On Being Too Much: The Racialized, Queer, and (Trans)Gendered Body Within the School

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

Abstract

This paper is situated within the move of Queer and Youth Studies of Education to privilege young people as participants and creators of queerness, or as Cris Mayo (2014) notes, the ways youth “are actively and creatively involved in making their lives and communities” (p. 54). Edward Brockenbrough (2015) extends this focus “on the agentive practices of queer students of color provides [as] an important counterbalance to discourses that reify narratives of youth victimization” (p. 38). Responding to these various calls to privilege agency, the paper is attentive to the performative play through which young gender non-conforming bodies of color move about and live within the confines of schools.
Specifically, this paper centers the life of Lawrence “Larry” King and how Larry expresses what the author has named as being and becoming too much, or the multiple relationships between Larry and the various and shifting identities that Larry inhabits. The multiplicity of Larry allows for a theoretical move to consider too muchness as a mode of being (and growing sideways) within schools that offer too little. The paper explores too muchness through several scenes in which Larry intrudes upon the familiar and everyday practices of school, such as playing basketball on the playground or socializing with friends in the hallway. These scenes illustrate an excessive child body, overflowing with identity that spills over onto the scene of the school. This abundance of identity shows what Cris Mayo (2014) notes as “suggesting to adults that there are more possible identities for students to inhabit than adults might consider normal or even possible” and in so doing indicates “not only adult insufficiency of understanding but also perhaps adult lack of control of young people’s identities” (p. 38). Too muchness troubles the discursive practices that attempt to fully explain and describe Larry that close off identity to bounded categories. Schools and teachers typically rely upon these bounded categories in order to effectively teach, yet may dangerously police identity. If educational researchers and schools consider young people like Larry, we may trouble our comfort in assuming that are current projects are necessary and enough.
Being and becoming too much pushes against schooling practices that name and police all that young people are and could be, especially for gender non-conforming students of color who are uniformly understood through their relationship to suffering. Rather than mark misery and melancholy as the emotional registers through which identity is chronicled, Larry may push educational researchers and practitioners to consider how young people perform identity through desire, pleasure, and agency and in so doing create distinct modes of racial, sexual, and (trans)gendered being and becoming.

Author

• Ricky Gutierrez-Maldonado, University of Utah