‘People need support and society needs change’: vulnerability and collective agency in queer youth organization

The present article draws on narrative interviews with 16 youngqueer people who are involved in organizing meeting places andactivities for and with other queers. Here, I explore how queeryouth describe their needs and motives for engaging inorganizing, and how narratives of agency and vulnerability areexpressed and intertwined. Drawing on Judith Butler (2016.‘Rethinking vulnerability and resistance’, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti,and L. Sabsay (Ed.), Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke UniversityPress), I argue that vulnerability among LGBTQ + youth is not theopposite of resistance and that agency is not the opposite ofexposedness. In this context, LGBTQ + youth’s ownacknowledgement of and collective resistance to dominantsexuality and gender norms, which put them at risk for exclusion,offence and violence, constitute a mobilization of vulnerability.The motives for organizing are described as three narrativesconcerning social needs and how queer youth relate themselvesto a collective. The first narrative recognizes the person’s need forother people, the second other people’s need for them, and thethird concerns the need for a community. The results show howqueer youth use collective agency to create their own spaces andcommunities as well as to formulate and practice resistance.