Racialized Embodiments: Young Queer Latinx Men in Australia

This chapter explores how young queer racialized men work on, within, and against dominant racialized narratives that implicates their body, gender, and sexuality in a white-dominant cultural context in Australia. This helps to illuminate young people’s ongoing negotiations with masculinities, embodiment, and the effect on identity. While children and young people are often reduced to categories of not knowing or categorized in linear “stages” they will grow out of (Cannella, Deconstructing early childhood education: social justice and revolution. Peter Lang, New York, 1997; Lesko, Youth Soc 28:13–61, 1996); this work uses a participatory and feminist methodology to learn with and from young men and their complex experiences in negotiating racialized narratives, demands, and the hyper sexualization and masculinization of their bodies. The felt and embodied dimensions of gender, sexuality, and racialization were explored through interviews and an arts-based creative method, “sandboxing,” that enables symbolic visualization of what it feels like to be a queer young Latinx man in Australia.