Patrick R. Grzanka

Queer youth suicide and the psychopolitics of “It Gets Better”

This article investigates a mass-mediated campaign against a perceived increase in suicides among gay (or presumed-to-be-gay) youth in the USA since September 2010. “It Gets Better” (IGB) became a rallying cry for “anti-bullying” activists, politicians, celebrities and ordinary people who created YouTube videos addressed to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth who might be considering suicide. A critical discourse analysis of a sample of IGB videos reveals a neoliberal frame that places the burden of a “better” life onto the emotional lives of LGBT youth, who are instructed to endure suffering in the interest of inevitable happiness. Drawing on Foucault and Orrs work on the construction and management of mental illness, we use the concept of “psychopower” to explore how these IGB videos render queer youth suicide both a psychological disorder and a sociological crisis for which the only viable solution is “homonormative” subjectivity.

Using intersectionality responsibly: Toward critical epistemology, structural analysis, and social justice activism.

The increasing popularity of the concept of intersectionality in the social sciences, including in psychology, represents an opportunity to reflect on the state of stewardship of this concept, its roots, and its promise. In this context, the authors aim to promote responsible stewardship of intersectionality and to tip the momentum of intersectionality’s flourishing toward fuller use and engagement of its roots and promise for understanding and challenging dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression. To this end, this article provides a set of guidelines for reflection and action. The authors organize these guidelines along 3 major formulations of intersectionality: intersectionality as a field of study, as analytic strategy or disposition, and as critical praxis for social justice. Ultimately, the authors call for expanding the use of intersectionality toward fuller engagement with its roots in Black feminist thought, its current interdisciplinary richness and potential, and its central aims to challenge and transform structures and systems of power, privilege, and oppression.

Intersections and Configurations.

Amongthemanynotable theoreticalcontributionsofferedbyvan Anders (2015) in her thesis on‘‘Sexual Configurations Theory’’ (SCT) is her serious consideration of intersectionality. Although whatprecisely‘‘intersectionality’’denotesisdebatedamongsocial scientists and humanists across the disciplines (Davis, 2008; Ferguson, 2012), van Anders operationalizes it here in terms of the U.S. Black feminist critical social theory that serves as the historical, intellectual, and political foundation of the concept. Accordingly, van Anders cites key Black feminist theorists (e.g., Collins, Crenshaw) in defining intersectionality as a theory that recognizes that‘‘social oppression is based on a social location at the meeting points of several identity axes in a way similar to concepts of emergence’’(p. 1188). She likewise asserts that‘‘Intersectionality matters forSCTbecausesexualconfigurationsarenotassumedto be isolated from other identity categories,’’and suggests that the phenomenology of sexual configurations may vary meaningfully across racial/ethnic groups and across age, nationalities, physical ability/disability, social class, andother salient identitycategories or‘‘axes’’of social inequality. In themultifariousfieldof sexuality studies, which has been robustly critiqued for its implicit heteroand homo-normative orientation (e.g., Bowleg, 2008; Ferguson, 2004; Johnson, 2001), van Anders’ attention to intersectionality in thisinitialarticulationofSCTiscommendableandpotentiallyquite consequential. Intersectionality, as van Anders elaborates, is distinct from additive perspectives that assume dimensions of difference and inequalitycansimplybesummedinordertocaptureanindividual’s experiences. Additive logic can be represented thusly: gay? Latino? transgender?undocumented=undocumented transgenderLatinoman(cf.Bowleg,2008;Sengupta,2006).Theories of intersectionality generally reject such arithmetic, instead foregroundingtheparticularitiesofexperiencesthatareshapedby multiple dimensions of marginality and, on the other hand, by the simultaneityofprivilegeandoppressionasembodiedbyWhite gay men, straight White women, and Black straight men. The discourseonintersectionalitytendstoemphasizeconceptssuchas co-constructionandco-constitutioninorder tosignalhowgender, race, sexuality, and nation never operate in isolation but rather collaborate in the production and maintenance of oppression. If wetakeanintersectionalapproachto thestudyofsexuality,asvan Anders advocates, this suggests at least a subtle displacement of sexuality (andgender) fromthecenterof sexualitystudies. Inorder to understand the uniqueness of sexual configurations at the intersections of multiple dimensions of social, cultural, and embodied difference, we must not imagine a stable, a priori sexuality that‘‘varies’’across groups. Note that this latter kind of logic leaves an implicitly White, masculine, cisgender, universal sexuality un-interrogated, while different sexualities are understood in terms of their quantifiable distance from the unmarked norm.Tothecontrary, in intersectionality theory—andperhapsin SCT—sexuality must be reimagined as always contingent on its relationship to race, ethnicity, class, and other contextually relevant dimensions of sociality. For example, sometimes Black gay men may experience discrimination in ways that are similar to Black straight men or to White gay men; however, they may also experience discrimination as Black gay men, irreducible to discrete processes of racial and sexual discrimination (Bowleg, 2013; Crenshaw, 1991; Harper, 2000). The extent to which SCT can empirically capture intersectionality remains to beseen. In many ways,van Anders’piececan bereadasaprovocationtointersectionalthinkingforscholarswho study sexuality empirically, particularly those scholars trained in post-positivist paradigms that may be most resistant to & Patrick R. Grzanka patrick.grzanka@utk.edu

The Machine in the Garden of Desire

At the end of their article, Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu (2014) argue that commenters need to take seriously the moral status of the project, and suggest that it would be more productive to focus on the ends for which biotechnologies may be used, rather than the means or the complexities of contemporary culture. We argue that serious moral investigation of the potential therapeutic interventions is not possible if we omit the role of culture in producing the very moral dilemmas raised by scientific and technological “innovations” or start with simplistic assumptions about users and ends. In our brief commentary, we focus on two of the false analogies and assumptions the authors make with respect to the imagined technology and its potential users. In their attempt to work through the ethical dilemmas posed by “‘high-tech’ conversion therapies,” Earp and colleagues analogize body modification practices, such as breast augmentation, and sexual orientation (SO) change efforts to argue that use of the therapeutic intervention could be considered ethical if an individual demonstrated both suffering and voluntariness. In doing so, they efface the differences between changing the shape of one’s body and eliminating or enhancing feelings of desire, as if cosmetic surgery were directly analogous to neuroscientific transformations of the brain. While investigating the motivations behind such “elective” biomedical interventions, the authors acknowledge that sexism, racism, and homophobia are real, but ultimately argue that these social forces do not preclude science and medicine from helping the individual, rational subject achieve her desired ends. From this perspective, social structures are coercive, but the science itself is not. Rather, for the authors, these therapies are potentially liberating. However, this imagination—of the independent actor who is empowered to make rational choices about her body—is problematic because it treats the science as distinct from political, social, and cultural contexts or economic considerations, and it views biomedicine only in terms of what it offers rather than how it limits and constrains agency. Abundant evidence, however, has exposed how cultural norms shape and are shaped by the form, content, markets, and delivery of biomedical technologies that target the body, including plastic surgery (Balsamo 1996), sexual enhancement drugs (Mamo and Fishman 2001), treatments of intersex (Fausto-Sterling 2000), and vaccinations for sexually transmitted infections (Casper and Carpenter 2008). As technologies emerge, they coconstitute or coproduce social orders, including norms, values, and social categories. In this context, the notion of “agency” is thoroughly un-

Intersectionality research in counseling psychology

This article introduces the special section on intersectionality research in counseling psychology. Across the 4 manuscripts that constitute this special section, a clear theme emerges: a need to return to the roots and politics of intersectionality. Importantly, the 2 empirical articles in this special section (Jerald, Cole, Ward, & Avery, 2017; Lewis, Williams, Peppers, & Gadson, 2017) are studies of Black womens experiences: a return, so to speak, to the subject positions and social locations from which intersectionality emanates. Shin et al. (2017) explore why this focus on Black feminist thought and social justice is so important by highlighting the persistent weaknesses in how much research published in leading counseling psychology journals has tended to use intersectionality as a way to talk about multiple identities, rather than as a framework for critiquing systemic, intersecting forms of oppression and privilege. Shin and colleagues also point to the possibilities intersectionality affords us when scholars realize the transformative potential of this critical framework. Answers to this call for transformative practices are foregrounded in Moradi and Grzankas (2017) contribution, which surveys the interdisciplinary literature on intersectionality and presents a series of guidelines for using intersectionality responsibly. We close with a discussion of issues concerning the applications of intersectionality to counseling psychology research that spans beyond the contributions of each manuscript in this special section. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Teaching graphic novels: practical strategies for the secondary ELA classroom, by Kate Monnin

It is unfortunate that this book’s small format and black-and-white printing preclude showing these highly detailed halfand full-page cartoons, teeming with streetwise characters and dense with lettering, signage and commentaries, at a larger size and in their glorious original colours. It is also a shame that most are marred by thin lines, perhaps due to microfilm or poor reproduction sources. Gambone contrasts the two simultaneously published versions of The Yellow Kid, hailing the fresh characters which Luks introduced, such as his sidekick Baldy Sours and the cheeky little twins Alex and George. He asserts that Luks was often both a bolder lampooner of New York society and a greater sympathizer with the chaotic, spontaneous slum kids he was portraying than Outcault. Despite his empathy, Luks’ portrayals of racial stereotypes are problematic and Gambone critiques especially the caricatured African Americans in his own later creation in 1897–1898: Mose the Trained Chicken. Underlining the endemic racism of the period, the author puts these prejudices into context, notably revealing the struggling teenage artist’s tours performing as a blackface vaudeville act. Luks did not abandon illustration once painting brought him success. Gambone goes into equal depth into his work on The Verdict, Vanity Fair and New Yorker. He is also frank about Luks’ lifestyle, from his European trips to study paintings by the masters to his addiction to drink and his tragic death in a drunken brawl. Life on the Press finally gives us a fully-rounded portrait of both the artist and the man.