'Queer Youth' on Australia's Gold Coast: Researching Amid Incoherence and Multiplicity
Author(s)
Buttigieg, Bob
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2015
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Queer youth on Australia’s Gold Coast are subject, by their very presence in the city, to often rampantly heterosexual public spaces such as Surfers Paradise, or one of the many family-oriented suburbs that constitute ‘the GC’. The ways in which these young queer people learn to navigate, resist and transform such spaces are mediated by the attachments they form. Living in and moving through the Gold Coast – a major city in Queensland, arguably Australia’s most conservative state (Feeney, 2012; Radio National, 2012) – is potentially problematic for young people who identify as (or even just appear) sexually and gender diverse. ...
View more >Queer youth on Australia’s Gold Coast are subject, by their very presence in the city, to often rampantly heterosexual public spaces such as Surfers Paradise, or one of the many family-oriented suburbs that constitute ‘the GC’. The ways in which these young queer people learn to navigate, resist and transform such spaces are mediated by the attachments they form. Living in and moving through the Gold Coast – a major city in Queensland, arguably Australia’s most conservative state (Feeney, 2012; Radio National, 2012) – is potentially problematic for young people who identify as (or even just appear) sexually and gender diverse. The relationships they form with other young queer people can serve, for instance, as powerful resources for resilience. The focus of this chapter is on providing a broad overview of several key issues facing those researching ‘queer youth’, and on the ‘friendships’1 developed by queer young people on the Gold Coast as uniquely valuable for surviving what I describe in this chapter as a ‘patently heterosexed city’.
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View more >Queer youth on Australia’s Gold Coast are subject, by their very presence in the city, to often rampantly heterosexual public spaces such as Surfers Paradise, or one of the many family-oriented suburbs that constitute ‘the GC’. The ways in which these young queer people learn to navigate, resist and transform such spaces are mediated by the attachments they form. Living in and moving through the Gold Coast – a major city in Queensland, arguably Australia’s most conservative state (Feeney, 2012; Radio National, 2012) – is potentially problematic for young people who identify as (or even just appear) sexually and gender diverse. The relationships they form with other young queer people can serve, for instance, as powerful resources for resilience. The focus of this chapter is on providing a broad overview of several key issues facing those researching ‘queer youth’, and on the ‘friendships’1 developed by queer young people on the Gold Coast as uniquely valuable for surviving what I describe in this chapter as a ‘patently heterosexed city’.
View less >
Book Title
Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives
Publisher URI
Subject
Sociology not elsewhere classified