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That Which Is Not What It Seems: Queer Youth, Rurality, Class And The Architecture Of Assistance, Kaila Gabrielle Kuban

Open Access Dissertations

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (or ‘queer’) youth are increasingly the objects of intense concern for ‘the state’, subjects of – and subject to – a panoply of interventional programs designed to mediate against queer youths’ ‘risk-taking’ behaviors. While the material and structural realities of queer youth’s lives are discursively absent in policy formation, they largely determine policy implementation and significantly shape policy reception, as there is an uneven distribution of state-based queer youth programming in Massachusetts. In the Commonwealth it is primarily rural and working-class communitybased organizations that receive most of the interventional programs, and thus it is working-class …