Queer Youth and Everyday Spaces in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand: A Photovoice Project

<p>Queer people are often ‘othered’ in everyday spaces because of the assumptions, practices, and beliefs that reinforce heterosexuality and cis-gendered bodies as normal and natural. For queer youth, these experiences are further exacerbated by their age and agency. Yet there has been little explicit geographic scholarship focused on understanding how queer youth navigate heteronormativity and practice their subjectivities in different everyday spaces. In this thesis, I draw on the work of queer theory and geographies of sexuality literature to consider how subjectivities are constructed, controlled, and experienced by some queer youth in everyday spaces of Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. I work within a transformative epistemology, and use photovoice as my research method to present the reflective engagements of six queer youth aged between sixteen and twenty-two through their photographs and accompanying narratives. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the participants’ visual and verbal texts yields contradicting and varying experiences of heteronormativity. Processes of subjectivity negotiation, queering space, conforming strategies, and gender performance influence how queer youth are placed within their everyday spaces. Safe spaces, like nature, the stage, and queer youth groups provide queer youth with the ability to be self-expressive, escape from the pressures of everyday life, and be surrounded with other queer people. Such spaces can be enhanced through activism, queer representation, and with the presence of animals and friends. This research contributes academically to research within geographies of sexualities and works towards disseminating these findings through a collaborative zine to support efforts to counter some of the dominating effects of heteronormativity identified by the queer youth.</p>

Exploring Tobacco and E-Cigarette Use among Queer Adults during the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The purpose of this narrative study is to describe the vaping and smoking characteristics of Queer people ages 18–34 before March of 2020 and to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted those behaviors since March of 2020. In total, 31 participants were screened. Thirteen participants were screened prior to the emergence of COVID-19, and 18 were screened when study protocols transitioned to a remote setting (pre and during). Of the 27 eligible participants, a total of 25 participants completed the study. Most participants (n = 13) self-identified as male, followed by five identified as female, four self-identified as gender non-binary, and three identified as transgender. The most common sexual orientation amongst participants was gay (n = 10), with bisexual being the second-most reported. Approximately 20 Queer participants reported using cigarettes, 14 participants self-reported using electronic devices, and 11 reported using hookah. Twenty participants reported smoking ten or less, and four self-reported using 11–20 cigarettes per day. Approximately, 92% of participants (n = 23) indicate that they are using an e-cigarette and regular cigarettes, and 57% of participants (n = 12) report using one pod or cartridge per day. The three themes that emerged in this study are: (1) Queer people during COVID-19 are experiencing heightened minority stress; (2) Queer people are unfamiliar with smoking cessation; and (3) vaping and smoking are attributed to stress and anxiety. Queer participants are likely to be dual users of cigarette and vaping products. This present study provides increasing evidence that Queer people are experiencing heightened stress and anxiety and using cigarette smoking and vaping to cope during the COVID-19 pandemic.

LGBTQ+ Communities and Digital Media

Digital media offer spaces to many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people (LGBTQ+) for connection, support, and friendship and hosts vital resources for learning and practicing diverse genders and sexualities. In this chapter, the authors review key research on LGBTQ+ communities and identities in digital spaces over several decades, dividing the chapter into three main sections: (1) community and connection, (2) romance and dating, and (3) identity work. In the first section on community and connection, they examine research centered on how LGBTQ+ people use digital media to forge connections and build “communities.” While this term is contested in the literature, many LGBTQ+ people use it to describe their experiences of digital networks. Second, they outline the growing body of research on how LGBTQ+ people use digital media in their romantic and sexual lives, from dating/hook-up apps to social media. They consider the challenges, pleasures, and opportunities in how LGBTQ+ people use digital media for sex and dating practices and potential. Third, they reflect on how these connections have figured into ongoing research on LGBTQ+ identities, where digital media allow LGBTQ+ people to develop shared languages to describe their experiences, to reflect on their lives, and to rehearse modes of self-representation.

Queer Youth and Everyday Spaces in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand: A Photovoice Project

<p>Queer people are often ‘othered’ in everyday spaces because of the assumptions, practices, and beliefs that reinforce heterosexuality and cis-gendered bodies as normal and natural. For queer youth, these experiences are further exacerbated by their age and agency. Yet there has been little explicit geographic scholarship focused on understanding how queer youth navigate heteronormativity and practice their subjectivities in different everyday spaces. In this thesis, I draw on the work of queer theory and geographies of sexuality literature to consider how subjectivities are constructed, controlled, and experienced by some queer youth in everyday spaces of Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. I work within a transformative epistemology, and use photovoice as my research method to present the reflective engagements of six queer youth aged between sixteen and twenty-two through their photographs and accompanying narratives. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the participants’ visual and verbal texts yields contradicting and varying experiences of heteronormativity. Processes of subjectivity negotiation, queering space, conforming strategies, and gender performance influence how queer youth are placed within their everyday spaces. Safe spaces, like nature, the stage, and queer youth groups provide queer youth with the ability to be self-expressive, escape from the pressures of everyday life, and be surrounded with other queer people. Such spaces can be enhanced through activism, queer representation, and with the presence of animals and friends. This research contributes academically to research within geographies of sexualities and works towards disseminating these findings through a collaborative zine to support efforts to counter some of the dominating effects of heteronormativity identified by the queer youth.</p>

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice

The history, principles, and contributions of the reproductive justice (RJ) framework to queer family formation is the nexus that connects the coalitional potential between RJ and queer justice. How the three pillars of RJ intersect with the systemic marginalization of LGBTQ people—especially poor queer people of color—helps clarify how the RJ framework can elaborate the intersectional understandings of queer reproductive politics and kin.

Public Opinion Change and the Uniqueness of Gay Rights

Chapter 8 demonstrates that support for marriage equality is the fastest liberalizing attitude in the history of American public opinion. Abortion rights and gay rights divide the American public along similar lines (by region, religiosity, and party affiliation), but gay rights has undergone a remarkable transformation, while attitudes toward abortion rights are relatively static. One reason for the difference is that gay people have come out of the closet, while abortion histories remain closeted. Chapter 8 also shows that support for marriage equality seems to have made Americans more appreciative of all kinds of queer rights, including transgender rights. Marriage equality reduced the stigmas faced by all queer people and paved the way for more appreciation of all kinds of gay rights, exactly as the proponents of marriage equality said that it would.

Revisiting berdache

The transformation of French bardache, ultimately a borrowing from Italian denoting the passive partner in sex between men, to English berdache, referring to Native American nonbinary gender identities or roles, involved a complex translinguistic dialogue in North America in the early nineteenth century. This history has never before been adequately explained. While berdache is now largely obsolete and considered offensive due to its exoticizing, colonialist, and ethnocentric origins, its multifaceted history encapsulates variation and change on phonetic, graphic, semantic, pragmatic, axiological, and ideological levels. In recent decades, Indigenous queer people have adopted Two-Spirit as a means of challenging this imposed categorization and asserting linguistic self-determination. With the aim of correcting previous accounts and omnipresent misconceptions about the history of the lexeme berdache, this paper uses a qualitative philological method to describe the development of this internationalism from a linguistic perspective.