This dissertation on the queer cultures found at two New England women's colleges, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College in western Massachusetts, engages in key debates over the value placed on community, identity, and visibility, demonstrating that all three concepts remain powerful and crucial organizing rubrics for many LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people. At the same time that the queer student cultures at these institutions are regarded by many current students and recent alumnae/i as celebratory havens for sexual and gender diversity, however, they are also implicated in intracommunal stratification and hierarchy, which I critically analyze using Adam Isaiah Green's sexual fields theory and Michel Foucault's theories on biopower and docile bodies. I consider the fundamental tensions that exist in spaces considered simultaneously utopic and oppressive, expanding in the conclusion on what these spaces can tell queer studies scholars about notions of queer futurity and utopia as theorized by Jose Esteban Munoz.

Using snowball sampling, I interviewed fifty-six LGBTQ students and recent alumnae/i at Mount Holyoke College and Smith College - 32 at Mount Holyoke and 24 at Smith - and asked a range of open-ended questions drawing on the themes of sexual and gender identity, belonging to and disidentification with campus community, characteristics and definitions of queer community, and overall views on gender and sexuality. Performing a qualitative discourse analysis that builds on the theories of a diverse set of gender, sexuality, and critical race scholars, I argue that while the women's colleges studied act as empowering and transformational erotic worlds for sexual and gender exploration, queer hierarchies found in both institutions' student cultures promote gender-, race-, and class-based stratification. These hierarchies elevate white, typically class-privileged masculinity as most desirable while alienating queer students of color and low-income queer students through the maintenance of white-dominated, class-privileged space, sidelining and erasing queer femme students, and rendering transgender-spectrum students simultaneously invisible and hypervisible.

Drawing on the tensions between biological determinism and social constructionism from my prior scholarship, this dissertation also shows that exposure to queer-normative erotic worlds fosters a willingness to question norms around sexuality and gender, which promotes a vision of what a utopian queer future could look like. The introduction to an educational environment where same-sex sexuality is not only normalized but embraced by the prevailing student culture creates a community where heterosexuality is not presumed as the default. Such a powerful sense of possibility and freedom rewrites the traditional coming-out narrative premised in failed attempts at heterosexuality and a discovery of one's "true self" and begs the question of what wider society would look like if more individuals were asked to challenge their assumptions about their own sexual and gender identities.