Queer and Trans Youth, Relational Subjectivity, and Uncertain Possibilities: Challenging Research in Complicated Contexts

This article addresses complications to how different disciplines define, study, and theorize sexuality, gender, gender identity, and other intersecting categories of subjectivity, like age, race, class, ethnicity, and so on. Categories that seem to get stabilized in empirical work are destabilized in theoretical and narrative research. These differences in key definitions and even refusal to make definitions mark how different disciplines approach research on gender identities and expression and sexualities. The contingency, relationality, and space-related aspects of gender and sexual identity, so key to humanities-based work and qualitative research, may not be amenable to measurement by some research methods. In trying to sort out methodological quandaries in quantitative work, complex subjectivities become a problem to work around, not focus on. What subjectivities mean to those who are developing them or grappling with their limitations may not get the same attention as more measurable things. This article advocates for thinking more capaciously about what counts as research, pushing for recognition of the work queer communities and theorists have been doing for generations and for the work that gender and sexual minority youth continue do now. Complexity, instability, and relationality have been queer practices for a long time, stimulating and responding to generative perversities.