Young Queer Research Articles

Journeys With HIV

Journeys With HIV

“Extra marginalisation within the community”: queer individuals’ perspectives on suicidality, discrimination and gay pride events

ABSTRACTSuicidality is more common among queer individuals. Past research has overlooked queer individuals’ own understandings of suicidality in relation to discrimination and supportive processes potentially achieved through gay pride events. This study applied the decompensation model as a framework to explore queer individuals’ perceptions of suicide, discrimination and gay pride events. Seven focus groups were held with a total of 28 queer individuals aged 18–25 years old. Participants had a range of sexualities, genders and ethnicities. Qualitative data from the focus groups were interpreted using an inductive form of thematic analysis, resulting in three themes: the invisibility of suicide; compound discrimination; and processes of normalising queer identities. Participants suggested that greater awareness of suicide is needed and proposed a trajectory from discrimination to suicide, wherein both queer identities and suicidality are discriminated against. Discrimination from within queer communities was problematised and gay pride events were understood to normalise queer identities by providing opportunities for support and fostering activism against inequalities. The results underscore nuanced perspectives on suicidality, discrimination and gay pride events among young queer individuals in Aotearoa/New Zealand and have implications for suicide prevention efforts. These findings also demonstrate the value of applying an intersectional approach to identity, ideology and discrimination in research on suicidality among queer individuals.

Much better than a like: Creative pedagogies of wellness among young queer men of colour

Abstract The Mpowerment Program was an HIV prevention effort focused primarily on young gay and bisexual men of colour in Los Angeles. The programme emphasized a harm reduction approach to sexual health while functioning as a community-based, popular education initiative. It operated from 2003 to 2009 and was based at AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), a large non-profit service organization. In the following roundtable discussion, former Mpowerment participants and staff look back after several years to reflect on their experiences in the programme. Their recollections address themes such as communication skills, sexual wellness, community building and the artistic components and creative practices of the group.

Activism, Visuality, and the Needs of Queer Youth

As LGBTI issues become visible within society there is a growing belief that society is ready to confront prejudices around sexuality and gender. But who is represented in these processes of visualization? The LGBTI agenda has focused on the defense of marriage, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, federal hate crime statutes and the Employment Non-discrimination Act. The political strategy around these issues has been defined by a moderate approach based on demanding inclusion into existing institutions. A look at the normalization of sexual politics reveals that minorities remain at the margins. I approached activists from QUEEROCRACY and immigration activist Felipe Baeza to discuss: What are the social issues young people care about ? What forms of activism do young people favor and what motivates them to organize? What forms of visuality do young queer activists use and how do these relate to the strategies of the previous generations?

The Hollywood Affair: Manuel Puig and the Queer Movie Fan

Given the Argentine writer Manuel Puig's penchant for using and skewering studio Hollywood films and stars in novels such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, he has often been understood as partaking in the discourse of camp. This article takes as a jump-off point the contention that camp is an inadequate framework with which to look at Puig's movie fandom precisely because camp usually brackets the very affection for film that is inherent in fandom. It argues instead for understanding Puig as a queer film fan. During almost daily childhood trips to the movies, he was at once seduced and betrayed by Hollywood and its stars. This article argues that Puig's early texts, The Buenos Aires Affair, with its collection of Hollywood epigraphs, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, with its movie-obsessed protagonist, perform the very concept of queer movie fandom. What one sees in Puig's early texts is a desire to re-create the security in the darkened theater he experienced as a child, a security grounded in the very real and material space of the movie house, by imitating the process of film fan spectatorship in his texts' formal and aesthetic construction. Puig as a young queer film fan, whose own sexual desires were awakened by the films he caught in his childhood, is deployed in his novels as someone who not only enjoys watching these films but constantly retrieves those visual memories and manipulates them.

Masculinity strategies of young queer men as queer capital

This article explores how 11 gay and bisexual young men in Iceland, whom we interviewed, have adopted different strategies to deal with the reality of Icelandic masculinity manifestations in the early 2010s. Bourdieuean views of explaining their ideas as social strategies were utilized to interpret how they had adopted behaviors, looks, and ideas in tact with, or contrary to, the hegemonic, heteromasculine views of how men are supposed to act, look, and think in contemporary Icelandic society. In Bourdieu's view, social strategies can create cultural or social capital. In this case, we discuss how the behaviors, looks, and ideas of these young men seem to constitute a certain type of such capital, that is, queer capital, which helped them to utilize being gay or bisexual to gain social status within the otherwise heterosexually hegemonic field of masculinity.

Situating queer migration within (national) welfare regimes

Building on recent criticisms within the literature on queer migration raised by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Nathaniel Lewis, the article explores ‘unconventional’ trajectories of queer migration: a Global North metropolitan area-Global North metropolitan area one and a Global North metropolitan area-Global North ordinary city one. Two very different migration patterns are analyzed: the movement of young queer ‘creative’ Italians from different metropolitan areas (Rome, Milan, Bologna, Catania, Naples, Padua and Turin) towards Berlin (Germany) and the relocation of young queers from the major Italian cities (Rome and Milan) towards ordinary/small size towns. Aimed at highlighting the complexity of material and immaterial factors leading the decision to migrate in times of crisis, austerity politics and increasing unemployment, the article introduces the role of welfare regimes in shaping migration’s choices. This way, queer migrants and their socio-economic status and possibilities find materially situated within national/local welfare regimes, thus challenging the teleological binarism of the ‘coming-out’ journey always presuming a rural/urban movement for queer subjects. Within such a framework, the ordinary/small size town can become a place for ‘outness’ and self-realization of queer migrants who create bridges and connections with the metropolitan areas, thus queering the provincial contexts.

Teaching Young Queers a Lesson: How Police Teach Lessons About Non-Heteronormativity in Public Spaces

This paper analyses qualitative data with LGBT young people to explore police-LGBT youth interactions, and the outcomes of these interactions, as pedagogical moments for LGBT young people, police, and public onlookers. Although the data in this paper could be interpreted in line with dominant ways of thinking about LGBT young people and police, as criminalization for instance, the data suggested something more complex. This paper employs a theoretical framework informed by poststructural theories, queer theories, and pedagogical theories, to theorise LGBT youth-police interactions as instruction about managing police relationships in public spaces. The analysis shows how LGBT young people are learning from police encounters about the need to avoid ‘looking queer’ to minimise police harm.

XVI. From the beginning

I have called myself a feminist ever since I learned the word. There was no grand moment of revelation, no single text to which I can attribute this – it was just something that I breathed in. I spent weekends reading my way through the village library, enraged on behalf of Jane Eyre, Katy Carr, Jo March. The cruelties of the past were obvious, and their solutions intuitive: equal education, property rights, the vote. I cared passionately about the battles of my foremothers without quite linking it to my own life. Attending an all-girls grammar school, feminism was the status quo, a background hum. We learned a history populated by strong women: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Suffragettes, Rosalind Franklin, Virginia Woolf. I felt buoyed on a tide of voices echoing through centuries: We rise. We fight. We were bright, ambitious, and in training to smash our way easily through the glass ceiling – into boardrooms and science labs and literary journals, dealing the final blow against patriarchy. It was not until university that I realised the immensity of battles yet to fight, that ‘feminist history’ was not complete – and that the history I had learned was solely that of economically advantaged white women. It was not until university that I began to consider more closely the variegated lights and shadows of privilege and oppression. I was a young queer woman fighting with perfectionism and intense self-loathing: but I was also white, middle-class, not yet disabled and supported by my family. Access to university was a privilege in itself but studying in London awoke me to the struggles of the present – and to new, unsettling complexities, in the world and in myself. Let me start again: I have always felt the gender system to be a trap. But I did not always understand it in the way I do now.

Intersecting and Embodied Identities: A Queer Woman’s Experience of Disability and Sexuality

This article tells the story of Josie, a gender non-conforming, young queer woman living with a disability. Through attention to critical moments and turning points in the participant’s lived experience of disability, sexuality, and gender, this study examines how intersecting identities both shape and are shaped by context and experiences of the body as both complex and fluid. This qualitative study employs a feminist-informed and narrative methodology called the “personal experience story” which seeks to uncover the meaning in an individual’s lived experiences. Five in-depth interviews were conducted with the participant. The impact of illness on the embodiment of identity, as well as on the participant’s agency and resistance to social and cultural norms relating to sex, gender, and the body, were main themes that emerged. Agency and resistance were important lived concepts for her, particularly in interactions with health care providers and systems and among communities in which she both located support and challenged hegemonic practices of gender presentation and discrimination. The findings revealed the importance of addressing heterosexism, homophobia and ableism at individual and institutional levels, in order to develop a social work practice that addresses the intersectional nature of identity, and the impacts of occupying multiple marginalized positions on a client’s experiences of their sexuality, body and environment.

Sounding Religious, Sounding Queer

This paper explores the role music plays in ‘queer-identifying religious youth’ worship, including attitudes to ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ musical sounds and styles. It looks at approaches taken by inclusive non-denominational churches (such as the Metropolitan Community Church, mcc), to reconcile different, and at times conflicting, identities of its members. Focusing on ‘spaces of reconciliation’ we bring together the embodied experience of Christian congregational music with the ‘age appropriate’ temporality of modern music, to examine the complex relationship between age, music, faith and sexuality. Young queers did not always feel ill at ease with ‘tradition’ and in fact many felt pulled towards traditional choral songs and hymns. Embodied and affective responses to congregational music emerged in complex and multiple ways: faith infused creativity, such as singing practice, enables queer youth to do religion and Christianity and be a part of ‘sounding religious, sounding queer’.

Making Space for Young Lesbians in Church? Intersectional Sites, Scripts, and Sticking Points

This article is a case-study exploration of Christianity and sexuality in the lives of young lesbians in the United Kingdom. Religion matters as a personal and political force, but secularizing trends arguably obscure its influence on the complex convergence and intersection of personal, political, familial, and institutional realms (Brierley, 2006; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). While the question of homosexuality has been a central focus in much discussion, highlighting around the presumed discontinuity between sexual identity and Christian identity (O’Brien, 2004), there is still a gap in terms of locating first-hand narratives of self-identified young queer Christians. Rather than assuming that these are separate and divergent paths (Wilcox, 2000), this article explores intersectional convergences and divergences, illustrating how religious participation can convey (de)legitimation within family, community and society. Such (de)legitimation is revealed in unpacking scripts of inclusion and exclusion (Taylor and Snowdon, 2014), which are (re)circulated via hetero-homo normative ideals, and perpetuated and contested in the context of intersectional Equalities legislation (Monro and Richardson, 2010). Here, we examine the highly gendered and heteronormative “role models,” “mentors,” and (familial) mediations experienced by young lesbian Christians, as intersecting public–private domains in the production of queer religious subjectivity and dis-identification.

“To the future”: Derek Jarman’s Edward II in the Archive

This essay traces the development of Derek Jarman’s ideas about Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy from his student days at King’s College London, through the film Edward II (1991), to the unpublished screenplay of “Pansy.” I argue that the play Jarman first read as a student and admired for its rhetorical figures and portrayal of same-sex love took on a political edge in 1986, when Jarman was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and homophobic legislation was first debated by Margaret Thatcher’s Government. The truncated film treatment “28” and the scripts for Sod ‘Em composed in response to these events use Marlowe’s tragedy as a structuring device that lends historical depth to the struggles of Jarman’s modern protagonist. In 1988, Jarman physically stood this script on its head as he started to rework it as Edward II in a script that imagined a Renaissance setting for the tragedy and stuck remarkably close to Marlowe’s words and Ranulph Higden’s chronicle account of the life of King Edward II. The screenplay Jarman eventually used for Edward II moves back in the direction of the political rage and focus on the present of Sod’Em and shows Jarman hesitating over the ending of his film and the significance of young Edward III. The return to Sod’Em is completed in Jarman’s Marlowe-inspired screenplay for the satirical musical “Pansy,” which imagines a hopeful future for its young queer king Pansy, who vanquishes the conservative forces of repression and dedicates his rule to sexual freedom.

Wu Tsang's Wildness and the Quest for Queer Utopia

Wu Tsang's <i>Wildness</i> and the Quest for Queer Utopia

Raising Gays

Taking critical aim at an emergent cultural demand for family “acceptance” of queer youth and at the trope of parental love offered “no matter what,” this essay resists the occlusion of long-standing traditions of queer pedagogy and acculturation in contemporary “pro-LGBT” discourses. Via an analysis of the musical sitcom Glee, the essay tracks how an insistence on parental acceptance displaces the knowledge, experience, and instruction of other gay people, as well as the cultural practices and traditions that have long sustained queer lives. Focusing on the coming out of gay boy Kurt Hummel and the outing of girl-loving cheerleader Santana Lopez, I highlight the aesthetic and discursive strategies that permit young queers to resist the demands associated with parental acceptance or at least manage and survive its inadequacies.

#FillThisSpaceIfYou'reAnAfricanWoman

abstractAmina Mama argues that once the diversity and heterogeneity of African history, society and culture is recognised theoretically, researchers have the ability to dispel myths about ‘essential’ African culture. This paper would like to contribute to this project by focusing on the ways in which young queer African women are making use of Web 2.0 technologies to engage in issues related to gender and sexuality, to challenge myths and negative perceptions about the lives of sexual minorities in African contexts. Various examples are used to show that that even though young African women are often faced with severe homophobic and heterosexist realities, a growing number of women are embracing social networking tools to challenge oppressive gender and sexuality norms and to build community.Blogs such as HOLAAfrica! and Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women provide an online platform for African women to share their stories and thus co-create knowledge that reflects diversity and the heterogeneity of queer African experiences. Facebook and Twitter also provide spaces that allow for the presenting of new subversive identities. The space that is created by using multiple Web 2.0 technologies allows for communicative identity constructions that are assisting women to challenge understandings in their contexts that see sexual identity as something that is fixed, natural, exclusively heterosexual, and not to be disturbed.

Leave “Those Kids” Alone: On the Conflation of School Homophobia and Suffering Queers

In this article I make a conceptual intervention in the idea that queer children and youth have needs that differ from those of other children and youth on the basis of their gender or sexuality alone, and that doing well by them requires adults to act on the basis of this difference. Namely, I examine the conflation of “fighting school homophobia” and “helping young queers.” I argue that making space for queerness in education is not the same as making space for queers, and that queer young people ought to be left alone. I offer two explanations for the conflation’s persistence such that “leaving them alone” is generally unthinkable: one affective and one institutional. In the first instance, I read a short memoir through a recent queer theoretical account of childhood as queerness, and argue that the “queer child” is the vehicle of queer adult longing for origins. In the second instance, I show how in education the nebulous (queerness) tends to become concrete (homophobia) and therefore actionable (fight homophobia) because of the constraints of schooling as the singularity of education in the present. In the conclusion, I suggest that a twist on the liberal concept of individual rights may ironically provide a pragmatic means of moving beyond the flourishing of individual queers and toward the flourishing of queerness in schools, and offer some preliminary suggestions of what can be done if queerness was to become the beneficiary of anti‐homophobia interventions in education.

Queers in the Line of Fire: Goffman's Stigma Revisited

Using data from in-depth interviews with young queer people, this article proposes revisions for four areas of Goffman's classic work, Stigma. Interviews reveal a situation between complete acceptance of queer identity and outright hostility, which I term “being in the line of fire,” and three strategies participants use to manage their identity in this situation. Unlike classical identity management, this project considers how their “double consciousness” allows them to respond to stigmatizing situations while remaining insulated from the negative appraisals of others. Instead, they orient toward educating the stigmatizer, minimizing interaction by tailoring their identity, or disengaging. I use these strategies to demonstrate that identity management theory does not properly consider possible responses to hostile reactions, the diversity of stigmatized groups, Goffman's so-called sympathetic others, or different frames of reference on stigmatized attributes. Orienting to the point of view of the marginalized, this article demonstrates how one manages an accepted identity when one is in the line of fire.

MEMORIAL ACCOUNTS

Under the conditions of narrative construction, young queer men's coming out stories present memorial accounts of ‘always-having-been’ queer; a queer childhood. The ways in which coming out stories operate have developed significantly over the past decade, particularly resulting from the use of online, digital technologies where such narratives proliferate. This article presents some initial theorisation of the role of young men's coming out narrative in the constitution of performative queer identity with a focus on the construction of memory. The article presents an overview of the history of coming out and the ways in which this history has influenced the conventions and genre of the coming out narrative online. It addresses some of the ways in which such memorial accounts are performative acts themselves, seeking to stabilise queer masculine identity, and ends with a discussion as to whether or not online sites such as YouTube continue or disrupt such stabilising narratives.

Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand

Since the early 2000s, masculine style for queer women in Thailand has been heavily influenced by Korean popular culture, or “K-pop”. K-pop is marked by deliberate gender androgyny and overall gender play. This new aesthetics of masculinity used by masculine-identifying women has been accompanied by linguistic shifts in which explicitly sexualised terms, such as queen and king , themselves products of complex transnational borrowings, have been borrowed from Thai gay male culture. This paper seeks to explore the possibilities of queer cultural transformation through forms of commodified images and capitalist intrusions. It also explores the process of creative borrowings made through transnational, national and local circuits of knowledge. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 focused on young queer women in Bangkok who have adopted the K-pop style and the new sexualised terms of identity, such as tom gay king and les queen , for example. It is also based on review of printed material including the fashion magazine Tom Act and the NGO publication Anjareesarn.