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 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-6487-8 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. 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-