Queer Youth Video Making as a Space of Liberatory Possibilities: Concientização and a Theory of the Flesh

• In Event: Codifications of Reality as Educational Tools for Critical Consciousness: Retheorizing Freire Through Praxis

Abstract

Objectives: This essay has several objectives. First, it illustrates the possibilities of working with LGBTQ youth and video and the idea of “storying the self” (Goodson 1998) in media production. Secondly, it engages Freire’s notion of codification in how LGBTQ youth represent the self/body as a mediating tool of conscientizacao in queer youth video poems. It is in the reflexive work of “storying the self” where LGBTQ youth begin a process of developing a critical consciousness through an interrogation of their own bodies as they confront HIV, survival sex, and suicide.
Theoretical Framework: This essay is grounded in the thinking of Bridge feminists, particularly Cherrie Moraga’s (1993) “theory in the flesh”—the process of grounding political, cultural and intellectual work in an interrogation of the lived experiences of women of color. It also draws from Freire’s notion of codification and its engagement with the ‘limit-situations’ that impact the lives of the youth of the study that moves students to a space of reflexive and critical possibilities.
Methods: This is a two-year ethnography in a large urban metropolis in the US where queer street youth between the ages of 12-21 were observed and interviewed at two community school based sites. Field notes and teaching journals supplemented the data collection. An interpretative ethnographic analytic model was used to theme, code, and do close readings of the narratives of the youth in the study. It is this framework that allows for close readings of video that provides opportunities to think about a multi-layered and multi-faceted approach to coding and analysis.
Results: Queer youth testimonials, despite their broken and fragmented narratives, often connect their life experiences directly to the health and condition of their own bodies. The use of youth video in the classroom offers teachers and students the opportunity to reframe and reinterpret the larger discourses of criminalization and contamination that often narrate the lives of queer youth of color. The notion of “codification” not only offers youth and education researchers the opportunity to “read bodies” and literally the narratives of scars, it offers LGBTQ youth the possibility of examining critically the larger ideologies that are often inscribed onto their own bodies. The prompt of ‘scars’ or ‘scarring’ began the process of queer students thinking about the body and its scars as narrative. The scar tells a story about the everyday conditions in which they live. The video work and the narrative of scars developed by the LGBTQ students becomes the mediating artifact that provides spaces of transformation on both individual and collective realms.

Author

• Cindy Cruz, University of California - Santa Cruz