Toward an Ethnography of Queer Youth Culture: Legibility and Visibility in Black Working-Class Community

• In Event: Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Necessarily Complex Research of Queer and Trans Youth Resistance and Survival

Abstract

Where, ultimately, is queer youth culture, and how can educational researchers observe it? For young people, even those living in or proximate to major cities, mobility between rural or suburban spaces to the urban sites organized around adult queer culture is anything but guaranteed. Scarcity of material and affective resources can prevent youth from accessing even programs designed to attract their participation, but of equal importance are questions about the legibility of queerness across spaces, places, time, and identities. This paper seeks to understand how queerness is organized by and for young people in the diasporic sites that often constitute their communities of origin.
This dissertation project is an ethnographic study at Augusta Clark Senior High with queer and gender-nonconforming teens. The school is in a mostly black working class suburb very close to a mid-Atlantic city. Its gay-straight alliance (GSA) is advised by the school nurse, who monitors students thought to be “at risk.” In reality, though, GSA members are more likely to be white and middle class than their peers, and almost all identify as straight or bisexual girls.
An observer might conclude there isn’t much queerness at Augusta Clark, but that would be an error. The truth is that there isn’t much queerness that indexes with mainstream (white, middle class) notions about what it means to be queer or gender-nonconforming – not much queerness that resembles Modern Famly, or The L Word, Laverne Cox, Portia Rossi, or Jason Collins.
Mary Gray (2009) has written about how rural queer youth use new media to connect with other young people, forming peer relationships that fuel identity development, grassroots organizing, and social and romantic ties. These forays into queer culture, however, often take as entry points prominent media representations of mainstream queer and trans life that are implicitly raced, classed, and gendered, increasing the likelihood that cultural barriers will render some or all of them illegible to many young people. In turn, the cultural production of queer and gender nonconforming youth, especially working class youth of color, is invisible to outsiders looking for signs of queerness as it is performed in adult spaces.
Preliminary fieldwork suggests that in this site, working class sexual minority and gender nonconforming youth of color often participate in making meaning about sex, sexuality, gender, and relationships with straight allies, queering their straight peers’ understandings and relying on them to form collective and individual identities. Shared racial and gender identities and longstanding friendships remain at least as powerful as connections to other queer or trans youth, even to those who have faced bullying or harassment. Youth triangulate among peers, media, and adult allies to form understandings and support networks to cope with heteronormative and homonormative pressures.

Author

• Mara Conroy Hughes, Rutgers University