Self-silencing and Settling for Less in Cross Disciplinary Collaboration on Behalf of Transgender Youth

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Sexual Knowledge

Abstract

This paper is a collaborative autoethnographic account of the experiences of two members of a research team in working with a team of digital media students to build a prototype of a videogame depicting the life experiences of transgender children and youth in our local communities. The principal investigator and a project coordinator worked with the student team over a four-month semester. At the end of this period, the Youth Advisory Council that had been set up by the research team beta tested the prototype of the Game and pronounced it a failure because of several plot devices that were decidedly unsafe and traumatic. Far from being shocked by the Youth Advisory Committee’s pronouncement, the principal investigator and the project coordinator were instead shocked by their own complicity. They wondered why they had remained silent in spite of their own discomfort with these plot devices. In viewing this failure as productive, the authors identify two key difficulties involved in cross disciplinary collaboration on behalf of transgender youth. These are gaps in knowledge and tensions between intersectional feminist theorizing and intersectional feminist practice. Writing about our experiences via collective autoethnography is a key way of making ourselves accountable: to each other as members of the research team and to the aims of the project as a whole to increase the life chances for transgender children and youth in our local communities.

Authors

• Ann Travers, Simon Fraser University

• Nadine Boulay, Simon Fraser University

• Jennifer Marchbank, Simon Fraser University

• Sharalyn Jordan, Simon Fraser University