When One Is Too Many: Queer Youth, Suicide, and Resilience of Spirit

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Issues of Identity Navigation and Construction Among Queer Youth

Abstract

Written by a teacher and two out teenagers- on transgender and one lesbian- this paper serves as an attempt to interrupt the metanarrative about the daily lives and inter-actions of teens in school. Through their counternarratives at a large, Midwestern high school, the authors argue the significance of attending to these daily experiences which transpire in the in-between of school rhetoric and a dearth of enacted school policy that could benefit LGBTQ youth. In addition, the authors explore being in and leaving fe-male bodies as these experiences intersect sociocultural understandings of femininity and being a teenage girl. Finally, the authors explore how these ideas are inextricably tied to a recent rise in teen suicide within the LGBTQ youth community.

Authors

• Boni Wozolek, Kent State University/Medina City Schools

• Aaron Demlow

• Lindsey Wootton