Street Disorientation; Feeling Queer in the Inner-City

• In Event: 569 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Children, Youth and Sexualities

Abstract

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have a long and complicated history with suffering, trauma, and violence. Forms of physical, emotional, and psychic suffering are increasingly seen in young LGBTQ children and youth whose recognition continues to expand in public and legal discourses, often collapsing into classifications like bullying, abuse, and suicide. These views, though important, mask other expansive, generative issues related to race, class, and geography, leaving unseen embodiments of queerness in young peoples’ lives. Grounded in queer theory, affect theory, and childhood studies, this ethnographic research conducted at an organization serving inner-city black and Latino/a youth explores the lives of LGBTQ young people at the level of the everyday street life, extending beyond and breaking from traditions related to urban ethnography and street violence. I use queer as a tool for reading transgender and genderqueer bodies to demonstrate different relations between queer bodies in urban space. I extend work related to ideas of orientation by Elijah Anderson (1999) and Nikki Jones (2010) to formulate the concept of street disorientation: an affective muddling emerging from normative and queer bodies coming into contact on the street. Street disorientation allows new ways of attending to the increasing visibility and voice of LGBTQ young people in media and everyday life while taking account of their lives in the present at the margins of what visions currently exist for young people living under the umbrella of the category LGBTQ youth.

Author

• Stephen Bernardini, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers