Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination In and Out of Schools

245 Pages·2004·8.588 MB·English

by  Mary Louise Rasmussen, Eric Rofes, Susan Talburt (eds.)

ISBN 978-1-4039-6488-5
9 781403 964885
Youth and Sexualities
Pleasure, Subversion, and
Insubordination in and out
of Schools
Edited by
Mary Louise Rasmussen, Eric Rofes, and
Susan Talburt
YOUTHAND SEXUALITIES: PLEASURE, SUBVERSION,AND INSUBORDINATIONINANDOUTOF SCHOOLS
Copyright © Mary Louise Rasmussen, Eric Rofes, and Susan Talburt, 2004.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2004 by
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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-6487-8
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ISBN 978-1-4039-6488-5 ISBN 978-1-4039-8191-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403981912
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Youth and sexualities : pleasure, subversion, and insubordination in and out of schools /
edited by Mary Louise Rasmussen, Eric Rofes, and Susan Talburt.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-6487-4
1. Gay youth—Psychology. 2. Lesbian youth—Psychology. 3. Youth—Sexual
behavior. 4. Homosexuality—United States. 5. School environment—United States.
I. Rasmussen, Mary Louise, 1967- II. Rofes, Eric E., 1954- III. Talburt, Susan.
HQ76.25.Y68 2004
306.76’6’0835—dc22
2004049588
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Autobookcomp.
First edition: December 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction: Transforming Discourses of Queer Youth
and Educational Practices Surrounding Gender,
Sexuality, and Youth
Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, and Mary Louise Rasmussen 1
Part I: Rethinking Adults and Youth
1. Intelligibility and Narrating Queer Youth
Susan Talburt 17
2. Martyr-Target-Victim: Interrogating Narratives of
Persecution and Suffering among Queer Youth
Eric Rofes 41
3. The Historical Regulation of Sexuality and Gender
of Students and Teachers: An Intertwined Legacy
Jackie M. Blount and Sine Anahita 63
4. Subject to Scrutiny: Taking Foucauldian
Genealogies to Narratives of Youth Oppression
Valerie Harwood 85
5. Between Sexuality and Narrative: On the Language
of Sex Education
Jen Gilbert 109
iv Contents
Part II: Rethinking Youth Practices
6. Safety and Subversion: The Production of
Sexualities and Genders in School Spaces
Mary Louise Rasmussen 131
7. Scout’s Honor: Duty, Citizenship, and the
Homoerotic in the Boy Scouts of America
Andrea Coleman, Mary Ehrenworth, and Nancy Lesko 153
8. Agency in Borderland Discourses: Engaging in
Gaybonics for Pleasure, Subversion, and Retaliation
Mollie V. Blackburn 177
9. Bent as a Ballet Dancer: The Possibilities for and
Limits of Legitimate Homomasculinity in School
Deborah Youdell 201
10. Melancholy and the Productive Negotiations of
Power in Sissy Boy Experience
David McInnes 223
Notes on Contributors 243
Index 246
Acknowledgments
One of the more pleasurable tasks in editing a collection such as this is
thanking those who made it possible. This collection reflects ongoing
conversations, papers, and emails over several years and we would like
to acknowledge the international community of researchers, within and
outside this collection, who continue to support and foster such work.
To all those who contributed chapters to this collection, thanks for
providing an erudite and extremely engaging body of work. And, to
Amanda Johnson from Palgrave, a big thank you for sponsoring this
project. To the queer young people, who are the principal subjects of
this collection, you continue to inspire our research and practice in this
area. It is our hope that collections such as this will contribute to a more
complex picture of these young people’s lives. Mary Louise Rasmussen
would like to pay special tribute to Susan Talburt and Eric Rofes for
their incredible generosity, patience, and knowledge; I couldn’t have
asked for better companions in this task.
Portions of chapter one, ‘‘Intelligibility and Narrating Queer Youth,’’
by Susan Talburt, initially appeared as ‘‘Construction of LGBT Youth:
Opening Up Subject Positions,’’ Theory into Practice Vol. 43,(2)
(spring 2004). Copyright 2004 by the College of Education, The Ohio
State University. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Chapter eight, ‘‘Agency in Borderland Discourse: Engaging in Gay-
bonics for Pleasure, Subversion, and Retaliation,’’ by Mollie Black-
burn, will appear in modified form as ‘‘Agency Borderland Discourse:
Examining Language Use in a Community Center with Black Queer
Youth’’ in an upcoming issue of Teachers College Record. Printed here
with permission of Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. The article is scheduled to
appear in volume 107, issue 1 in January 2005.
Introduction
Transforming Discourses of Queer
Youth and Educational Practices
Surrounding Gender, Sexuality,
and Youth
Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, and
Mary Louise Rasmussen
This book is an intervention into the ways we conceptualize, represent,
and work with all young people, but especially with queer youth. At a
moment in which some argue that issues of access to public education
and safety in peer groups will be the next major civil rights struggle
facing schools in the West, we put forward this book as a strategic
intervention aimed at altering the very premises that guide the actions of
teachers, counselors, youth workers, and researchers. As school sys-
tems address bullying, harassment, and legal threats for failing to
provide equal educational access, an entire army of professionals is
being marshaled to create effective responses to newly identified ‘‘prob-
lems’’ related to gender, sexuality, schooling, and youth cultures. The
editors of this volume have grave concerns about a range of policies and
activities that are emerging internationally and that are intended to
‘‘protect’’ queer youth, create ‘‘safe’’ school cultures, and effectively
divide ‘‘queer youth’’ from ‘‘straight youth.’’ In this context we deploy
the term ‘‘queer’’ to refer to individuals and communities of young
people who may identify themselves as not straight.
The concerns we articulate above about policies and activities
pertaining to ‘‘queer youth’’ are also informed by queer theory. In
Foucault and Queer Theory (1999), Tamsin Spargo notes that queer
theories ‘‘expose and explore naturalized models of gender’’ (56) and
sexualities. In the queer theoretical tradition, our text also tries to undo
2 Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, and Mary Louise Rasmussen
the cultural understandings that continually reinscribe and naturalize
the heterosexual/homosexual binary in the service of ‘‘queer youth.’’
We ourselves have participated in the establishment of programs and
services for queer youth; we have engaged in political action related to
school-based oppression and violence; we have written academic pa-
pers and books that examine the ways in which schools respond—or
fail to respond—to gender and sexual diversity. We see schools not as
purified spaces nurturing innocent children but as concentrated sites of
contestation around issues of power and identity. While we share in
many people’s commitment to civil society, participatory democracy,
and public education, we do not believe that the safety and empowerment
of children and youth are enhanced or strengthened when liberal
constructs and narrow interventions constitute the entire range of
cultural responses to complex social dynamics.
To our minds, the majority of discourses related to adolescence,
sexuality, and gender are dominated by liberal understandings of
complex matters such as identity, tolerance, safety, and equity. Partially
as a result of such discourses, we believe that queer- and heterosexual-
identified youth often find themselves in untenable situations, increas-
ingly defined by a dynamic that somehow manages to promote the
utility of separating ‘‘queer’’ and ‘‘normal’’ young people. This text
aims to critique and undermine this liberal discourse and move it
toward radical reinterpretations that have the potential to transform
cultural understandings and practices relating to ‘‘queer’’ and ‘‘nor-
mal’’ youth communities.
A certain common sense has overtaken public and professional
discussion about queer youth, a common sense that frames them
overwhelmingly in terms of oppression and victimization. A parallel
common sense has overtaken gay and lesbian political activism in the
West, one that is driven to mainstream or normalize gay and lesbian
people as a strategy for gaining entry into civil society (D’Emilio and
Freedman 1997; Vaid 1995; Warner 1999). This volume challenges
both of these seemingly commonsensical approaches to social justice. In
fact, we believe that the intersection of these two common senses creates
a limited context for understanding youth in fully complex ways,
constrains analysis of cultural identities and conflicts, and serves
effectively as a barrier to transformative practices in and out of schools.
The creeping liberalism that repeatedly marshals tropes of victimization
and stigma as tactics encouraging support for queer youth emerges out
of a broader gay political denigration of institutional multicultural
approaches of integrity in favor of an obsession with acceptability.
Hence people who are nonheterosexual-identified are expected to beg
Introduction 3
for liberal, and often only symbolic, forms of support and tolerance (see
Kumashiro 2002).
As social conceptualizations and cultural understandings of young
people continue to change, we note the creation of an extended
adolescence, a constructed developmental stage that is itself problem-
atic (Lesko 2001). While the extension of adolescence has the potential
to pose profound problems for all young people, we argue that queer
youth are one of the populations that exemplify the conflicts and
contradictions inherent in this transformation. Contemporary under-
standings of youth make it nearly impossible for young people to
embrace non-normative identities or take possession of their bodies and
their lives. With these understandings reigning supreme, is it any
surprise that an entire regime of social service programs, modeled on
child-saving concepts, has emerged in the past two decades, intended to
‘‘service’’ and ‘‘protect’’ queer youth? When such cultures insist on
seeing ‘‘good’’ young people as asexual, how can there be a lesbian
seventh-grader? When society constructs teenagers as the chattel prop-
erty of their adult parents, how can we talk about a young person’s right
to forge his or her own gender identity? When schools embrace
abstinence-only approaches to sex, how can we begin a dialogue about
young people’s sexual pleasure?
Normative frameworks, including heteronormative frameworks,
are the scaffolding that holds in place an entire system of power and
privilege that endeavors to relegate young people, people of color,
queers, and women to the symbolic fringes of society. For this reason,
we believe that confining talk about youth and institutional change to
the seeming ‘‘givens’’ of normative frameworks prevents us from more
ambitious goals. We argue for understandings of young people, queer
politics, and practices in and out of schools that interrogate the
production of identities and practices and challenge social and institu-
tional norms with a view to reforming existing practices. And key to
such reform is a revised approach to the agency of children and youth.
To understand youth and the institutions they inhabit as productive
of identities and differences is to acknowledge that both are actors, or to
imbue both youth and institutions with agency. In the present political
moment, it sometimes seems as if we have an easier time accepting the
power and agency of cultural institutions, than that of people, particu-
larly young people. Instead of setting up a sociological dichotomy of
structure versus agency, our understanding of people and institutions as
active constitutes a step against reification of queer youth or of the
spaces they inhabit. In other words, neither queer youth nor schools nor
cultural practices is narrowly seen as one thing or the other. They are in
4 Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, and Mary Louise Rasmussen
changing relations and mutually constitutive, resources and responses
rather than fixed entities. Yet there is an essentializing tendency at
present in social scientific discourse, educational practice, and in gay
and lesbian politics to understand subjects and institutions as fixed.
Perhaps more importantly in regard to queer youth, this tendency sees
both gender and sexuality as inherent or biologic, sacrifices youth self-
definition, empowerment, and autonomy in order to garner ‘‘a place at
the table’’ (Bawer 1993), and centers mainstream, white middle-class
cultural values.
In the following sections of this introductory chapter we lay out our
agenda in editing this volume by offering a brief sketch of the current
mainstream gay and lesbian political zeitgeist, dominant frameworks
for understanding queer youth, and the interventions of this text as a
whole and its individual chapters.
Queer Politics
We cannot underestimate the conservative opposition to recognition of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities, sexualities,
or cultures in schools and the lead the Religious Right has taken in
defining public schools’ approaches to sexuality in general (Irvine
2002). Yet we cannot capitulate to that conservatism by perpetuating a
discourse of queer youth that frames them as victims-in-need-of-
tolerance-and-inclusion or as ‘‘just like everyone else.’’ D’Emilio (2002)
points to a shift in queer politics that is suggestive of a cautionary stance
on the part of those who would endeavor to support queer youth:
Whereas the issues of the 1970s revolved around a demand to be left
alone, those of the 1990s call for recognition and inclusion. Instead of a
core outlook captured by the phrase ‘‘here we are,’’ the agitation around
family, school, and work puts forward a different demand: ‘‘we want in.’’
If the former appears as a simple statement of fact that can be realized
through visibility and the creation of public communities, the latter
demands both action and response. It requires, for its realization, a
strategy of winning allies, of building support outside the community
from the people—heterosexuals—whose lives too will inevitably be
changed by the full inclusion of homosexuals in the core institutions of
American society. (97)
This search for allies all too often results in the desexualizing of the
mainstream LGBT movement as it searches for normalcy and respecta-
bility (Warner 1999). While normalization might enable greater inclu-