Pushing Boundaries: Young People’s Experiences Developing and Expressing Intersecting Identities

Abstract

While discussion of intersectional identities has entered popular media, very few scholarly works on young peoples’ experiences with gender, sexual, and racial identities have been published in the past decade (Bettie, 2014; Lee, 2009; Pascoe, 2007). This dissertation responds to that gap and presents findings from a two-part qualitative study about identities and education. This dissertation focuses on the ways young people navigate boundaries that family members and classmates maintain around racial, gender, and sexual identities. The data discussed and presented in this dissertation comes mainly from nine life story interviews (see Atkinson, 1998) with adults from the Lindy Hop community who were asked to think back on how their families, educational experiences, friends, and social media impacted their identity formation. Additional data was collected from one student participant who shared her stories through a social media diary, a photovoice activity, and two rounds of interviews. The interviews reveal that young people encounter boundaries around their gender, sexual, and racial identity possibilities maintained by family members, community members, or classmates. The participants navigated these boundaries by pushing against them, moving beyond them, or strategically silencing aspects of their identities in different spaces. The findings suggest that young people make conscious decisions about how to engage with identity possibilities and enact agency in ways that are reflective of boundaries and privileges around their intersecting identities. The stories of these ten participants help to fill a gap in research on how young people engage with identity possibilities enacted by family, schooling, and social media as they construct their racial, gender, and sexual identities.