Stereotype Content at the Intersection of Race and Sexual Orientation: Black Lesbians

With queerness and feminism equated with whiteness and racial movements focused on men, Black lesbians suffer from an erasure of experience and invisibility (Nash, 2008). The current study utilized an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989; Harnois, 2014) to examine racial and sexual stereotypes as applied to Black and White lesbians and Black and White straight women. This work explored how the social categorization of race and sexuality culminates in unique stereotypes that may have implications for the discrimination they experience. College student participants (n = 125) viewed lesbian and straight Black and White female faces and identified either the sexuality and race of each face followed by a stereotype identified in the Facet Model (Abele et al., 2016) within the framework of agency and communion. Stereotype activation was analyzed with a 2 (Target race: Black, White) x 2 (Target sexuality: lesbian, straight) x 4 (Stereotypes: Agency and Assertiveness, Agency and Competence, Communion and Morality, Communion and Warmth) repeated measures analysis of variance. These results yielded that for Black lesbians there are unique stereotypes that differ based on their intersectional identity, wherein race and sexual orientation both/and influence stereotyping, following the trend that when intersectional identities are stereotyped their stereotypes often oppose those applied to groups with one aspect of their identity.