The World-Making Practices of Queer Youth

Popular discourses about queer teenagers offer two narratives: either young gay and lesbian youth are victims of a homophobic culture who experience increased suicide rates, drug use, depression, and alienation, or they no longer desire to identify as gay and lesbian and wish to be as “normal” as their straight counterparts. ¹ Susan Driver’s new edited collection Queer Youth Cultures is a much-needed intervention in these mainstream portrayals of queer youth, investigating queer youth as agents in their own world building in a variety of contexts. In fourteen chapters organized in three sections, the contributors of Queer Youth Cultures offer important insights into the lives of queer youth who have defied or refigured what it means to be a young citizen in the United States or Canada in the early twenty-first century. Rather than build a totalizing view, Driver’s collection focuses on the local activities of queer youth, arguing that “queer youth are not discursively containable, and they are not reducible to any single dimension of their embodiment, identity, or situation” (2). Ultimately, rather than describe what and who queer youth are, this book records and theorizes what queer youth do and produce in particular settings, making it a rich archive of queer youths’ discursive activities and a cogent theorization of queer youth subcultures.

The first section focuses on how queer youth perform culture and create communities, and many essays come from the perspectives of ethnographic participants. Judith Halberstam’s chapter, “What’s That Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives,” provides a strong start to the collection, describing the discursive activities of queer youth in subcultural scenes such as dyke music, drag king performances, and spoken word. Halberstam, as well as other contributors, problematizes and deepens the reader’s understanding of what it means to be young, what it means to be a fan, and the influential role that feminism plays in queer youth cultures. Angela Wilson’s chapter on lesbian punk rock also makes a compelling case for the role that feminism still plays in youth cultures, despite dominant narratives that feminism is no longer salient there. She stresses that feminism is still alive and well in dykecore, especially through do-it-yourself (DIY) political activism. Jama Shelton chronicles how queer youth represent themselves against dominant homonormative narratives and discourses of shame in video performances, through a program called Turned Up Volume in Houston. Other essays in this section investigate antihomophobic educational materials in Australia, transgender zinesters, and women using the social networking site the Pink Sofa. The book also takes the unconventional turn of including a photo-essay: Cass Bird’s evocative images confirm that queer youth cultures cannot be reduced to any single representation.

The last half of the book is divided into two sections: one on the reading of popular culture and the other on queer youth’s political activism. Mark Lipton’s ethnographic study investigates how youth often find subversive readings in fairly mainstream texts, such as the author’s own reading of a gay Jughead in Archie Comics. Andil Gosine’s chapter is a strong exploration, through a study of the film Banana Boy and the zine FOB, of how queer immigrants in Canada negotiate their multiple subjectivities in terms of citizenship. The book closes with three excellent chapters (Megan Davidson’s on trans youth activism in New York City; Neal Ritchie’s on queer anarchist activists in Asheville, North Carolina; and Ziysah D. Markson’s on queer citizenship in Peterborough, Ontario) that explore notions of citizenship, forms of community building, and various modes of activism.

Because of the variety of methodologies employed by its contributors and its refusal to build a single description of what it means to be queer and young, Queer Youth Cultures could easily lack cohesion. Instead, Driver has collected essays that jell through their insistence that queer youth are not as containable as many, academics included, would like to believe. The collection complicates and invalidates assumptions about queer youth in North America: that...