Doing gender and sexuality while doing group. The intertwining of collective and personal (self-)education in queer youth work.

• Applicant: Dr. Nils Klevermann
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513700553

Queer youth work tries to deconstruct gender and desire in a pedagogically guided way, thus enabling identities beyond a heteronormative and cisgender order. It meets the challenge of enabling the addressees to be recognized by providing protective spaces and spaces for empowerment. Queer group work thus represents a place where adolescents and young adults are accompanied in the formation of a gender and sexual identity. The project focuses on the reciprocal educational processes of individual and collective subjects and asks how young people are educated and educate themselves in queer group work to become lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, inter and queer youth (LGBT*IQ). Gender and sexuality are not understood as grounded in the individual in the sense of doing gender and sexuality, but are conceptualized as a rule-governed social practice. By means of participant observation of a queer youth group, it is analyzed how educational opportunities create a sociality in which young people (can) form and perform an identity. In order to empirically operationalize the intertwining of personal and collective (self-)education, interactions between participants in and with the group are considered. The project focuses on the relational constitution of such educational processes between the poles of submission and resistance. On the one hand, the project thus reconstructs how the participants position themselves in relation to the orders of recognition valid within the youth group in order to be recognized as queer youth and to recognize themselves as queer. On the other hand, it describes how the group with a specific order of recognition emerges performatively in everyday group life – that is in the sense of a “doing group”. The social relevance of the research project results from the educational-theoretical and practical significance of collectives for pedagogical measures and offers. The results of the project contribute to a better understanding of educational processes with their emancipatory as well as restrictive-restrictive components.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position