Resisting embodied failure: Queer and trans adult allies welcoming queer and trans youth

Abstract

This paper presents the initial data from a larger project, considered through the lens of failure from the perspective of Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) as a way of resisting hegemonic narratives about success and how it is culturally defined. As suggested by Halberstam’s use of failure, the limitations or undesirable elements of failure reside in rigid institutional definitions of success. As such, I will examine the failure of adults and institutions in queer and trans youth lives, and how uncreative and limiting rules and roles within schools require queer and trans youth to experience failure. By contrast, queer and trans adults as collaborators and accomplices to youth recognize the failure that has shown up for queer and trans youth in institutions, and redefine failure and success in solidarity with youth. Using an understanding of failure as a particularly queer epistemology and ontology, I look at this reframing of failure as resistance to institutions, such as schools, where young people are often blamed for their failure. This blame contributes to the violence young people experience in schools.

Keywords:

• Queer failure
• queer youth
• trans youth
• adult allies
• solidarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Darla Linville

Darla Linvilleis an Associate Professor of educational foundations and research at Augusta University. She researches discourses of sexuality and gender in schools, and how those discourses limit student engagement in educational spaces. Dr. Linville's research focuses on institutional failures and attempts through policy, curricular, pedagogical, and school climate changes to make schools “less bad” spaces in which queer and trans youth bodies must exist.