Always the Least-Adult: The Intersections of Gender and Age in the Field

• In Event: 44.069 - New Approaches to Queer Methodologies in Education: Engaging the Queer Research Process

Abstract

Queer methodologies provide an opening to engage with the messiness involved in acknowledging the complex personhood of our participants (Gordon, 2004). They create space for fluidity, change, and uncertainty. In this presentation, I focus on the ambiguities and challenges that arise during ethnographic research with youth and adults as a result of gender presentations. More specifically, I interrogate the intersections of my non-binary gender identity and perceived youthfulness to explore questions around work with non-binary queer youth, teachers, and staff while in the field. I engage with Nancy Mandell’s concept of least-adult role and how this idea has been taken up and extended by CJ Pascoe (Mandell, 1988; Pascoe, 2005). The strategy of the least-adult role acknowledges children and youth as meaning-makers similar to the ways that research studies position adults. It places the onus on adult researchers to work at mitigating some of the differences that distance adults from children and youth, therefore making adults more accessible and able to participate in their processes of meaning-making. The concept of least-adult points to the complex negotiations of insider and outsider that researchers undertake while in the field and how these negotiations are played out on and with the researcher’s body. Since in North American society we do not have a well-established framework of non-binary adulthood, adulthood is still a binary experience with grown ups ‘looking like’ cisgender men or women. As such, when Mandell remarks on the unusualness of adults performing least-adult roles, I am forced to ask: which adults? The confluence of my social locations informs my infrequent acknowledgment of adulthood from others, and I know that my experiences of transphobia are inextricably tied into ageism. I argue that as a trans non-binary person, I often occupy a least-adult role and it is because of this position that I can access insider moments with my participants. Mandell and Pascoe documented intentional decisions they made regarding self-presentations in order to gain rapport with the children and youth in their studies. I focus on a discussion of my intent to navigate being a perpetual least-adult in research that involves multiple groups with different and at time conflicting interests and needs. In doing so, I examine the limitations of a least-adult strategy both as a non-binary person and in terms of what the concept facilitates (or not) methodologically in research relationships with youth.

Author

• LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia