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Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity

Online ISBN:
9781479807512
Print ISBN:
9781479879601
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity

Mary Robertson
Mary Robertson
California State University, San Marcos
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Published online:
23 May 2019
Published in print:
27 November 2018
Online ISBN:
9781479807512
Print ISBN:
9781479879601
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

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