"I Don't Have Time to Have a Bad Day": Trans Youth and the Passage of Time in Urban Spaces

• In Event: What Does It Mean to Be Recognized? Theorizing the Experiences of Trans and Gender Nonconforming Young People

Abstract

In light of the symposium’s focus on theorizing the experience of trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) young people, this paper examines how young TGNC people experience the passing of time while taking up space in urban spaces. This study focuses on the ways in which TGNC youth, especially those who are homeless or transitionally housed, occupy and navigate through the city and the structures, affects, land, and bodies that comprise it. Such attention centers on the ways in which youth are making sense and developing knowledge about themselves and aspects of the city around them. Inspired by Kathleen Stewart’s (2016) concept of “worlding writing” this paper focuses on ways to “build concepts that make it possible to venture out into the life from which they emerge…” (p. 96). This involves taking into account youth’s own meaning in their accounts of their actions during their daily lives, the ways in which they occupy space, and the manners with which they relate to people around them.
To enact this theorizing, this paper explores the experiences of TGNC youth by pulling from a mobile ethnographic study of the everyday experiences of youth in New York City. Through mobile interviews—called go-alongs (Kusenbach, 2003)—the study moved and talked with youth as they went about their daily routines. The intention was to journey with youth as they navigated their everyday lives in order to gain new perspectives into the challenges and opportunities they faced in moving through and amidst the currents and flows of the city. However, for many of the homeless participants, especially those who lived in shelters, most of the go-alongs were almost exclusively stationary. Instead of navigating between home, school, and work, these go-alongs took place sitting still in public libraries, computer labs, city parks, and other outdoor public spaces. These youth often spent 12 hours per day wandering the city while their shelters were closed during the day, forcing them to finds ways and spaces to spend their time.
This paper, then, offers a reflection of the experiences of TGNC youth with a tenuous relationship to the concept of “home” as they pass time and take up space in the city. This is especially important for TGNC youth, whose daylong journeys are mitigated with the pressures of maintaining a gender presentation as they interact with government agencies, police, transit workers, school officials, and passersby in social service offices, public spaces, libraries, parks, and public restrooms. The paper considers how TGNC youth resist and avoid normative conceptions about time, space, and growing up by examining how youth utilize and embody certain places in the city in ways that stand counter to the ways they are intended to be used. It positions TGNC youths’ experiences with the city as a form of knowledge production by centralizing the ways in which youth are shaped by the city flowing around them and the ways in which they shape the city in return.

Author

• Sam Stiegler, University of British Columbia