“It’s not fiction, it’s my life”: LGBTQ+ youth of color and kinships in an urban school

ABSTRACT

This article argues that chosen family structures are critical for LGBTQ+ youth of color. Further, it articulates the inherent sense of agency that is found in choosing a family—something that not only shapes young ways of being, knowing, and doing but impacts their ability to resist toxic cultural norms that all too often position students for the school-to-prison and school-to-coffin pipelines. Finally, this article argues that schools should attend more closely to chosen family structures and find ways to include them in school culture to better sustain students, classrooms, and communities of color.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional resources

1. McCready, L. T. (2004). Some challenges facing queer youth programs in urban high schools: Racial segregation and de-normalizing whiteness. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, 1, 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1300/J367v01n03_05

This article is a brief look at how queer youth of color are impacted by various school programs. It attends to the way that advisors of school enrichment programs are often unaware of the supports necessary to help queer youth of color thrive in schools and their communities.

2. The Gay Lesbian Straight Network (GLSEN)- www.glsen.org

This website aims to create safe and affirming schools. They include several resources for teachers on how to create and maintain safe spaces in schools and how to incorporate LGBTQ+ identities into the curriculum.

3. The Center for Disease Control, LGBTQ Resources- https://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/youth-resources.htm.

This website includes links to several other pages that can be helpful for youth and their guardians. Links include everything from how to facilitate a child’s coming out process to HIV/AIDS resources.

Notes

¹ Throughout this paper, all proper nouns referring to the school or participants are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the youth in this project.:

² This paper uses chosen kinships/families rather than fictive kinships to attend to the tensions and critiques within anthropological dialogs about kinships (e.g., Geertz, 1968; Mead, 1928). The construction as families as blood-relations is a rather Western notion, and the use of “chosen” is used to articulate questions of agency and non-Western constructions of family lines.

³ For more on this method, see Gershon (2017).

⁴ For more on this significant theory, see Ortner’s (2006) text, Anthropology and social theory: Culture, power, and the acting subject.

⁵ Here I am following Barad’s (2007) dialogue on intra-actions, or the human and non-human entities that form and inform our relationships and our ability to enact agency. To see more on this dialogue, see Barad’s book Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.