Policy Change Won’t Cut It! Building Power and Aesthetic Awakenings With LGBTQ+ Youth

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Into the Fray: Critical Participatory Action Research Approaches for Impacting Policy and Building Community Power (Table 39)

Abstract

The last several years have seen major gains in terms of visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ+ and gender expansive (GE) youth, owing in large part to youth organizing. Nevertheless, LGBTQ+ and GE youth continue to experience disproportionate discrimination, dispossession, and violence in school, in their families and communities, and by police (McCann & Brown, 2019; Mogul et al., 2011; Parker et al., 2018; Russel et al., 2021; Wilson et al., 2014). Further, the far right have mounted a nationwide attack on the very existence of queer and trans* youth. Given this social and political context, this paper asks: How can we use participatory methodologies to build power to resist revanchist policies and continued violence against LGBTQ+ and GE youth? Is working towards policy change enough? How can art-based participatory methods offer aesthetic awakenings (Greene, 2000; author, 2015; Fine, 2018) to go beyond visibility, acceptance, and temporary policy change toward intersectional justice, solidarity, and liberation?
To engage these questions, this paper draws on a critical participatory action research project that brought together an intergenerational group of LGBTQ+ and GE artists, organizers, and social scientists to better understand and document the experiences that LGBTQ+ and GE youth have with family. In a partnership between our university and the Department of Health, the research collective formed to develop policy and programmatic recommendations in response to the large number of LGBTQ+ and GE youth that experience family rejection. Transforming the initial narrow and neoliberal public health framing that focused on encouraging families to “accept” LGBTQ+ and GE youth, our intergenerational collective instead wanted to know how LGBTQ+ and GE youth envision liberation, and how they understand justice to intersect with family. To answer these questions our collective conducted a series of focus groups with 28 young people who identify as LGBTQ+ and GE, a majority of whom were youth of color. The 3-hour long focus groups combined a creative form of mapping with semi-structured dialogue.

In this paper, we focus our discussion on how our methods, analysis strategies, and research products -- which included data driven zines, comics and other multi-media -- allowed our collective and research participants to engage family-related experiences not in a vacuum, but as a nexus that intersects with structural, social, and racial (in)justice. Additionally, we suggest that centering epistemic justice, relationality, and aesthetic provocation in a participatory framework allowed us to go beyond a simple intervention-based policy framework. Finally, we discuss insights this work offers about the potential for participatory inquiry conducted in contexts of relational harm and structural violence to activate painful emotions and experiences for co-researchers and participants. We suggest that, rather than being outside of the scope of knowledge production, engaging with these affective dimensions by creating a “critical methodological holding space” can strengthen both the processes and epistemological/political power of collective research.

Authors

• Mica Baum-Tuccillo, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Serena Yang, CUNY

• Audre Martinez, Public Science Project

• Willow Lipson, The Public Science Project

• Maria Elena Torre, The Public Science Project