The Spatiality of Queer Youth Activism: Sexuality and the Performance of Relational Literacies through Multimodal Play

Abstract

In this dissertation, I use arts-based inquiry, performance ethnography, and spatial rhetorics to analyze the role of play and relational literacies within multimodal community performance focused on the exploration of queer youth sexuality and gender expression. I ground my study in an analysis of the effects of neoliberalism on sexuality research, noting the ways in which the erasure of cultural politics, in concert with the risk-resilience binary through which queer youth are often framed, forecloses queer youth futures. In my study, I argue that play--as a rich, complex critical thinking practice--offers a way to understand queer community performance as a moment of critique that reimagines everyday spaces outside of oppressive cultural logics. Throughout my analyses, I propose and illustrate the value of sensate engagement as an embodied, performative rhetoric and research practice that opens up an awareness of the transformative potential of everyday play in the con/texts of multimodal community performance. Specifically, I argue that an embodied, multisensory engagement with multimodal performance can make recognizable--but not singularly knowable--the value of play as a critical, everyday practice for performing provisional, queer/ed utopian spaces of youth community.