"I am something else. For now": Exploring youth conversations about gender online.
Date
2017-10-04
Authors
Walker, Elisabeth M. Mattie
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Abstract
Although Child and Youth Care research and pedagogy is committed to diversity, as yet
this field has produced very little research that specifically focuses on supporting children
and youth who do not identify with cis/heteronormative standards of gender. Further,
despite that recent media attention to trans issues and gender diversity has sparked
questions concerning how issues of gender are approached in practice, there continues to
be a distinct lack of consensus on how best to talk about these issues, how to define
gender, and how to approach these issues in practice. Through combining Situational
Analysis (Clarke, 2005) with aspects of Relativity Theory this thesis makes a
contribution towards filling the existing gap in the research. This study provides a
descriptive exploration into the many ways language is being utilized by young people to
shape, evoke, and construct the diverse understandings of what gender means in their
lives by analyzing data gathered through the social media platform, Tumblr. This inquiry
shows that these young people create unique terminology to describe, discuss, define and
share their engagement with gender categories and identities. The findings of this study
suggest that a creative, nuanced, and flexible understanding of the ways in which the
language and terminology shape and influences how gender is lived and then discussed
within specific contexts both on- and offline, will greatly assist practitioners to support
youth with this highly complex topic.
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Keywords
gender, gender diversity, gender variance, youth, young people, gender nonconforming, trans youth, Situation Analysis