Unraveling "Queer" and "Trans": On Getting to Unknow Youth

• In Event: 75.052 - Research De/sign: Theory as a Thimble for Tailoring Methodological Excess

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores a methodological approach that unravels commonplace conceptions of queer and trans youth, specifically those co-constructed by the organizations dedicated to serving them. Through an examination of these organizations’ websites, this paper unsutures normative constructions of youth; the dominate ways of knowing, thinking and talking about their bodies and life experiences; and the discursive processes that make them intelligible as queer and trans, as youth, and, moreover, as subjects necessitating education and support.

Theoretical Framework
I adjoin theories that explore images of youth (Brumh and Hurley, 2004; Foucault, 1977; 1978; Halberstam, 2011; Kincaid, 2004; Lesko, 2012; Muñoz, 2009; Stockton, 2009) and suggest these revelations will highlight how youth are never fully what they are imagined to be [Thread 1]. In reading the websites as documents, I reveal how images of children and youth are forcibly sewn together by dominant notions of success and failure, futurity, education, youth development, and psycho-medical frameworks and presented by the organizations as bodies intrinsically in need of support, education, funding, protection, and care.

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
I weave together the theories from various epistemological backgrounds in order to “think with theory” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) through the websites and social media presence of five LGBTQ youth-serving organizations from across North America. Pulling together various theorizations of document and textual analysis (Bowen, 2009; Mazzei, 2007; Prior, 2008), this paper unknots always already overlapping constructions of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, and ability that are tied-up into normative, dominate understandings of queer and trans youth. Specific attention is given to how the websites use constructions of queer and trans that are always already read through racialized, classed, aged and ablitied lenses; as well as how race, class, age, and ability are enmeshed with specific understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. To think through these fabrications, I rely on scholarship focusing on these constructions, including Halberstam (2005), Kumashiro (2001), McCready (2010), and McRuer (2006). These multiple layered and ensconced constructions are necessary to examine because of the tendency in qualitative research for queer and trans youth to be viewed as only queer and/or trans thereby putting under erasure their multiple subjectivities. [Threads 2 & 3]

Results and Significance
The examination of these websites-as-documents builds upon the work of queer theories in education (Mayo, 2006; Talburt, 2004) who consider questions concerning childhood, youth, and futurity; furthermore, it weaves in critique of queer theory’s inattentiveness to matters of race and racialization (Brockenbrough, 2013; Holland, 2013; Loutzenhesier, 2010). I suggest these static and partial fabrications of “youth” perform a specific “ethical violence” (Butler, 2004, p. 27) that predetermines who these youth are, how they learn, what services and programs they need, and how they move through and experience the social world. [Thread 4] It is within this productive tension—that the unintended ethical violence is performed by the organizations against the very communities they aim to serve—this paper offers new methodological approaches towards getting to un-know queer and trans youth.

Author

• Sam Stiegler, The University of British Columbia