Intelligibility and Narrating Queer Youth

Abstract

William Haver (1998) has written that educators “have very nearly agreed that the pedagogical enterprise is about the production of subjects” (349). Although there is little agreement about what sorts of subjects education aims to produce, he says, “pedagogy is the work of Bildung, a coming to subjectivity as jubilant and relieved self-recognition” (350). Whether educators understand the subject as developing according to a natural ontology or according to culture, the education of subjects is defined by a project to “elaborate the ‘systems of the world,’ to make sense, and to transmit the sense that it makes” (350). This development of subjects entails the production of knowledge and self-knowledge, or what I will call “intelligibility.” As children move through adolescence to adulthood, society expects that they will acquire knowledge of self and other (the world and their place in it will become intelligible to them) and that maturing youth will become intelligible to others, knowable as such and such. In this chapter, I explore this problem of intelligibility—not how we can attain it, but what it attains—as it relates to queer youth. The fraught knowledges that contribute to the construction of queer youth have implications for the interventions adults would create for them and for how queer youth come to know and understand themselves.