Queer Youth Developing Practices of Digital Interruption, Disruption, and Survival

• In Event: 72.039 - Queeruptions: Queer of Color Analysis as a Basis for Radical Action and Education Reform

Abstract

Much of digital and new media literacy research takes place in predominately privileged educational spaces and middle class contexts, where elite youth are able to leverage their knowledge and participation with digital technologies, maker culture communities, and networked social media sites into academic achievement, career possibilities, and even civic engagement (Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., et al, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012). Yet despite a growing educational and technological disparity between in-school and out-of-school learning for youth of color, I have found that queer homeless youth are not only developing practices of digital disruption to leverage their own basic needs of food, shelter, and basic health care needs (Author, 2016), but are also using mobile technologies to assess the risks of ‘exchange and barter’ under new conditions of increased police surveillance both online and offline in newly gentrified spaces.

This case study of 20 LGBTQ homeless youth aged 14-23 investigated how homeless queer youth bend/hack digital technologies in ways where the issues of “safety” and “mobility” have become central. In a series of focus groups, participant observations, select interviews and ‘hanging out’ at a LGBTQ youth drop-in center with youth aged 14-23, I have found that homeless queer youth learn to interrupt and unsettle technology to circumvent the surveillance of police in newly gentrified environments. Thinking through Kris Gutierrez’s (2008) concept of literacies in the third space, I find that gentrification forces a certain kind of movement or migration across familiar and always changing practices in youth mobility, creating cognitive and sometimes even digital maps to help themselves and others follow and access resources across the city. To access resources requires tools to facilitate accurately the sense-making practices necessary for survival. Digital tools and their disruptions become lifelines for queer homeless youth as they travel throughout the city. These practices of movement, safety, and surveillance highlight the survival practices that are very much a part of homeless youth worlds and technologies. But I want to begin to suggest that as the changing and gentrifying landscape directly affects youth practices of access and survival, it is tempered by the surveillance of police that I suggest make an already underground practice even more invisible, and potentially more dangerous for the youth involved.

Author

• Cindy Cruz, University of California - Santa Cruz