Abstract
Rob Cover, Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? Ashgate Publishing: Farnham, 2012; 172 pp.: IBSN: 978-1-4094-4447-3, £55.00 hbk
The issue of queer youth suicide is a contemporary political subject, requiring multi-disciplinary academic enquiry, which might benefit the life chances of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) youth. Heightened discourse was stimulated on queer youth suicide after a number of gay male youths killed themselves in September 2010 in the USA, and primary responses included the web-based It Gets Better Project, which presented video blogs from contributors from all over the world offering positive messages of support. Rob Cover’s timely publication engages with the tragic and persistent issue of gay youth suicide, foregrounding the significance of queer theory, in attempting to explore new possibilities, through theoretical imagination.
Potentially building on the foundational work of Rich Savin-Williams on gay youth identity, Caitlin Ryan’s and Donna Flutterman’s explorations of lesbian and gay youth care and counselling, and specifically the discourse of Michel Dorias and Simon La Jeunesse in Dead Boys Can't Dance: Sexual Orientation, Masculinity, and Suicide (2004), Rob Cover’s Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity, relates issues of media representation, alongside the discourse presented within online communities, to the life chances of queer youth. At the same time this book is a challenging read in relating the expression of young lives to identity deconstruction and contingency as evident in queer theory, rather than identity construction and affirmation as evident in social construction.
However this book’s strength is its adventurous methodological approach, in relating queer theory to expressions of vulnerability within queer youth. Rob Cover offers a sophisticated and developed discussion of key writers within queer theory, foregrounding the impact of Judith Butler and her work Precarious Life (2004), as a paradigm relative to issues of queer youth suicide. Despite this, I would argue that more attention should have been afforded to the constructive potential of social worlds with regards to sexuality, as evident in the substantial work of Jeffrey Weeks. This might have more thoroughly contextualized history, politics and morality, relating wider theoretical models of transgression and subversion. Also Cover’s strongly determined focus on Butler (particularly in the conclusion), and the significance of queer performativity limits engagements that might have been made for queer youth, further exploring the potential of sexual citizenship such as evident in Ken Plummer’s work Telling Sexual Stories (1995), or placing in deeper context the significance of neoliberalism such as evident in Katherine Sender’s work Business Not Politics (2004).
Despite this Cover’s analysis is worthy and stimulating, particularly with regard to his central focus on the It Gets Better Project (Chapter 3), relating this to the dissemination of its contributors with regards to commodity and identity achievement. He considers that while the project offers use, it stigmatizes the identity of queer youth, as eternally fixed in ‘losing hope of escape from the intolerable pain of bullying’ (p. 64) at school, promulgating the idea that queer youth are fixed in an archetypal narrative of vulnerability. Furthermore Cover’s discussion on LGBT community (Chapter 6) offers insight into issues of caring for queer youth, questioning the mainstreaming of queer culture itself. He affirms that contemporary LGBT community ‘norms, practices, cultures and representations might unwittingly be implicated in some of the difficulties experienced by younger queer persons, particularly in reproducing forms of isolation and exclusion’ (p. 117), evident in preferred forms of identity and engagements with neoliberalism, as enabling.
At the same time Cover suggests that although media representations have evolved and more people are talking about queer youth, as evident in a number of films and dramas that he also references, many of these representations, are founded on a need to relate normality of type, and the means of commodity. Hence the care of queer youth is determined as a performative trait, rather than constructed as a necessary component of community.
Nevertheless, although Cover highlights that queer theory is ‘wrongly thought of as being the result of critical theory which is ‘out of touch’ with lived lives’ (p. 145), I would argue that his theoretical model highlights such a disparity. Hence while Cover’s summative contention is that the prevention of suicide might be enabled ‘through critique whereby deconstruction rather than affirmation [could be] the tool to forging resilience’ (p. 148), I find that the drive to critique affirmation, overemphasizes the ability of queer youth to adopt models of identity deconstruction. Similarly although he is right to attest that ‘what is required is the radical subversive act of persistently reframing sexualities and identities as contingent’ (p. 143), I believe such an approach is more philosophical than youth identity conscious. For queer youth it is the lived moment and the potential of specific subjectivity connected to rites of passage, for example evident in fixing a sense of belonging or the instinctive fulfilment of desire, which forms a way to move forward, not the suspension of identities, or places to be.
However Rob Cover’s book is an essential read, as it offers excellent insight into possible connections that could be made between queer theories, and the issue of queer youth suicide. While I would argue that there is determination to focus on queer theory, his critical thinking will stimulate many readers.