Methodology That Invites Liminality in Research With Gender-Nonconforming Youth

• In Event: 43.060 - Will the Truth Set Us Free? Queer, Trans, and Youth of Color Challenging Essentialism

Abstract

In North American educational research, queer and trans youth are frequently positioned as liminal subjects ‘at-risk’ of bullying, suicidality, substance (ab)use, and school leaving (Fetner, Elafros, Bortolin, & Drechsler, 2012; Greytak, Kosciw, Diaz, Gay, & S. E. N., 2009; Meyer & Pullen Sansfacon, 2014; Payne & Smith, 2013; Taylor & Peter, 2011; Veale, Saewyc, Frohard-Dourlent, Dobson, & Clark, 2015). When risk is the primary framework for engaging with queer and trans youth in schools, then protection and safety quickly become the most prevalent responses. Scholars and educators prioritize curtailing the plethora of identified risks and harms associated with being a queer and trans youth (Rasmussen, Rofes, & Talburt, 2004). However, in order for adults to fight for queer and trans youth, the youth have to be knowable subjects. In directing efforts toward this objective, scholars and educators participate in creating legal and administrative categories that have the power of determining what counts as a ‘real’ gender identity (Spade, 2011). In part, youth’s identities in this type of scholarship often cohere around the need for adult recognition and protection. The dominance of binary trans youth as the focus of scholarship, school policies, and media stories is enveloped in this process. Their gender nonconformity can achieve legibility and thus safety and inclusion through transitioning into binary coherence. In my research, I specifically focus on gender nonconforming (GNC) youth, whose experiences at the intersection of non-dominant gender identities and sexualities both relate and diverge from those of their queer and trans peers.

Research on GNC people is challenging in part because we often lack the language to describe the fluidity of their genders (Nicolazzo, 2016). However, there is likewise a methodological obstacle in that studies inevitably capture a moment in a participants’ life, which can stultify a person’s otherwise flexible and fluctuating relationship to their gender(s), bodies, sex, and sexualities (Nicolazzo, 2016). In this presentation, I draw on the methodology I employed in attempt to reject fixed narratives during a yearlong ethnography with several gender nonconforming youth in an urban high school in Vancouver, Canada.I worked with the youth to invite manifold, overlapping, and complex storyings of their experiences, genders, bodies, and relationships that resisted logics of intelligibility and the idea of a singular, authentic ‘truth’.Rather than work toward uncovering authentic knowledge, the research I propose resists the ethnographic desire for a coherent narrative that captures a fixed, stable truth. As Britzman (2000) explains, “while educational ethnography promises the narrative cohesiveness of experience and identity and the researcher’s skill of representing the subject, poststructuralist theories disrupt any desire for a seamless narrative, a cohesive identity or a mimetic representation” (p. 31-32). I will explore my experiences generating data with the youth, including the tensions involved in disrupting the notion that a researcher can ever fully know what transpires in the field or understand their participants. By disrupting this desire and creating room for myriad knowledges to be concurrently ‘real’, I intend to welcome multiple and complicated constructions of gender nonconforming youth.

Author

• LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia