Accounting for the Lives of Homeless Queer and Trans Youth: Moving and Reading Alongside Methodology

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

Abstract

This paper demonstrates of a mode of giving an account (Butler, 2005) of the lives of homeless and transitionally housed trans, queer, and non-binary youth as they move through and take up space in urban environments. Pulling from a mobile interview-based study of youth in New York City, the telling of these youth’s stories places the reader alongside youth as they would be encountered on a sidewalk, park bench, or subway car. Such a methodological orientation towards animating the lives of these youth centers the processes of how living on and experiencing the streets showcases youths’ ability and need to navigate the city with sophisticated understandings of where they are allowed to take up space (and not). Examining these movements and geographic positioning highlights how “the bodily experiences of homeless street youth...cannot be separate from [how] the political and resistance is measured in the smallest of actions” (Cruz, 2011, p. 557). The variety of spatial knowledges youth possess about the city can be traced back to their individual experiences of moving through and existing within the streets, buildings, people, and spaces that comprise it. Moreover, youth knowledges about urban space illuminate how moving through the city can be both circularly and pedagogically informative. Moving through the city teaches about the dynamics of traveling through myriad racial, religious, economic, ethnic, and linguistic enclaves; about who lives in and occupies different places; and what it is like to experience each neighborhood specifically through an individual’s own positionality.

However, as “positionality and subjectivity are not fixed along an axis” (Loutzenheiser, 2007, p. 123), neither are the positionalities and subjectivities of the neighborhoods and communities that youth pass through and occupy. Assessing homeless young people’s perspectives about producing knowledge about the city through their intersectional subjectivities highlights the “historic myopia toward reading territories at the scale of the geopolitical replicates masculinist, hetero- normative and colonial perspectives on place-making” (Gieseking, 2016, p. 262). These narratives of trans, queer, and non-binary youths’ movements, and the ways they articulate (West, 2014) them through what they say, how they move, and how they interact with people, spaces, affects, and discourses, also demonstrate to the reader how neighborhoods are accessible or not; if a certain area is dangerous or welcoming; if it is a place to seek out or a place to avoid. The re-accounting of the stories in this paper illustrate the ways areas of importance and significance for trans and queer communities of color are often either ignored and avoided by White trans and queer communities or appropriated through gentrification (Gieseking, 2016; Hanhardt, 2013). The re-telling of these youths’ stories from this study works to hold the reader accountable for recognizing such dynamics and how homeless trans, queer, and non-binary youth both account for such challenges and how their knowledges of the street are often formed as result of their strategic maneuvering around them.

Author

• Sam Stiegler, Colgate University