My
research agenda concentrates on contemporary gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-identifying
youth experiences in the United States (see In Your Face: Stories From the Lives of Queer Youth,
Haworth Press, 1999). Currently, I am interested in the ways queer identities
and communication technologies intersect.
My most recent research project examined how rural young people and their advocates use local support agencies, peer networks, and the Internet’s digital environments as sites and technologies of sexual and gender representation and what I refer to as queer identity work.
(manuscript
synopsis and chapter summaries available here)
Methodologically
blending ethnography and critical content analysis, this project engages three
areas of debate: 1) I examine the unique relationships youth have to modern
constructions of sexual and gendered subjects that queer/sexuality scholarship
currently imagines. 2) Additionally, I consider how rural queer life challenges
us to theorize queer experiences in ways that break the current reliance on
urban paradigms. 3) Lastly, I look at how new media technologies take part
in producing and circulating queer categories and how the materiality of rural
young queer life increasingly—although differentially—involves entanglements
with online spaces.
I
ask: where, when, and how rural youth seeking support acquire their articulation
of LGBT identities? And, with the rapid but unequal incorporation of new information
technologies into the lives of youth and their support agencies, what difference
does the Internet’s increasing presence—and presumed ubiquity—make to youth
negotiating their sense of sexuality and gender in the rural United States?