Understanding 'ordinary wellbeing' for queer youth in suffocating conditions: reflections from an online reading and writing group

Abstract

‘Wellbeing’ has become a keyword in popular and academic understandings of young people. Queer youth have historically, and problematically, been represented primarily as at-risk victims of high school bullying and mental ill-health. Whilst scholars have proposed a counterapproach to studying and representing queer youth, which I brand ‘queer thriving’, this impulse generates a troublesome victim/thriving dichotomy. This research explores how queer youth articulate and embody wellbeing beyond the victim/thriving framework and considers what their reflections reveal about their conditions of living at the present historical conjuncture, keeping front-of-mind how these conditions shape queer young people’s political horizon. This study involved facilitating a fortnightly online reading and writing group with Australian queer (anyone who identified as other than heterosexual and/or cisgender) youth aged 16-24 for 6 months during 2021. Using participatory ethnography and an action research approach, this study recorded group discussions, pieces of writing produced and shared by participants, as well as semi-structured interviews. Through theorising ‘ordinary wellbeing’, this research examines how queer youth: critique and exceed dominant ideas about identity affirmation; navigate temporal scripts of ‘success’; generate feelings of belonging across differences and geographies; and employ practises of ‘everyday tending and tenderness’ in attempts to sustain life and its meaningfulness amidst large-scale crises that they have limited power as individuals, or as a social category, to transform on their own. I argue that contemporary conditions generate a constricting, suffocating atmosphere, defined by the culmination of housing, health, and environmental crises alongside neoliberal logics of individual ‘thriving’ within a cis-heteronormative world.