ABSTRACT
Based on interviews with college students assigned female at birth and identifying as anything other than heterosexual, this chapter explores the meaning of fluid sexual and gender identities and the ways that students come to these identities. We find that women students adopt fluid identities because their desires are expansive and include the possibility of attraction to transgender and genderqueer people; their identities shift, and more fixed identities do not always fit; and their new fluid identities evoke a rejection of binary sexualities and have political meaning. Students come to these new collective identities when they arrive on campus through courses and literature on sexuality and queer theory and socialization in queer organizations and the campus queer community. The identities nonheterosexual women college students embrace are influenced by the scholarship on queerness and sexual fluidity, which itself originated in the increasingly fluid and nonbinary sexual identities adopted by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.
