Queer Recognition and Interdependence: LGBTQ Young Adult Literature and the Contemporary Moment

• In Event: Ethics and Eros: Theoretical Considerations of LGBTQ Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to explore how Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition offers some insight into how gay youth are portrayed in literature. More important, this paper shows how Honneth’s theory gives scholars a lens through which to investigate the current role that rights for LGBTQ can play in the struggle for equity and justice.

Perspective/ Data Sources: This paper uses the emerging scholarship on Honneth’s theories of recognition in education (Carlson & Linville, 2015). Honneth’s theory of recognition is based on the assumption that individuals cannot obtain self-fulfillment without the help of others. As human beings, he argues, we are bound to each other in the quest for mutual recognition. The continual “struggle” for recognition is the sine quo non of human interaction and relationships. His theory has four aspects: Love, Respect, Self-Esteem, and Mis-recognition. The struggle between forms of recognition and mis-recognition structures the “grammar” of recognition in a given space. This paper uses this perspective to unpack the “grammar” of recognition for gay youth in Bill Konigsberg’s young-adult novel, Out of the Pocket (2009/2014). Konigsberg’s novel tells the coming-out story of a high school senior, Bobby Framingham, who is the quarterback of the high school football team, respected by his peers and has a rather stable, suburban home. The story chronicles how he negotiates coming out, his desires for classmates, and the difficulties of being outed to the school by the local newspaper.

Conclusions/Significance: This novel is an exemplar of how individuals, gay individuals, negotiate social spaces as a struggle for recognition. Bobby, the protagonist of the novel, was recognized as an elementary level as the quarterback of the football team, as a team and school leader, and as someone of whom his parents were proud. He received inter-subjective recognition for personal autonomy, for respect, and for esteem. The grammar of recognition in this novel illustrates how peers have, in many ways, more influence on the recognition process than do parents or school officials. More important, however, is the ways in which those who misrecognized him (Bobby) as a human being worthy of love, rights, and esteem; and in so doing, also offered themselves the possibilities for recognition. Difference and conflict, thus, hold the potential for growth and social progress through struggle and shifts in perspectives. LGBTQ young-adult literature retains the potential to display this progress and can nourish perceptual shifts from misrecognition to social recognition. Honneth’s theory offers a scholar the analytic tools to see how perceptual and social shifts occur and progress happens.

Author

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University