Beyond resilience: Resistance in the lives of LGBTQ youth

Abstract

Resilience has come to define a wide breadth of impactful research on marginalized groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. This resilience framework shifted the deficit “at‐risk” model of research on marginalized populations to a more nuanced strengths‐based perspective. In this critical review article, we examine this research trend to understand how the shift to resilience has shaped patterns of LGBTQ youth research. In doing so, this piece calls for a more sophisticated engagement with operationalizing resilience–which is vaguely defined and often upholds dominant relations in society, such as capitalistic, heteronormative values of success and happiness. We show how a shift to understanding resistance, joy, and pleasure in LGBTQ youth's lives promotes a more dynamic and complicated look at how marginalized groups navigate their social worlds and exert power in shaping these worlds. Acknowledging and uplifting LGBTQ youth's resistance and power are necessary in pushing scholarly dialogue and the possible interventions informed by research towards a more fully transformative framework in changing and dismantling oppressive societal structures.

“I Didn’t Come Here to Make Trouble”: Resistance Strategies Utilized by Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth in the Midwestern U.S.

“…Participants in this study depicted resistance as intentional acts that decouple TGD youth from societal marginalization-it sets boundaries on oppression. Our findings were congruent with Clonan-Roy et al's work in that resistance is an intentional resilience strategy sometimes employed to counter oppression and dehumanization, and they were congruent with Robinson and Schmitz [4] in that TGD youth employ resistance to challenge and change oppressive systems. We believe it is critical to underscore the temporal and selective nature of resistance by individuals to be in line with current literature that research should emphasize the role of marginalizing systems by studying critical consciousness and its correlates at this ecological level (Godfrey and Burson, 2018; Robinson and Schmitz, 2021).…”

“…Scholars have proposed that cultivating resistance in marginalized youth can lead to the development of critical consciousness [4,10]. However, this relationship is built from a definition where resistance is transformative at the individual level but not within social and structural environments [9,10].…”

“…Much of the scholarship on TGD youth has examined the prevalence and causes of health disparities and other poor outcomes, illustrating the very real consequences of stigma, discrimination, and victimization of TGD youth [1,2]. Although critical in establishing an understanding of the relationship between oppression and mental health, a deficit-oriented approach fails to account for the strengths of TGD youth and the ways in which they cultivate resilience [3] or resist oppression [4].…”

“…It has been conceptualized as both a positive outcome and a process for dealing with challenges [7]. While the concept of resilience is useful and important in shifting away from a predominant focus on risk, it has also been critiqued for "inadvertently put(ting) the burden on youth to build resilience and navigate discrimination, instead of focusing on how to change, Youth 2021, 1 challenge, and dismantle the oppressive structures" [4] (p. 4). Indeed, a growing body of literature emphasizes the importance of tending to community and contextual resilience strategies, or the ways in which communities support TGD youth to reduce oppression and increase support to avoid placing the onus on individual youth to manage external risks and oppression [4,8].…”

“…Commonly situated within a critical consciousness framework, resistance includes individual and collective acts to oppose or reject oppression, stigma, and violence rooted in oppression [9]. In a call to action for LGBQ and TGD youth scholars, Robinson and Schmitz argue that focusing on resistance rather than just resilience illustrates the work required "to dismantle systems that create hardships" [4] (p. 7). They note that resilience and resistance are often used interchangeably, and that resistance may be a form of resilience.…”