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Reviewed by:
  • Queer Youth Cultures
  • Heather Rachelle White
Queer Youth Cultures. Edited by Susan Driver. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. 307 pp. $27.95.

The picture of queer young people, drawn from most popular media sources, is usually one of unique vulnerability: they suffer coming out woes, hostile school grounds, disproportionately high suicide rates, and parental rejection. This anthology, edited by social science professor Susan Driver, is a welcome challenge to those predominantly victim-driven images. Driver, also recently the author of Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media (Peter Lang, 2007), seeks to reorient scholarship toward "culturally transformative engagements" by youth who "refuse to be simplistically characterized according to their wounds and abjections" (p. 7). The anthology, thus, decidedly casts to the sidelines mainstream and elite cultural productions that youth might passively consume, and it focuses predominantly upon queer youth as cultural creators and negotiators: they are media critics, movement activists, 'zine writers, do-it-yourself video producers, and self-reflexive sex workers.

As this collection reorients common images of LGBT youth, many of its contributors also work to queerly re-imagine what might constitute youth studies. The most insightful contribution to this theme is an article by Judith Halberstam ("What's that Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives"), who theorizes temporality and aging in relation to queer cultures. Arguing that "queer subcultures afford us a perfect opportunity to depart from a normative model of youth cultures as stages on the way to adulthood," Halberstam raises the notion of "queer time" as a alternative mode of temporality operating in queer subcultures (p. 44).

Halberstam's article is the first in a theme, titled "Performative Queer Youth Cultures, Embodiments, and Communities," the largest and most eclectically organized of the book's three subsections. Three contributors examine queer self-representation in youth-produced subcultural media: Angela Wilson ("The Galaxy is Gay") analyzes intergenerational relations in lesbian [End Page 288] punk rock, Jama Shelton ("Redefining Reality through Self-Representational Performance") explores queer youth self-representation in guided media projects, and Jackie Regales ("My Identity is Fluid as Fuck") investigates transgender youth 'zine publications.

Where these authors, along with Halberstam, emphasize liberatory narratives in queer youth subcultures, the final two articles analyze disciplinary discourses implicit within two distinct forms of pedagogy. David McInnes and Cristyn Davies ("Articulating Sissy Boy Queerness within and against Discourses of Tolerance and Pride") deconstruct Australian anti-homophobia curricula, and Anna Hickey-Moody, Mary Louise Rasmussen, and Valerie Harwood ("How to Be a Real Lesbian") use Henri Giroux's notion of "public pedagogy" to theorize lesbian youth subcultures on the website The Pink Sofa. McInnes and Davies' consideration of mainstream educational material suggests that other contributors have perhaps too quickly replaced the still potent image of the abject queer youth; these authors argue that the curricula's discourse of tolerance continues to produce the otherness of a gendered "sissy boy" while shoring up the gender normativity of those who must consider how to respond to—and "tolerate"—him (p. 120). Hickey-Moody and her co-authors usefully consider how young lesbians' media engagement might be disciplinary as well as exploratory. They argue that The Pink Sofa website functions as a disciplinary forum for "public pedagogy" wherein young women learn to perform and construct lesbian identities (p. 128).

The two remaining sections in the book balance their inclusion of mainstream and alternative media outputs and activist projects, and these smaller sections also cohere more readily around central themes. Part two, titled "Desiring Youth and Un/Popular Cultures," includes Mark Lipton's fascinating ethnographic study of queer identity formation as a mediated practice—articulated through subjects' queer readings of comic books, movies, and T.V. sitcoms. Lipton's article is nicely paired with Melissa Rigney's analysis of the film Boys Don't Cry, about murdered transperson Brandon Teena. Triangulating these contributors' audience analysis and film analysis in the third article, we hear next from the represented figure himself. Zeb J. Tortorici ("Queering Pornography") reflects upon his own participation in gay sex work as a university student. Tortorici's self-reflexive contribution courageously disrupts ordinary relationships between the scholar and object of study. The...

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