Beyond Resilience: Survival Strategies and Resistance of LGBTQ Youth

• In Event: 196 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Paper Session. Children and Youth Troubling Sex and Gender

Abstract

The majority of research on LGBTQ youth has focused exclusively on “individual-level risk outcomes,” (Russell 2005). Heeding Russell’s call to shift attention from the overwhelming focus on risk to a focus on resilience (2005) this study examines contexts, relationships, practices and institutions that work as “unique protective factors,” which support young people in developing coping mechanisms and survival strategies, perhaps even allowing young people to thrive. To contribute to filling these gaps, in this study we speak with contemporary teenagers and people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who self-identified as LGBTQ when they were teens, to understand their experiences as queer youth in multiple different contexts, including home/family, school, extra-curricular activities, religious institutions, workplaces, peer circles, and on line communities. In our approach, we break from the common dichotomous framing in which youth are pathologized and constructed as pitiable in their tendencies to self-destructive practices or as targets of assault, or they are celebrated as miraculous overachievers, founders of GSAs, leaders of social movements to end oppression. Between those extremes we find the everyday lives of GLBTQ youth who are finding their way, strategically coping in a mix of institutional and personal contexts that both support and challenge them, but ultimately finding paths to living full lives. In doing so we argue that an emphasis on school context in research on LGBTQ young people promotes an over-psychologized “deficit” model that doesn’t fully reflect young people’s lives and experiences.

Authors

• Ellen K. Scott, University of Oregon

• C.J. Pascoe, University of Oregon

• Miriam J. Abelson, Portland State University

• Ben Anderson-Nathe, Child & Family Studies | School of Social Work