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5 books match the query 'Sexual minority youth'

cover of Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child

Ambivalent Childhoods

Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child

Jacob Breslow

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible

The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them.

Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young. 

Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people. 

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cover of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Kids on the Street

Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Joseph Plaster

Duke University Press, 2023

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.
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cover of LGBTQAI+ Books for Children and Teens: Providing a Window for All

LGBTQAI+ Books for Children and Teens

Providing a Window for All

Christina Dorr

American Library Association, 2018

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cover of Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queerness

Minor Troubles

Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queerness

Erin J. Rand

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

In Minor Troubles, Erin J. Rand investigates a series of controversies about youth sexuality and queerness from the early twenty-first century: adult concerns about teen sexting, the bullying and suicides of queer kids, trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school, and sex education. In the public deliberation and mediation of each of these controversies, the imagined qualities of childhood—innocence, vulnerability, nonsexuality, and, crucially, whiteness—are deployed by adults to justify the protection of children. However, these rhetorical figurations of childhood often produce material precarities for actual young people, especially youth of color and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth.

Rand foregrounds the fundamental role of racialization in forming ideas about childhood, arguing that the image of innocent white childhood depends upon the dehumanization of racialized youth. Moreover, the rhetorical process of figuration produces vulnerability and constrains agency for real young people and creates cultural ideas about childhood that come to justify policies, discipline behaviors, regulate identities, control knowledges, and determine interventions that shape children’s lives, bodies, and experiences.

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cover of Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Brainer, Amy

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph

Interweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike.
 
Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.
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