LGBTQ street youth talk back: a meditation on resistance and witnessing

Abstract

In this ethnography of LGBTQ street youth, I argue that despite the regulation and containment of their bodies, queer street youth consistently create spaces of resistance that move them away from the tropes of infection, contamination, and deservedness that are inscripted onto the bodies of queer youth. Using the work of feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, this essay articulates a framework for resistance researchers – scholars who enact a “faithful witnessing” in solidarity with the communities they are describing, a movement away from the radical othering that often happens in social science research. It is in this positioning as a faithful witness that researchers can attend to the deconstruction of the discursive climates of deficit tropes that obscure the gestures and maneuvers of resistance. The tropes of contamination and irresponsibility intersect many of the experiences of LGBTQ street youth in ways that implicate not only LGBTQ street youth, but also other marginalized bodies.

Keywords:

• LGBTQ youth
• resistance
• witnessing
• urban ethnography
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

Several folks were just ¡presente! with earlier versions of this paper. Sofia Villenas at Cornell University, Ron Glass at UC Santa Cruz, and Wanda Alarcon at UC Berkeley were instrumental in my thinking around resistance. I would also thank the staff and fellows at the Center for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz’s COR Grant Program for their support.

Notes

1. Maria Lugones (2003) talks often of resistance in tight spaces – a spatiality of “one’s relations, of one’s productions and their meaning in both concrete and an abstract sense. You are concrete. Your spatiality, constructed as an intersection following the designs of power, isn’t.” This essay attempts to operationalize Lugones’ concepts around resistance. To recognize resistance in “tight spaces” is about seeing “how oneself and others violate this spatiality or inhabit it with great resistance, without willful collaboration” (10). From Lugones’ Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.

2. See McCoy (1993).

3. Gregory Lewis, “Homeless Youth Shelter Stirs Debate in Castro,” San Francisco Examiner, February 26, 1999.

4. Medical researcher James A. Fletcher evokes St. Paul’s condemnation of men who have sex with men in an editorial of the Southern Medical Journal, February 1984.

5. See Mroz (2010).

6. “Clarissa” is a pseudonym. All subjects in this study were assigned codes and pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality and complete anonymity. No names, places, or any identifiable information were collected during this study.

7. See Baron (1999).

8. Kaposi’s Sarcoma is an opportunistic infection often associated with the HIV virus.

9. “Deservedness” is the discourse that argues that some folks deserve help, while others, through their own recklessness or through their lack of initiative or ambition, or because they are a criminal, deserve little or no help from state programs such as welfare, health care, or social services.