Researching Queer and Trans Youth as an Autobiographical Practice

• In Event: Sounds of Silences Still Breaking: A Celebration of Janet Louise Miller's Life and Her Contributions to the Field of Curriculum Studies

Abstract

In her essay, “Autobiography as a Queer Curriculum Practice,” Janet Miller (2005) offers a caution to researchers who might be tempted to see our work with young people as redemptive. For LGBTQ+ researchers studying the lives of queer and trans youth, the danger is personal—we may hope that a shared experience of sexual or gender non-conformity connects us across generations. However, before we turn these young people into truth-tellers or harbingers for some better, more progressive queer future, Miller reminds us that a queering of autobiography seeks out difference and the unfamiliar. A queer curriculum practice sees the messiness of sexuality and gender as a place of learning. In this paper, I reflect on the experience of researching queer and trans youth while I myself continue to age. While my age increasing puts distance between me and my young participants, Miller would insist that the assumption of proximity was always an illusion. Instead, I consider how research with queer and trans youth must link us to our own ambivalent desires towards sexuality and gender. That is, my research does not just document the experiences of queer and trans youth, it also archives the adult’s desires for the child: “A queer curriculum practice compels us to consider … how we are implicated in our desires for and enactments of, as well as our fear and revulsions toward, those identities and practices that exceed the norm” (p. 223). This is what Miller, borrowing from Britzman, calls “the tangles of implication” (p.223). In this paper I examine these tangles and try to notice how my own hopes and fears for myself and for young people are smuggled into the project of research queer and trans youth lives.

Author

• Jen Gilbert, OISE - University of Toronto
  Presenting Author