Collective Narratives of Resilience and Empowerment: Exploring the Importance of Positive Accounts for Nonconforming Youth

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Representations and Reflections of LGBTQIA and Nonbinary Identities

Abstract

This paper acknowledges the risks that gender-nonconforming youth face in U.S. schools while insisting on the need to expand mainstream discussions to include positive accounts of these youths’ school-based experiences. Drawing on collective biographic narrative writing, we return to our youths in a conservative rural Southeastern town where—despite prevailing oppressions and misunderstandings—we, sometimes impossibly, found empowerment and senses of self. We conclude by insisting on the importance of recognizing the possibilities of empowerment available to nearly all gender-nonconforming youth in nearly all school settings, and ways that noting those sources of personal power necessarily rewrite prevailing literature on gender-nonconforming youths’ school experiences.

Authors

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama

• Aryah O. S. Lester, Trans Miami