Queer Youth Research Articles

Playing Recognition Politics: Queer Theoretical Reflections on Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Youth Social Policy in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s.

This article provides a queer theoretical reflection on the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer (LGQ) youth as subjects of policy attention in Australia in the late twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific forms of social, bureaucratic, and organizational recognition have given shape to LGQ youth as categorical policy objects. To this end, this article critically interrogates social policy related to the provision of funding for LGQ youth support during the 1980s and 1990s in two Australian states: New South Wales and Western Australia. More specifically, it focuses on some of the ways in which LGQ youth have been discursively shaped and materially supported in three different organizations, two of which continue to be strongly associated with support of LGQ youth in Australia. This study of the emergence of these organizations, resourced by three different sectors-the state, the church, and the LGQ community itself-necessarily draws on ephemeral resources, reflecting the conditions of possibility in which this work was being enacted. We conclude with an analysis of the necessity for situating policy recognitions within specific contexts to examine the implications for LGQ youth as the subjects such recognitions simultaneously seek to constitute and serve.

Youths’ Literacy Disidentifications in a Secondary Classroom: Contesting Transphobia through Humor in Role-Playing

BackgroundRecent decades have seen an increased number of literacy education researchers attending to LGBTQ people and texts in secondary schools, frequently documenting tensions that emerge, such as conflict. However, this research tends to be limited in scope with respect to time, texts, and identities. Moreover, it shows that students tend to face challenges and constraints when attempting to challenge homophobia and transphobia.Focus of StudyIn this study, I sought to extend previous scholarship by exploring how students used reading and writing to work within, on, and against normative values and practices in a secondary classroom as they enacted queer activism, efforts I conceptualize as literacy disidentifications.SettingThis study took place at a public urban comprehensive high school that I call Harrison High School, which was in a midsized Midwestern U.S. city. In this manuscript, I focus on one course, a sophomore humanities class that combined English language arts and social studies.Research DesignI conducted a yearlong literacy ethnography at Harrison, acting as a participant observer throughout the high school but focusing on literacy learning contexts, including English language arts classrooms and a GSA (Genders and Sexualities Alliance) club.Data Collection and AnalysisDuring my participant observation experiences, I constructed field notes. In addition, I made audio and video recordings of classroom lessons, collected documents, and conducted interviews with teachers, students, and administrators. I analyzed these data through an inductive and comparative grounded theory approach.FindingsDrawing on sociocultural perspectives of literacy and language along with queer theories, I conceptualize literacy disidentifications and explore this heuristic through the actions of Imani, a queer youth of color who encountered a schooling context where her activism was frequently shut down. To legitimize and sustain her queer activism, she blended humor with other literacy practices, such as role-playing and signification, which resulted in critiquing, yet not necessarily transforming, transphobia.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that educators working to cultivate queer-affirming schools can: sanction conflict and teach youth how to navigate conflict in compassionate and humanizing ways; recognize, rather than squelch, youths’ queer activism; teach LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, especially curricular texts that foreground the lives and perspectives of trans people; and broaden the range of youth literacy practices valued in classroom lessons.

Queer Up! Application of Queer Representation in Art Education

Abstract Gender representation is inherently a part of child-oriented media that plays a significant role in childhood identity development, and the lack of positive queer representation may lead to unfair treatment of queer youth. An art classroom cannot be a space for exploration and risk-taking if art teachers are unaware of how to structure an appropriate environment for queer curricula. Recognizing the circumstances, we categorize queer representations in media as queer main-text and queer subtext. (Queer representation can be utilized as a foundational approach for cultivating pre-service art teachers’ visual literacy regarding two aspects: (1) the sensibility of decoding visual spectacles of queer representations, and (2) the actions of encoding visual messages for educational application. With a mind-set of advocating for diversity, pre-service art teachers can critically and logically refute normative interpretations of LGBTQ+ representations in media, create a space for open exploration of LGBTQ+, and reveal and neutralize top-down power relationships within K—12 art classrooms. Further, pre-service art teachers will be better primed to take on a leading role in advocating for LGBTQ+ themes, and they will be encouraged to create an appropriate place for queer students to feel welcome to express themselves, but also a place where students can experience open-mindedness and empathetically embrace diversity.

On Being Haunted by King: An Elegy for Queer Youth

In this elegy for queer youth, the author returns to a photo of Lawrence/Leticia King to reflect on the ways King's life and death provided then and now insights on the promises and perils of queer and trans youth in schools. King has become a part of the past, a shared queer past, but a past that might be used to imagine a future—a queer, a trans, future—for students becoming amidst the halls and classrooms of school.

Taking a Moment for Life: Remembering Black Queer Lives Through Performance

This essay foregrounds Black and queer youth stories of encountering and surviving violence, as reenacted through Tell It!: A Contemporary Chorale for Black Youth Voices. A performance ethnography, Tell It! draws from narratives on the bullying experienced inside and outside K-12 schooling contexts, and narratives of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Throughout the essay, I argue for the reframing of anti-Black and anti-queer violence as mutually constitutive, coalescing within and through educative spaces and practices. Reflecting on the staged performance of Tell It!, I demonstrate how and why performances of Black and queer youth narratives enable the valuing of these lives and experiences. Rooted in the lives of Black and queer youth, this essay expands educational theory and practice by exploring how the coupling of queer pedagogy, race, and performance creates possibilities for new and different (queer) futures.

Re-Reading Lawrence/Leticia/Latisha King: The Time of Genders and Sexualities

In the current paper, the author offers a philosophically informed history of the present to address the evolving intersections of gender identity and sexuality within the K-12 student body. The author returns to the case of Lawrence/Leticia/Latisha King, a murdered middle schooler, to unpack the evolving frames that have been developed since King’s murder in 2008. To do this, the author addresses the ways King’s name and clothing choices were used to frame King’s life and death in diverse ways at school. Schools, of course, are a space and time where youth come into presence and where decades of research have documented the less than ideal climate of schools for LGBTQ + students. King’s school experiences represent a challenge to the typical narrative of victimization that often frames LGBTQ + issues in education. The author argues engaging King’s life contributes to the need to address the everyday agentive practices of youth, particularly queer youth of color, in educational scholarship. As the author argues, King’s school experiences represent a challenge to the frame of victimization providing a key inflection point for understanding twenty-first century students.

Troubling the discourse of the victimization of queer youth in Icelandic and South African education

The homophobia and hostility experienced by queer learners in Icelandic and South African schools are well documented. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer youth (16–19 years) in Iceland and South Africa, this paper aims at understanding how queer youth navigate heterosexist and homophobic school spaces and create some positive spaces. The findings highlight that queer youth employ various social and discursive strategies to (re)position themselves as agentic subjects. They counter heteronormativity by drawing on what we define in this paper as “queer capital”, which entails deploying various social and discursive strategies to establish some kind of distinction within the school and in their interaction with peers. Humour, parody, and active resistance, as well as finding ways to escape the regulatory mechanisms of gender, and relating easily to both genders, are examples of the social/discursive strategies employed by our participants and discussed in the paper. The paper then concludes with implications for research with queer youth.

The Relationship Between Queer Identity, Social Connection, School Bullying, and Suicidal Ideations Among Youth of Color

Queer youth, and specifically queer youth of color (YOC), identified in this study as Hispanic/Latinx and African American/Black youth, disproportionately experience suicidal ideations (SI). The nexus of limited social support and school bullying exacerbates the effect on SI among these youth. Using data from a larger Drug-Free Communities grant initiative among YOC (N = 687; 65.6% youth aged 16–18 years; 53% female; 16% queer [i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer]) this study examined: (1) the mediating role of school bullying between queer identity status and SI and (2) both the mediating and moderating roles of family, social supports, and school importance on the initial mediating model. Findings from this study provide implications that may help prepare counselors to intervene across contexts.

Hidden Curriculum of Violence: Affect, Power, and Policing the Body

Grounded in two collaborative interpretive studies—one with women in India who were survivors of domestic violence, and another with queer youth and youth of color in the Midwest who were survivors of sexual assault—this paper argues that there is a hidden curriculum of violence. This curriculum of violence can be traced through affective resonances that exist within an assemblage of violence. Powerfully enacted on the bodies of women and girls and their ways of being, these lessons occur across contexts, from the classroom through the communities where they are learned. This is significant because victims/survivors of such violence are often working to exercise their available power within a set of agentic contingencies that reify oppression, making it difficult to surmount normalized aggressions that are ultimately understood as business-as-usual.

Twitter as Safe Space for Self-Disclosure among Malaysian LGBTQ Youths

Majority of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) youths in Malaysia are not able to express their sexual orientation in real life due to fear of threats and backlash from the society. Thus, they turn to social media like Twitter to share their true selves and sexualities. Twitter plays an important role in helping the LGBTQ youths to reveal their true selves and and finding a sense of belonging to a community that supports and encourages them and in a country like Malaysia, that is important to their mental well-being. Ten participants from the LGBTQ community gave their consents to be interviewed. This study focuses on the concept of self-disclosure between the participants and their Twitter followers. Results are organized around three primary themes. 1) Motivation which includes knowledge, private life, self-acceptance, and movement and clique. 2) Reciprocity in self-disclosure from both the giving and receiving end which can be positive or negative. Under the giving end, recognition is positive whereas exclusion is negative and under the receiving end, acceptance is positive while dismissal is negative. 3) Consequences of disclosure in the forms of income that is internal gain and outcome, the external gain. It is found that the participants’ actual intentions of self-disclosure are self-acceptance and self-actualization. They use Twitter as it is seen as a private space where they can be themselves and be safe, supporting the notion of Twitter as a safe space for LGBTQ youths. Keywords: LGBTQ, Twitter, self-disclosure, safe space, youth.

Subjective Connectivity: Rethinking Loneliness, Isolation and Belonging in Discourses of Minority Youth Suicide

ABSTRACT While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in much suicidology as having social and cultural causes. At the same time, contemporary media, film, television and other popular cultural representation of suicides of both youth and minorities present an account of suicidality grounded in issues related to loneliness, isolation and disconnection from contemporary sociality. Problematic among these depictions is that ‘ways of being connected’ (and therefore what counts as a liveable life) are understood principally through white, western, older-generational perspectives of what social connection means and how it is recognised. At the same time, such approaches often problematically conflate and interweave complex concepts of loneliness, aloneness, isolation, disengagement, disconnection and disintegration in the representation of forms of suicide causality. In the context of queer youth suicide, this paper (i) examines some examples of popular stereotypes of “suicide-causing loneliness, (ii) undertakes a new critical reading of Durkheim and Joiner’s writings on suicide as related to social disconnection and (iii) deploys theories of networked connectivity and social relationality to determine their efficacy in understanding minority youth dis-attachment in relation to Judith Butler’s approach to grievability, liveability and social belonging.

A queer youth’s challenges to normativities of time, space, and queerness: pedagogical encounters in a small town Christian youth group

ABSTRACT Previous scholarship on queer youth in small town and rural educational contexts has primarily documented educators’ perspectives and experiences of youth victimization. Drawing from a broader, interview-based teacher inquiry project, I extend this research by considering a queer youth’s voice and agency. Using queer theorizations of time and space, I examine the telling case of Sylvia, a queer young woman in a semi-rural, small Midwestern US town. Through her participation in the educational context of an interdenominational Christian youth group, she experienced pedagogical encounters that helped her challenge and reconfigure normative constructions of time, space, and queerness, which facilitated movement toward greater healthiness and happiness, even as she reproduced racial and class normativities through a politics of respectability. Sylvia’s experiences suggest the need to attend to heterogeneity and agency in working with queer rural youth and the importance of considering constructions of time, space, and queerness in queer-inclusive curricular texts.

We Are Family: Chosen and Created Families as a Protective Factor Against Racialized Trauma and Anti-LGBTQ Oppression Among African American Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) youth are at an increased risk for social isolation and family rejection. This is particularly true in African American communities where there is an increased lack of social support and acceptance for LGBTQ youth from their biological families, communities, churches, schools and healthcare systems. To counteract the social isolation and develop a sense of community, African American LGBTQ youth often form chosen or created families, with peers and older LGBTQ persons that mimic nuclear family structures, to cope with rejection at home and in their communities. These resilient social networks are created with varying sets of rules and relationship dynamics that may directly impact the social determinants of health among this community. The purpose of this manuscript is to systematically review the literature on African American LGBTQ youth and created families and identify patterns about the unique experiences of African LGBTQ youth who participate in these systems.

Topics for Inclusive Parent-Child Sex Communication by Gay, Bisexual, Queer Youth

The purposes of this study were to identify the sexuality-related topics parents and gay, bisexual, or queer (GBQ) adolescent males discussed at home and to describe the topics GBQ adolescent males recommend for parents to discuss with future cohorts of GBQ youth. Minimal research on parent-child sex communication with sexual minority adolescents prevents the development of interventions that would benefit adolescent males with same-sex attractions, behaviors and identities. As part of a multimethod qualitative study, we interviewed 30 GBQ adolescent males ages 15-20 and asked them to perform card sorts. From a list of 48 topics, we explored sexuality-related issues GBQ males were familiar with, the topics they discussed with a parent, and topics they suggested parents address with GBQ males at home. Most participants reported that parents assumed them heterosexual during sex talks prior to GBQ adolescent males’ coming out. Participants challenged the heteronormative scripts used by parents when discussing sex and health. Participants identified sexuality topics that parents did not routinely cover during sex talks, but that GBQ youth felt would have been useful for them growing up with emergent identities. A non-heteronormative approach to parent-child sex communication is recommended to provide appropriate guidance about sex and HIV/STI prevention to this youth population. Our findings highlight a need to reconfigure parental sexuality scripts to be more inclusive when assisting GBQ males navigate adolescence.

‘You’re going to teach my son to beviado’: From ‘girling’ toqueeringsport for development?

This paper critically explores how queer youth experience sport for development programmes in Brazil. Whilst the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) field is not void of discussions that touch upon heteronormativity and sexuality, the ‘sensitive’ stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals within SDP initiatives remain rather unheard. Drawing on ethnographic methodology and queer theory, this paper aims to understand the impact of two different SDP programmes located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, that use sport to address sexuality and gender issues as part of their mission. The findings of this study indicate that delivery of sexuality-focused projects is a complex, problematic and contested process. Whilst the programme is conceived of as and committed to being LGBT-inclusive, the space is not completely void of heterosexism and homophobia. The queer lens here allowed for the revelation that whilst the SDP initiative provided a relatively supportive environment regarding the free expression of queer desires, it creates rather ‘safe(r)’ spaces, as the conventional norms of mainstream hetero-patriarchal society permeate these spaces. Furthermore, initiatives led to new means of exclusion and alienating experiences for its non-queer beneficiaries. Ultimately, raising the question of sexual diversity resulted in unexpected consequences outside the SDP space associated with misinterpretations, suspicions and a rejection of the initiatives. The conclusion consists of overall reflections regarding the use of the queer approach within SDP research and suggests possible directions for future studies of this topic.

Narratives from the Closet: Stories of LGBTQIAP+ Youth

LGBTQIAP+ youth are living in unprecedented liminal spaces. While positive changes related to the acceptance and recognition of this community have occurred in the United States, youth who are questioning, coming out, and navigating their sexual journeys remain socially, emotionally, and in other ways vulnerable in their environments. Drawing from narratives of youth who live outside of the normative structures of sexuality, we weave a tapestry of stories to highlight the challenges and struggles, as well as the strengths and protective factors, of LGBTQIAP+ youth. We found cohesion in the themes that emerged from the narratives; yet, at the same time, we acknowledge that each queer youth's story has its own cultural specificity based on their lived experience in their particular environment. Finally, we offer suggestions for supporting the health and well-being of all young people in their varied environments, highlighting those that particularly provide space for questioning and coming out youth.

On Being Haunted by King: An Elegy for Queer Youth

On Being Haunted by King: An Elegy for Queer Youth

Cellphilm production as posthuman research method to explore injustice with queer youth in New Brunswick, Canada

Posthuman research methodologies center nonhuman actors and spaces. In this paper, we argue that technological mediation is a key component in a move toward the exploration of posthuman subjectivity in research and the restructuring of dominant understandings of gender and sexualized difference. Drawing on a cellphilm (cellphone + film production) based project with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in New Brunswick, Canada, we seek to center queer stories and experiences to speak back to their erasures in school spaces and landscapes. We argue that in researching with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in the Anthropocene, cellphilm method offers us the opportunity to think critically and creatively about environments, inclusions, and queering environmental futures (Lebel, 2019) within schooling structures.

Queering the (Ab)Normalization of Gender, (Hetero)Sexuality and Schooling in South Africa

ABSTRACT Schools are places where youth do work on the construction of their sexual identities which is intimately connected with issues around gender. Using one-on-one in-depth interviews, this article addresses how queer youth navigate dominant understandings of gender and sexuality in the context of their identity and practice. Cognizant of how gender remains a significant force in organizing social relations in schools, the youth parody and abnormalize heteronormativity calling into question the fragility of hegemonic heterosexuality. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that despite evidence that associates schooling with social exclusion, the queer youth’s accounts highlight, strikingly, that queer identity and inclusion are not necessarily separate storylines. Offering an alternative view of the schooling experiences of queer youth, the paper motivates that within exclusion, in a matter of speaking with all its unduly assemblages, is inclusion.

Theorizing Lateral Violence in Sápmi

Until the advent of social media, it has not been natural to speak openly about sexual violence in Sápmi. The tendency toward silence on the part of victim/survivors can be attributed to a number of factors, including fear of collective racialized judgement, fear of not being believed, and a tendency on the part of minorities to “protect their own.” However, in the last five years we have witnessed a wave of Sámi survivors—especially young women and Queer youth—sharing their personal, storied experiences of lateral violence on social media, and even in Sámi and mainstream media. Many survivors’ stories reflect a “calling out” of Sámi society to break with taboos, as well as a “calling out” of Norwegianization and state systemic indifference to the problem of sexual violence in Sámi communities. Pre-dating the watershed moment of the Divtasvuotna/Tysfjord case and the #metoo and #timesup movements in the USA, young Sámi women began telling their stories of survival of sexual assault and harassment on various social and traditional media platforms, and Sámi youth organizations addressed issues of sexual violence and harassment in their own organizational structures and in societal terms.
 To the best of my knowledge, there has been limited research on sexual violence in Sápmi, with the exception of large-scale surveys from the health sciences that reveal that Sámi women experience domestic and sexual violence at higher rates than the majority Nordic population; further, it is well-known in Sámi society that the majority of offenders are themselves from within the Sámi community.
 My presentation will be a “discussion of a new research idea” on theorizing the gendered, racial, and colonial nature of sexual violence against Sámi women in a historical and systemic trajectory.