gender non-conforming, international, and representing a wide range of ethnic
backgrounds. As Patton (2015) has observed, the integrity and competence of researcher are
paramount for the credibility and trustworthiness of a study to be meaningful, which brings the
present chapter to discussion of researcher’s positionality and then study’s ethical concerns.
Researcher’s positionality. Positionality in qualitative inquiry encompasses two
essential components that flow into each other during the inquiry. One of them is the
positionality as a world-view and held positions in relation to research goals and means (Savin-
Baden & Howell Major, 2013). Another one is reflexivity, accounting for potential changing
process of positionality in relation to research (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011), which then
necessitates ongoing transparency and conceptual space to allow for clear awareness of
positionality’ impact on research that stem from the researcher’s cultural, political-ideological,
and socio-economic contexts (Bryman, 2012).
With the study’s philosophical backdrop of critical theory/praxis, the researcher’s
positionality and reflexivity remains of crucial importance, because “it is critical to pay attention
to positionality, reflexivity, the production of knowledge and the power relations that are
inherent in research processes in order to undertake ethical research…” (Sultana, 2007, 380).
Furthermore, the account of positionality and reflexivity is particularly pertinent to queering and
subversive goals in regards to the established higher education leadership orthodoxy (Pasque,
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Carducci, Kuntz, & Gildersleeve, 2012). The means of subversion, queer theory, can be
discernable less in its methodological utility for the study and more as a medium of expressing a
lived experience (Gunn & McAllister, 2013). Transparency and awareness on this front is
paramount in maintaining the authenticity of study participants’ discourse and revelations of how
campus lived experiences inform intersectional queer students’ learning, campus and public life
orientations.
As the researcher, I identify as a queer person and my positionality’s relevance to the
theme and purposes of the study is difficult to miss. Given the study’s relevance to intersecting
social identities as well as the antagonism inherent and the inequities present between minoritzed
and majoritized student populations, my positionality may present a unique splitting of
difference between the two. First, Jewish identity renders one significant aspect in relation to the
inquiry. I was born and grew up in Lithuania that to this day considers Jewish community one of
the most controversial and debated minorities. This is due to Lithuania’s epi-centric position and
local majority’s ambiguous interrelation with the Jews leading up to and during the Holocaust.
At the same time, queers faced potential criminalization or other forms of institutionalization
because Lithuania did not delete the non-heteronormative sexualities from its criminal codes
until the researcher entered higher education contexts. In this specific and atypical sense, I have
experienced intersectionality, albeit without explicit awareness of the notion and outside of its
original definitions and contexts. There is another unique aspect of my positionality of having
experienced minoritized and majoritized status over the years. As mentioned, I was a minority
with more than one minoritized identities earlier in life. However, since I moved to the United
States, I have in a way lost my minority status and became majoritized as the White man in the
new home country. My life’s circumstances have also led me to experience relatedness to Asian
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LGBTQ community, including acting as a two-term president of a California Public Benefit
organization serving Asian LGBTQ and those related to them.
In order to establish clarity and maintain awareness of any of the above aspects of
researcher’s positionality when interacting with study participants and analyzing the data, I noted
my positionality to study participants at the time of research interview introduction. In the
introduction to research interviews and before conducting the interviews, I identified that my
experiences and philosophical viewpoint were strongly aligned with the queer theory alongside
critical praxis but that at the same time I had no intention and would be doing my best to not
steer the interactions toward any specific view point during the collection and interpretation of
the qualitative data.
Ethics
The study required IRB approval by virtue of being a data-based inquiry involving
human participants and sensitive identity topics, so the strict transparency was key in meeting the
universal research ethics requirement that reasonably foreseeable benefits of research strongly
outweigh all foreseeable harms to research participants (Tracy, 2013). As part of the IRB
process, all design aspects were clearly presented in the IRB application, recruitment strategies,
all other expected angles of researcher’s communication with the actual and potential
participants, applicable incentives for them, and informed consent forms were fully disclosed. As
just implied, the sustained transparency was crucial to obtaining the IRB approval as much as to
maintaining study’s integrity. Drawing from Patton (2015), this transparency included clear and
up front explanation of research participants’ individual and affiliation confidentiality,
autonomy, informed consent, data collection boundaries, seeking explicit permission to record
the interviews, approaching gatekeepers in diplomatic manner.
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With the study’s approach and methods reviewed, it will now turn to the next chapter in
which it will provide its findings.

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CHAPTER IV: Findings
The present chapter will provide an analysis and its findings of study’s interviews and
other relevant aspects from the data collected. It will do so by identifying themes and sub-themes
supported by the data.
The findings of this study reflect an approach to making assertions about data organized
from general assertions connected to the study’s research questions in its generality and breath.
Then each general assertion is split into specific chain of sub-assertions infused with the
evidence from the data as part of ensuring valid data linkages (Erickson, 1986). As part of this
framing, each data reference is “sandwiched” with researcher’s points connecting each data
reference to the sub and general assertions to tie the data in to the findings that the data serves as
evidence of.
The study’s research questions structure the presentation of findings. Thus, the chapter
discusses how the participants engage, answer, and/or expand on the following research
questions, also presented in the Introduction:
RQ1: What are the ways in which intersectional queer students identify? Subsequently,
how those ways of identifying critique fixed social identities?
RQ2: How do intersectional queer students critique campus leadership, particularly in
regards to ordering of campus life and study experiences?
RQ3: How do queer students understand their leadership aspirations?
RQ4: How do campus leaders recognize and view the intersectional queer students?
This general structure does not prevent a recognition and referencing linkages among the
research questions. As noted in previous chapters, two senior RU administrators participated in
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the study to provide insights for the RQ4. Certainly, such insights are relevant to all other RQ’s
and which in turn requires engaging RQ4 while discussing findings relevant to RQ1-RQ3.
The specific findings of the study are presented in what follows.
RQ1: Students’ Ways of Identifying
The study initially inquired its student participants, of which there were eleven, how they
identify. Two senior campus administrators also provided insights in to how they recognized and
viewed or interpreted students’ social identities of relevance to their leadership and campus
management approaches. Also as mentioned in the previous chapter, the participating students
were asked to draw either their identity map or a map of how they see social identities work in
general. This exercise is not only an integral part of understanding research questions about
students’ ways of identifying and how they critique fixed social identities, it is also utilized
below along with the relevant study interview questions as a way to provide an insight about the
participating students. The pronouns “she” and “he” used in the chapter reflects how the students
and administrators appeared to present themselves gender-wise. The pronoun “they” is used as a
pronoun to reference participants who self-identified to blur gender lines or visibly appeared to
do so. Student participants are referred to primarily as the intersectional queer students or simply
as RU students. The analysis below references student’s sexuality identities as queer, LGBTQ or
LGBT. This is done to maintain sensitivity to one of the aspects of the RQ1 in gauging the
degree to which the student use the terms to reference fixed or fluid sexuality identities. In very
general terms, queer term is used when the students consistently referred to themselves that way
and highlight their suspicion or critique of the fixed sexuality identities. LGBT term appears in
instances where students referred to themselves or group activities that way or discussed
sexuality positions in traditional fixed identity ways. Students often referred to sexuality by the
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 54

term LGBTQ themselves, which in most of the cases the researcher understood to indicate a
neutral stance of a student in regards to the discussion of the balance of the identity’s fixed or
fluid nature. Instances of LGBTQ use, as opposed to LGBT term, is not to be interpreted as using
queer and the traditional sexuality terms interchangeably. To the contrary, the queer in such
instances is considered a part of the identity spectrum. Coupled by the traditional indeterminacy
of the term queer, LGBTQ then refers to a dialectical, rather than interchangeable, usage of the
identity terms.
Queerness and intersecting identities: Representations, strategies, critique,
dialectics. Not unexpectedly, students at RU have multiple ways of identifying. The increasingly
changing environment of American college campuses reflects a wide-ranging spectrum of sexual
identities (Stewart, Renn, & Brazelton, 2015). The participating students all had clear self-
awareness by claiming specific sexual identities as well as clear knowledge of the spectrum of
identities even in cases where their identities were not firm and unmovable. The same applied to
other types of identities. A student Eren noted how “…I identify as bisexual or pansexual, either
works,” clearly self-aware yet flexible about firm labeling of her own identity. The same student
also introduced “queer” as a way to identify. In her depiction of identity, she drew the
bisexual/pansexual identity just under the notion of “queer.” Queer then seems to be engaged as
a more generalized way to classify specific sexuality label that applies to her while specifying
her “female” gender identity separately. Eren similarly depicted her “Chinese” ethnic identity
deriving from the “Asian” race she belongs to in the same identity drawing. Demonstrating
strong grasp of her various social identity components, she separately depicted being “atheist”
and her “upper-middle class” socio-economic positioning. Eren also reminds us that what she
calls “interests” is not an individual idiosyncrasy alone but rather an integral part and relevant to
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understanding students’ current situation and what brings them to higher education contexts.
STEM is her key interest. It indicates multifarious segments of the student’s identity and
development. As the study walks through its participants’ ways of identifying, its discussion
engages intersectionality in specific ways that are germane to recognizing stereotypes and
expectations of students in higher education. That is, intersections of STEM, social sciences,
humanities gets into the mix of intersections surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender that
are of particular relevance to the higher education. To put it in the student’s own words: “I am
Physics major, …lots of STEM classes. So usually that doesn’t come up a lot, right? Which is
another interesting thought, the intersection between queer people and the STEM field.” At the
same time, Eren acknowledges that her Asian peers are well represented in the STEM fields of
study. Sandra, another undergraduate of Chinese descent, who’s pansexual identity is briefly
discussed and qualified just below, echoed Eren’s observations about how different minoritized
students are represented and social identities discussed depending on the fields of study: “It’s not
very often in my classes particularly because I was going after STEM major so there isn’t much
to talk about social issues. I have taken a couple of sociology classes… they talk more about race
or gender.” These observations imply structural differences and challenges how to tackle
diversity and inclusiveness-related debates and processes from one field of study to another. To
make this point clearer, a non-STEM student’s example will soon be relevant to bring in.
Sandra is an undergraduate of Chinese descent identified themselves as demisexual.
Sandra clarifies that in slightly broader terminology, this way of identifying is similar to
pansexual yet demisexuals’ sexual attraction to others only follows after a strong romantic
connection. This clarification appears to support an absence of predetermined sexual orientation
to a specific gender of the other person. It is definitely so in regards to Sandra’s relation to their
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own gender identity. In contrast to Eren, Sandra noted a non-determinate queerness in their
gender identity, further radicalizing this non-determinate queerness by inserting a confusion, an
active working through, instead of expressing their gender in pre-defined ways: “…in terms of
gender, I am very confused at the moment. I haven’t completely figured it out, but I believe I
don’t fall into the standard male or female category.”
Natalie has similar sexual, ethnic identities, yet her gender identity is different from the
two students above: “So I identify as a Chinese American cis-gendered female. I identify as
queer and bisexual.” It is noticeable that Eren and Natalie merge from bisexual identity to queer
term when describing their identity. The analysis will return to Eren’s use of the term queer.
After noting Eren and Sandra’s observations actively cross-referencing their field of study and
such social identities as race and sexuality, it is relevant to put them side by side with Natalie
who is race and sexuality similarly self-identified as Chinese, cis-gendered, bisexual. Natalie is a
graduate student in the area of Social Work and Eren and Sandra are undergraduates in STEM
fields. As was discussed just above, Eren’s sees a lot of peers in her own racial and ethnic
positionings but as a queer student, she sees herself as one of a few represented in STEM fields,
similarly to Sandra. Natalie sees it in flipped way in her field of study. Yes, “… for social work
school, probably 90% of us are ethnic minorities here in LA and are people of color. And
everyone is pretty open with who they are.” But the people of color she references are not of
Asian descent: “There's not a whole lot of Asian people in my program, so it's not really brought
up a lot. It's predominantly Hispanic Latino. A lot of minority issues are brought up, just not
specific to Asian American.” And as a contrast to Eren and Sandra who are in STEM field,
Natalie paints a radically different picture when it comes to the representation and open presence
of queers: “And everyone is pretty open with who they are. People have come up to me in class
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as being part of the LGBT community. I feel like within that space, we can be who we are.” All
these students’ observations paint a type of semiotic square with diametrically opposing
experiences depending on whether they consider racial-ethnic or sexuality-queerness aspects of
their identities. Clearly, the types of academic fields and their associated cultures, structures,
expectations, histories, professional prospects are what splits the difference in leading the two
students to such different experiences.
The study observed that these students seemed to use sexual/gender identities alongside
references to queer. So to return to Eren, how does she incorporate the notion of queerness as a
way to identify apart from conceptually subsuming her bisexuality/pansexuality under the
“queer” categorization? One of Eren’s reflections used “queer relationship” as a reference to a
homosexual relationship:
Oh, I think it was called alcohol education was talking about drinking and also
talking about partying and that kind of culture on campus, right? There was one
example of a relationship and of the types of relationships portrayed in the video,
one of them was actually a queer relationship.
But queerness to Eren can also come as a reference to something hidden, strange, and
something that is outside of mainstream and underrepresented by the media and society,
“…because it’s like, that’s a very sad reflection of society that because there is not enough
representation, people think they can’t be a certain way. I think that’s true for not just for queer
issues but you know, for race for beauty.” Eren’s adding race and beauty may reference a social
suppression of non-normative expressions of social identities, but her recounts of religious
identity add confrontational connotations, relevant to familial as well campus contexts, as aspects
that impacted her religious development is strong ways:
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Well my family, we're kind of Christian, like a little bit. It wasn't like, we don't
practice it greatly but we would go to the church. But then sometimes I would
think, before I actually knew I was queer, I would think like, you know, if people
say like, "Oh, God made you the way you are," right? So if God supposedly made
people, right, queer, gay, or whatever form of that, then why is it that God doesn't
do something when people use his name? Right, to justify their hate towards the
LGBTQ community, right? So I couldn't reconcile that so after that I think I kinda
lost my Christian faith. Then for a while I said I was agnostic, and now I think I'm
atheist.
The above passage recaptures Eren’s development of how she came to realizing about
being atheist. By contrast, Natalie depicted her relationship to religion simply as herself being
non-religious in her identity map. But taking Eren’s account above, it does not strike as
exclusively a causal explanation of loss of faith. It is possible to see a regulatory component at
work. That is, her way of thinking references an increasing distance to faith and religion based
on social justice criterion. Eren does not seem to distance herself from religion on part of
ideologically engaged activist. Eren’s account is more developmentally relevant to her as a
student and a young individual rather than confronting certain institutional structures, such as
organized religion, to oppose herself to. The application of social justice criterion by the students
in assessing their relation to communities, to teachings of their communities, and to campus life
in this example presents a case of dialectical deployment of seeking social justice as an ongoing
mode of learning. RU students learn how to extend the reach of social justice principles based on
learning curve not only of their own intersecting identities, but also multiplicity of marginalized
identities of their peers and communities other than their own. Another student, Will, who has an
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intersecting minoritized identities of Latino, gay, and First-generation student, is motivated to be
a future leader precisely to help others who are disadvantaged:
I always think about, it's mainly my two intersectional identities are my ethnicity
of being Latino and my sexual orientation being gay, I mean, in leadership, like I
said before, I just I want to be an example to other people who are struggling or
afraid to come out. I mean, I really want to see the world become more accepting
and more open about these kinds of things. I guess, in my leadership I always
focus on diversity and inclusion, giving it an equal opportunity.
Will does not react to negative life experiences here. He sees that others may need
support because there are LGBTQ, even if it is just “… an aspect about you,” because of a need
to protect others who are bullied. Will is concerned personally, “I haven’t involved myself in too
many LGBTQ clubs, just because I feel like it’s about dealing with discrimination and bullying
and I haven’t really experienced that…” And specifically in relation to the campus location of
Los Angeles where Will studies, he feels accepted, at the very least in generic terms: “Everyone's
so accepting and so loving. I mean, being here in Southern California, I feel like it's very
accepted. Everyone's so open-minded here. Where all college students, so I mean, I feel really
accepted by my community” and also that “USC does a good job including the LGBT
community…” In regards to his intersectionality, he notes that
I do feel like they do a good job of including intersectional identities. I mean, I
remember during welcome week there were special events for every sort of
identity you could think of, I mean, even racial or sexual identity-based or gender-
based.
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Will’s self-reflection on his intersecting identities is subtle in that it appears to include awareness
of special positioning that his intersectional identities create. After all, he is not only Latino, or
specifically, cis-gendered Mexican and Guatemalan, not only queer, but also First-generation
college student. His reflections on his intersectionality suggest that the ways of identifying
involve strategic relation to own social identities as well as certain overtones of critique of
utilization of those identities for oppositional grouping relative to majoritized identities.
The study will return to the above themes as it gets familiar with more participating
students, but for Will, “…I feel like that they assume that they are all, not necessarily
discriminated against, but they really required to be grouped together in order to feel accepted.”
To the researcher, this reads as a subtle critique of oppositional notions of minoritized vs.
majoritized positionings, indispensable in obvious ways in activism of resisting encroachment on
the rights and safety of minoritized social groups and receiving rewards of acceptance. Another
student, Paraleli, who the study will become more familiar with later, seems to engage in a subtle
critique of identities. Yet they do so more as a matter of labels as containers of emotional states:
“I feel like we have labels and groupings for a sense of comfort, but those labels and groupings
can also be a sense of discomfort.” For Will, groupings and labeling do not create a distance
from an active engagement with others in similar disadvantaged social positions as him. As he
said earlier – “I just I want to be an example to other people who are struggling or afraid to come
out. I mean, I really want to see the world become more accepting and more open about these
kinds of things.” It is a reminder about Will’s awareness of social justice goals he has as a
motivation to engage in future leadership. At present as a young undergraduate, he engages in a
strategic relationship with his own identities, as a strategy to maintain campus and community
relationships, gain general acceptance in thought-through ways:
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This is my first year here, and when I introduce myself to people I didn't say I was
gay right off the bat, just because, I mean, to me it's just something else about me,
it's not something that I really need to feel it's important to share right away. But
when I would tell people, "Oh, I have a boyfriend," or, "Oh, I'm gay," I'd always
get, I never got anything bad.
And for Will, it is not just about the strategy how to be and remain accepted by those
around him. His strategy include utilization of his currently friendly environment on campus to
better understand others in different minoritized positions:
I feel like there are options to learn about LGBTQ studies and being gay, and
multiple identities. I took a Gender Studies class, and an Intro to LGBTQ Studies
last semester, a general education class, and I learned about how there a lot of
different genders and there are a lot of different identities and it's important to
respect and identify them.
Researcher sees that learning about social identities and issues surrounding a student is
the key strategy to develop student’s own preparedness for leadership that is sensitive to social
justice concerns, which higher education campuses are positioned for. One mode of engaging
student’s own identity in a way that maintains that learning about a self to better understand
different positioning of others, is to question your own identity. As another student, Jed, points
out,
I identify as a gay man but definitely also kind of questioning, in terms of, I mean
I'm always questioning my identity in terms of my sexual orientation and also my
gender identity, and how as my understanding of gender and its place in society
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evolves and I feel more strongly with what I do believe I guess, with that, it poses
questions I'm always asking myself again and again…
Jed, who is White, espouses queers’ indeterminacy and their own identity’s questioning
as a path to learn and deeper understand experiences of those in different social groupings. After
all, “Yes, I’m queer, but that is not my whole identity, right?” They want to always espouse
queerness as a matter of their looks and relatedness to others. Jed acknowledges that no matter
one’s own performance of queerness, “some aspects of their identities are obvious,” while
recognizing that others are not. This is how Jed says they seek to understand how others “move
through this world,” first, by clearly acknowledging their privilege: “I still move through the
world as a white man, and with that I have inherent privilege.” And then establishing a conscious
relatedness to others precisely through listening to narratives of individuals and applying them
against the realities of their own privilege, constantly digging into intersectionality behind the
narrative of others:
So I think that keeping in mind intersectionality, like where these aspects of
identity align and which aspects of identity might not be as visually obvious and
knowing that has allowed me not to pass judgements as quickly about people and
the way they walk through the world. And I guess it's also just in the sense that
everyone has a different story and a different background and so it's not
something that you can just tell at first. I think definitely keeping in mind
intersectionality allows you to be an open listener and to embrace different
identities and welcome those stories.
The student does not seek to circumvent their privilege to be on the similar footing as
other intersectional students in respect to continuous attention to minorities, such as Will could
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claim. But how a student in more privileged positioning would justly accommodate everyone’s
“moving through the world?” Attention to the intersectionality in others as well as in espousing
collaboration, interactions with others on campus, brings the student to a situation where the
privilege is put aside to a limited degree, so that their queerness allows them to understand the
struggles of other minorities. As their own example would have it, to be able to understand how
lesbian women “move through the world” without sharing their experiences and intersectionality.
The study will note how Katie, a senior administrator in RU with a role related to equity
and diversity, sees all students as intersectional when discussing study’s research question 4. For
now in the context of the present discussion, Katie’s observation seems to reference dialectical
nature of social identities that students come with and continue to develop when on campus. But
the aspect of privilege gets lost in such otherwise significant insight. And the intersectional
students themselves tend to acknowledge the privilege they have. Kagen, for example, is racially
and ethnically mixed with Asian, specifically, Chinese, and White communities represented in
her family. She considers herself queer and cis-gendered at the same time. Yes, she sees
“othering” taking place on campuses in regards to queers and other students and their groups
who disagree on various campus policies,
Who don't necessarily like the way that the campus is, you know, if you want to
change it, if you want to be an advocate against the way things are, it's hard to
become an institutionally recognized leader because the university probably
doesn't necessarily recognize an organization for that, so I think there's a lot of
marginalized folks.
The same student feels othered also among her White peers because of her mixed racial
and ethnic identity and similarly, when surrounded by her Asian peers: “you know when I'm in
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white spaces I feel Asian, I feel very othered, but when I'm in Asian spaces I also feel that I am
an intruder and that I am sort of too white to fit in.” Yet such othering experiences of Kagen do
not prevent her from clearly acknowledging the inherent privilege she enjoys, especially when
coming from self-identified affluent socio-economic background: “I think because I do have
privilege people don't usually question me or bring that up in a confrontational way.” As she puts
it further, “I think because I do have a more privileged identity in terms of class background that
I've had the resources to be able to navigate that and still find a place here and still be pretty
comfortable.” In general, Kagen sees how “…the campus is very much structured towards white
students, upper class students, cis straight students.” Kagen noted how she aims to seek out
student advisors who are similar or appear similar to her own set of identities but at the same
time, she wants to recognize and work with
cultural assemblies that represent the black and Latinx and APA student
communities and I think just recognizing those leaders, like not only giving them
the resources to work within their own communities but making sure they're also
included in higher discussions on everything even if it's not a cultural specific
issue, you know?
From the above it can be said that Kagen is strategically approaching those who provide
administrative support to her and on the more universal socio-cultural level, is actively
considering social justice and equity in her desire to have marginalized groups at the table where
high-level discussions take place and decisions are made.
Interviewing students indicate that the students with more than one minoritized identity
from the underrepresented minoritiy backgrounds engaged in institutional critique of how
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identities and privilege play out more outwardly. Returning to Will’s example may help to
clarify it.
With the social justice concern in constant consideration, students like Will can engage in
critique of groupings, identities, and structures that he sees as problematic on campus now,
particularly through an example of Greek life:
It's not huge on Greek Life and fraternities and sororities, but I feel like that group
of people is very, I'm not gonna say racist and closed-minded, but if you look at
that population, they're all white and heterosexual, so I just think it's a divide
between intersectional queers and them, just because they're so different and I'm
not sure why they're scared of each other. I mean, I notice that on campus that, I
mean, I've been to a LGBTQ meeting and everyone talks about how they don't
like fraternities and sororities…
The above passage critiques the issue of “being scared of each other.” At the same time,
it does not fail to engage a problem of inclusion, representation in campus structures built for
student life. Will does not explicitly draw a binary between heterosexuals and homosexuals in a
single and static opposition but rather his critique slides into stressing the multi-layered nature of
how some groups get excluded by the dominant social groups. That is, it is not difficult to
discern a critique of LGBTQ groups who are not up to a par in their inclusion of intersectional
queers. Consistent with seminal literature on intersectionality, those with multiple minoritized
identities would be well positioned to recognize oppressive relationships beyond single
minority/majority distinction.
Will critiques the lack of inclusion of ethnic minorities within LGBTQ minority based on
his observations of campus structures such as Greek life. Natalie, who the study has already
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introduced, references the topic of minority within minority by bringing into thw researcher’s
view her ethnic and, more directly, familiar community expectations, mores. In that context and
by extension in her view, ethnic life and queerness exist in two separate worlds:
Yeah, I think it's hard because I have to, my ethnicity and racial identity and then
my queer identity, they feel like they're from two separate worlds, in a way. When
I think of the future, I think of it in terms of separate paths. I don't think of like,
oh, what's going to happen in the future of me being seen as a Chinese woman
dating another Chinese woman. I don't think about that too much. But it's
definitely a reality, because I see it with my family and how they view people
who just deviate from the norm.
Natalie seems to reference queer minority within ethnic minority, though the structures
she references are ethnic and even familial. In that sense, she describes a different situation from
what Will did. She engages this topic by putting it in personal development terms, by noting that
“I see myself in the future still being cautious about it. Not really being so open about my
relationship with my girlfriend or talking a lot to my family members about that.”
The criticism by Will is a strategy to understand his own and other’s social identities and
issues associated with them. And as already noted, that strategy consists of learning about
identities in and from campus structures. Natalie on the other hand, deploys the strategy
regarding her identities first and foremost within ethnic community’s and family structures, what
appears from her description as the sequenced and separated navigation and display of her social
identities:
And I see myself kind of, like I said, how there's two worlds, displaying one at a
time. It's hard to be in setting where, unless I'm in a setting that specifically is
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talking about Asian and LGBTQ identities, it's hard to be both at the same time, I
feel like. Oh, if I'm going to LGBTQ I'm not going to talk about being Asian
there. And then if I'm at a Chinese New Years event, I'm not going to talk about
me being queer and stuff. I feel like there's hardly a space for me to be both at the
same time.
Can it be concluded from the above that Natalie’s strategy does not include a concern for
social justice, learning empathy through understanding her own and others’ identities and
struggles associated with them? It would be a mistake to see Natalie’s strategy to be limited to
how her own identities get displayed. While her queerness, for example, lives in a separate world
from her familial and own-community interactions, she does not lose awareness and concern for
the struggles of others:
I mentioned how it kind of gives me that potential to help, to be a leader for those
I could relate to. And, in a way it showed me, also, let's see, that I can do these
things, like being, I guess, having this specific identity just gives me the ability to
understand the issues and understand myself so I can help others. And, for being a
leader, I think that's really important, to know yourself and know what others are
going through.
Natalie’s consideration of her leadership as a current student is oriented towards future,
but the passage also shows certain self-awareness of the dialectics of her own development to be
intrinsically related to the ability to help others by learning from her own experiences and
experiences of others.
Another bisexual student, Paraleli, reminded Researcher that their bisexual identity, or as
they reference it, “polyamorous,” when considered on its own, carries a challenge that many
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others around them do not see - that diverging gender and orientation identities are not either/or
matter:
I find that depending on when a person sees me, or who they see me with, they'll
already determine if they think that if I'm gay, or they think I'm straight, it doesn't
occur to them that maybe I could be both.
The student’s experiences seem to show that others around them do not see a divergence
of sexual orientation. Struggling to be recognized by others also came forth in earlier years of
life:
I just think about growing up, especially middle school, but I think middle school
is hard for a lot of people because they're going through puberty, but feeling like
an outsider because people would say, "What are you?" Cause they couldn't--
when I was younger, I looked very androgynous, not intentionally, but so a lot of
people couldn't tell what my gender was.
One theory they suggest for that is that “I feel like we have labels and groupings for a
sense of comfort, but those labels and groupings can also be a sense of discomfort.” Almost to
point out how labeling constitutes identities, they depicted their identity map by drawing a
silhouette of a person with her name spelled out as a label on a forehead… Then with bisexual,
[racially] mixed, female, cross-dresser following. And not to miss their earlier point that the
identity labels can be used for discomfort, they added “hurt/sad’ at the neck level, the figurative
meeting place of intellect and emotion at the crossroad of understanding. Does such depiction
invoke an understanding that they experience identity labeling as a source of discomfort?
Earlier-discussed students spoke to how social identities are deployed, expressed to others as a
part of a strategy for acceptance, or to use Paraleli’s expression, for maximizing “a sense of
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comfort.” To the contrary of that, Paraleli recalled the opposite, an extreme sense of discomfort
from a high-school experience:
I went to an all-girls catholic school, and I was wearing knee-high socks and they
fell down, and I hadn't fixed them yet. And, it wasn't even my teacher, it was
another teacher who was in this classroom because they both had desks in the
classroom, but she wasn't teaching that period. She was just coming in to visit,
and she was telling me that I need to pull up my socks, and she was like, "Are you
trying to be a slut, or something?" I remember my face was red and I didn't know
what to do cause, first of all, I didn't know I felt about the word 'slut'. I had never
heard anyone called a slut before in real life. I'd only seen it in TV, like in
Friends, or something. But also, I just didn't know why I was being attacked, and
also, I just didn't really understand what was going on, and how she was regarding
my clothes. I remember being upset because none of my classmates said anything,
but I don't know what they could say, and my teacher didn't say anything. She just
looked down at her desk, sourly. I just remember feeling really alone and sad.
There is no strategic response to such an experience, only sadness. Paraleli gave an
example of asexual people about whom they heard only recently. They observe that something
hidden like that requires nothing more but a label of asexual about them, which drives
conclusions by the others and cause a discomfort:
They might still be attracted to women, or men, or both, but they just don't feel
necessarily sexual about it but feel pressure. Like, "Oh, they're gay and they're
probably sexually deviant." I'm like, "That's already kind of messed up.”
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For fuller picture and to come back to Paraleli’s own experiences, it has to be pointed out
that Paraleli also reported that they suffered from clinical depression and fibromyalgia. That
provides a better understanding about their experiences of discomfort and what brings them to
sadness when it comes to their college campus experiences, - when the hidden conditions and
situations of the student produce expectation of ability and performing as everyone else in all the
mundane aspects of studying and moving around the campus:
Sometimes I wake up and I'm having a lot of pain. Usually it feels central, like it's
in my back or my legs and so I'll be using my rolling backpack cause it's not
pressure on my spine. I'll be using elevators more or the special walkways versus
if I'm not feeling pain then I try to take the stairs, or something like that. I find
one thing that's really hard navigating with other students when I'm using my
rolling backpack is, a lot of people don't really see a backpack. Maybe they're not
thinking about how I'm using it, so they're like, "Why don't you just pick it up?"
It can be claimed that the example above refers to the opposite of what was discussed
before. Is a lack of readily attachable identity labels to people with hidden conditions and
situations precisely what causes discomfort of behaving differently than expected? Or is it that
neither is the case and Paraleli reads into how they are perceived by others on campus? Paraleli
reports that in many such circumstances, they do see extra curiosity on part of student peers who,
they say, often ask them “What are you” in a sense that something of what is a routine behavior
to them in dealing with their condition hidden from others (pain), produces a wonder about them
on part of others.
This is not to say that Paraleli doesn’t strategically use identity groupings for managing
their own life on campus: “Right now, I'm a peer mentor through the resource center, and I
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would hope to be able to keep doing that, and once I'm done being a student to keep giving back
to communities.” It is a leadership-oriented strategy with a future in mind. This example of
involvement with the LGBT resource center, is what gives the student a sense of fulfillment and
meaningfulness against a background of previously mentioned discomfort experiences on college
campuses and growing up. They add that
I think it's hard cause right now, a lot of times, people will say something and
they've never been checked before. And they may get shamed for it, but they may
not know the right words, or how to navigate it, and we need to be coming from a
place of empathy and trying to teach instead of shaming.
This reminded the researcher of Paraleli’s pre-college experience of being shamed by
their teacher as a “slut” and experiencing sadness and confusion while not even being explained
or able to understand why they experiencing shaming and far-reaching labeling. Their alternative
strategy, what the researcher would like to refer to as a critique of identity labels, is questioning
the very need to explain yourself, especially if nobody is to step in and provide empathy,
protection:
I think, regardless of how privileged someone might be, I think we all experience
at some point is--there's a time when you were being called out or picked on, and
you didn't really have the words to defend yourself, or explain yourself, but also,
why did you have to explain yourself, and wishing someone else stepped in, and
someone didn't step in.
Clearly, once a student has a self-recognized and established identity, whether clearly
defined, static, or dialectical and non-fixed, the contours of leadership orientation with social
justice principles in mind take shape in the above Paraleli’s passage.
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However, not everyone has put firm foot in regards to their identity development. Sandra,
introduced earlier, was open about how confused they were in regards to their gender identity:
“In terms of gender, I am very confused at the moment. I haven't completely figured it out, but I
do believe I don't fall into the standard male or female category. I will either be in between or
both or neither.” However, Sandra’s non-committal to the cis-gender identity does not prevent or
reduce expectations on campus to perform one gender or another:
In terms of gender, most people will immediately assume that I'm female and I'm
still trying to learn how that's different from them approaching someone who they
don't think is female, but I've noticed it more in closer relationships I have with
the students here. Like the friends I've made. A lot of times they expect me to act
in the ... How they define a girl to be. They expect me to enjoy let's say makeup
or fashion or things like that. They expect me to be more emotional or
emotionally vulnerable.
Yet the same is not perceived in regards to being a student of Chinese descent – “I think
they don't expect me to act very differently from the rest of the students because of my Chinese
American identity.” An open exploration of gender identity impacts Sandra in how their peers
and perceived campus expectation work – expectation of cis-gender performance spills over into
an expectation in regards to sexuality, even if the same was not the case with their Chinese
American identity. Sandra notes that “A lot of times when I bring up that I am not straight, the
common response is, “You don't look like LGBT” or, “You look like you would be straight.”
Which then confuses me because I don't know how you look.” While ambiguity in gender
identity and expression can be interpreted as performative strategy in how that identity is
expressed and deployed in relation to campus institutions and peers, a confusion in gender
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identity would suggest an absence of the strategy in how identity is lived, expressed, and used.
Yet Sandra’s resistance to strong campus expectation in regards to their gender identity indicates
that confusion of identity requires its own strength and ability not to succumb to such
expectations to perform gender identity in a proscribed way. And to be fully welcoming, the
campus requires accommodation not only of non-binary gender expressions and their inherent
ambiguity, but also to provide spaces for identity exploration.
A second graduate student who Researcher had an opportunity to meet as part of the
study, had more firm self-understanding of identities like sexual orientation and gender. Boyd
remembers he needed space in familial, Peruvian, community as well as on campus as an
undergraduate to become clearly self-aware of social identities he carries. At the same time, he
acknowledges that for him as a graduate student, the “fluidity” of own identities as Latinx gay
man of color has been settled for himself. From his younger years, Boyd saw his one generation
older family member struggling to come out to his family and surrounding community. Boyd
saw an initial need to look for “freedom of flowing between labels” of social positions and
identities. Like with many undergraduate students, strategically expressing and deploying their
identities as part of their exploration and establishing their fit with the peers on campus, Boyd
can also be said to have settled his intersectional identities in strategic ways: “Of course, it's in a
spectrum and no one fits nicely into one, a single label, but it's a way that it's just easier for me
to, I don't know, identify myself and carry myself.” The study will return to the theme of
students’ ambiguous relations to their social identity, but Boyd sees how the ambiguity of his
intersectional identities bring up curiosity on part of those he interacts with. That is,
intersectional identities have a potential to surprise others when the intersectional identities
combine racial and ethnic positioning: “But if you are, say, I'm Afro-Peruvian. So I also have
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Black in me.” And “so that surprised my peers, my friends. They didn't quite get that.”
Intersectional identities appear ambiguous in the individual’s interaction with others, by and
within perceptions, reactions of others.
The study has already observed that among the ways students identify on campus, the
awareness of social justice concerns and considerations often inform those ways of identifying.
To take Will, a Latinx undergraduate student, the concern for struggles of others was seen in
Will’s desire to understand others. His own minoritized identities provide a sensitive perspective
on learning about the identities of others and especially of those who are struggling and in need
of support and help. He sees a struggling marginalized individual. Yet Boyd sees social and
systemic dimensions more directly, and there is a clear pathway how Boyd comes to actively live
guided by those social justice considerations. As a graduate student, he is actively engaged in a
project with a city connecting impoverished communities via public transit for better
opportunities and more equitable access throughout the region:
And these communities are some of the most impoverished minority communities
in LA County, that currently don't have as many access opportunities, jobs,
education. They also happen to be within, some of the commuters are enclosed
with freeways, so there's a lot of environmental justice issues there.
The trajectory could be seen from previously mentioned struggle within his own
community when growing up and developing his own identities towards a proactive and
systemic project-by-project consideration of social justice: “But I feel the need to push the
boundaries within our own family, to educate our cousins, our uncles, everybody, in queer
issues.” It is not only the individuals who are struggling and are discriminated against by a larger
society, not just an empathy and desire is required to help struggling individuals. Unlike
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undergraduates, graduate students through their immersion in professional study and practice, are
positioned to see those social and systemic dimensions of impoverished communities that don’t
Have the time, the means, the power, the knowledge, the education to, I guess,
mitigate some of the things that are happening in their communities. But I feel my
education has empowered me to help them get what they want, achieve what they
want to achieve in terms of the communities.
While Boyd expressed a concern that there is, as he sees it, a discrimination of sexual
minorities within racially and socio-economically minoritized communities, that does not
preclude his desire to be actively involved and professionally training himself to mitigate it.
Researcher met another graduate student who is also in the professional training in urban
planning and transportation. Colty brings a different perspective to the same policy area. She is
White from upper middle class background who at the same time sees problematic
heteronormative structures on campus: “There seems to be a pretty clear social expectation of
heteronormativity especially in regards to gender on campus.” Colty unapologetically asserts her
queer identity:
I can tell in the professional and educational experiences that I've had so far that I
like to look queer and I like to identify as being queer, and if I want to talk about
being queer I'm gonna talk about it.
This student’s strategic deployment of her background focuses on the importance of
appearance of “othered” groups on campus, seeking to fill a niche of representation by noting
that “…there is othering within the classroom that I've seen of international students and queer
students partly because they're hard to find.” The study saw the example of Boyd’s desire to
engage the racial-ethnic and class inequities as a motivator for training and future professional
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engagements. Colty by contrast comes from economically secure family and is concerned with
hard to identify queers around her. She is not ignoring the class divisions of students on campus,
in fact, she observes that there is “…I guess the expectation is that students look like students
who have a lot of money regardless of if they have money or not.” As Colty’s training is in the
similar field as Boyd’s, it is not unreasonable to project that her near future study and work
projects are also likely to engage the impoverished urban communities that lack equity in
benefiting from urban development.
Colty also speaks from the perspective of strong female identity: “To be a woman talking
about these things also takes on a different dimension of things.” She sees it so because
I want to work in transportation, that's a very male dominated sector. There are a
lot of, from what I can tell, fantastic gay men working in transportation as well as
planning, but not as many out queer women that I have found so far.
Colty’s representational niche for queer women in male-dominated fields of study and
practice is oriented towards policy and equity concerns. She is a student co-leader in Public
Policy School’s Queer Policy Caucus and, as seen earlier, has strongly embraced the prospect
that “…I will continue to represent a certain facet of people but also continue to engage in
conversations about identity and about people in general and why identity matters.” And she is
concerned with the matters of identity as a policy-relevant engagement with her own identity and
of those who are othered on campus and beyond.
To circle back to RU’s undergraduate students’ ways of identifying, it is worth to look at
two more students’ experiences. Rory, a White student, was persistently laconic in discussing his
ways of identifying as well as other discussion topics. He simply claims gay identity. This is in
contrast to most other students who seek to identify more than one intersecting identity of theirs.
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Rory noted how he saw campus to be geared towards heteronormativity where everyone, as in
the larger society, are presumed “straight by default.” At the same time, he feels no pressure to
comply with such an overarching expectation as a gay man. Researcher wonders about student’s
seeing no reason to negotiate his fit into heteronormativity or a need to adopt any identity-related
strategy for himself. He projects his future to be similar like straight people would, only with a
“different-gendered spouse.” Yet researcher is hesitant to jump to a conclusion that this would be
an example of assimilationist strategy. While Rory was very laconic verbally in the study’s
interview, he made up for it by drawing very picturesque identity map. His map reveals imagery
that is resistant to projecting social phenomenon to reflect his views on social identity and its
implications to social justice and similar concerns that other students brought forth. It is
important to note that Rory did not want to attach labels to his drawn items on the map even
though the drawing did not resemble a drawing of any social mapping. Thus, any reading into his
drawing is interpretive.
The drawing has what is even difficult to name precisely as a biological entity or natural
entity at its center. It very much resembles painter’s pallet. Researcher sees it that way as the
whole drawing clearly betrays Rory’s vivid yet mysterious imaginary, which is suggestive of an
artistic soul. There are several entities that seem to reference nature/landscape, biology, and
social identity symbols, each of them intertwined with the artist’s pallet by multiple threads. To
the researcher, the nature is represented by picture of trees and flowers. Biology, whether
referring to biology of birth or sexual act in and of itself, is represented by pictured flow of
sperm. And social relation aspect is represented by the two intersecting male symbols. It is too of
a subjective interpretation to attempt far-reaching conclusions about student’s experiences and
thinking about social identities and how he relates to his own identity and identities of others. It
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is, however, suggestive that the student has the imaginary that may not reflect lack of concern for
social structures, social-systemic dimensions and equity within them. When Rory says that
without his struggles as a gay youngster growing up, he “…wouldn’t have as much empathy for
others,” coupled with labels-resistant imaginary, his concern for the future simply does not
project current definitions of social labels. Perhaps this example resists drawing conclusions or
making practice-relevant recommendations. Yet to the researcher, it corresponds to the resistance
of reproduction of pre-defined notions of social justice, equity and other societal considerations
in to the future.
Researcher had an opportunity to also meet Huy, an American Vietnamese student in his
senior year at RU’s Business School. He is an example of a student who’s trajectory of
opportunities so clearly depends on educational success in extremely competitive field of study
like Business School. Huy identifies as cis-gendered gay man who is First-generation to go to
College in his family. That is, he comes from impoverished background. To put it in his own
words, “I applied to RU on a whim and I come ... my high school was very different. Everybody
went to community college for two years…” Huy’s family members survived economically
through various forms of manual labor but instilled the thirst for the best education he could
pursue. The student did not have the exposure how to understand his own gender and sexuality
identities at home community. At his own initiative, he therefore took on a Gender Studies minor
in addition to his Business major: “I'm a gender studies minor at RU, so I did that because I
really wanted to learn more about myself and my identity and how that fits into the greater
works.” Researcher’s understanding is that the reason for that was the fact that Huy felt an
instant need to strategically negotiate his social identities and their presentation in competitive
Business School contexts, where “…the business school where you're not supposed to talk about
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specific things and that's not really relevant and like bringing your whole self to the business
school isn't really a plus.” To put in to a strategy language, “I've learned my impression. I've
learned how it's viewed, how I'm viewed in the public and how I can mitigate that.”
The impoverished familial community’s background and growing up at the short-end of
economic class divisions can be said to stimulate Huy’s critical consciousness and approach to
education and opportunity pursuit in relation to dominating cultures and institutional structures.
He is unambiguous when it comes to recognizing and identifying economic, racial, gender and
similar forms of privilege and other structural obstacles separating him and his educational,
professional goals. RU campus is no exception. Huy’s critical view of campus structures and
realization of how close Business education is bringing him to the much brighter economic
prospects, have brought him to offer a comprehensive strategy and a praxis. He sees how
majoritized or minoritized identities play into student’s prospects of success:
There's definitely a perceived notion of masculinity or even like, sometimes we
mention the professors really do favor specific students over others, usually based
on skin type, and you can definitely tell professors have favorites. Sometimes, and
it's like, some Asian American students have even cited that their grade has been
affected because a professor had subliminal subconscious biases on Asian
Americans and how they're a bit inferior in sense of communication and
presentations and how they're not aggressive enough. I have heard that myself.
Huy says that he developed a strategic approach to tackling such biases from before
college by developing and maintaining emotional intelligence that he saw as the crucial first
ingredient in surviving and advancing, his socio-economic disadvantages notwithstanding: “I
think being queer, from an early age, develop a keen sense of emotional intelligence and know
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when you're in danger and when you're not in danger. You learn how to read people very
quickly.”
Furthermore,
From an early age, it's kind of a sense of survival, right? Because you didn't fit
into a specific sense of masculinity on the fields when you were playing ball on
the first grade, right? You can get bullied. You just learn to really identify these
stressors early on. I can definitely sense that in other people, just from my own
experiences on what makes people uncomfortable on a team. I really try to
mitigate that. As soon as I sense it, I literally ask them, "What is wrong? How can
I make it better? Do you feel uncomfortable?" Sometimes I may slow down my
leadership, but I think it's an extra precaution to take so that the team's not dis-
unified.
Even if unintentionally, Huy identifies here an emotional intelligence more than the basic
tool of survival without a socio-economic privilege. His example shows that he sees his own
emotional intelligence as the key leadership ingredient. After all, Huy saw how masculinized
Business schools were from the beginning of his studies and developed a clear critical relation to
it. The key example was the critical need to get into Business students clubs as “a lot of these
clubs are pre-cursors to success because at the end of the day, they ultimately become student
leaders.” He just could not fit into clubs lead by and dominated by Whites, especially males, and
got rejected by four clubs. So he ultimately took his situation into his own hands, and engaged in
leadership by
Ultimately, I decided to make my own gay business club within Business School.
For me, it's a departure and a lot of other minorities, not just ... Like other
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minorities that have joined the club, say it's a refreshing experience because
you're not subjected to the specific norm of how to be a successful, aggressive
business student like with these other clubs.
The strategy with creating and leading your own club is focused on those who are
minoritized along the intersectionality lines rather than focusing exclusively on one’s own
identity, even if that single identity of being a gay man was the main driver for it: “I really
focused on intersectionality so we work a lot with the blacks through association, or the Latin
Exposition Association or like Smart Women Securities, which is like the finance organization
for women.” After all, the White man’s privilege among queers is difficult to ignore, “…because,
again, it's still a lot of white gay men who come from very privileged backgrounds at the end of
the day, in these positions.” Not to mention, campus cultures, especially in Business school
contexts, continue to privilege Whites where “…some students who are White, just bond so well
with their professors.” That additionally requires Huy to strategically look for support outside of
campus support systems:
I really didn't have a role model in college, per se. For example, I wanted to do
finance. Was there a lot of gay, first generation Vietnamese Americans going into
investment banking at USC? Not really. I had to find that elsewhere. It wasn't
through faculty.
Huy’s leadership with the student club, focused on intersectionality, continued to point to
the previously mentioned aspects that help to relate to his identity and identities of others around
him: critical consciousness and emotional intelligence. His student club aims to counteract
viewing of minorities in Business on part of majoritized employers and peers in the way that
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We worry about our future orienting into the world of business because we're like
... Your performance review is based on someone else's perception. Your
mobility, your compensation is based on someone else's perception of you. That's
what worries a lot of minority students within the business school, I would say.
Especially challenging for intersectional students in Business schools is that privileged
students often view minorities as “encroaching” on White students’ “entitlement,” to use Huy’s
terms, to opportunities in the schools’ clubs and obtaining competitive jobs afterwards. Critical
view of such workings of privilege is counteracted with the attitude that
We have to make a good impression. Then we have to know about the finance,
the markets in the interview and to actually, successfully get the internship or the
job. At the end of the day, it's not like we're getting a free pass and the fact that a
lot of people in the business school do see us as minorities who got the job
because they're minorities is really upsetting.
Yet to maintain critical approach to structures of discrimination and espouse cohesive and
constructive nature of intersectional Business groups, Huy continues to draw on what he learned
from young age about the emotional intelligence. Or, as mentioned earlier, he recognizes the
emotional intelligence as the key ingredient of leadership. It serves him to keep his own privilege
as a group leader in check: “For example, like, you know, how many people at the table is one
thing, but making sure that the voices are heard is another thing.” Giving the entire group credit
for every project, ensuring everyone’s opinion is fully addressed were just a few of examples
how the emotional intelligence works among the intersectional queer students. It necessitates
such students to adopt the best strategic ways to express and deploy their identities on campus,
critically assess privileges of dominant groups and cultures that put obstacles in their pursuit of
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education. And as mentioned about Huy, to remember at the same time to keep their own
specific privileges in relation to other minoritized students in check. All this maintains social
justice as a constant perspective of educational and leadership pursuits. It is difficult to project
how sticking to one’s identity as unambiguously fixed would effectively seek and establish
meeting one’s goals without loosing intersectional perspective in relation to others. A dialectical
relation to one’s own identity is important to mention here.
It is intuitive to say that students’ own identity shifts, affected by their developmental
trajectory within familial community, prior schooling, continuous interaction with peers and
educators. Perceptions of others, circumstances that necessitate various strategies to negotiate
expression and alignment of a given identity to cultural expectations, constitute dialectics that
maintain relatively open trajectory of the students’ relation with their background and how it is
perceived by others. Some students show complete ambiguity, especially in regards to their
gender non-binary identities where “either works.” Several students indicated their confusion,
open exploration of identities, their dialectical relation to the identities that were not consistently
nurtured yet continue to be relevant to them or in their lives. Jed earlier used “questioning”
language about sexual orientation and gender identity. Family circumstances create a lot of
ambiguous interaction of the intersectional identities, such as Kagen, who’s half of the family is
Chinese yet she finds herself unaware of traditional Chinese artifacts, foods.
The most obvious aspect of dialectical nature of social identities arguably can be claimed
to derive from the social nature of identities, crucially from students strategically negotiating
their deployment of identities against the perceptions of others. As Paraleli pointed out, showing
how identity workings get impacted by perceptions of others:
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They might still be attracted to women, or men, or both, but they just don't feel
necessarily sexual about it but feel pressure. Like, "Oh, they're gay and they're
probably sexually deviant." I'm like, "That's already kind of messed up", but also,
it doesn't necessarily need to be mutually exclusive, how they navigate that. I
think also, a lot of people are still figuring out their identities and there may not
be a word for it, and that's okay.
The passage shows that identity dialectics occur at the level of formal identity definitions,
such as whether opposite ends of the identity spectrum are mutually exclusive or not. The
importance of pointing the dialectical aspect of identity workings
comes primarily from study’s aim to queer and question fixed social identities. More
specifically, it addresses a need to circumscribe identities as a part of students’ trajectory, its
narrative-building nature in which everyone is challenged to account for and incorporate
intersectional perspectives during their study years and beyond. In Jed’s words,
And I guess it's also just in the sense that everyone has a different story and a
different background and so it's not something that you can just tell at first. I think
definitely keeping in mind intersectionality allows you to be an open listener and
to embrace different identities and welcome those stories.
This study’s initial question about the students’ ways of identifying on campus yields a
picture in which RU students show a wide range of identity spectrum. Students study in campus
contexts in which they need to strategically deploy their intersectional identities or sensibly
relate to the intersectional identities of their peers. By doing so, they build their own educational
and experiential trajectory and developmental narrative in which social identities play a defining
role as above analysis suggests. The analysis also suggests that RU students never cease to keep
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the social justice perspective in mind with a sense of confidence that their own past and present
struggles around their minoritized identities contribute constructively to building the kind of
leadership skills that persistently aim to account for all voices, especially the ones that are
disadvantaged on campuses of selective schools.
To bring students stories to be more relevant to practice by campus administrators,
however, necessitates a question of how the students’ ways of identifying on campus relate to
campus living, studying, and its structures. From this derives the importance of addressing this
study’s question about what experiences they had with their peers, campus structures, study
programs, and campus administrators. And from all of that, what, if any, constructive critique of
campus structures and management approaches can be seen from it. With these aims in mind, the
study will now turn to discussing these questions.
RQ2: Intersectional Queer Students’ Experiences and Critique of Campus Life and Study
The study gauged and yielded insights on the participating students’ experiences and their
views on a few key aspects of campus life and study that can generally be expected to impact and
structure students’ identity, success of their study, life experiences, interpersonal and other
leadership skills. The students engaged topics of relating to their student peers and faculty,
particularly in regards to their social identities. The study also requested the students to discuss
what they have learned about the identities relevant or important to them from their study
curriculum. They also shared their views and experiences of interacting with campus
administrators, where applicable.
The previous discussion of the students’ ways of identifying brought up their family
backgrounds and communities they came from. Certainly, their identity development and
experiences while in college cannot be reasonably disassociated from their family background.
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Hence it is important to briefly engage this aspect before focusing on campus-related
experiences.
Listening to students provides an insight how their ways of identifying among family and
their communities of origin continues to inform the strategies they apply on campus. And then
based on similarities or dissimilarities in relation to others, they adjust how they deploy their
intersectional queer identities. Eren, for example, draw a clear line between level of comfort with
her own queerness before coming to campus and after: “I think I actually became more
comfortable with being queer coming here. I came from actually like, Dallas, Texas so I hadn't
told…” Eren stopped short of saying whether she is out or not out to her family. Yet she pointed
out right away that her situation and her level of comfort is much different now, including some
views of why so:
I don't know how much that was just me coming here and being older and feeling
more comfortable with that, or just in my own personal journey, or if that was
knowing that Los Angeles is a very liberal, understanding environment.
The above passage indicates how the student’s coming to campus from their family home
entails a different chapter in their identity development and a major step in fulfilling themselves.
From previously noted observation by Natalie, the impact of family on her ways of identifying
on campus differs depending on whether the racial or the sexuality identities are considered. As
Natalie sees it, those two aspects of her identity are “two separate worlds.” She is unable to find
ways to express her racial and sexuality identities in the same space, primarily in relation to her
family, because
I see it with my family and how they view people who just deviate from the norm.
They're still coming to terms with my identity. So I see myself in the future still
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being cautious about it. Not really being so open about my relationship with my
girlfriend or talking a lot to my family members about that. And I see myself kind
of, like I said, how there's two worlds, displaying one at a time.
The above concern on part of the student brings up minority within minority issue that
can play itself out in both familial and campus community contexts. From this it is not difficult
to observe that intersectionality requires the intersectional students to negotiate their multiple
lines of minoritization not only by the majoritized groups but also negotiate their minority within
minority situation. To put in words of Boyd, “I feel like there's a lot of work to be done to get to
people, to understand intersectionality of identities.” Boyd then instantly brings up his family
example:
So in the Latino community and within my family, we don't really discuss
LGBTQ plus issues. And my family members, one family member, had a hard
time coming out. She's the generation before mine. But I feel the need to push the
boundaries within our own family, to educate our cousins, our uncles, everybody,
in queer issues. And what it means to be part of the LGBTQ plus community.
Of course, the networks in which education about intersectional experiences and systemic
issues come forth can be at the student’s home and on campus. The student walks through all of
them as a continuum. And to understand campus networks, it is important to see how the
intersectional queer students experience their social positioning in relation to campus networks
constituted by campus structures, their student peers and then faculty, administrators.
How do intersectional queer students view campus structures? “I think as any social
institution or any public sphere, straight is the default. So, the expectation is that everyone is by
default straight,” – observed Rory while adding that “I don't think there's necessarily a
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repercussion to not fitting that expectation.” However and based on what several students have
indicated, it would not be precise to state that there are no structured expectations on RU campus
as driven by fixed social identities. Once students talk about campus expectations by considering
gender and sexual orientation aspect of one’s identities, the issues to consider multiply. Perhaps
there are no overt repercussions, but they note some subtle ones.
One example came from Eren. She was reporting on a bi-sexual visibility event on
campus, a sign of how RU structures the visibility and representation of bi-sexual students. She
noted there were multiple questions that echo stereotypical understanding of bisexuals, “Like,
"Oh, so you're really promiscuous," or like, "Oh, when are you going to choose?" Or, "Which
gender do you prefer more?" I actually hadn't been ... I mean, not a lot of people had known I
was bi in high school, so I hadn't gotten really questions about that.” The study will discuss
students’ reports and views of how their peers and faculty relate to them separately in this
chapter. Clearly, stereotypes do not dissipate on campus, even though many participating
students acknowledged the liberal region RU was in and by extension, how relatively liberal its
campus was.
Another American-Chinese student, Sandra, pointed out RU’s “root of ethnic diversity”
and suggested how inconsequential their Chinese identity was as nothing is expected of them that
they were not comfortable with as Chinese in particular or as a student in general. Then
In terms of gender and sexuality identity, specifically for gender identity, they do
expect certain things. For example with housing, they would house you with your
assigned gender. There aren't that many all gender inclusive bathrooms and I
especially noticed it in advertising from the school.
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Sandra also sees lots of gendered advertising taking place on campus, including
merchandise. Sandra’s thoughts about the RU’s rather strictly gendered campus spaces were also
echoed by Colty, saying “it can be little things on forms, having different ways to identify other
than male or female.” In her particular School,
There are no gender neutral restrooms in them. The administration has supposedly
been working on it for quite some time. It's very expensive, they grouped it in
with other building remodeling things to get it up to code, but because it's lumped
in with all these other things it's not happening very quickly. The money keeps
stalling out.
Colty’s thoughts clearly implicate campus administrators less as an issue of campus culture and
more as an issue of prioritizing changes on campus in regard to its gendered structures. Both
Colty and Sandra referenced the strictly gendered student housing when discussing this topic.
Colty did not fail to also point the RU’s heteronormative structuring in that
I can't remember a time specifically where I filled out a form and said oh,
something else should be here. That's a small thing, but it doesn't seem to me that
queerness is included in campus culture from a leadership perspective and that it's
not initiated top down of yes, we are going to include queer students to the utmost
degree that we possibly can.
Two aspects are important to point out from the above conversation. One is that Colty
acknowledges that there are fiscal challenges in building a more accommodating campus. And
perhaps precisely for this reason, she sees a lack of leadership and a prioritization of “top down”
initiatives. The other aspect she brings attention to is that a campus structure is not monolithic, it
is constituted by multiple and relatively independent Schools, with their own advancement or
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struggles in building a welcoming and accommodating environment for any student who may not
fit the dominating and fixed identities and expectations.
Furthermore, there are aspects that go beyond administrative and fiscal decision making
on part of campus-wide and School-specific administrators or physical structures. Campus
Schools are defined by their own disciplinary cultures and ways of relating to students when
training them and providing academic experiences. This point will be even more relevant when
discussing the students’ ways of relating to faculty and administrators as well as discussing
curriculum aspects of the students’ experiences. But it would be of relevance to point out that
individual Schools impose their culture and practices of training and advising. This is where
Huy’s example of how he sees his Business School as extremely “masculinized” becomes
relevant. How does he explain his School tendentious set of discourse, particularly in the
classroom? He sees that the most direct path to success in the Business major is to fit the
masculinized discourse of his School, including the necessity to be familiar with sports
analogies:
In a lot of my business classes, even on exams sometimes, analogies of ... Like for
example, analogies of sports come into play into explaining a metaphor or
analogy for a business concept. For example, I was in macro-economics and
somebody was explaining a macro-economics theory with soccer with the team
dynamic of a goalie and that statistical occurrence. For me, it just never registered
to me and for some reason, I didn't want to say out loud, and make the lecture hall
of 80 people, "I really don't get this analogy. Can you explain it again." So, there's
kind of that silencing effect…
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This is clearly a strong indication of how monolithic this particular Business School is in
regards to gendered discourse and structuring of student’s educational experiences. And
according to Huy, it goes beyond gender expectations. The study saw in earlier discussion of
Huy how he was compelled to create his own gay business school club the participation in which
is a must to create a competitive edge as a business student and future jobs candidate, precisely
because of sense of alienation and silencing by the dominant Business School’s culture. Earlier
discussion also saw how his club got filled with Black female and other intersectional students
beyond just the sexual orientation and gender identities. Huy’s subsequent example of
participating in the School’s and financial industry’s diversity programs look as if such programs
miss their own raison d’etre when considered from the intersectional perspective:
And honestly, even in my own experience, I did get to one of those programs.
Like I interned at Wells Fargo Securities in New York, and I remember at
training, there was 160 interns nationwide… Out of 160 of us, I was amazed on
how women specifically, white women specifically, have made great strides in the
workplace.
However, when Huy looked around, he could not find more than two Black
women in the room and one Latino man. The student went on to say that the event did not
consider his gay identity as part of the program. And when bringing up another, JP Morgan’s,
program with gay participants in focus, the student pointed out that that particular group ended
up selecting 15 student interns out of 300, as he put it, “that’s not even a percent.” Huy’s and
researcher’s discussion did not dive into minute recollections of all the details, but one can easily
wonder: How many of the 15 selected gay student interns were intersectional or otherwise non-
White? This point brings researcher to question how such major financial institutions consider
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the notion of diversity. In turn, how do Business Schools consider diversity? Another point that
Huy brought up was a tokenization and accompanying notions of reverse discrimination, as if
minoritized students exist outside of circumstances that other students build for themselves based
on hard work and their own merit, Huy brought up an event for gay Business students. Huy first
addressed the point that it is not something exclusive for gay student benefit in that straight
people have “their oyster” already, that succeeding in meeting career goals is an entitlement for
them. He sees the reaction, sometime explicit and sometime implicit, that queers are encroaching
on others just because they have a dedicated career event. Huy reacts to that kind of reaction:
You're just like, "Oh, my God, this is what my peers think of me?" I'm in the
same club, I'm in the same school, I'm performing basically on the same level
academically as well, and these are what my peers think of me? How exactly…
Huy went on to note that seemingly the minority students’ success in the competitive
field like his is too substantially driven by the perceptions of others to the point that “no matter
what you can do, you don't even have control over your own destiny or your own trajectory
because it's society perceives you in a specific light.”
It would be difficult to turn the tables on the above passage to say that it is easier to see
privilege of others than one’s own. We saw earlier that Huy comes from low income and racial
minority backgrounds. Prior chapter also saw that those from the more affluent economic
backgrounds do recognize their own privilege. With School and campus culture and structures
built for the privileged, the minoritized student’s combative focus on privilege of his peers does
not prevent a social justice perspective from being considered. Thus specifically with Huy, he
explained at length how as a leader of his gay club at the Business School, he constantly checks
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 93

himself on questions such as “do I appear to take credit for the work as the leader,” or “do I look
for the voices and input of female peers in the group?”
The last quote is also directly relevant to how the intersectional queer students see and
experience their interaction and relation to their student peers in relation to their identities.
Relating to student peers. As discussed above, RU campus has heteronormative and
gendered structures and expectations. The intersectional queer students observe similar features
when interacting with their student peers. From discussing this topic with the participating
students, the researcher did not hear the same expectations or stereotypes to have been heard by
the same students from their peers in regards to their ethnic or racial identities. This distinction
was already emphasized a little earlier by Sandra who noted that the campus expectations were
strong in regards to gender binaries while their ethnicity was not as objectivized due to the
campus’ “root in racial and ethnic diversity.” How do the intersectional students see the gender
and sexuality norms and even biases imposed on them and impacting them in their interactions
with peers?
The prevailing views on part of students were that they recognized the liberal
surroundings of RU campus where “… even though everyone in my program is very
conscientious and really accepting, they still, a lot of times, use heteronormative language,” – to
put in Natalie’s words. She also notes that often the peers “think I have a boyfriend, or
something, and ask me about him. Even though right now I'm dating a woman.” Students at the
same time realize that the heteronormativity is not a feature they deal with on campus only, as
Rory has noted: “I think as any social institution or any social just public sphere, straight is the
default.” Or as Sandra put it,
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In terms of sexuality, it's very common that people assume me to be heterosexual
because the close friends I have on campus, a lot of times when we get into the
whole relationship talks and things like that, you often hear like, “Oh, if you had a
boyfriend” or, “If you ... Oh, do you think this guy is cute?” There's no
consideration that you might not be straight.
Sandra’s critique of such heteronormative talk brought up its pervasiveness even on the
level of the imaginary talk about students’ romance, dating, relationships: “If you were a guy like
what girl would you date?” Which I find interesting because they could just say, if you were
attracted to girls,” – Sandra wondered. This is a critique of normativity, especially in regards to
establishing normative boundaries for looks and other optics:
A lot of times when I bring up that I am not straight, the common response is,
“You don't look like LGBT” or, “You look like you would be straight.” Which
then confuses me because I don't know how you look.
Perhaps there is no severe repercussions for not meeting the optics of the heteronormative
expectations, yet at the same time it is difficult to say that it is neutral in terms of intersectional
queer students’ confidence and self-assurance when they have to actively consider the level of
belonging among their student peers.
The participating students did not dwell on critical view of how their peers interact with
them in relation to their straight counterparts. In fact, Kagan does not observe a great difference
when interacting with these two distinct groups:
… I haven't had any individual instances of aggression or negative comments, but
sometimes people will use language that I don't necessarily identify with. People
would say, I guess just generally like LGBT or gay, it's not like something I
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would personally choose to identify with those labels, but because I think because
I do have cis privilege people don't usually question me or bring that up in a
confrontational way.
The subtle and balanced nature of Kagan’s critique of defined and fixed identity labeling
is noticeable. It is not one-directional in a sense of not fitting into a label of how she is viewed by
other sexual minorities. She does not fail to note the two-way movement when it comes to peer
interactions and impact they may have. Thus she is quick to point out that she enjoys a certain
gendered privilege, effectively recognizing that the impact of gendered bias may be more severe
on the underrepresented queer minorities. This particularly becomes clear when students point
out the expectations to look affluent economically, as if lower income students are obligated to
follow lead of higher income students, or pass like them,. As Colty noted: “I guess the
expectation is that students look like students who have a lot of money regardless of if they have
money or not.” The above note appears to reference the type of othering that does not relegate
lower income students to be objectivized by their status as a separate or separated group. They
are also obligated to fit into the ideology of passing, and probably with that, aspiring to be like
their peers form higher income backgrounds.
Gendered, particularly binary, nature of various student to student interactions were
pointed out by other participating students as well. This was particularly pronounced among
gender non-conforming or questioning queers, such as Sandra:
In terms of gender, most people will immediately assume that I'm female and I'm
still trying to learn how that's different from them approaching someone who they
don't think is female… A lot of times they expect me to act in the ... How they
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define a girl to be. They expect me to enjoy let's say makeup or fashion or things
like that. They expect me to be more emotional or emotionally vulnerable.
It is not difficult to see how gendered expectations, especially when they present
themselves in relation to student peers, forecloses the dialectical questioning and development of
student in regard to gender identities. How is a student supposed to show and demonstrate, or
proverbially, wear on one’s sleeve, their process of working through their gender questioning?
The study saw earlier how Huy’s discussion of his experiences focused on RU’s Business
School. That earlier discussion noted a pervasive sense of resentment on part of heterosexual,
particularly male, students have any time queer or other types of minorities are considered
separately in school-industry programs and career services. There “… you just have to adopt this
like very masculine aggressive energy within your presence, whether that's networking or
meeting with other students or professors.” The Business School’s “masculinized” culture and
practice cannot be escaped even in relation to the student’s own peers, since in
Business classes we have a really large team component. It's probably ... It's
anywhere from 10% to 20% of our grade and we are assigned, usually at the
beginning of the semester. Often times, the language that a lot of my peers use is
often times gender assuming. That for me, kind of throws me off sometimes,
especially when there's like a gender queer person within my group.
Huy provided a more detailed critique that will be especially pertinent to the discussion
of intersectional queer students’ relating to faculty and what they are learning from their study
curriculum. Huy commented on Business faculty’s pervasive usage of sports analogies. Yes, Huy
does not seem to mind if he sees a need to use analogies for teaching with the faculty member.
But there is a subtle component in relation to student peers:
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I was in macro-economics and somebody was explaining a macro-economics
theory with soccer with the team dynamic of a goalie and that statistical
occurrence. For me, it just never registered to me and for some reason, I didn't
want to say out loud, and make the lecture hall of 80 people, "I really don't get
this analogy. Can you explain it again." So, there's kind of that silencing effect…
How does Huy cope with the above conditions? He applies the strategic approach to how
he deploys his identities: “I've learned my impression. I've learned how it's viewed, how I'm
viewed in the public and how I can mitigate that.” Assuming leadership opportunities is another
strategy when faced with masculinized nature required for success in Business School clubs.
That is, he formed his own club and surrounded himself with peers who are queer and
intersectional, including various racial minorities. Yet not all students are equally extrovert, so
the heteronormative and gendered expectations coming from their peers impact students in other
ways as well. After all, not all student peer interactions take place in front of the student. As
Paraleli put it in regards to what their peers say about their gender expression, “… cause when I
hear that question, I think of how they might talk if I'm not there. I don't know what they might
say, I guess.” Maintaining the acceptance by student peers is not a trivial matter for some
students. Some utilize passing, yet others, like Will,
When I introduce myself to people I didn't say I was gay right off the bat, just
because, I mean, to me it's just something else about me, it's not something that I
really need to feel it's important to share right away.
The effect of keeping one’s identities safe from exposure and disruption of passing as cis
gendered or straight is not necessarily a one-way street. Intersectional queer students sometimes
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observe that they are not the only ones trying to interact with their peers in safe ways. Their
interlocutors do so too:
And they keep reusing the name instead of putting she in there. Granted, I do find
people use female pronouns, which is fine cause that's how I identify. But,
otherwise, I feel like a lot of times people use the name consistently to play it
safe, I think. And sometimes I think I do that, too, and I don't realize it until I'm
doing it.
It does not appear to the researcher that this tendency to mutually play safe in peer
interactions is a symptom whereby biases consciously or subconsciously are displaced from the
structurally established materiality of the bias informing the core of the interaction as such onto
imaginary site in which social biases reside in individuals rather than in the social and material
systems. To put simply, the notion of bias is not a person’s feature whereby calling that person
out or eliminating resolves the biases associated with him or her. This is the kind of displacement
that Leigh Patel warns about in her discussion of de-colonializing educational research (2016,
85). That way, to paraphrase earlier words used by Huy, everyone has to “learn their
impressions.”
Another impact of identity expectations in peer interactions is that queer students
naturally feel compelled to surround themselves with the same peers as they identify themselves:
The majority of my close friends do, in some aspect, identify as queer. And I
think because of that you just have that understanding of identity, or I guess you
have that understanding that allows you just to connect with that person over that
similarity.
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Jed’s strategy above is not likely to be an outlier regardless of one’s identities. But the
intersectional queer students do not tend to reside in their own group’s context all the time. Huy
provides a good example of that. Compelled to establish his own Business School club for gay
students, he quickly aimed to move away from the prospect of single-identity group “subjecting
everyone to the specific norm of how to be successful” on two fronts: as the resistance to
prevailing biases the minoritized students find themselves dealing with on campus. But also,
encouraging other minoritized students with different backgrounds and experiences to join the
club, to consistently acknowledge each other’s collective credit for accomplished projects and
presentations of those projects in classes.
The intersectional queer students at RU consistently observe pressure to fit sexuality and
gender based norms in to their interactions with their peers. This certainly impacts them by
putting them into certain student group silos, puts forth pressure to act in passing ways, and
potentially prevents them from engaging in the civics and their own development in more open
ways. Their interactions with RU’s faculty and administrators is no less paramount to their
experiences and learning on campus. The study will now turn to review students’ thoughts and
experiences regarding that.
Relating to faculty and administrators. Inside or outside of classrooms, the
intersectional students cannot avoid interactions with faculty. Intuition is sufficient to know that
faculty transfer knowledge to students as much as provide guidance, offer direct and indirect
evaluation of students. Faculty can be said to be life mentors too. As such, students pick up from
their mentors in pre-college educational contexts. A story by Paraleli of their high school
experience serves as a good indicator that the intersectional queer students may already come to
campuses with experiences of bias, shaming, and other such experiences from their educators:
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I remember, I was a freshman in high school… and I was wearing knee-high
socks and they fell down, and I hadn't fixed them yet. And, it wasn't even my
teacher, it was another teacher who was in this classroom because they both had
desks in the classroom, but she wasn't teaching that period. She was just coming
in to visit, and she was telling me that I need to pull up my socks, and she was
like, "Are you trying to be a slut, or something?" I remember my face was red and
I didn't know what to do cause, first of all, I didn't know I felt about the word
'slut'. I had never heard anyone called a slut before in real life. But also, I just
didn't know why I was being attacked, and also, I just didn't really understand
what was going on, and how she was regarding my clothes. I remember being
upset because none of my classmates said anything, but I don't know what they
could say, and my teacher didn't say anything. She just looked down at her desk,
sourly. I just remember feeling really alone and sad.
The Researcher was certainly prepared for a remote possibility that something similar
may have happened to the students in relation to RU faculty, though not necessarily expecting
that. And of course, the students were honest and insightful in bringing up issues that were not as
sensational yet referenced issues that constantly surround them, or place them in biased boxes or
limit their academic experiences. Or by contrast, provide role modeling, especially as future
leaders. It would be difficult to argue against the notion that faculty have the most powerful role
over the students and affect all such considerations.
Relating to faculty. Some participating students indicated that they simply did not
experience interactions with faculty on topics that relate to the students’ social identities or that
they experienced bias. Perhaps a simple explanation from the perspective of some, for example,
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Will, is that “I'm not really open about my sexuality just because I feel like it just doesn't pertain
to them, because I'm a student. Were just talking academics and stuff.” In the words of another
masculine-passing student, Huy, “I would say that most faculty have been great” but premises
that point with the fact that “… my gender performance is relatively masculine, so it's not like I
come in with a rainbow flag every single class and so, I think a lot of my professors, that's really
enjoy my comments and how articulate I am.” It would be amiss not to notice Huy’s
qualification “most faculty.” The study has already mentioned his observation in how extremely
masculinized RU’s Business School is even when claiming his own masculine-passing
performance.
At the same time, lack of problematic experiences with faculty for Will does not mean
that he feels surrounded by affirming faculty where he would be comfortable to speak openly
about his identities and what they entail in his educational journey. Initially referring to the lack
of underrepresented minorities among his faculty, he notes that
As a student, I mean, I would say it's rare to see a Hispanic or a Latino professor.
I've never had one before, or even an LGBTQ community, I've never really had
one, so in that aspect, it's been kinda hard to see them in a higher up place in
education.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that when the students from the underrepresented
minorities get engaged in questions about leadership, they sound somewhat subdued in how
expressive they are with their leadership abilities on campus or when projecting them into the
future, the topic the study will address separately.
Some students straightforwardly appreciate affirmative nature of faculty when the
students engage in discussions relevant to their identities, in words of Colty, “a lot of faculty
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have been extremely supportive but more understanding, I guess, and accepting of however I
choose to out myself or not in the classroom or in one-on-one settings.” While another student
Boyd’s interactions with fellow gay faculty may imply a silo-like effects, it does not take away
from the supportive environment and the student’s expression of personality when they find
affirmative faculty. That is, even if
There's only one faculty member who I was able to really relate to in terms of, not
just academics, but also on a more personal level, because that faculty also
happens to be gay, so he understands what it means to be gay. And I was able to
touch on topics of his coming out, relationships with other people…
Faculty as mentor aspect may seem obvious, yet examples of that should be considered
from various angles of the faculty’s diversity as well. Would Boyd stand a chance to find such an
openly gay mentor among faculty in STEM disciplines, just to put out one question that would
potentially have complicated otherwise an idyllic report above?
And indeed, the very presence of faculty diversity has potential to create a tremendous
“solace” effect for students who may not even share the same minoritized identities as their
faculty, as was in Huy’s case:
I've found great solace in minority faculty, for example, professor Terendon
[pseudonym – RO], who is like one of the few African American professors in the
business school. … She's been very frank with me when I go with her office hours
and how she's dealt with, in the work place, on how people steal her work, talking
down to her, she's just been giving amazing advice. It's just a beam of hope. ... No
professor has offended me, per se, but it is a bit discouraging to see … there aren't
that many diverse people within the business school.
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Not forgetting the larger than interpersonal context, Huy added “I'm thinking to myself,
"Is there no other great faculty members who are diverse? Why aren't they coming here if the
university is so great, right?" And this context is not unique but perhaps especially problematic at
his Business School: that is, the general problem of faculty diversity and particular problem of
faculty diversity in highly sought-after disciplines.
One aspect that study is interested in is to see structural setups and modes of thinking
when inquiring students about their interpersonal experiences with RU’s faculty. Sandra noted an
issue of having a preferred name to be distinct from their legal name. While they spoke about
how faculty try to accommodate that but it is usually a matter of time before they default to the
formalized ways of referencing students, including switching to their less preferred, even if legal,
name. Huy goes even further, stating that the generally expressed campus inclusiveness does not
prevent faculty from creating a masculinity vibe around them and their ways of teaching,
including
Sometimes, and it's like, some Asian American students have even cited that their
grade has been affected because a professor had subliminal subconscious biases
on Asian Americans and how they're a bit inferior in sense of communication and
presentations and how they're not aggressive enough. I have heard that myself.
The student is referencing the fact that after giving general praise of faculty as supportive
in general as much as several other students did, he has a sense that faculty, despite their
conscious effort, do often revert back to biases and masculinity or other types of structured
expectations of campus and in discipline-specific contexts. As Kagen pointed out, “I've had a
professor ask, in my email signature I include my pronouns and I've had professors ask like,
"Why do you do that? What does that mean?" Yes, encountering that with a student is atypical,
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established gendered assumptions prevail sooner or later. And also, is Kagen here observing
another general issue – faculty’s lack of awareness of social identities, particularly minoritized
ones? Based on much earlier discussions with Eren and Colty, the degree of that lack of
awareness is likely to differ depending on humanities, social sciences versus STEM disciplines.
When speaking to Natalie and Rory, it appeared as if faculty stick to treating their students
individualistically, as if there is no need to engage students’ social dimensions of their study and
campus experiences: “they'll treat everyone, of course, equally. And everyone as their own
individual.” (Natalie). Or in Rory’s words, “I don't think they had any like interest or idea of my
social, my sexual identity, so, there was no type of treatment in one way or the other. They don't
talk much. I go take a test and leave.” Needless to say, the individualistic view of students by
faculty is perhaps a safe way to avoid controversies and maintain a transactional nature of
interactions with the students.
An interviewed senior administrator, Katie, offered an additional insight about what was
seen by some students as the faculty’s lack of awareness of the students’ social identities and
how to relate to the students in that respect. She notes that “there are students of all different
backgrounds experience issues with faculty and staff who are not as aware as other faculty and
staff.” Of course, there is a generational aspect whereby students are likely to be much more
keenly aware and by extension, expect responsiveness and sensibility from faculty regarding
identity-related issues. Katie goes on to point out that there is further distinction among RU staff
and faculty where the level of awareness differ: “There are some faculty and staff who are very
familiar with non-binary and trans-students and others who are not. But is also true around race.”
The problem of differing degrees of awareness is that it brings RU to having “… people who
make complaints to university about experiencing micro-aggressions, things that don’t rise to the
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level of policy violations, to reporting harassment and discrimination…” These are issues that
can be read as both structural and HR-related. To what degree the training and other awareness
campaigns, present at RU already and perhaps in need of more, can be structured properly? RU
presently is in the middle of developing a more meaningful central HR structure to create
universal policy enforcement arm yet plentiful examples, especially by Huy about RU’s Business
School, suggest that it is likely to be a challenge how to absorb such HR initiatives. Bringing a
meaningful impact to Schools with their own disciplinary cultures and governing structures may
remain a challenge.
After reviewing how students view the interaction they have had with RU faculty, it is
likewise important to see how they have reported their interactions with RU administrators.
Relating to administrators. Similarly to the intersectional queer students’ interactions
with their faculty, the interactions those students experience, from what the study is finding,
happen mostly on the interpersonal level. That is, it happens most frequently as a matter of
obtaining academic advisement from academic advisers and student services advisers. Students,
especially undergraduate, rarely have an opportunity to engage with administrators who clearly
possess policy-making roles. Researcher postulates that perhaps seeking out engaged student
activists may have painted a different picture. The study did not aim to focus on student activists
who’s voices can be reasonably expected to be well represented in many on-campus studies with
the LGBTQ focus.
Certainly, some students who participated in the study do engage in student organizations
and are aware of RU’s policy-related shortcomings in meeting their needs. A couple of instances
represented below involve graduate students who can be expected to note policy-relevant issues.
Boyd, for example, likely because of his intersectional identities, sees how consistently the RU’s
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cultural centers lack the funding and function in inadequate spaces, be it LGBTQ Resource
Center or El Centro Chicano. Moreover, according to him, “…even though the Latinx
community on campus is growing slowly, it seems to be growing, our space has shrunk.”
Without RU being engulfed in any major budgetary crisis, policy prioritization of the cultural
centers for resource allocation is the first aspect of policy-decision that comes to researcher’s
mind when a student mentions inadequately provided cultural centers.
Another graduate student, Colty, pointed out an issue of all-gender restrooms in her
School. By contrast, the senior administrator in charge of the Student Affairs, Adam, argued to
the researcher that establishing all-gender restrooms had been considered as nearly achieved.
Colty, disagrees by referring to her individual School. Her understanding is that every time
students inquire about it, the School answers that it has brought consultants to work on this issue.
In this context, she provides a multi-layer critique of what she sees:
I have tried to ask members of the administration more directly and it's usually
deferred to the person who is in charge of the plans, which I understand that
person is also a consultant. … I think it has failed to meet the needs of the
students and many visitors, other students who are not part of the Ponder School.
While it sounds like the School’s administrators try to take the issue on by externalizing
its implementation to consultants, the student’s critique is difficult to miss: the consultants are
not embedded; There is no sign that the School’s administrators even strategize a more caring
optics in how they respond to the students’ inquiries about the issue that may be pressing to trans
or other gender non-conforming students.
From the perspective of undergraduate intersectional students, one challenge is finding an
administrator who either shares a minoritized identity with the student or affirmatively supports
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student’s positioning, provides an enormous sense of belonging, even when otherwise
surrounded by the majoritized students and faculty. This especially pertains to the First-
generation lower income students, such as Will. He had to work on campus and felt encouraged
by the support of his affirming boss who knew he was gay. Also finding a fellow Latinx
academic advisors, according to Will, “propelled” his confidence as a First-generation student on
campus. Huy, another First-generation student from lower-income background, noted about the
Business School’s Chief Diversity Officer:
I've worked closely with her through ... Our first case competition, she definitely
helped me a lot with administration, booking, stuff for the events, bringing in
sponsors. She works along with the high, high administrators, like the Vice Dean
of Academics, like academic programs…
Another student, Jed, appreciated his advisers’ support despite their disciplinary actions
against him when he acted inappropriately in the dorms, putting it in to almost a poetic language:
I've looked up to and valued their opinions, so that, in terms of academic
advising… So my advisors I love, I've really valued also my RAs, people that are
in the building to make sure that you're okay, especially my freshman year when
there were a lot of changes, adjusting to college life… My first year I definitely
got into trouble living in the dorms, doing things I wasn't supposed to do, which is
part of growing up, I suppose. … 'Cause you can really tell they're not out to get
you, they're there to learn, right? And to make sure that you learn, so I appreciated
that aspect of interaction.
In the above instances, the researcher observes some contours of advisers and
administrators acting as what can be called institutional agents (Stanton-Salazar, 2011;
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Bensimon et al, 2019) who go beyond their immediate role to seek out resources and point
students to other offices in order to help students achieve their immediate needs and find support,
act as agents for the students at all levels of the university.
By contrast, some students do also observe how some RU administrators they have
interacted with fall short in understanding the students’ identity-related issues and in providing
full support on campus. The study reported Colty’s note about her School externalizing
establishment of gender-neutral bathrooms to consultants who never interact with any students.
Kagen offered a more general note about
Student-facing branches of administrator and I think it's a mixed bag, like there
are some folks that are very much open to the community and then also some that
aren't super receptive or just unaware of the issues about, you know, gender
neutral housing, gender neutral restrooms on campus, and it's very much, sort of
just political game of knowing who would be willing to speak out for you,
knowing who has been supportive…
It sounds like students can pick up when administrators they interact with are unaware of
queer-related issues. Boyd also noted that he sees a persistent lack of understanding of such
demographically important and underrepresented minority of RU’s surrounding communities as
Latinos:
I don't, I guess, show all my identities to faculty because I feel like a lot of times,
they just won't get it. Mostly by being Latino. I guess being gay is not that much
of an issue, but just being Latino, people don't know what that is.
It is not difficult to hear a tone of frustration from Boyd. Perhaps it is not an expectation
for faculty and administrators to be able to distinguish what kind of Latino a student is from
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superficial and brief interaction. Yet it is at the same time difficult to find an alibi for the
political bias that a connotation of Mexicans as a stand-in of all Latinos represent, and singling
out those of Mexican origin being used as a general code for othering. Needless to say, battling
elements of ignorance in regards to the students’ intersectional identities can be predicted as even
more difficult issue to tackle.
Other students also see how some administrators, not unlike it was seen with the faculty,
relate to the intersectional students in rather transactional ways. As Rory put it, “…it’s kind of
just like business, right?” That transactional approach, especially when coupled with occasional
lack of the administrators’ awareness of intersectionality issues, can be rather toxic. Boyd
referenced an instance of how a long-tenured Director of one key students’ program for
supporting financially struggling students from the underrepresented backgrounds got fired for
reasons never explained or discussed with such student groups: “And the students rallied, the
students asked and asked, alumni came over, they sent emails.” What happened with all that
noise with the upset and perplexed students in that program? As Boyd remarked, “She just got
fired just like that. And it felt like our voices weren't heard by the administrators.” Whatever
legitimate or questionable reasons for pushing out a long-term student advocate leading the said
program, it appears that they were likely HR-related or intra-office policy related. Yet the
minoritized students of the program are left in the dark while at least in part depending on the
program for succeeding with their studies. Fitting then is to add a cry from Huy, “… make time
for us minorities!”
The intersectional queer students appreciated when meeting the administrators who are
supportive, who look and sound credible to understand their struggles as the minoritized
students. Most students’ experiences were limited to interacting with their advisers. This then
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falls on those advisers in line Departments to be the institutional agents who can point students to
system-wide opportunities and support-systems beyond their assigned work areas. The students
also noted that many administrators lack awareness of intersectionality issues, and that some
School-specific administrators tend to externalize fixes for gender non-confirming students in
regards to addressing request for gender-neutral bathrooms, mixed gender dormitory
accommodations and alike. As the study reported above, the students feel that administrators
shift work needed to accommodate the students’ needs to external entities that are not embedded
with the students on campus. The discussion also saw that the administrators follow intra-office
policies and considerations without transparency with the student groups that depend of the
affected programs.
Interactions with faculty and administrators are part of students’ study experiences. What
do students say about what they have learned about social identities relevant to them from the
RU’s training and study curriculum? To this question the study turns now.
Learning about identities from training classes and curriculum. There were several
students who mentioned that they learned or discussed matters pertaining to social identities in
general or identities relevant to them in particular. Some of those were compulsory training
sessions, basic introductory classes and campus welcome events, and degree program courses.
Eren noted a simple detail from the RU-required harassment and sexual violence prevention
training in which examples portraying LGBTQ relations were utilized. The student thought it
was not too minor to point out for at least two reasons. One was that it helped her to alleviate
anxiety about fitting into the campus as LGBTQ student but also appreciated that RU educators
do not forget to teach the student body that problematic relationships can occur irrespective of
gender or sexual orientation of the parties involved in a given relationship.
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RU also has freshmen welcoming event where Will remembers to have provided space,
peers, and educators to discuss and learn about “…every sort of identity you could think of, I
mean, even racial or sexual identity-based or gender-based.” Even though the event sounded not
to be set up to focus on intersectionality of identities, it was a setup in which that topic was
literally hanging in the air. Other students who participated in the study pointed out lack of
intersectionality in various classes they have taken, to which the study will return shortly.
Another freshmen compulsory course that a few students mentioned to be relevant to
their identities in some ways was a Writing class. Eren remembered how the topic of aesthetics
involved students writing about social identities a lot. That is, Eren engaged in a light critique of
identity labels seeing how easy it was for the student peers to agree they liked using identity
labels. But more importantly to her, this was the class in which she realized that she as a bisexual
student, has “… a community I can relate to” from hearing people mentioning that fact about
themselves and hearing that there are students like her around. To Jed, the Writing class
introduced them to more than various individual social identities to discuss and write about. It
“…was centered on identity and one core component of that curriculum was just thinking about
identity in term of intersectionality.” Their assessment of their own outcomes of this class
sounded to the researcher like experienced educator’s overview of class’ key objectives as far as
teaching about intersectionality is concerned:
I think that keeping in mind intersectionality, like where these aspects of identity
align and which aspects of identity might not be as visually obvious and knowing
that has allowed me not to pass judgements as quickly about people and the way
they walk through the world. … I think definitely keeping in mind
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intersectionality allows you to be an open listener and to embrace different
identities and welcome those stories.
Moreover, Jed was not amiss to see how the topic of intersectionality and learning about
it pertained to him as a White gay man: “Yes, I'm queer, but that is not the whole of my identity.
Right? I still move through the world as a white man, and with that I have inherent privilege.”
Jed probably did not claim that he learned all of the above from a single class, but his discussion
of experience from this class definitely recounted long term discovery and perspective for his
“moving through the world.” One indication from the above quote is that the intersectionality is
and ought to be relevant even to those who may not have a strict claim to intersectionality, in
Jed’s case, putting his own social positioning into a perspective through self-awareness of
privilege.
Some students engaged in a critique of various aspects of their curriculum. Most of them
appreciated focus on diversity. As Rory put it, “I know diversity is like a big topic or buzzword.”
It was echoed by Huy who appreciated his School Dean’s efforts on the diversity yet cautioned
“…but at the same time, is it kind of for the sake of saying that we're diverse?” As study saw
from this student in earlier discussions of relating to faculty, his School relies on overt forms of
masculinity and heteronormativity in how Business courses are taught. That is, there is a lot of
dependence of teaching in sports analogies, expectation of emanating “aggressive masculine
energy” in students club activities to the point where the biggest concentration of intersectional
female students ended up in his student club originally conceived as a gay Business Student club.
Being himself a First Generation student from the low-income background, the most sting of his
School’s critique is that the rhetoric of the School does not match the realities on the ground:
“…but at the same time, is it kind of for the sake of saying that we're diverse?” In this
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questioning, Huy refers to the most pressing matter of diversity at his School that does not yet
have a sustained focus:
And if you do see the diversity initiative working but at the end of the day, where
are the facts? Are we progressing more towards to be like diverse like the local
area of Los Angeles? Are we working more towards social economic diversity?..
Are the scholarships going to the right students?”
While speaking to this topic, Huy wondered about a basic awareness of economic
diversity issues at the Business School from the example whereby students in economic need for
financial support get the same amount of scholarships as the ones who otherwise can pay their
own tuition. Given his earlier-discussed rejection of distinction between the need and merit as
the voice of the privilege, his point questions the basic definitions that govern the meaning of the
economic diversity for a particular School and overall higher education industry. The researcher
postulates that including economic justice into such definition would be met with claims on part
of industry as being outside of incremental approaches that the leaders can act on.
Some other points of students’ critique was the fact that they see the heteronormative bias
present in teaching the human development, such as was in the case of Natalie:
Even my class on human behavior and development, everything was boys, girls,
heterosexual relationships. It was the typical human development pattern, without
anything saying, like, "Oh, if you're gay, this is how things might pan out." Or
how different your development of identity would be.
The above was an example of Sociology class. Sandra, a STEM major, noted that they
literally had to take a sociology class to engage any learning pertaining to social identities or how
those social identities may affect all fields of study. That is, as far as gaining understanding of
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the above, they said “I really haven't from the curriculum,” by referring to their own overall
STEM curriculum. Colty recounted how she learned about identities she cared about as
exclusively a matter of self-education.
The intersectional queer students did not fail to consider other aspects of minoritized
identities, such as gendered and culturally biased contents of the curriculum. This was
particularly true in cases of the participating graduate students who were able to reflect on the
totality of their undergraduate learning. Colty had to take specialized courses to learn about
feminist perspectives to add that perspective to her desire to go into urban planning profession
after finishing undergraduate studies. Boyd openly stressed cultural bias present in study
contents at the undergraduate level, whichever aspect of the minoritized identities one may want
to consider:
There must be changes in terms of inclusivity, in terms of programming, in terms
of the classes, the GEs, I guess, the required courses for students. We need to
include more authors of color, more authors from diverse communities. Most of
the papers that I read were from white males, not many women, less people of
color, less queer people, less Latinos. I think there's only two authors that I read
that are Latinos.
This is an example of student pushing back on the prevailing canons of culture and how
they are transferred to students. Eren provided an example of student leadership on the issue. She
referenced an initiative that aspired to add more perspectives and more diversity exposure to
students once they arrive on campus. She referred to student government’s initiative for a
cultural competency course for freshmen. The group set up booths on campus to solicit new
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students what they would find important to hear about in such a course. To build on that, as Eren
sees it,
So that could be like cultural competency with queer issues, it could be talk about
etiquette during a shooting situation, or just a variety of issues there. Yeah. So I
think ... I think that's cool that they're considering that.
The above initiative sounds somewhat ephemeral from the perspective of students’ study
programs lasting four years or more. Ostensibly, the exposure to the multiplicity of cross-cultural
issues is the intent of this initiative.
Paraleli brought up an aspect of cultural competency among teaching faculty. They
reflected on taking English, in which they discussed a classical work where a female character
performs as male in what the student saw as a case of strategically “confused identity.” They
were critical of
The teacher stated that this character was gay. And, I was like, "Well, we don't
know that. We just know that he loves this person who's in disguise. And, we
know he's having trouble navigating it. But it could be he's bisexual, or it could be
he doesn't know how he feels because otherwise it's shown that he was attracted
to women in the past.
The above is critique of faculty applying static labels of social identities across times and
cultural epochs. On the opposite side of viewing Paraleli’s example, there is an opening for the
faculty to consider how a resistance to suppression of minoritized social positions can come
through and has come through over long historical periods. However, Paraleli did not indicate
that class discussion touched upon that in any way.
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The intersectional queer students seek and expect to find meaningful ways in how the
RU’s training and study curriculum reflect their social positioning, and through that, to better
understand the social positioning of others and their application to their future professional lives.
Some of them saw an emergence of their community when learning included relevance to their
identities in affirming ways. The students also possess sufficient awareness and critical
consciousness to offer insights into how RU could improve their training and study portfolios.
That includes more diverse cultural representation in study contents, exposure to authors of more
diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, female author perspectives. The students do not
automatically believe teachers when the teachers apply identity labels across cultures and time
periods. And especially notable is that some students question how adequately their Schools and
leadership take the issue of economic diversity’s presence on campus and give attention to it.
Critical awareness and strategic relation to the campus structures the intersectional queer
students bring to campus is strong. They come to RU campus with an expectation of acceptance
by the peers, faculty, and administrators. Furthermore, they come to campus with an expectation
that they and their ways of relating to the world through the medium of their social identities will
meaningfully resonate in how faculty teach them, what kind of breath and depth of various
cultures their study curriculum represent. To the researcher, that lays a strong background to
what to expect from the students in their view of their own leadership outlook and leadership in
general. With this, the study will review the question of how students view leadership and their
prospects for it.

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RQ3: Students’ Ways of Understanding Leadership
The study questions pertaining to intersectional queer students’ view of leadership
touched upon their views as they relate to campus leadership, leadership in relation to them
personally and in relation to their social identities.
The students were not amiss to engage the leadership topic by referencing its and higher
education’s proximity as much as its cultural ethos, to use Jed’s words:
Leadership. I've found the whole concept of leadership potential to be something
that I've always kind of wrestled with as a kid. I know I suppose it has to do with
growing up in the American education system, just because I think as Americans
we place a large emphasis on leadership ability, just in terms of schools and
getting into college you have to demonstrate that, and who we value as a society.
We're looking up to these figureheads that have done something monumental, our
leaders in our own fields of whatever they choose to go into. So, kind of having
leadership on a pedestal all throughout my education and plus my formulative
upbringing, leadership has always been something that's been thrusted on me, just
like expected if I want to succeed in the world.
Leadership here is a major reference to what educational system prepares individuals for
and what is expected of an individual. Leadership also cannot be disassociated from the
individual’s competitiveness, particularly in respect to prospects of success in the society. As if
qualifying Jed’s above point, Will notes how leadership and education is always instilled from
formative years of many students: “it's always been told to me, "You need to go to school, and
you need to be successful." Such cultural pathos would be blind to structural involvement of
power relations, limited resources, competition that an individual aspiring to be a leader faces, if
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there is no attention given to the aspects of privilege, othering, sub-altern existences. The
individualistic leadership perspective can be justified in terms of personal reflection and
negotiation of the privilege and subalterity of communities where, as Boyd sees it,
A lot of times, our community doesn't have the time, the means, the power, the
knowledge, the education to, I guess, mitigate some of the things that are
happening in their communities. But I feel my education has empowered me to
help them get what they want, achieve what they want to achieve in terms of the
communities.
The student in the end clearly acknowledges the importance of education as the tool for a
personal reflection and understanding of communities and their struggles. How does that relate to
a college campus as a special place for that reflection and what relevant topics may it entail?
With increasingly diverse RU campus, the campus can be seen as a fertile ground for
such reflection as a base for leadership development of students. Bringing their intersectional
identities, minoritized and majoritized perspectives, diverse sets of communities, the
participating students contributed to a rich discussion of the leadership topic. First, the students
had their ideas about an ideal leader yet also discussed complications, critiques, intersectional
perspectives, social justice issues they felt compelled to point out.
Describing an ideal campus leader. The intersectional queer students at RU are willing
to engage their imaginations to reflect what an ideal college campus leader would emulate and
entail. At the same time, they are not oblivious of structural contradictions that any discussion of
an ideal leader would represent. Their own minoritized background and awareness of
pervasiveness of social inequities do resonate in discussing what a great campus leaders would
be.
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Students see a good campus leader amplifying increasing campus diversity. Such a leader
requires to be well versed in issues of social identities and their interactions. To put in Colty’s
words, “I would say that leader would be very well-versed in discussions of identity, understand
and be engaged in identity politics in some way, whether they've studied it or they have spoken
about it.” Such a leader would in general “…pertain to obviously everyone of diverse
backgrounds,” the way Will sees it. And indeed, the scope of discussing the diversity is wide in
obvious ways, even if a person leads a single campus, since “…being a leader of a community
that represents so many more identities than one person can ever encompass, “ as Jed would say.
Kagan picks up on this point further by saying that a great top administrator
Is very much into the different communities on campus and obviously can be a
descriptive representative of every community, you know, he can't represent
everybody but somebody that makes a very conscious effort to surround
themselves with advisors from every community.
The same student adds that campus leaders ought to compartmentalize social, cultural,
and administrative aspects of creating a vibrant space for communities to participate in. Jed’s
point clarifies it, as from the standpoint of the way they see the RU’s values, “…are those of
community and acceptance and also those of rigor and integrity and academic excellence, just
the fact that we thrive so much with our research facilities and also with our sports.” Natalie
cautions while describing her ideal campus leader because the community’s value ideas need to
be accompanied with genuine nature of espousing those values by a campus leader with a
empathy-related premise: “Someone who can understand other people and what they're going
through and also is passionate about what they believe in so that they're not just projecting these
ideas but that they really believe in them.” According to the same student, that ability to
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“advocate” for others becomes genuine with a knowledge and understanding about others who
are different then leaders themselves. To use her expression, “…informed about issues outside of
themselves” before they can claim to “… know what’s affecting people and what college life and
everyone in this whole system interact.”
In depicting the ideal college leader, the intersectional queer students are not oblivious of
other than ideal campus and general social realities the campus leaders are likely to find
themselves in. Colty earlier pointed out a need for a campus leader to be knowledgeable in social
identities, similarly to Kagan and Will’s views. Yet at the same time, Colty also stresses that it is
important for a leader to be aware of privilege:
Also, a leader who is within identity politics, well-versed in matters of privilege
and understands that identity is something that is so much bigger than just labels
and different things. That there are so many different meanings to a way that a
person identifies and many different ramifications for how they identify, how they
choose to represent those different aspects of their identity and that they
reverberate throughout that person's life…
Colty engages dialectical aspects of interactions of privilege and identities that may spur
negative reactions to minoritized student groups. Furthermore, Colty above provides an overt
critique of viewing social identities as fixed labels. Additionally, Colty references a need for a
leader to take into account the dialectical workings of social identities of others whom they lead
as those identities “reverberate” throughout a person’s life depending on social circumstances
and contexts they find themselves in, and their other developmental underpinnings.
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Moreover, students do also remember the RU’s international presence to be a part of this
dialectical mix what a great campus leader should be versed in and pay attention to. In this
regard, Boyd points out that campus leader ought to have had
Plenty of international experiences and different culture experiences throughout
their professional time… But learning to fulfill the needs of their diverse
intersectional students, they need to get out of the U.S. and kind of see the world
for themselves first, before leading such a diverse group of people.
In such a view, the static prescriptions what would constitute a normative aspect of a
leader of diverse campus would seem ill-conceived. Perhaps the starting point would be what a
White gay male student sees as an intersectional leader leading their campus, as Rory said:
I think my ideal leader would be ... I don't know why, but a lot of really powerful
women I know are like popping into my head. So, probably a girl. And, probably
not white, like some minority so then she has some knowledge about people ...
A pathway to new leaders of college campuses, to believe the above discussion, would
lead through attention to privilege, through espousing and reflecting intersectionality, global
cultural perspectives, before it can arrive to and bring “loving and accepting” features to college
campuses.
The students also engaged questions of how they view their own leadership perspectives,
including from the perspectives of their social identities. Researcher saw some contours of
transformational, emerging, and critical leadership from the discussions with the students. The
study will turn to these views and perspectives now.
Students’ views of their own leadership. It is be important to reiterate that the students
referred to similar issues of campus diversity, issues of privilege, intersectionality, sub-alterity
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when discussing their own leadership perspectives. Some students clearly expressed a desire to
help others with the minoritized and intersectional identities to embrace their background with an
expectation to succeed when doing so. Will put it in a way that clearly stated his leadership
goals’ and his intersectionality’s relevance to it:
Ideally, … I want to be a person that is known as a leader and role model to those
people who are growing up like I did, as queer and intersectional, to have hope
that, I mean, just because of their identity, that they can also be successful… That
that should be something they're proud of, and something that shouldn't hold them
back from being successful, so that's my goal.
Several students mentioned their specific ways of involvement in leadership, which was
another way they showed their identities’ relevance to such activities. Paraleli spoke about being
an LGBTQ peer mentor on campus. Earlier discussions showed how Huy established a queer
Business School club in response to the school’s masculinized culture and expectations that
come with it that were foreign to his being. Boyd was involved in leading a group of young
undergraduates abroad in Latin American country where he led all the logistics as well as
designing research activities for the younger fellow undergraduates.
Such experiences and students’ own self-awareness of the minoritized and intersectional
identities’ issues appear to potentially enhance their ability to be engaged with relevant
communities on campus and beyond when they consider their leadership outlook. In relation to
social identities and being a leader, Natalie does not see that her ability to work with diverse
communities is dependent on what her own identities are:
I don't see myself limited in any certain ways because of my identity. I just see
myself being a leader, an advocate for people who feel like minorities, who feel
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like they're being oppressed and things like that. I think having my identity
definitely gives me more potential to be a leader…
Colty, a White queer graduate student, emphasizes the need to engage people with
identities other than herself in combination with people who are women in her leadership outlook
and how she approaches it:
I've really pushed myself to reach for those opportunities and try to grab them,
especially when I get to work with students of color or just people of color
depending on circles, especially when I will be one of the only women there.
The intersectional queer students are interested to contribute as leaders to engage social
justice, to lead people in pushing against oppression. Students’ own experiences, in Will’s view,
is what puts them on that leadership trajectory, to be prepared to meet an adversity: “if you have
experienced that sort of marginalization, you can be a good mentor to other LGBTQ students that
are current students and mentor them.” That way, people with such experiences “would have an
understanding of the way systems of oppression keep other people marginalized.” From the
perspective of queer students with White majoritized identities who are in some way aware of
their privilege do acknowledge that queerness can dialectically put them on the path of ability to
relate to intersectional groups with whom they may become engaged as leaders, as Rory put it:
I think if I wasn't queer and didn't go through whatever struggles, and schooling,
and social life, and that kind of stuff, then I wouldn't have as much empathy for
others. And, I wouldn't know that there are people who need to be protected. So, I
feel like I just wouldn’t know that I should be protecting them, if that makes
sense.
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Dis-equilibrium may be expected to develop a person who can recognize others and have
empathy for them. However, it would be difficult to argue that a leader with a privileged
background would recognize a social justice norm without self-reflection of that privilege and
how it may affect marginalized groups. Even space, particularly pertinent to college campus
contexts, requires leaders to work at changing it as the privilege and inequality can bar the
minoritized intersectional students from having a chance at the leadership opportunities. In that
regard, Kagen notes that
…I definitely find it harder to seek out leadership roles in a more general setting
just because I think it does always, you know, feel like general spaces aren't set up
necessarily for people like me and it's hard to feel like I'm confident enough to
lead a group of people that doesn't share your same experiences and I often will
sort of naturally fall to somebody who shares experiences with the majority of
people in a setting.
On a surface, this would seem to echo a finding by Rosch’s and colleagues’ (2015) about
the students’ self-group activism being a negative predictor of leadership overall in the future.
However, the spaces for leadership outside of single-identity group, which arguably not identical
to activism, may continue to be generally foreclosed to the intersectional individuals and
particularly obstructed by unrecognized shadow of privilege of some.
Above considerations would also be difficult to tackle without framing them through a
political lens. It is clear to Paraleli that leadership aspirations are not meaningfully thinkable
outside of the political frame:
I feel like our campus does a good job of bringing up the issues, bringing them up
tactfully and trying to present solutions and be active, and it's just so great how
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quick the communication is, for better or for worse. Okay, we need to be here.
You need to contact this congress person, or what's going on. I don't know, but
I'm hoping we keep being political because it's everywhere. It can be an
uncomfortable topic, but politics is in arts, it's in music. It comes up in sports. It's
everywhere, so hopefully we keep staying involved and keep being aware.
The political framing of leadership for the campuses with increasing diversity and more
vocal pushback against minoritized students’ marginalization will resonate shortly in this chapter
when discussing the topic of leading such campuses with one of RU’s top Administrator. The
political frame may be the complicating factor for anyone looking to making a sensible
contributions to leadership theory relevant to diverse campuses yet the political may be what is
the necessary ingredient for it. For now, students offered views on leadership in ways that may
yield insights to enrich its understanding, especially in regards to diverse campus contexts.
Leader-queer insights. The intersectional queer students at RU describe their thinking
about leadership, their experiences, their plans and aspiration in leaderful ways. They view the
current equity and diversity issues, existing inequalities on campuses as a call for being proactive
in their leadership outlook. Natalie notes “I think it will change in the future. I can see it already,
kind of. Just more people being more proactive and things like that.” Colty describes how she
has taken proactive steps to prepare herself to gain leadership skills from the young age:
I, from a very young age, have sat and also been put into those leadership
different tracks. From being in Girl Scouts to five to age 18 to being leader of
different organizations in high school and then college and now in graduate
school. I can see myself continuing to do that. I really like being in those roles. I
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like being challenged by those roles and by other people in it. I like engaging in
discussions. I like including people and bringing a lot of voices to the table.
There are ways to seize the future – to gather experience, to try out various tracks. It can
also involve making changes at levels that are not expected. These can entail proactively
proposing specific ways to go beyond existing norms, such as gender assumptions at student
group meetings, as in Huy’s example:
That for me, kind of throws me off sometimes, especially when there's like a
gender queer person within my group. I'm trying to combat that with by saying,
"You know, let's go off of gender pronouns." Using the first meeting to set the
tone…
Proactive leaderful thinking also involves awareness of privilege. This can involve a use
of it as a tool to redirect gained advantages beyond own individualistic interests, in Colty’s
words:
I can see myself talking with younger people as well about what it means to be a
queer professional, what it means to study as a queer student, and also take into
account some of my privilege that has worked to my advantage in regards to my
race, my nationality… and as a white woman for sure…
The sight of the privilege in discussions like these is necessary to keep inequities-
sustaining privilege of some and systemic marginalization of others in clear view before equity
and meaningful diversity can be arrived at on college campuses. To be transformational as
leaders towards such goals, students also see a need to develop empathy in sustained ways as an
important aspect of the leader’s deference to the followers in putting a team above a single
leader, in Paraleli’s words,
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…Extending that sense of validation or empathy, or they're not really working.
Even though you're a leader, you still need to be a team. You still need to be
thinking of others. That's, I find, where I step up, I guess. I try to contribute
regardless…
Huy gives an example how a young leader can have it play out in the concrete situation,
within the group dynamics of a student club:
Since I'm president of my club, I really do try to check my privilege. For example,
like, you know, how many people at the table is one thing, but making sure that
the voices are heard is another thing. … I really try make sure that everyone is not
afraid to have their thoughts spoken and that they are heard, and I'm not trying to
talk over them.
Huy sees emotional intelligence as the necessary ingredient for deploying leadership
roles in transformational ways. He sees young people with marginalized intersectional identities
be put on the spot most often that makes developing such emotional intelligence unavoidable
from early age.
The intersectional queer students engage opportunities for emerging leadership around
campus-relevant topics and issues while at the same time not forgetting the structural importance
of critical leadership for that. Natalie believes that the diversity in leadership will emerge from
the increasing diversity on campus, since the current disparities are clear to her: “There's
definitely going to be diversity in leadership, I think, because people are realizing that not a lot
of people in leadership positions have diverse identities.” Colty sees additional gaps in campus
leadership that creates space for emerging leadership. For example, the lack of queer leaders on
campus, because
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That really means a lot to students, especially undergraduate students who are
often exploring different parts of their identity when they get to college through a
new lens and maybe seeking out those discussions on identity and trying to figure
themselves out.
The student is careful to draw distinction between undergraduate students and graduate
students who often have field-focused ideas for leadership and require less exploratory space,
less need for role modeling. These two distinct student level tracks are worth keeping in mind
when exploring emerging trends in fostering student leadership by campus administrators.
As mentioned earlier, it would be difficult to imagine future leadership on campus
without clear awareness of the existing privileges of some groups who are structurally
recognized and reinforced on campuses and those who seek alternative ways of structuring
campus life. This question is structurally persistent in the students’ view and creates a mutual
dependence of emerging and critical leadership when it comes to leading college campuses.
Kagen brings up the example of Greek life:
The university is very open about opportunities for Greek life, …and then there's
also just not as many student leadership opportunities for people who don't
necessarily like the way that the campus is, you know, if you want to change it, if
you want to be an advocate against the way things are, it's hard to become an
institutionally recognized leader because the university probably doesn't
necessarily recognize an organization for that, so I think there's a lot of
marginalized folks who hold very much leadership positions that just aren't
formally recognized…
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It is noteworthy that Kagen does not put forth a contrast between socially privileged
students groups and the marginalized ones. One way to read it is that Kagen simply does not
persistently experience herself as marginalized on campus. Will early in the present chapter
noted the association of Greek life with the privileged students groups. He drew a contrast there
between those privileged groups and those intersectional student groups who are marginalized.
In Kagen’s view, the distinction is shifted from being driven by social identity distinctions. She
stresses the maintained practices of how leadership opportunities are sanctioned and how the
opportunities are supported. The student clearly sees a sub-cultural murmur of student activity
that constantly works at alternative campus spaces for more diversified campus voices and policy
goals. This is the space from which the new campus leadership approaches will emerge. And this
is the space that the critical leadership can function in too. Critical approaches can mutually
engage students with staff and faculty creating a front to be met by campus administrators.
Overall, the queer students at RU do associate emerging and even ideal campus leaders
with increasing diversity on campus. Not dissimilar from their views of their own intersectional
identities, the students see that a strong campus leader would be deeply considering issues
surrounding marginalized identities, overlapping communities representing intersecting social
identities, and no less importantly, keeping privileged and administrative practices supporting
privileged norms, in clear and dialectical perspective. That is, keeping such perspective without
separating themselves from that privilege framework. Such a view maintains critical perspectives
on social relations represented by campus and its administrative practices.
With RU students’ views on their own social identities and how it is impacted by campus
structures in clearer view, the study will now review how RU senior administrators perceive the
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intersectional queer students and their take on challenges associated in leading increasingly
diverse campuses.
RQ4: Senior Administrators’ perceptions of intersectional queer students and campus
management approaches
Two RU senior administrators participated in the study. It allowed the researcher to
juxtapose the students’ views about queer and intersecting social identities on campus and
campus admnistrators’ views and approaches. One such administrator was Adam, the top RU
officer in the area of student affairs. The other administrator was Katie, senior management
officer with RU’s equity and diversity policy/enforcement arm. Katie, a trained sociologist, had
particular and specific views about significance of social identities for students’ development and
campus experiences. Adam was proliferous in offering insights and views on managing campus
for the students and how the increasing presence of intersectional students challenge typical
campus management approaches.
Katie discussed in depth several aspects of students’ social identities and how they
dialectically shift when considered along with the students’ increased autonomy in college. She
also spoke about the importance of the familial communities the students come from, increasing
relevance of and cultural shifts in understanding of social identities when considered through the
prism of intersectionality.
Katie points out how coming to campus involves a structural shift in the students’ campus
experiences, first and foremost, as defined by new space of increased individual autonomy:
I think that from the intersectional understandings, students are going through a
degree of change in their identities and in their lives, right? So there are ways in
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which stepping into a more autonomous positions for the traditional students that
are living on campus. Away from home for the first time.
Considering students’ new circumstances of autonomy on campus in comparison to
family contexts, Katie references an example that specifically addresses sexual identity. Yet,
without keeping any social identity separated from others, she connects it to the students’
religious identity. This helps to understand the complexity of the students’ identities when
intersectionality is kept actively in perspective. In her example, the religious identity moderates
the development of sexual identity, “… so if somebody grows up in the religious household,
when they step away from that, what is that like, in terms of the identities around sexuality in
general, not just LGBT?” Regardless of the sexual identity, the autonomy that moving to campus
provides to students is developmentally and behaviorally relevant to the sexuality of all students.
Yet Katie is not oblivious of unique impact that homophobia, transphobia impact queer students.
From the students’ strategic ways in which they live and manage their campus lives, it is
apparent how the privileged sexual identities obscure aspects that apply to those students who
manage marginalized sexual identities. In Katie’s view, home communities mediate the impact
of that. In regards to homophobia and transphobia,
How much they have internalized would vary based on their previous life
experiences in terms of their household, their homes, their families, their extended
families, their communities that they grew up in. So if students grew up in a place
like California, the particularly coastal California, they are going to have a very
different experience because they probably went to school where other students
who were openly identifying as LGBT or non-binary and gender presentations,
gender non-conforming.
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At the same time and depending on the students’ home communities and geographical
contexts, heterosexual students are not shielded from experiencing impact of both autonomy and
potentially sharp distinctions of ethos between home and campus, therefore “… it may be a
mistake to say that LGBT students are the only students going through those challenges.” On the
point of student sexual identities, Katie referenced additional issues that add to campus culture
expectations and impact an ability of campus administrators to respond adequately to them when
managing a campus. One of them is that sexuality taxonomies guiding the administrators’ work
towards campus inclusivity, which she sees as lagging behind natural sexualities. The other point
is that the current cultural shifts among young people end up proliferating the natural sexualities
and gender identifications and expressions. As Katie notes:
I personally believe that there is more variety naturally in terms of sexual desire,
sexual expression, sexual practices, those are all different things. … I think there
is more natural variety among those, and then when historically, we have tried to
put everyone into binaries, at least since the modern time, when the word
“homosexual” was coined, you started to see taxonomies of sexuality that
proliferated. I think there is much more natural diversity than that.
There is no way for administrators to capture all the current students’ views and identities
adequately without adapting to those cultural shifts. Katie provided several examples of cultural
shifts, from sociological statistics to more accommodating laws to changing imagery in mass
media. For example:
We are at the very exciting time right now where 27% I think of 12-17 year olds
in CA identify as gender non-conforming or non-binary. That is dramatically up
from 4% just a few years ago. That’s huge. … What do you do with somebody
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whose sex is non-binary, how do you classify them for health insurance? … Does
the person have to fit into their mold or does the mold need to change?
It was the other senior administrator, Adam, who provided a pointed example of a student
not fitting into a mold that can pose unexpected challenges to a college administrator. His
example illustrated how an accommodation of all-gender bathrooms that many administrators
pursue on campus can quickly be eclipsed by a need to provide gender-neutral housing: “We
have worked to add more gender neutral housing options for the LGBT male who doesn't wanna
live with a fraternity man cause he feels uncomfortable in that environment so he'd rather live
with a freshman woman.” Other examples both Katie and Adam spoke about were a work to
catch up with accommodations of the students’ preferred pronouns to correspond to a student’s
psychological gender and the actual gender expression. As we saw from student Paraleli’s
example, the familiar assumption in that arena can be challenging. This is considering that
Paraleli spoke about changing gender expressions they practice. That is, the administrators may
work effectively to set up practices to implement pronouns policy for faculty and staff to use
when interacting with the students. That may require channels for expansion of pronoun options
and ways to implement them in a fast changing cultural environment.
Both Katie and Adam engaged the topic of the students’ intersectionality and how it
informs campus administration in dialectical ways. Indeed, pre-intersectional ways of how
campus leaders consider diversity and minority students is not sustainable in Adam’s view.
Specifically, Adam uses an example of a conglomerate of cultural centers and how each in itself
is not well set up to meet the intersectional students’ needs:
One of the interesting things that we have been observing over the past couple
years, a student may be LGBT and African American. LGBT and Hispanic.
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LGBT and Asian American. I sense ... I sense that there's some discomfort or
confusion by the student who now has to decide, "Which one do I go to?". I'm
both. And that may also happen for the student who has one parent, African
American and another parent Hispanic. How do they identify? Some students may
be LGBT and African American. Which resource center should I use? Can I go
back and forth between both?
Adam is concerned that the intersectionality challenges the traditional cultural centers
that he sees to be developed based on the 1970’s and 80’s paradigm and are based “…for
different silos of communities” with a need to
….Start to think about our communities this way because we have students that
live in multiple of these communities, in some cases two or three of them at the
same time. Yet we have a model that is a stovepipe model of services and
delivery.
The intersectionality for Adam complicates leadership in ways that go beyond the
cultural centers. The intersectionality pertains to and at the same time, complicates other aspects
of academic life. Adam’s example focuses in on students advocating for the increased presence
of Black faculty:
... A growing appreciation for that we don't leverage enough is that students who
have, you know, live in these intersectional spaces, …they have the ability to see
some of our most challenging issues from multiple perspectives. … So we saw
this when we were having campus conversations about issues of diversity and
inclusion that some students may say, "We need more black faculty," and some
students say, "No, we need more LGBT faculty". And then I heard one student
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say, "LGBT faculty could also be African American," so there was this kind of
this moment of realization that, ooh, wait a minute, they can be both. So I think
they help our students think about the complexities of leadership and the
expectations that in some cases we could satisfy both needs by not thinking of
these as mutually exclusive characteristics.
Clearly the recounted example references both the complexities of leadership as well as
how in campus contexts, the intersectionality and overlapping cultural communities complicate
the traditional modes of thinking of leadership in servicing the student needs. The
intersectionality perspective provides a clearer picture of overlapping student communities and
wider considerations of discrimination experiences a given student may face. But do campus
leaders see a universal dimensions in the notion of intersectionality? And especially, does the
intersectionality perspective lend itself to consistent leadership practices? Katie again provided a
sociological take on these questions while Adam ventured to claim that as a leader, he does aim
for universal criterions to base his management decisions on.
Katie is a “sociologist by trade,” and from that perspective, “…everybody is
intersectional to me. I don’t look at the LGBT students as being intersectional. I look at
everybody having these intersections of identities. I think that everyone has their complicated
identities.” Katie’s earlier-reported example alluded to how both the minoritized and majoritized
students would inevitably have religion-related or sexuality-related identity, not to mention
varying cultural identities. This may sound to be diluting the focus of intersectionality and
concern for the added and unique lines of exclusion and oppression of the minoritized student
groups. Katie herself points out that “…if you have experienced that sort of marginalization, you
can be a good mentor to other LGBTQ students that are current students and mentor them.” Yet
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she adds a broader reading, which goes in tune with some of the students’ earlier-reported take
on the importance of experiencing at least some aspects of minoritization to develop empathy
towards others. As Katie notes, “I would hope that anybody who experienced some sort of
adversity or marginalization or oppression would have an understanding of the way systems of
oppression keep other people marginalized.” Discussion of the students’ views included White
gay students, Jed and Rory, who expressed that same view. What perhaps disallows one to see
claims to comparability of single minoritized identity and intersectional underrepresented
identities is that Katie sees the importance of experience in combination to conscious aims of
self-education and functioning in the society:
Because there could be people who, you could have a cis-gendered heterosexual
white man who has all of the systemic privilege, but who has taken the time to
educate himself and to take on them a responsibility of understanding oppression
and marginalization. And not expect of those who are oppressed to educate him.
Who has made himself a personal practice to understand and who wants to use
that power that he has to bring people up who have a lot of experiences different
than his own.
A broad-brush interpretation of Katie’s thoughts would be that diversity can present itself
in broader ways from what the diversity may be typically associated with. Experience rather than
a possession of identity might make the intersectionality relevant to every student’s
development. Katie says that “I don’t think it’s based on identity. It is much more based on the
commitment to diversity, a commitment to social justice…” Of course, a caution to these points
would need to be added: experiences of adversity and discovery of adversity others are
experiencing may reasonably acquire a connotation grounded in privilege or lack thereof. Any
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form of education may be considered a commodity that the privileged groups have advantage of
a greater access to. Also, the researcher sees additional risks of implicit superiority claims in
crediting self-education and discovery of cultural contingency as part of the world-view
development that embraces everyone: while sounding noble on their face value, it is difficult to
communicate and practice them without infantilizing the other by drawing the seemingly
inevitable line between those embracing their own cultural contingency and those caught up in
celebrating and drawing from their supposedly essentialist view of their unique culture (Žižek,
2008).
From the standpoint of the campus leader, Adam’s starting point seems to allude to a
universal criterion in making leadership decisions:
I have seen no significant difference that requires me to do anything different
from my leadership style, whether I'm meeting with a group of LGBT students,
African American students, Hispanic students, so I have not adopted any different
style or approach or ideas in order to advise, support, and guide students…
When combined with previous insights from Adam about the complexities of leadership
practice in the context of increasing awareness of intersectionality on campus, the common
criterion that his and researcher’s discussion yielded was the consistency in decision-making.
How does Adam view the varying and combined social identities of the student groups he
overseas? His mode of thinking about it is inductive:
So we wanna create that space for them no matter who the student is. So we've
done a lot of work to be cognizant of those differences, and I leave that kind of
detail work to the person at the ground, and I am thinking about the best interests
of all of the students… You know, as we evolve as a human race, we are
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recognizing more and more the injustices that have been done in the past and
trying to make sure we correct those things and we're conscious of them moving
forward…
Understanding the cultural differences and applying the decision-making criterions
consistently read logical enough. However, Adam’s thinking also includes what Katie discussed
as cultural shifts that in Adam’s passage adds new and expanded criterions for social justice.
Indeed, Katie stressed that it is not exclusively minoritized groups that seek inclusion nowadays.
Younger individuals in particular, “…students of this generation in general, that they are pulling
us forward culturally and they have an expectation of inclusion.” That is, Katie is referring to the
cultural shift where the expectation of inclusion manifests itself by “…being shouldered by a
more broad audience now.”
Is there something more to this seemingly idyllic picture? Katie and Adam’s topics that
complicate the consistent decision making on part of campus leaders pertained to subversive
cultural practices of some students and managing discursive controversies on campus grounds.
Katie brought up an example of sex work by some students. While traditional expectation
would be that any administrator would view the entire topic as problematic, Katie’s
contemporary approach is split:
For me, based on experiences with friends who were engaged in various forms of
sex work, if I was in some sort of leadership position and there was a student
involved in sex work, that doesn’t necessarily mean to me that they are in danger.
That could be an informed decision. People who are sex-trafficked or forced into
sex work against their will, which is certainly problematic.
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Even currently as an administrator, Katie has “interacted with students who were
involved in different communities. I certainly interact a lot with trans and non-binary students
given my role.” Yet the turn Katie takes with it is that it is a function of ideology in determining
how subversive or controversial a given topic is. When interacting with gender non-confirming
students in her administrative role or studying and befriending drag kings as part of her
sociology studies, “…I don’t see that as subversive, that to me is normal. That there is a normal
array within that community. To have different gender presentations is normal to me.”
Ultimately and with considerations of safety and personal autonomy in view, Katie alludes to the
potential conclusion for campus administrators to consider: your ideology determines whether
you see a social practice as subversive or not. From the leadership perspective, this to the
researcher translates to that the leader’s experiences with marginalized social practices and his or
her ideological openness to such practices determines the leader’s ability to be effective in
tackling the sub-cultural practices. And specifically from the emerging leadership’s perspective,
the effective campus leader would have the ability to “… to see the complexity” in Adam’s
words. And the intersectionality perspective and experiences are the necessary ingredient for it:
“I find students who come from multiple identities have an appreciation for the complexity of
leadership when you're trying to serve multiple communities.”
Adam’s own example of what complicates consistent decision-making on part of leaders
when serving the “multiple communities” of students pertains to a protection of free speech on
campus. Regarding the free speech, “We allow students to express their dissent on matters. We
allow students to express their approval of matters.” Adam anticipates that in this context, there
will be things said that are offensive to some groups of students. The approach of a leader here is
that “We don't greet it. We don't invite it, but it's protected on our campus." Of course, the
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leader’s role in this example is a balancing act. From the Researcher’s perspective and to
combine Adam’s and Katie’s insights, the balancing act itself needs to be balanced against the
leader’s prior exposure to adversity and controversy on a given matter and the ideological
definitions of what supposedly is controversial yet a matter of free speech. The political, to put
differently, is the defining frame for managing campus with the voices of the multiple
communities and ideologies present, and present themselves without a cooptation. Before a
separate attention to the political frame of campus organization is discussed, the study will
review some of the Katie’s and Adam’s thoughts with the general organizational framing by
Bolman and Deal (2003) in background view.
Framing the campus management challenges. Katie and Adam were asked to provide
their take on which challenges are the most acute when placed into the four organizational
frames: Structural, HR, Cultural, and Political. For the Structural frame, both administrators
quickly referred to the topic of adequate access to gender-neutral bathrooms. In Katie’s view,
“Non-binary and trans who are looking for bathrooms or changing rooms that are all gender” is
in a sense of physical structures. Attention to these structures do apply to campus visitors beyond
LGBTQ students, so as Adam put it,
So anybody could use it. So it works for the LGBT student, it works for the
cisgender student, it works for a Mom coming in with a little kid or a Dad coming
in with a daughter, like it works for multiple people.
Adam here is referring to single-stall bathrooms converted to all-gender bathrooms.
Adam brought up gender-neutral campus housing as well earlier in this chapter. Clearly, the
pressure on the structural set up comes from the cultural shifts, such as overt presence of students
who require accommodations like that.
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Additional topic pertinent to the Structural frame of major college campuses, as Adam
sees it, is a distribution of resources to the cultural centers:
And any time you provide support to one community in a way that's above and
beyond what we provide community B, community B comes back and says,
"Time out. You just gave them this space, this center, this director. We've been
here for 30 years, and we don't have this space, this center, this director, these
resources." So then it becomes this political fight of who is the most harmed
community. We're the most harmed community. No, we're the most harmed
community.
Two common thoughts emerge that were consistently brought up by Adam. One of them
is a critique of cultural silos as a manifestation of old, 70’s and 80’s, view of how campuses’
cultural centers should be structured and supported. Another one is a strong prevalence of the
Political frame for most challenges related to managing college campuses, to which the study
returns as the discussion of the organizational frames proceeds.
Katie noted issues related to HR frame. Her example echoed a point that some students
had about the college faculty and staff not being well aware of a presence of emerging visibility
of social identities of students and their ability to adequately relate to such students:
There are students of all different backgrounds experience issues with faculty and
staff who are not as aware as other faculty and staff. There are some faculty and
staff who are very familiar with non-binary and trans students and others. But it is
also true around race.
The uneven awareness and skill in relating to the minoritized students puts a pressure on
the HR organization of campuses as an issue of training, campaigns of awareness and similar
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measures. Such measures have to chase, as it were, the cultural and political shifts that allowed
for such students to become visible. Gaps in the HR frame on this issue, as Katie further reminds,
have implications for the Structural frame, for maintaining sound policy compliance by a given
campus:
And there are certainly people who make complaints to university about
experiencing micro-aggressions, things that don’t rise to the level of policy
violations, to reporting harassment and discrimination, which could rise to the
level of policy violation if investigated and there is a finding, from all over. That
is not just based on sexuality or gender. That would be true for race, religion, etc.
Adam previously alluded to an example of the intersectionality’s impact on leadership
complexities, whereby a debate about priority between bringing more black and LGBT faculty
elevates debaters to a realization that a faculty recruit can be both. With that, it would be difficult
to argue that increasing the faculty diversity can bring additional challenges and opportunities
when colleges and universities design HR policies and initiatives once the intersectionality is
actively taken into account.
Katie touched upon a Cultural frame example that she saw as unique to RU, at least when
compared to other campuses in the region, with the point that “…this campus has more
conservative culture than others. Not necessarily conservative as associated with any particular
political affiliation, but it’s a more corporate environment.” That is, the fact that students in RU,
as she sees it, are often seen on campus wearing suites to classes that is not explainable as an
expectation stemming from the Board, faculty expectations, Greek Life expectations, occasional
class presentations, or specific events. It is cultural as she sees it. More pointedly, “It is more like
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a business environment for students than other campuses.” And such environment’s impact is
that “…with that, there is less diversity in terms of presentation.”
While Katie above offers a mesh of Cultural and Political frames in seeing her campus as
corporate-like with an impact on presentation of diversity, Adam on his part treats the Political
frame separately and distinctively as the most challenging organizational frame to manage for a
campus administrator. As he sees it,
To me, right now in our time, it seems more the political frame is the one that is
most challenging. We can make structural adjustments, move a person from this
box to that box and give this box higher priority so it looks, you know ... so we
can make structural changes and those are minor. We can make human resource
changes. Hire trained people to do this job who have credibility, who have
academic integrity. We can make symbolic changes, but the political issues
around this are emotional.
Adam clearly points to the Political frame as the one that requires managing conflicting
emotions. As he puts differently, “the political issues, it's almost like talking about a religion in
that people have very strong opinions, and opposition to very strong opinions create emotional
reactions.” Adam is well aware that in the pre-intersectional spaces and time on campuses,
providing resources to cultural centers may have kept the Structural frame as challenging as he
sees the Political frame nowadays. That would have been the Structural frame’s close proximity
to the Political frame, in that each cultural center, representing a distinct social identity group, is
challenged to have that identity recognized as requiring adequate resources: “So then it becomes
this political fight of who is the most harmed community.” Adam seems to critique the pre-
intersectional cultural centers, and perhaps continues to do so in regards to their contemporary
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competition for resources – “… now they want separate but equal programs and services and
attention, and it becomes a political battle.”
Additional reason Adam sees the prevalence of challenges of the Political frame on
campuses is the elusiveness of how to fully define the political in the administrative decision-
making. That is, with a given group’s identity potentially in competition with others for resource
allocation, or with the resources reserved for programs seemingly benefiting the more privileged
groups, with emotions running high around social identities, all that can insert the politics
regardless of what criterions are used in making the administrative decisions:
And politics aren't always clearly communicated and clearly defined so people
have a lot of assumptions about what people are doing behind the scenes. So we
hear a lot about transparency. We've made a decision, everybody doesn't know so
you'll hear, "The university isn't transparent." What does that mean? That's a kind
of signal for there's some political issues that people think are being played in the
background.
Perhaps no political considerations can be fully captured up front when working to
accommodate emerging intersectional spaces, accommodate each social group, account for the
privilege of other student groups. To look at leadership challenges from the critical perspective,
Adam may be critiquing the notion of cultural silos. Students in this chapter were seen to focus
less on individual social identities and more on spaces to negotiate their place on campus with
the intersectional perspective in mind along with a sharp and recurrent critique of the socio-
economic privilege. This creates a need to realign the students’ and managements’ perspectives
how to define the criterions for management decision-making without loosing a critical
evaluation of those very criterions.
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Chapter Summary
This chapter focused on the RU students’ ways of identifying, their experiences with
peers, faculty, and administrators, their outlook of their own leadership prospects and views.
RQ1. The intersectional queer students name themselves queer in most of the cases as
one of their key ways of identifying. At the same time, the chapter’s discussion saw that some
students utilize queerness as a sexual minority identity. All students engaged in questioning their
sexual identities, sometime pointing to the effect of stereotype reinforcement when queer identity
is used interchangeably with the lesbian or gay labels. The questioning of social identities was
most pronounced in regards to gender identity. Some students also challenge the notion of fitting
into sexuality, gender, and even ethnic stereotypes and assumption on part of their peers, faculty,
and administrators. Students do not show high interest in engaging in identity politics but rather
live, express, and communicate their identities in strategic ways. Those strategies aim for a
general acceptance, navigating campus life successfully and in relation to faculty and peers, seek
out communities they can relate to, which for the intersectional students is a multifaceted pursuit.
For some students, identity is an aspect of social engagement, a venue to learn empathy and
meaningfully engage the ever more intersectional nature of campus. The students appear to
leverage their cultural experiences about themselves and their peers as part of learning and
engaging social justice perspective. In this regard the students demonstrate awareness of the
distinction between strategic use of the social identities to leverage their individual study pursuits
and the deeper social systemic issues of inequality and educational inequities that they also
actively and analytically consider. It is also important to reiterate that the students are also aware
and reflect on their privileged position where applicable.
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RQ2. The students do see elementary issues in regards to campus structures and rules
reflecting gender binary, fixed view of identities no matter how strongly a campus purports an
inclusive environment. Some of it circles back to uneven power relations between the students
and campus administrators in that minority and other intersectional student groups see
themselves excluded from the decision making about issues pertaining to academic opportunities
and how their systems of support are managed. Student participants also critique the lack of
faculty’s awareness of student social identities, particularly where the intersectional identities are
relevant to them. Navigating their interactions with the faculty and their student peers compound
their prior experiences, such as mixed family backgrounds and minority within minority
situations when they move to study on campus.
RQ3. The intersectional queer students note the Westernized curriculum that they are
taught and how it reinforces the campus structures to be tilted towards benefiting the majoritized
students. The minority students in some cases take their situation in to their own hands: they
show their leadership in critiquing and taking steps to secure their own academic success amid
biased pedagogical approaches, particularly in the most competitive disciplines of study, such as
Business and STEM. The students’ critical consciousness extends beyond critiquing gaps in their
study and campus life needs being met. It extends to consistently considering the deeper social
systemic issues behind such gaps. The students see their leadership interests and prospects to be
connected to and even dependent on their ability to see and learn the perspectives of the
minoritized peer groups. Their leadership views consistently connect to the topic of
empowerment of the marginalized groups rather than a pre-occupation with the topics of most
effective ways to get the groups to follow their views and perspective as the potential followers.
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RQ4. The campus administrators who participated in the study do acknowledge and aim
to support the intersectional paradigm of a contemporary college campus. They want to move
away from the “pre-intersectional paradigm” of campus set-up and management approaches
while at the same time seeing how the Political frame of their organizations impede their desire
to forge ahead with building a new paradigm. Campus administrators see that the
intersectionality is bringing a need for the intersectional spaces, particularly since one of the
administrators see that both the social identity and the students’ experiences bring the
intersectionality and queerness to campus as a fully relevant paradigm to consider in virtually all
the aspects of their management work and decision-making.
This chapter focused on the RU students’ ways of identifying, their experiences with
peers, faculty, and administrators, an outlook of their own leadership prospects and views. The
chapter also looked at how campus senior administrators view the intersectional students and
what challenges present themselves in fostering them on campuses. The next chapter will work
through these findings with the study’s theoretical framework in view, so that informed
recommendations for practice of higher education administration can be proposed.

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CHAPTER 5: Discussion
The last chapter of the study will engage the findings deriving from the intersectional
queer students’ and senior campus administrators’ interviews discussed above and draw broader
observations to see how the study’s theoretical framework informs the findings, what insights
can be drawn for those interested to further build a queer leadership theory. The chapter will also
speak to higher education practitioners who seek to apply such theoretical observations and
modes of thinking to engage in praxis to impact the students’ experiences and leadership
outlook. Finally, the chapter will recap the implications for research while noting those
implications throughout theoretical and practice discussions. The chapter is therefore divided
into the three parts: the discussion of theoretical insights and prospects for further theory
development, discussions of implications for practice and research.
Theoretical Implications
Theoretical framework of the study included several theories. The discussion will first
focus on queer theory and intersectionality’s implications and then incorporate CHAT and a
leadership framework and other queering theories into that discussion.
Aspects of queer theory, intersectionality, and CHAT. The students participating in
the study name their identities as queer. They often use it as an identity label of sexual minority
positions yet demonstrate its fluidity in relation to other sexual minority positions. In that way,
they do not specifically aim to align their ways of identifying with the classical queer theory that
questions any fixed and stable sexual identities. Several students indicated how they questioned
some of their identities. A lot of it came in reference to rejecting or questioning binary gender
identity more so than sexual identity. Suspicion of fixed sexuality identities on part of the
students like Sandra and Eren came in the form of active working through when considering
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sexuality and gender identities together. Students perform their gender in questioning ways yet
tune it into a strategy of how to perform their gender in ways that are livable and recognizable, to
use Butler’s (2004) way of looking at such a process. To take such students like Sandra and
Paraleli, their ways of identifying challenge a need to explain themselves to peers and faculty
administrators in regards to fitting into the fixed identity labels and stereotypes. It suggests that
the queer theoretical lens is relevant to understanding student personal development and
leadership development. That is, the queer theory disturbs a quest for students or their mentors to
‘find’ their gender or sexual identities, as if they were innate and in a pure state pending
conclusion of identity questioning and searching. To borrow Lacanian psychoanalytic term of the
imaginary (Lacan, 1997; Rumsey, 2013), there is no hidden fullness of being queer or fullness of
being of one gender, or even a non-binary combination between the two genders, that a student
would just need to unveil or put together. Students do not engage in focused critique of fixed
social identities, particularly sexual identities for their views to neatly correspond to the queer
theory. In pursuing their study and community experiences on campus, the social identities they
explore, claim or emulate correspond to the symbolic order to borrow from the body of the
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, 1997; Rumsey, 2013). As part of the symbolic order, it
has real cultural and economic effects over every student yet it can only remain as a partial and
dialectically transient social identity label.
The more consequential element of the queer theory for the RU’s intersectional queer
students is an incorporation of critique of the existing power relations and resource arrangements
of how the campus structures, hierarchies, and curriculum are decided upon and run. This aspect
puts the queer theory in close relation to the intersectionality to which the study will return.
Queer theory’s alignment with critical consciousness can be seen from speaking to students in
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their blistering critique of minority within minority positions, stemming from many
intersectional identities the study-participating students have. Those were particularly strong in
the examples of Will, Boyd, Huy when discussing campus Greek life and masculinized ways of
teaching in some of the schools. White students who identify queer, like Rory, Jed, Colty, show
awareness of their privileged social position when speaking to the issue of existing inequality on
campus, whether based on racial, ethnic, or socio-economic status. In most cases, students are
concerned with social justice as a regulatory consideration for equality (Badious, 2008), while
recognizing a constant need to challenge themselves to keep their privileged positions in
perspective. From the more privileged students’ standpoint, this constant questioning of
themselves bring them to believe that their queerness is that line of life experience and learning
that helps them to learn empathy and learnable perspectives from and about the minoritized
intersectional students. This suggests that further exploration of how students consider their
privilege in society and critical perspectives in their praxis may bring importance of queer
theoretical perspective in developing new leadership theories. At the same time, all students
expressed their awareness when treated individualistically in their interactions with faculty and
administrators on campus. From the leadership theorizing perspective, it is a sign that students
have intellectual and cultural ability to keep the systemic issues surrounding social inequality
and inequities on campus separate from the colonialist drive to individualize racism and other
minoritization of social groups that Patel sees as an impediment to the project of de-
colonialization (Patel, 2016).
Intersectionality also features directly and prominently in the study students’ experiences
and views in regards to their own ways of identifying and in critiquing the existing power
structures contributing to a systemic inequality in society and inequities on campus specifically.
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First and in close proximity to the queer ways of identifying, the RU intersectional students draw
attention to the identity complexities of their multiple minoritized social positions to strategically
navigate their study and campus lives. This strategy and mode of thinking challenge normative
categorizations of individual social identities. As exemplified by many participating students,
especially Will, Paraleli, and Huy, their focus on the intersectionality allows them to engage in
critique of the oppositional view of minoritized economic, racial and ethnic groupings when
reflecting about the campus life and structures. This mode of thinking resists a drive for activism
based on single-identity grouping across various students’ cultural groups. This also has campus
leadership implications as Adam, RU’s senior administrator, noticeably critiqued the
management view of the student groups as adequately supported in the form of single-cultural
centers that in turn creates an oppositional relationship of the cultural centers competing for the
limited campus resources.
Especially pertinent to student experiences on a college campus is the fact that many
students stressed the importance of learning the underpinnings of intersectionality and how the
intersectionality manifests itself on campus. For some students, learning subtleties of the
intersectionality relate to their directly applicable intersectional identities yet to others it is a way
to maintain an awareness of their privilege and how their privilege may affect other students, like
in the cases of Colty and Rory. This is an important theoretical aspect of students’ leadership
development with a focus on social justice considerations since Rory, Colty, Will, Paraleli, and
other students could not separate a need for developing their sense of empathy and emotional
intelligence from learning about intersectional identities and how they work in practical terms.
Intersectionality is further important to consider in student leadership development in that the
researcher observed a slightly more subdued leadership outlook for themselves among
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underrepresented minority students in comparison to the queer students who were either White
or from the affluent economic backgrounds. It is no less important to consider the intersecting
lines of oppression of the minoritized students when theorizing ways of improving their
leadership outlook along with recriminating historical and structural injustices by the single-
group activists. The discussion will touch upon the CHAT (Engeström, 2007) later, but it is a
good place to note that the intersectionality perspective requires the higher education
practitioners to consider competing definitions of activity objects and subjects that to an activist
may seem clear, to borrow CHAT terminology. The same applies to cultural rules and tools to
meaningfully impact the multiple communities and their activity domains.
RU senior administrators who participated in the study also contributed to the discussion
of intersectionality. Adam, the top executive in the area of student affairs, addressed the
seemingly perennial problem of adequate funding and space provision to the cultural centers of
the distinct student socio-cultural groups. He observed how the cultural centers are treated by the
management as immovable silos with the fixed space and funding needs that those centers than
find themselves competing for the limited resources. Adam swiftly tied this predicament to both
the structural problem of the limited resources as much as the complication of a political nature.
Ultimately, he called the silo-mode of thinking about the cultural centers and how they are
managed as pre-intersectional paradigm. And he saw it as problematically still dominant and
pervasive on campuses, including RU. Of course, tackling the question what practical challenges
and opportunities an intersectional era on campuses would bring carries many complexities. To
borrow CHAT terminology (Engeström, 2007), objects and subjects of activity of campus
managers, students would need to be defined using the intersectionality’s mode of thinking. The
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new intersectional paradigm would also require a careful consideration of what management
changes are needed over time in the structural and HR frames of a given campus.
Adam made the intersectional mode of thinking relevant to the profound problem of
faculty diversity. Recounting interactions with student groups demanding to see more African
American faculty and LGBTQ faculty, he took it as an invitation to think about this issue
through the intersectional lens – a faculty candidate can be both. To the researcher, it is not about
finding faculty candidates who meet single or multiple identity criterions that is the key
challenge. Without some universal regulatory principle of equitable resource distribution and
critical assessment of the disciplinary cultures of campus’ individual schools, the intersectional
thinking stands vulnerable for cooptation just as the silo-thinking about the social groups is.
Katie, a senior administrator with the equity and diversity enforcement arm at RU,
suggested a rather global way of thinking about intersectionality itself, especially when
discussing student identities, experiences, and developmental considerations. To her, “every
student is intersectional.” Students’ prior experiences form their identities, which then can
intersect with the student’s background at a juncture of coming to campus with a newly acquired
autonomy. This can then bring a student to experience “minoritization,” to put provisionally,
with or without intersecting or traditionally minoritized background. Katie did not aim to
legitimize traditionally “majoritized” students to be on the same vulnerable footing as many
“minoritized” students are. It would be more useful to interpret it as seeing every student at the
intersection of familial, cultural mores, ideological ruses, systemic levels of economic inequality,
and so on. For the campus administrators, this type of view of the intersectionality implies that,
for example, an ideological background, affinity, or engagement may determine whether they see
a particular student engage in radically subversive cultural, political, or even sexual practices that
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must be punished or otherwise swiftly counteracted. Or whether such practices appear rather
normal to that administrator.
Yet again, the above provisional new intersectionality on the one hand requires strict
regulatory assessment along the criterions of equality (Badious, 2008) to avoid reduction of the
minoritized students’ experiences to be comparable to everyone else’s. CHAT theoretical tools
(Engeström, 2007) remind this discussion that a campus provides students with the new and
multiple domains and subjects of activity that the students are objects of. On the other hand, the
students bring with them the familial and communal domains of activity with their own rules,
available tools, mores, cultural practices. Student Natalie utilizes different tools of interaction
and communication when strategically negotiating her queerness, depending whether she is
functioning on the campus domain or is participating in her familial communal domain where
then she accounts for the traditional Chinese communal expectations and rules. Furthermore, the
disciplinary domains provide varying contexts to indicate how visible and opportunity-prone the
students from the minoritized backgrounds are. Sandra, an Asian student found herself very
visible in STEM study program as Asian yet completely invisible there as a queer. On the other
hand, another Asian student Eren experienced to be a rare exception in the Social Work program
as Chinese yet very visible and comfortable as queer. Huy, a First-generation gay student found
himself succeeding through cooperation with other female students of color yet continued to be
discriminated by the masculinized culture of his Business School, presumably just as much as his
female colleagues of color.
Another of Huy’s points of criticism pertained to his Business School’s and aligned
industries’ diversity programs. His observation of White women dominating such programs did
not seem to focus on the gender distribution. The issue was the absence of women of color.
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Those particular programs clearly lack awareness of intersectionality when considering issues of
diversity. To use contemporary CHAT’s concept of overlapping domains of activity (Engeström,
2007), the diversity programs bring representatives of varying cultural and socio-economic
groups as part of overarching object of diversity development and ensuring inclusion. Targeting
and accounting for the intersectional subjects of activity seem to be crucial in order to make
diversity programs responsive to all variations of communities the programs want to achieve a
greater representation of.
Campus contexts also provide students with opportunities to find their community
members they feel affinity to that they did not experience as well growing up in the familial
communities. Without claiming a strict analogy, CHAT’s concept of the overlapping domains of
activity (Engeström, 2007) can be seen to correspond to the reality of the intersectional students
that is built from the multiple cultural strata that inform their social positioning and experiences.
The convergence of overlapping domains of activity is a ground for intersectional identities to be
found, grown, and expressed. Student Eren’s example comes to mind when as a subject of
freshmen programs, Eren unexpectedly realized there was a community of bi-sexual students that
she noticed while participating in the activity unrelated to the LGBTQ visibility. Ultimately, the
campus administrator’s ability to draw from their own experiences to proactively be engaged
with a full range of other communities the campus is set to serve, was one of the key ingredients
of an ideal campus leader. No authentic representation of varying and intersecting cultural
groups can be easily achieved. Leader’s attention to understanding and learning aspects that each
cultural group brings to campus makes CHAT conceptual network of significant import.
In terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1997; Rumsey, 2013), a campus leader’s
object of activity is not uncovering the participating groups’ authenticity to support or nourish.
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The cultural rules and tools constitute imaginary and symbolic registers that in turn require
strategic alignment with other cultural activity domains, including campus domain that bring
them together. No leader has a claim to the real of minoritized or intersecting communities, it is
always fragmented and is continuously glued together by the symbolic domain with no guarantee
of permanence and meaning outside of itself.
Contours for theorizing leadership. Some of the theoretical building blocks emerge
from the students’ discussion of their own leadership pursuits and engagements. One key theme
from the students is as follows: their familial community and campus experiences suggest that
exposure and learning about and from the minoritized intersectional identities are essential
ingredients for their preparedness to lead diverse communities and future engagements in
industry. This implies that campuses require to pursue structural and cultural change within and
around discipline-specific schools to create the new intersectional paradigm. Students like Will,
Paraleli, Huy, Colty, Rory and others indicated that their ability to relate to other groups of
students relied on empathy developed from their own minoritized identities or exposure to
groups they were less familiar with at the time of coming to RU. Some of the students referenced
Westernized curriculum they learn. This is an impediment to creating the new intersectional
paradigm on campuses yet involve time-consuming need for structural and cultural changes in
individual disciplinary schools that maintain historically established disciplinary cultures and
Western-driven own disciplinary paradigms. STEM fields would further suggest that nurturing
higher visibility of the minoritized students would require normative engagement with the basic
societal issues of equality, opportunity and access to education and industries that will employ
the students. The students observed frequent manifestations of lack of social identity awareness
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on part of faculty they study under. Without addressing this HR-related issue, it is difficult to
imagine success in moving to the new intersectional paradigm on campuses.
Another leaderful ingredient that several students referred to, especially Huy, Paraleli,
Will, Boyd and others, was significance of emotional intelligence. Students referenced it in
regards to both negotiating their queer status when growing up in their familial communities and
pre-higher education experiences. They continued to fine-tune their emotional intelligence when
on campus. This trait is the key feature of theorizing leadership in transformative ways in which
leaders learn to relate to the people in their domains of activity, especially when the people they
lead come from varying socio-economic and other diverse backgrounds.
There are additional levels of emotional intelligence driven by regulatory principles of
equality and emancipation (Badious, 2008). They go beyond the individual student’s strategic
aims of coming to study on campus. One of them is awareness of the socio-economic privilege in
self and in others who they interact with. Considerations of experiencing minoritization on part
of the privileged groups or seeing, keeping in check, their own privilege were spoken to by Will,
Rory, Colty, Huy and others. Interestingly, some of these students were White, from higher
income backgrounds, yet others were from marginalized economic and racial backgrounds.
Keeping oneself in picture that carries opportunities and impediments to achieving equality of
educational opportunities is one of the main conditions for developing critical consciousness and
ability to engage in praxis driven by such consciousness.
There is another more abstract aspect to consider, especially with many students’ desire
and commitment to lead towards more just, egalitarian society. It is plugging in the emotional
intelligence into the critical consciousness to see the systemic economic and cultural barriers to
assess, call out, and seek to transform, including individual selves. This keeps the earlier-
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mentioned provisional new intersectionality outside of abstract and universalistic notion that
everyone is intersectional. Awareness of privilege resists cooptation risks in it. Critical view of
economic and cultural systems students engage with and regulatory aim of equality find the
universal dimensions of the human condition precisely in the displaced and the marginalized
social groups as theorized by Butler, Laclau and Žižek (2011), which is drawn from the Hegelian
dialectics. This view of the particular and displaced as the real in the Lacanian sense of the
universal human condition is what may be one of the possible responses to Patel’s (2016) call for
the moratorium on social justice as coopted by the drive of individualism and property-
mindedness. Subjecting social principles to the Kantian way of regulation (Badiou, 2008; Butler,
Laclau, & Žižek, 2011) requires centering it on the particular experience, not an individual,
sociological term, or an abstract idea. To borrow from the Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan,
1997; Rumsey, 2013), the social real perturbs the imaginary appearance of the completeness of
the social-symbolic order when fragments of what does not neatly fit into the social discourse
shines through for the critical consciousness to capture. This is how the contours for further
theorization of critical leadership under the intersectional paradigm emerge for further
development and studying. It is coupled by indications from RU students of emerging leadership
in which, as cited earlier from the student Kagen,
There's also just not as many student leadership opportunities for people who
don't necessarily like the way that the campus is, you know, if you want to change
it, if you want to be an advocate against the way things are, it's hard to become an
institutionally recognized leader because the university probably doesn't
necessarily recognize an organization for that, so I think there's a lot of
marginalized folks who hold very much leadership positions that just aren't
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formally recognized, they're just sort of leading their own social groups and
circles in terms of the actions that they're taking.
There is praxis brewing just underneath of surface of campus run in, to use VP Adam’s
expression, the “pre-intersectional mode.” It will be useful, however, to place some of the issues
in students as well as senior administrator’s critical views on the four organizational frames as
conceived by Bolman and Deal (2003). This brief exercise will refocus the discussion towards
drawing implications for practice for those engaged in the higher education industry.
Senior administrators who participated in the study recounted several management
challenges and how they place them in the four organizational frames: Structural, HR, Cultural,
and Political in the last discussion of Chapter 4. The present discussion will focus on
management issues commonly noted by those administrators as well as the students who
participated in the study.
Both administrators Adam and Katie referred to availability of all gender bathrooms or
all gender housing. A student Colty engaged in critique of her individual school for externalizing
this issue to outside consultants. From the perspective of the Structural frame, this approach
makes sense in that those outside consultants have expertise on the issue and ability to provide
more efficient ways to implement the goals. It creates the Cultural or symbolic problem of all
gender bathroom needs when it is externalized away from student groups who require and push
for such accommodations. The consultants are “not embedded” as Colty put it. Applying CHAT
(Engeström, 2007) to this issue would suggest that object of activity may be seen to require
different tools and principals of implementation depending on whether students are drawn in as
subjects of such a campus or school project.
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Adam as well as many students discussed adequate support for the campus’ cultural
centers that provide a community continuance, support systems for study and living on campus
to many minoritized students. Boyd as well as other students called out lack of space as well as
resources to the RU’s cultural centers. He also critiqued firing of the former Director of the
particular office that support lower income students through scholarships that was done
following internal considerations of HR frame. Yet this approach created symbolic as well as
political challenge by leaving the affected student groups outside of the discussion, further
exacerbating their structural, financial, standing on campus during that turmoil. Sticking to the
internal HR processes affecting student services is clearly insufficient. It requires taking into
account balancing HR and cultural-symbolic drivers of the internal student affairs office issues
when a structural impact can be foreseen. To return to the problem of resource allocation to the
cultural centers, Adam ascribed the issues to be related to the “pre-intersectional” thinking about
the cultural centers. This partially relates to the Cultural milieu and its impact on the Cultural
frame of colleges and universities. Yet on the more basic level, this creates a Political problem of
resource allocation since students contrast limited resources for the cultural centers and
availability of need-based scholarships with Greek Life and merit scholarships that are difficult
to disassociate from the notion of socio-economic privilege. The definition and guiding
principles of this domain of activity is not sustainable when considered from the internal framing
of organization. CHAT’s conceptual framework may offer more complex relationship between
need and merit, which in turn contributes to maintaining a static distinction between the two
regardless of historical drive to maintain social groups associated with either manual or
intellectual labor. To put differently, a need and a merit are a function of access to education and
economic opportunities.
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Katie as well as students referenced the fact that many faculty are still not well aware of
minoritized social identities, particularly the intersectional identities. It can be seen as HR issue
that requires training, ways to be tuned into cultural shifts through awareness campaigns. Yet one
simple principle to achieving it has been in the workings on campuses – a drive for faculty
diversity, achieving racial, ethnic, First-generation, and other identities of students to reasonably
match faculty identities and background. It is related to more than the HR frame, casting a net
wide in hiring, special hiring themes. It is related to pipeline yet no less so to access,
opportunities, and experiences of the minoritized students in that pipeline at various junctures of
their education (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Furthermore, student Huy’s strong critique of
masculinized teaching imagery in his Business School and absence of the minorities in STEM
fields of study point to how faculty diversity and disciplinary cultures are intertwined. The
academic disciplinary cultures, rules and tools of how their paradigms are maintained, gate-kept,
are the key components of any campus’ structural frame. To move a needle in achieving the
campus diversity and equity require a thinking of something what is perceived as controversial
on campus, as Katie saw it: It depends on one’s ideology and experiences. To put differently, the
Political frame needs not to be contained to minimize its impact of managing colleges. It needs
to be globalized as praxis, including the core of the scientific method among its considerations:
apply a critical lens and question all the campus management tools and rules and no less
importantly, keep the disciplinary paradigms and ways of gate-keeping continuously questioned
from the historical and institutional perspectives.
Implications for Practice
The present study focused on the students’ ways of identifying on campus, their
experiences and ways of viewing how their queer and other intersecting social identities impact
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 162

their relation to the campus structures, peers, faculty, and administrators. When juxtaposed with
RU senior administrators’ views about similar topics, the study finds that RU continues to
maintain relatively traditional set up of campus in regards to creating spaces for gender and
sexual identity exploration beyond identity binaries. The study also finds that the students keep a
social equality and educational equity in perspective, including some of them recognizing their
or their racial-cultural group’s privilege in comparison to other student groups. This perspective
is a necessary ingredient for continued rise of and responsiveness to students’ equality-
mindedness. This aspect is difficult to address as a matter of specific practical recommendations
for action on part of administrators yet it must be kept in perspective when developing equitable
campuses and educational system overall. However, there are specific starting points.
Non-binary gender identities and questioning gender and sexuality identities are relevant
to queer students. All-gender bathrooms continue to be brought up by students as a structural gap
on RU campus. Individual school administrators as well as Student Affairs top management
would need to provide the leadership opportunities to queer students to be part of developing the
gender-neutral facilities. This could extend to sensibly considering housing accommodations
without gender segregation at every turn. Such initiatives may prove controversial to some
university and college constituents. Yet engaging in discussion of such structural adjustments on
campus would provide campus managers with an opportunity to engage the relevant students
groups, thus providing them with the leadership opportunities that carries specific purpose of
expanding campus inclusion.
To use top RU Student Affairs administrator Adam’s thoughts, university and college
administrators need to reassess the “pre-intersectional” paradigm of how they conceive of
policies and support mechanisms they provide to the student cultural centers. It is clear from the
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study data that the “pre-intersectional” paradigm maintains student groups in silos, creating
management problems of political nature of resource distribution within a structural frame of a
given campus. When student study participants see intersectionality “hanging in the air” at major
students events, the starting point of acknowledging the relevance of the intersectional student
identities at campus events is a necessary starting point. It opens space to providing the
leadership opportunities to students at the cultural centers to engage in the multi-center activities,
so that the move to a new intersectional paradigm of campuses may be more realistic. Concrete
steps in that direction in the cultural-symbolic organizational frame will enhance the
intersectionality’s presence in the campuses’ structural frame. The study saw that the
intersectional students, particularly undergraduate, use a sub-cultural, unrecognized spaces to
explore student communities. Such sub-cultural spaces provide an opportunity for the
intersectional students’ exposure to the actual campus structures and requirements yet
unencumbered by the ‘pre-intersectional’ modes of thinking. For a given student to see that there
are communities like that, campus administrators do have to provide the initial exposure of the
intersectional, queer, minoritized communities on campus and integrate their presence and
learning about them for others on campus to recognize and experience.
Students as well as administrators who participated in the study noted faculty’s lack of
awareness about the minoritized identities and how such identities intersect and interact in
educational contexts. This is the HR frame challenge that requires campus-wide awareness
campaigns, faculty training and development initiatives. Such initiatives would, however, likely
experience Cultural and Structural frames’ issues if treated as responsibility of central campus
offices and HR professionals alone. That is, faculty’s primary embeddedness is within their
Schools and disciplines as far as their teaching and training of researchers are concerned. The
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 164

study saw examples of othering that pertained to the disciplinary cultures. It is not a stretch to
say that general cultural-symbolic and HR initiatives would not gain a deep and sustained
attention on part of the faculty without a relevance to their deeply held habits of thinking within
their disciplinary frames. School and discipline-focused queer and intersectionality research
would need to mushroom to build the evidence-based practice approaches for faculty
development within the new intersectionality paradigm to take deeper hold throughout schools
and disciplines.
Several RU intersectional queer students have indicated appreciation for or desire to have
interacted with faculty or student advisors who share the students’ minoritized identities and
experiences. The students do not look specifically for faculty with intersectional identities but
rather any of the shared identities. To the researcher, it implies that the students anticipate and
expect faculty diversity on campus. The students and senior administrators alike see benefits of
the intersectional thinking about diversity. They see it working through the leadership of faculty
and administrators with the intersectional identities or with the knowledge of diverse
communities and experiences from working with them. Initiative on part of current campus
senior administrators to educate campus stakeholders what intersectionality is and what benefits
it would bring towards the campus diversity goals would be a step towards in defining the
diversity. That is, defining the diversity through the lens of intersectionality without abandoning
the significance of racial, ethnic or gender diversity individually.
Virtually all the students in the study connected their othering experiences to the notion
of privilege, particularly along the lines of race and economic status. Some of those students did
so as a matter of self-reflection. To the students, the privilege informs the process of learning on
both ‘what’ and ‘how’ levels. Some of them see a need to reconsider the Westernized curriculum
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 165

and how its current state may skew the educational success of students from the underprivileged
backgrounds and their interest in academia beyond a basic college degree, on which securing the
minoitized students’ interest to be in academia depends in obvious ways. At the same time,
Huy’s sustained critique of how his Business School teaches through the gendered tropes and
analogies suggests that the pedagogical training of faculty needs not wait for any radical
curricular overhauls in order to integrate a wider range of socio-economic and cultural
perspectives to teach students without creating cultural or gender-based learning barriers for
some of them. To put it in broader terms, the researcher sees a potential link between pedagogy
of distinct disciplines in regards to diversity goals on the one hand, and the disciplinary
paradigms of individual schools on the other. Encouraging a placement of value in evaluating
scholarship of faculty who do research in pedagogy would be a constructive step in creating a
more culturally objective bodies of knowledge from discipline to discipline.
Each individual student’s minoritized or privileged background, is no less pertinent for
reaching equity in higher education and building egalitarian campus spaces for all students, as
those who participated in the study see it. Some of them noted the additional barriers to their
education access before they came to college campus due to their family or community’s
disadvantaged backgrounds, which they overcame on their own or with the concerted efforts of
their families and home communities. Some of these students offered a critique of how their
campus consistently and overtly supports the Greek Life and merit-based scholarships benefiting
those with the privileged backgrounds. To add a relatively strong awareness of privilege of some
of the White and economically more affluent students in the study, the researcher sees a curious
symbolic practice on the RU campus. That is, while students see financial resources, particularly
scholarship support, to be distributed and perpetuating the divide between the privileged and the
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 166

underprivileged, the higher education institutions, as a matter of common knowledge, claim the
distribution of such resources along the need and merit divide. The study participants strongly
critiqued what they saw as a prevalence of the merit-based scholarship over the need-based,
continuously targeting the unquestionable distinction between the notions of need and merit. To
the researcher, their views directly connect the concept of merit in academic support mechanisms
to the notion of cultural and socio-economic privilege. Further research into the normative
definitions of need and merit scholarships would be required to sensibly tackle this issue of the
outmost importance to the minoritized students. No less important would be inquiries into the
extra-institutional limitations to such internal university’s debates as it is a common knowledge
that institutions often distribute government funds towards scholarships and have to comply with
the funders’ policies and requirements of how the funds are used. Simultaneously, higher
education institutions need to study and assess how the existing school ranking methods
perpetuate the focus on recruiting the students from the privileged backgrounds under the guise
of merit and standards. It is also reasonable to see the power of the normative shifts by the entire
higher education industry on the question of need and merit in student scholarships. Training and
professional socialization programs for university business and student affairs professionals and
faculty should integrate the notion of privilege and the patterns it creates at the higher education
institutions.
For the individual students with the intersectional identities and minoritized positioning,
campus administrators’ willingness to assume the institutional agent’s role carries practical
strengths as applied by Bensimon and her colleagues (2019). The difficult to comprehend college
support mechanisms, dispersed among and impacted by various campus structures and other
organizational frames require such agents to help a student integrate system elements of support
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 167

and critically assess obstacles and opportunities to their educational success on their campus. The
institutional agent’s willingness to advocate for students from the underprivileged backgrounds
puts the students on a clearer mental path to accurately define their own position as objects of
activity within campus structures and support mechanisms. Because one of the key traits of
institutional agent is critical consciousness (Stanton-Salazar, 2011), the campus administrators in
such roles have a unique opportunity and obligation to transfer the critical consciousness onto the
intersectional students and develop a more integrative leadership ethic among the students.
Campus administrators need to equally balance their training, institutional knowledge
acquisition, widen institutional networks, integrative and systemic thinking with a willingness
for a sustained exposure to the egalitarian schools of thought and praxis. After all, it is intuitive
to say that gathering a meaningful institutional authority and deploying it as part of the
egalitarian praxis is not without risks of misinterpretation, reactionary spin by others in roles of
authority at the same institutions or relevant external domains of activity. Functional and
structural pairing of professional staff and tenured faculty create a stronger authority among
networks of the institutional agents.
The intersectional queer students also require institutional support in finding
intersectional and other hard to find communities on campus. The persistent invisibility of such
communities, lack of their integration into campus policy deliberation process were some of the
themes in the study’s findings. As the participating senior administrator, Adam, called it, there is
the “pre-intersectional” paradigm of silo cultural centers. Students in the study show that there is
also a sub-cultural student murmur for diversified and more egalitarian campus spaces and
policies regulated by the concept of equality. The participating administrators referenced a
variety of internal and external stakeholders and environments that put limits for critical and
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 168

committedly egalitarian campus spaces to emerge as a sustained reality. Senior campus
administrators have the ability to trigger a shift in this seeming stand-off by assuming the role of
the institutional agents with all its underlying features of willful spending of institutional
authority, networking, systemic approaches to educational problems, and… the commitment to
the egalitarian praxis. The study will close the chapter with the overview of the implications for
research.
Implications for Research
The discussions of theory and implications for practice have noted and carry implications
for research as well. Further building of queer leadership theory to benefit the leadership
development and outlook of the intersectional queer students will require continuation of the in-
depth inquiry into this topic with a sustained effort to expand such an inquiry to encompass a
representation of multiple campuses, especially among diverse regions with diverging liberal and
more conservative regions.
Further research into the queer leadership will benefit and will be dependent on the
intersectionality lens to meaningfully develop for the higher education contexts. More
immediately, the same applies to connecting the research to building the diverse and inclusive
university and college campuses. The study found that the students’ familial community and
campus experiences support the premise that the exposure to and learning about and from the
minoritized intersectional identities are essential ingredients for research to fully integrate the
prospect of leading the diverse communities and industries. Additionally, this line of research
would need, based on study’s findings, to closely examine the themes of development of a sense
of empathy and emotional intelligence and how they are learned from exposure to the
intersectional identities and how they work and manifest themselves in the studied domain. This
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 169

line of research is also important for the student development in that the study noted a slightly
more subdued leadership outlook among the students from the minoritized backgrounds in
comparison to the queer students who are White or from the higher income backgrounds. It is
crucial for researchers to build a sense in what ways the affected students see the reasons and
sets of experiences that may have created a perception with their interlocutor to be less optimistic
about their leadership outlook.
As students in the study stress, the diversity of campus is closely related to the issue of
faculty diversity. Researching this topic from the intersectionality perspective appears to be a
must for the practitioners to apply it in practice. The study observes that many issues related to
building a faculty diversity and diversity on campus in general, stem from the diverging
approaches and views of diversity among diverging academic disciplines and schools. These
differences need to be researched before the practitioners can apply different approaches based
on the disciplinary context or school and what uniform evidence can be developed that bridges
them for the campus-wide approaches.
The researcher sees a potential link between pedagogy of distinct disciplines in regards to
the diversity goals on the one hand, and the disciplinary paradigms of the individual schools on
the other. It emphasizes the importance of research in pedagogy that aims to develop culturally
objective bodies of knowledge from discipline to discipline. In turn, this can be expected to make
inroads in developing faculty with a greater awareness of social identities, which is what several
students in the study noted a lack thereof. The diversity research requires a critical lens and
questioning of campus management tools and rules as much as how the academic disciplinary
paradigms and ways of gate-keeping are evaluated from the historical and institutional
perspectives.
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As many above lines of research are difficult to disassociate from the problems of
equitable access to education and economic inequality, many researchers may object to how
realistic it is to bridge the systemic social problems and context-specific evidence and its
implications for practice. CHAT is the conceptual network that is helpful to often incorporate
into research as its contemporary version (Engeström, 2007) sensibly combines distinct and
overlapping domains of activity while keeping the researchers in check from venturing too far
into large overlapping domains. The utility of CHAT is particularly fruitful for the
intersectionality research on campuses for the practitioners to learn the overlapping and
diverging perspectives the students bring to the campus’ activity domain from their varying and
intersecting familial and cultural communities.
One of the study findings of particular relevance to the higher education practitioners was
the fact that students strongly contrasted the notions of need for support, such as scholarships and
funding of the cultural centers, to the merit and privilege. More importantly, the study saw that
the students consistently connected the notions of merit and privilege, especially in regards to
scholarships. That is, the students directly connect the concepts of merit in the academic support
systems to the notion of cultural and socio-economic privilege. Further research into the
normative definitions of need and merit scholarships would be required to sensibly tackle this
issue of the outmost importance to the minoritized students. It would likewise be important to
research the extra-institutional limitations to such internal university debates as the institutions
are required to comply with the sources of the funds for scholarships. Similarly, the higher
education institutions need to study and assess how the existing school ranking methods
perpetuate the focus on recruiting the students from the privileged backgrounds under the guise
of merit and standards.
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The study’s overall finding is that the queer and intersectionality research would need to
mushroom to build the evidence-based practice under the new intersectionality paradigm.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 172

Conclusion
The preceding study found from 11 in-depth interviews with intersectional queer students
that the students draw from their familial community’s experiences, campus cultural centers,
discovery of campus communities and faculty, advisors, and their own emotional intelligence to
strategically deploy a wide spectrum of queer and other minoritized identities in seeking to fulfill
their study goals and future leadership potential. Some of the students from the more privileged
socio-economic backgrounds place their own privilege in view when considering their own
leadership aspirations and when interacting with their peers. Despite RU campus’ liberal
surroundings, the intersectional queer students at RU critique culturally biased study curriculum,
campus support systems, lack of engagement of students groups by campus administrators to
address social identity-related accommodations, a lack of campus-sanctioned channels to find
and engage with the sub-cultural student groups. They also critique the campus’ merit-based
support systems to students and resource distribution across various schools and disciplines and
see such support systems skewed towards those with the privileged backgrounds. The students
continuously consider and apply the principles of equality and educational equity.
Two senior RU administrators who participated in the study saw a need to reconsider the
campus set-up and management paradigms. They see the new intersectional paradigm to be
studied and they consider it when it comes to the question of how resources are allocated to the
student cultural centers, faculty and overall diversity initiatives, and campus climate overall. One
of them suggested that the intersectional paradigm is a workable normative approach to how
campus structures are set up and cultural shifts managed. This is so because the new ways of
understanding intersectionality makes it relevant to a higher range of students based on their
social identities they bring to campus, experiences they have had in their own communities or in
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relation to other communities, while firmly maintaining awareness of where and how the
privilege manifests itself on campus, including the students’ awareness of their own privilege
where applicable.
The regulatory nature of equality principle (Badiou, 2008) in respect to the university’s
management of the disciplinary cultures, bureaucratic and resource allocation structures,
transparent decision-making process, scholarships distribution, attention to policy dissent require
the critical consciousness to be protected and deployed on campuses. To be certain, the
normative principles such as regulatory equality principle, are widely known to be subject to the
binary distinctions of some cultures and, for that matter, economic groups, to be a more universal
fit than other cultures as bases for the decision-making and guiding paradigms. This is why it is a
contention of the preceding study that the universal principles of social justice are to be
identified with the socio-economically displaced, oppressed, and intersecting social identities.
Further inquiry on building the intersectional campus’ paradigms will need to engage with the
seemingly counterintuitive notion of the particular as universal as much as continuously apply
the critical theoretical lens in tandem with other leadership and organizational models. The
reason it matters is because as the study shows, the students possess equality-mindedness that the
higher education practitioners will need to recognize and to account for in order to enlist policy-
participation and cooperation of the increasingly present intersectional student body in building
inclusive campuses in which the intersectional queer students can strive along with other student
groups. The higher education practitioners need not wait to propel students’ ability to use their
social identities strategically on campus as part of their leadership development for the future
civic and professional pursuits. For those who specifically are engaged in the queer praxis, the
conclusion of the study points to the importance of utilizing the new intersectionality in further
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 174

building an effective queer praxis. All the above considerations are a must to building an
equitable higher education system in the U.S.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 175

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LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 189

APPENDIXES

Appendix 1: Interview Protocol for Students
My name is Rokas Oginskis, an Ed.D. candidate at the Rossier School of Education at USC.
The purpose of our interview today is for me to learn from you about your experiences
and meanings you see regarding your being a queer student on campus, for which you are
a valuable individual for me to learn from. If applicable: I see you particularly valuable in
understanding your experiences as a student with a minority background.
Since I come to learn from you through critical theory’s lens, please know that I
personally see the topics we will discuss from the specific view of queer theory and
practice. My purpose here is to learn from you and I’ll do my best not to steer our
interaction or flow of thoughts you share to match any specific theory or worldview. In
fact, my key interest lies in understanding your experiences and thoughts in how you see
campus live as a queer student, taking into account other minority backgrounds you have.
Please know that my goal to ensure your confidentiality is the top priority to me. As
required by law, I will ask you about recording this interview before I start recording. You
have every right to stop the interview, its recording at any time or decline to answer any
specific question along the way. The thoughts you share with me won’t be shared with
others unless de-identified as required by IRB protections. Interview’s data won’t be
linked to your real name or affiliation. You will have additional opportunity to consider
your participation as part of informed consent process for participating in the study.
I anticipate our interview to last about 45 minutes to an hour. Your time is valuable and
therefore I wanted to point that aspect out. Please know that I am absolutely flexible to
extend it as needed, if you feel that the thoughts you want to share requires any more
time to complete.
Do you have any questions that are important to you that I may have not addressed yet?
I am very grateful to you for the willingness to meet and discuss about topics of high
importance to my learning.
At this time, do I have your permission to record our interview?

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 190

Q 1
Could you please describe your ways of identifying as an (intersectional) Queer student?
- Identities I am referring to may include but not limited to gender, race, ethnic-
cultural, sexual orientation, queering.

Activity request related to Q1
Would you be willing to spend a brief minute or two to draw your identity map? Or
alternatively, an identity map as you see it work in general?

Q 2
Could you please describe how your ways of identifying compare to the way campus
expects or asks you to identify?
- By campus expectations I mean its setup, policies/rules, administrators.

Q 3
Could you please share your experience in how your student peers interact with you,
such as the language they use, in relation to your identity?

Q 4
Could you also please share your experience in how faculty interact with you in relation
to your identity?

Q 5
How would you describe what you have learned about identities of relevance to you from
your study curriculum?

Q 6
Could you please describe how you imagine your future as an (intersectional) Queer
individual?
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 191

Q 7
How do you view your leadership potential or aspirations?

Q 8
How does your (intersectional) Queer identity(ies) inform your leadership aspirations?

Q 9
How do you imagine college leadership in the future be different from the way you see it
working on your campus now?
- I’d be equally interested in your views if you do not believe leadership will be
any different in the future.

Q 10
Could you describe your experiences of interacting with campus senior administrators in
seeking to fulfil your needs as (intersectional) Queer student?

Q 11
Could you describe an ideal college leader who could change campus life to make study
experiences fulfil aspirations of a student like you?

Q 12
Please share any additional insights that are important from your perspective about the
topics we discussed.

Thank you very much for your willingness to meet and discuss the topics of high
importance to my research and learning.
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 192

Appendix 2: Interview Protocol for Sr. Administrators

My name is Rokas Oginskis, an Ed.D. candidate at the Rossier School of Education at USC.
The purpose of our interview today is for me to learn from you about your understanding,
experiences, and management of queer students on campus, for which you are a valuable
individual for me to collect data from.
Since I come to learn from you through critical theory’s lens, please know that I
personally see the topics we will discuss from the specific view of queer theory and
practice. My purpose here is to learn from you and I’ll do my best not to steer our
interaction or flow of thoughts you share to match any specific theory or worldview.
Please know that my goal to ensure your confidentiality is the top priority to me. As
required by law, I will ask you about recording this interview before I start recording. You
have every right to stop the interview, its recording at any time or decline to answer any
specific question along the way. The thoughts you share with me won’t be shared with
others unless de-identified as required by IRB protections. Interview’s data won’t be
linked to your real name or affiliation. You will have additional opportunity to consider
your participation as part of informed consent process for participating in the study.
I anticipate our interview to last about 30 minutes. Your time is valuable and therefore I
wanted to point that aspect out. Please know that I am absolutely flexible to extend it as
needed, if you feel that the thoughts you want to share requires any more time to
complete.
Do you have any questions that are important to you that I may have not addressed yet?
I am very grateful to you for the willingness to meet and discuss about topics of high
importance to my learning.
At this time, do I have your permission to record our interview?

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 193

Q 1
Based on your knowledge and views, how would you describe uniqueness of
(intersectional) LGBTQ students when it comes to managing campus life?

Q 2
How in your view, would (intersectional) LGBTQ students of today uniquely
contribute to campus life if they returned as campus leaders?
- Which campus leadership practices do you foresee such new
leaders to change (or not) in considerable ways?

Q 3
How would you view the (intersectional) LGBTQ leaders of the future differ
(or be closely identical) from their peers with other social identities
(majoritized and minoritized)
‐ racial, gender, sexual, cultural, etc.

Q 4
Could you describe a situation or professional experiences you have had
interacting with students engaged in subversive cultural, gender, or sexual
practices during study years?
‐ Or if not directly encountered, how would you describe the balance
between maintaining campus order and tolerating subversive cultural
practices by students?

If Applicable:
Q 5
Please elaborate about whether I understood correctly, that (intersectional)
LGBT students’ successes as leaders are contingent on overcoming any
socially subversive practices?

Q6
LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 194

To recap the above topics through the four organizational frames prism
(structural, HR, political, cultural), which of the key organizational frames are
the most challenging to make a campus fully welcoming to (intersectional)
LGBTQ students?

7
Please share any additional insights that are important from your perspective
about the topics we discussed.

Thank you very much for your willingness to meet and discuss these topics.

LEADER-QUEER STUDENTS 195

Appendix 3: Study Ad

Are you a queer student?
Are you a student with intersecting minoritized identities?
If the first or both apply to you, this study may be for you.
- - -
The study aims to build a queer leadership theory and
praxis through learning about your experiences, meaning-
making and leadership aspirations while studying. Your
participation will involve a confidential 45-60 minute
interview and provide a $25 gift card.
- - -
If it sparks your interest, please contact Rokas Oginskis at
oginskis@........, XXX-XXX-XXXX.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Oginskis, Rokas (author)

Core Title Leader-queer students at the intersection of social identities

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Education (Leadership)

Publication Date 02/26/2020

Defense Date 01/08/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag higher education equity,intersectional students,intersectionality,leadership development,minoritized students,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer students,queer theory,regulatory equality

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Green, Alan (committee chair), Beard, Trista (committee member), Hinga, Briana (committee member)

Creator Email oginskis@usc.edu,rokasoginskis@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-273499

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Legacy Identifier etd-OginskisRo-8214.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Oginskis, Rokas

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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