Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2007
Abstract
Gloria Filax poses an important question that has a specific context for the conservatism found in the Canadian prairies, yet is more generally applicable to modern western societies: Can queer youth, who struggle to define themselves as "normal," negotiate a place of social belonging where heterosexual norms still dominate? She problematizes this question through a complicated mixture of ethnography, discourse analysis, history, and theory. Queer Youth in the Province of the "Severely Normal" tells a story about how queer youth in Alberta in the 1990s, unlike their heterosexual counterparts, have been actively excluded from social supports and public education that continue to be linked to Christian fundamentalist thinking that abhors the notion of sexual diversity.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Research17:2 (Fall 2007). Copyright ©2007 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.