Review of Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity

Abstract

Mary Robertson’s Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity explores how teens and young adults make sense of their sexuality and gender within a particular social context. Drawing from ethnographic observation of an LGBTQ youth drop-in center and interviews with participants as young as 15, Robertson argues that these young people are “queer” in the sense that they exist outside of dominant models of LGBTQ identity. Although teens today have more exposure to sexual and gender variation than previous generations, mainstream LGBTQ identity politics have constructed their subjects through a homonormative white, middle-class lens that reifies essentialist concepts of gender and sexuality. The youth of Growing Up Queer, by contrast, embrace a more fluid and ambiguous model of gender and sexuality. Their position outside of the LGBTQ mainstream is not only informed by their sexuality and gender but also by their positionalities as young people of color and people from working-class families who are further outside the white, middle-class norm. Robertson situates her observations and interviews within the literatures on LGBTQ youth and queer theory, creating a dialog between her data and works by Ritch Savin-Williams, CJ Pascoe, Sarah Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, Michael Warner, and other prominent critical theorists.