"The Scandal Is My Gender": Disrupting Risk Discourses During a High School Ethnography

• In Event: Mobilizing Traditional Methods for Transformational Ends: Subversive Possibilities When Combining Critical Frameworks and Conventional Methodologies

Abstract

Purposes: It is challenging to find scholarship on queer and trans youth that does not position them as ‘at-risk’ (Airton, 2013; Greteman, 2018; Hackford-Peer, 2010). While it is important to recognize the challenges they encounter, in this presentation, I attend to the complexities of gender nonconforming youths’ lives without privileging solely experiences of risk, danger, and harm. This paper draws on data from a yearlong ethnography with several gender nonconforming youth at an urban high school in Western Canada. I focus on data with Vixen, a grade 12 participant in the study, who was positioned as ‘at-risk’ by the school because of their family situation, drug use, class background, queer sexuality, and gender identity. I knew many sides of Vixen, far beyond the similar tropes that were exchanged about them. A focus on risk may be based in good intentions that are meant to foster safety and inclusion within schools, but these approaches rely on students being knowable within narrow structures of legibility (Halberstam, 2018). I explore how the subversive, unique research-participant relationship Vixen and I created over the course of the project invited generative possibilities not just for the study but, importantly, for both of us.

Theoretical Framework: Britzman (1998) calls on education to take an interest in “the mistakes, the accidents, the detours, and the unintelligibilities of identities” (p. 60). By resisting the normative regimes of knowability, education can transition into a “time of hospitality” (Gilbert, 2014, p. 82). “Hospitality is a welcome, but one that resists idealization and risks ambivalence” (Gilbert, 2014, p. 82). By inviting ambivalence, incoherence, and liminality into education, schools can cultivate the potential for desiring gender nonconformity, in whatever forms it may emerge. I approached this study from a place of desire. I desired the queerness and gender nonconformity of the youth in the project. Desire is methodologically complicated, especially in schools. However, it is also a question of ethical responsibility. Research ethics are integral when thinking through all research and especially pertinent in research with youth (Loutzenheiser, 2007). As the only non-binary adult in the school, part of my methodology involved acknowledging my ethical accountability to my participants and how they may be affected by my presence in their lives.

Methods: This qualitative study draws from queer theory, trans studies, and critical youth studies to interrogate observations, interviews, and field notes from a yearlong school-based ethnography. Informed by the post-qualitative turn (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013; Lather, 2013; St. Pierre, 1997), I think through the ways school-based ethnographies can be challenged, expanded, and reshaped to engage differently with participants.

Results and Significance: In the winter, Vixen stopped attending school; however, they would transit to a nearby café to read me their novels and hang out. Together we created a project that was inviting, fluid, and expansive. I argue that, in reimagining conventional ethnography, Vixen and I generated research that made possible the troubling of ‘at-risk’ discourses and the welcoming of more complicated understandings of gender nonconforming youth.

Author

• LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia