Unbelonging as Community Cultural Wealth: Youth Playing in the Borderlands of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Recognizing that Queer Desis/South Asians still reckon with both the intergenerational effects of their own colonized history and their desires to belong to a national Queer imaginary experienced largely on white terms (Puar, 1998), this chapter employs an empirical exemplar of applied-drama research in which Queer Desi/South Asian youth in Toronto played in order to discuss notions of belonging. The results demonstrate that the youth, instead, realized a sensibility of unbelonging – that is, reflexivity/relationships/spaces that undo the violence of “belonging while not leading to the destructive erasure of not-belonging” (Garvey, 2011). The chapter concludes by arguing that such a sensibility of unbelonging functions as a critical form of community cultural wealth for multiply minoritized youth. In doing so, this chapter takes seriously the relationship between structures, subjectivities, and agency in youth studies research.