Abstract
How do young people become sexual and gendered? How do they put to use the political movements, narratives, and cultural resources available to them? In Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity, Mary Robertson undertakes an ethnographic inquiry into the lives and practices of youth at Spectrum, an LGBTQ youth drop-in center in an urban center in the western United States. Asking, ‘What is it exactly that counts as sexuality?’ (p. 15), Robertson conducted fieldwork in 2012–13, including life history interviews and participant-observation, to explore how young people’s sexuality is informed by orientation, desire, behavior, and identity. Rather than take gender or sexuality for granted, Robertson focuses on becoming, processes of ‘forming identities within a particular social, historical, and cultural context and representation and recognition within family, media, and community’ (p. 4).
Robertson locates her fieldwork in an era of relative reform, during which Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act were repealed, Congress passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to include gender identity, numerous celebrities came out, and anti-bullying and ‘It Gets Better’ discourses proliferated. She notes that as she sent the book to press five years later, same-sex marriage had been legalized in 2015, backlashes ensued, and the Trump administration fomented a threatening landscape for minoritized subjects. Positioning her time at Spectrum as a moment when LGBTQ youth became recognized as thinkable subjects, Robertson inflects her ethnography historically, asking, ‘What is different about becoming sexual now?’ (p. 39).
The youth at Spectrum are working-class and low-income, with white youth the majority and youth of color, particularly Latinx and Black, strongly represented. Chapters interweave Spectrum’s practices, the youths’ narratives, and theorizations of becoming gendered and sexual. Robertson foregrounds her anxieties about ‘belonging, intention, and trust’ (p. 2) as a straight white woman whose privilege positions her both to reproduce and dismantle inequality. She engages Ahmed’s conceptualization of ‘queer orientation,’ queer of color analysis, and sexual script theory to underscore becoming sexual as a process unique to individuals while also eschewing the precarity/resiliency dichotomy researchers typically ascribe to LGBTQ youth. Chapter 2 contextualizes Spectrum as a space of socialization that offers youth opportunities for non-heteronormative belonging, learning a language and culture of queer, and developing queer orientations beyond the sexual. These orientations are responses to the workings of white supremacy and capitalism as race, class, nationality, and (un)documented status intersect with gender and sexuality to queer bodies and relations. Chapter 3 focuses on the formation of gender identities and expressions, arguing that youth draw on the increasing salience of transgender discourses to enact non-heteronormative orientations. For example, while Spectrum youth do not typically ‘come out’ with a sexual orientation, naming gender identity is standard practice. Chapter 4 turns to mainstream media’s increasing normalization of queerness, arguing that alternative queer media, specifically erotic fan fiction and anime, offer youth cultural scenarios that challenge the hetero- and homonormative mainstream. Chapter 5 considers the family as young people come out to parents earlier than did previous generations. Robertson attributes the largely positive experiences the youth recount to the broader normalization of queer family formations and to her contention that the youths’ families ‘do not conform to the white, middle-class, heteropatriarchal regime of the Standard North American Family’ (p. 26).
This optimistic book reads youths’ refusals of male/female and homo/hetero binaries and identifications with such terms as pansexual, genderqueer, and heteroflexible as having much to teach adults about sexual and gender fluidity. Even as she critiques dominant normalizations of gender and sexual diversity, Robertson nonetheless positions this normalization as opening spaces for youth to proliferate new genders and sexualities. This generational optimism follows a logic that youth are ‘products of the LGBTQ rights movement [of] the 1970s’ (p. 151), that they live in an epoch of increasing rights and recognition, and that in this epoch, ‘gender identity is becoming as prevalent a part of the formation of self as sexuality’ (p. 70). But progress is not seamless, as the book’s closing sentences acknowledge: ‘Yet Spectrum is no utopia. Within the Spectrum community, boundaries are still drawn and domination still occurs, but it has tremendous potential to imagine and manifest something better. This is what gives it so much promise’ (p. 152). This acknowledgment of to-and-fro touches on my occasional frustration with Robertson’s reliance on interviews to embody her analysis. Given her extensive participant-observation, I kept wishing to see the youth in action, animating and activating Spectrum, to witness processes of adopting genders and sexualities, with all the frictions and pleasures those negotiations entail. Robertson’s intersectional analysis leads her to argue against identity politics in favor of coalitional organizing that seeks justice for all bodies, all queer orientations. To see interactions, rather than mostly read reflections, would demonstrate how young people find and create resources for worldmaking, how categories explode and proliferate, both during the book’s era of reform and with insights for the regressive present. Regardless, this is a book worth reading.
