Synopses & Reviews
These cutting-edge international essays challenge dominant narratives of queer youth predicated on oppression and victimization. As school systems address the emergence of Gay-Straight Alliances and calls to provide equal educational access, researchers, educators and youth workers are paying increasing attention to sexuality, gender and schooling. Yet present discourses are limited to liberal understandings of tolerance, safety, and equity that are defined by a separation of "queer" and "normal." This text documents and offers radical interpretations of the creativity of queer youth in challenging existing practices. Interdisciplinary analyses offer multiple vantage points for reconceptualizing adolescent sexual subjectivities and institutional and cultural practices.
Review
"Every so often new scholarship constitutes a powerful political act. In its analysis of adolescence and naturalized models of gender and sexuality, Youth and Sexualities goes beyond the liberal discourse of identity, tolerance, safety, and equity. The authors of the essays in this volume are skilled at presenting radical critiques of constructs that emphasize oppression and victimization in the lives of GLBTQ youth, even as they take into account their own appreciation for these more popular approaches to civil society.
In its efforts to contribute to a transformation of cultural understandings of sexuality and youth, Youth and Sexualities invites readers to consider "institutional multicultural approaches of integrity." On this point alone, the work is an invaluable resource for courses in critical education theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
The editors of this text present a set of well written essays that will gain the attention of queer studies scholars. Yet the structure and language of these essays-offering historical, ethnographic, psychoanalytic, critical, interpretive, and Foucauldian analyses-make them accessible to the general reader interested in GLBTQ issues. In prompting us to rethink our conceptions, politics, and practices, Youth and Sexualities promises a fuller understanding of all youth-queer and straight alike."-Karen Graves, Denison University
"Fraught knowledges, genealogies, dividing practices, gaybonics, and heterotopia: this astutely-edited collection performs pleasure, provocation, and per(e)-version."--William F. Pinar, St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, Louisiana State University
Synopsis
A new collection that addresses the problematic pathologization of queer youth, this book argues that the majority of educators and youth workers still know little about queer youth's negotiations of identity and community. The contributors examine the dangerous effects of heteronormalizing practices, and look at how young people negotiate labels and stereotypes in and out of school settings. What makes this project unique is that the contributors go beyond the discussions of homophobia young people experience on an everyday basis - the look at how youth subvert these experiences into those of pleasure, power, and confidence. In addition, the contributors look at how youth organize communities and negotiate positive identities in different settings.
About the Author
Mary Louise Rasmussen is Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at Deakin University, Victoria.
Eric Rofes is Assistant Professor of Education at Humboldt State University.
Susan Talburt is Associate Professor of Social Foundations, Department of Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Transforming Discourses of Queer Youth and Educational Practices Surrounding Gender, Sexuality, and Youth--Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, Mary Louise Rasmussen *
Part I: Rethinking Adults and Youth * Intelligibility and Narrating Queer Youth--Susan Talburt * Martyr, Target, Victim: Interrogating Narratives of Persecution and Suffering among Queer Youth--Eric Rofes * The Historical Regulation of Sexuality and Gender of Students and Teachers: An Intertwined Legacy--Jackie M. Blount and Sine Anahita * Subject to Scrutiny: Taking Foucauldian Genealogies to Narratives of Youth Oppression--Valerie Harwood * Between Sexuality and Narrative: On the Language of Sex Education--Jen Gilbert *
Part II: Rethinking Youth Practices * Safety and Subversion: The Production of Sexualities and Genders in School Spaces--Mary Lou Rasmussen * Scout's Honor: Duty, Citizenship, and the Homoerotic in the BSA--Andrea Coleman, Mary Ehrenworth, and Nancy Lesko * Agency in Borderland Discourses: Engaging in Gaybonics for Pleasure, Subversion, and Retaliation--Mollie V. Blackburn * Bent as a Ballet Dancer: The Possibilities for and Limits of Legitimate Homo-masculinity in School--Deborah Youdell * Melancholy and the Productive Negotiations of Power in Sissy Boy Experience--David McInnes