Teaching LGBTQ Young Adult Sports Literature Through a Queer Theory Youth Lens

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

Abstract

This paper examines the teaching of young adult sports literature with LGBTQ characters through a queer theory youth lens as a means of providing all students with safe spacesfor conversation, self-differentiation, learning, and development. The short-term and long-term benefits of participation in sports include physical and emotional health,
academic achievement, and feelings of connectedness and belonging (Kosciw, et al., 2012). While not all students may choose to actively engage with a sport culture, YA sports literature can provide vicarious experiences of understanding for all adolescents as there are universal human emotions present in these stories that can be understood by all students whether they are athletes or not.

Working within a queer theory youth lens framework, secondary English language arts teachers can breakdown binaries with respect to adolescence, athletics, race, ability,
gender, gender expression, and sexuality and can instead call for fluid continuums that provide individuals with the necessary space to construct their own lived identities without the constraints of labels, stereotypes, and norms that serve to divide rather than unify (Richter, 1998). The queer theory framework utilized in this paper includes reading the world and literature through a critical understanding of representations of adolescence/ts that challenge hegemonic social norms. Both queer theory and the youth lens share a similar goal in seeking to remove restrictive labels and stigmas that are often associated with those labels (Petrone, et al., 2015; Sarigianides, et al., 2015; Zacko-Smith & Smith, 2010).

Through a queer reading of LGBTQ YA sports literature, students are given opportunities to question the way gender, sexuality, and adolescents are positioned in the sport culture of a novel and make suggestions for a more inclusive and less restrictive “what could be” in sports and society. When the construct of the athlete is paired with adolescence, new stereotypes emerge. Many adolescent athletes do not fit common stereotypes about what it means to be a student-athlete in a school culture; these unique stories can be heard in popular YA literature. Moreover, LGBTQ adolescent athletes face a different set of stereotypes that needs to be confronted. As many YA novels reveal, LGBTQ adolescent athletes have multi-dimensional identities that mitigate stereotypes about ways of being (e.g., an athlete, an adolescent). Through a queer theory youth lens, stereotypes can be deconstructed and individual, intersectional identities can be realized. Teaching students to read YA sports literature queerly is empowering for all adolescents because it teaches self-differentiation, which is necessary for optimal adolescent development.

Author

• Nicole Sieben, SUNY College at Old Westbury