“I Don’t Like to Say That I’m Anything”: Sexuality Politics and Cultural Critique Among Sexual-Minority Latino Youth

Abstract

This article offers an initial exploration of forms of cultural and political agency of Latino youth who experience sexual attraction to both men and women. The authors focus on young people’s perspectives about bisexuality, their views and critical responses regarding social categories of sexual identity, and their reflections about the relationships between sexual and gender identities. Following a social constructionist approach, the authors explore sexual identity not as an essence to be discovered in a coming-out process but as a dynamic, interactive process in which the subjects construct their sexual identities in dialogue with existing cultural possibilities and within the context of their social relations. Based on in-depth interviews with 11 boys and five girls from 15 to 19 years old who had Latin American or Caribbean ancestors, the findings show different ways in which these sexual-minority Latino youth participated in struggles over meanings, labels, forms of discrimination, and normalization.