The Possibilities and Futurities of LGBTQ Youth

Abstract

Abstract LGBTQ scholarship has maintained the focus and analysis of LGBTQ youth as the other and has failed to critically examine what it might mean in theory and in practice to encompass a nonvictimized intersectional identity with the possibilities of its disruption. This review is a critical analysis of the potentiality and limitations of “queerness,” with an emphasis on queer of color critique within educational research. Rooted in the work of critical scholars of color and situated within the U.S. context, this chapter explores the way “queer” has been taken up and problematized by educational scholars. Starting with the premise that queer theory would be able to make sexuality and desire central rather than peripheral to radical politics, this critique of queer and nonbinary youth scholarship pays special attention to the shift from LGBTQ studies in education to a queer and of color framework whose efforts to unveil liberatory possibilities are blocked by the given state of affairs—including a critical understanding of race, class, gender, and capitalism—and imagining what alternatives and futurities are possible for LGBTQ youth.