“We simply don’t believe that boys, especially during adolescence, could be having emotionally intimate male friendships.” (16)
Niobe Way explores the friendships adolescent boys maintain, and often lose as they get older. This loss of deep friendship, or loss of trust among friends, however, is not because boys no longer desire to have these intimate male friendships, but rather because there is societal pressure not to have them. Continue reading Friendship for females only
“Perhaps the single most defining characteristic of sexual-minority youths’ intimate relationships is that they have no single defining characteristic: the types of casual, intimate, platonic, and romantic relationships these youths pursue with same-sex and other-sex peers are as diverse as the youths themselves.” (from Diamond and Savin-Williams)
This passage sums up the most important point of this article very simply. Sexual minority youth can, like any other group, be studied. However, sexuality across the lifespan cannot be examined categorically. There are countless factors in the formation of sexual identity, orientation, and relationships which exist on a sliding scale and not as yes/no answers. Continue reading Young, Gay, and Absolutely Singular
Having skills merely to say no does not help young people make tough decisions, but instead simply drains decision-making from them and places them in the hands of more powerful others – the state, the media, advertisements, a partner, abuser, or predator. The echoes of lost skill reverberate for a lifetime in the student…
-Fine and McClelland
Sexual Education and Desire: Still Missing after All These Years
“we learned that marriage meant something different to each of these participants…these “marriages” varied depending on where they were from, their age, how long their families had been in the States, whether they were in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors, and a host of other questions. Only one of the married participants in this research study had been married at City Hall and could pinpoint where her marriage certificate was located. Clergy in their homes or community mosques performed most of the marriages. None of the girls’ school teachers or counselors knew of their marriages” (Yetu, 2012)
“Middle school students are not only ready to examine complex and sophisticated issues of identity but are already forced to tackle the on their own, if nowhere but in the hallways of our school. Racial typing and stereotyping, sexual harassment, and queer-bashing can be witnessed outside my classrooms every day (and this phenomenon is absolutely not specific to under-resources schools.)” (Loren Krywanczyk, 2009)
I was shocked by the fact that middle school students have to deal with this very sophisticated identity issue which I, as a teacher, never thought about addressing to my students. This queer pedagogy the author proposed and employed in his classroom is actually a whole new content for me because of the huge cultural differences related to this kind of issues. To be honest, I’ve never heard the words like “queer”, “dyke” and “fag” until I came to the U.S., and although I did talk about gay when I was in china, I have had some deeper thinking about it since I were here. Continue reading Cultural differences related to identity issues