Representation and Methodology: Queer Cinema Studies, Narratives of Trans, Queer and Nonbinary Youth, and Survival Techniques of Coming Out

This paper explores an innovative form for writing and presenting education research. Pulling from a study utilizing mobile ethnographic methodologies to examine the everyday movements, knowledges, and experiences of trans, queer, and non-binary youth in New York City, this paper presents its findings through rich narrative description that asks readers to unpack their own reading practices, both of the ways they are reading the text of this paper and also how they read the young people described therein. This shifting framework works to add needed nuance to representational practices of trans, queer, and non-binary youth in educational research.

The development of a university-based course for First-Year Students on the history of QueerCinema highlighted the intersection of personal identity, academic responsibility and Queer aesthetics. Issues of representation, identity and definition circumscribed the seemingly “simple” attempt to tell a story of political emergence through the lens of film over time and across cultures. This proposal addresses the first of three overlapping phases (course construction, teaching, evaluation) to explore how issues of academic and personal identities were inextricably implicated in decision-making and definition activities. Students’ perspectives contribute to an evocation of how QueerCinema could be delineated and experienced.