Intersections of Race and Sexuality in LGBTQ Young Adult Literature

• In Event: 42.075 - Queering Identities in Adolescent Literature and Classrooms

Abstract

This paper conducts an intersectional analysis of the young adult novel Money Boy (Yee, 2011) to discuss how YA texts featuring LGBTQ immigrant youth can function as powerful counternarratives that challenge dominant formulations of sexual, racial, and ethnic identities for immigrant youth. In this first-person narrative, Ray is a Chinese immigrant living in Canada; he is not yet fluent in English and thinks he might be gay. On any given day, Ray crosses multiple
contexts with differing constructs of his ethnicity and sexuality.

The analysis of this text is framed by a “queer of color analysis,” which extends women of color feminism to establish a standpoint theory grounded in the lived experiences of queers of color (Collins, 1990; Ferguson, 2004; Kumashiro, 2001). An intersectional understanding of identity is central to queer of color analysis, which “considers how race, sexuality, gender, class, religion,
region, and other forms of difference variably intersect across social and historical contexts to generate myriad narratives of what it means to be queer of color” (Marquez & Brockenbrough, 2013, p. 464). In other words, individuals do not experience identity categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. as discrete identities.

The methodology for this analysis draws on Collins’ (1990) articulation of Black feminist thought and argument that, “People experience and resist oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class,
and gender; and the systemic level of social institutions” (p. 227). An intersectional analysis of young adult literature similarly describes how identity categories such as race/ethnicity and sexuality among others are constructed by the individual characters, by the group or cultural
communities to which they belong, and by the institutions with which they interact. It also considers the potentially oppressive situations these interactions create as well as the possibilities that emerge from these particular arrangements and tensions.

As the student population in the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse, teachers and administrators will need to cultivate a deep understanding of and develop strategies to meet the complex needs of students of color who are immigrants and/or LGBTQ. This paper suggests that one way to
begin examining the experiences of youth of color across a variety of socio-cultural contexts is through critically engaging their representations in young adult literature.

Author

• E. Sybil Durand, Arizona State University - Tempe