Youth Resisting and Gaining Control through Embodiment: Queerness, Gender, Race, and Ontological Security during the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: 40409 - The Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Discipline, Punishment, and Resistance in Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic was a time defined by both a lack of control and hyper external control. Daily life came with more restrictions over which young people had little sway, and these restrictions posed a special challenge for young people engaged in the primary tasks of adolescence—developing autonomy and identity. Consequently, the pandemic disrupted youth’s ontological security- the ongoing project of constituting a sense of self and locating that self in the world. From COVID-19, to stay-at-home orders, to virtual schooling, to altered living arrangements, youth found themselves trying to establish ontological security in new contexts. Pandemic assemblages, or the dynamic network of human and nonhuman elements that intra-act to shape emergent actions, thus distinctively threatened young people’s ontological security. Interviews conducted as part of 4theRecord data, a multi-method study of risk in the lives of queer and/or racialized young women and gender-expansive youth during the pandemic, also suggest these pandemic assemblages presented unusual circumstances through which individuals could work towards ontological security. Notably, decreased in-person interactions reduced direct experiences of judgment, opening space for experimentation with embodied appearance. We argue that, during a broadly shared time of uncertainty and a life phase associated with the establishment of autonomy and identity, modifications in style and pronoun changes thus operated as ontological security practices for young people. Changes in embodiment therefore functioned as acts of becoming and self-making within the context of pandemic assemblages.

Authors

• Lacey Bobier, University of Toronto

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto