Article

Queer youth suicide and the psychopolitics of ‘‘It Gets Better’’

Sexualities 2014, Vol. 17(4) 369–393 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363460713516785 sex.sagepub.com

Patrick R Grzanka Arizona State University, USA

Emily S Mann University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Abstract This article investigates a mass-mediated campaign against a perceived increase in suicides among gay (or presumed-to-be-gay) youth in the USA since September 2010. ‘‘It Gets Better’’ (IGB) became a rallying cry for ‘‘anti-bullying’’ activists, politicians, celebrities and ordinary people who created YouTube videos addressed to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth who might be considering suicide. A critical discourse analysis of a sample of IGB videos reveals a neoliberal frame that places the burden of a ‘‘better’’ life onto the emotional lives of LGBT youth, who are instructed to endure suffering in the interest of inevitable happiness. Drawing on Foucault and Orr’s work on the construction and management of mental illness, we use the concept of ‘‘psychopower’’ to explore how these IGB videos render queer youth suicide both a psychological disorder and a sociological crisis for which the only viable solution is ‘‘homonormative’’ subjectivity. Keywords Homonormativity, mental health, neoliberalism, suicide, youth

Corresponding author: Patrick R Grzanka, Arizona State University, Barrett, the Honors College, 166 Sage South Hall, 751 E Lemon Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA. Email: [email protected]

370

Sexualities 17(4)

As for the mentally ill, they are no doubt the residue of all residues, the residue of all the disciplines, those who are inassimilable to all of a society’s education, military and police disciplines. (Foucault, 1973–74: 54). Surely, feeling better is better, and we all want to feel better? (Ahmed, 2010: 8)

‘‘It Gets Better’’ formally begins when sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his boyfriend Terry create and upload a video to YouTube on 21 September 2010, in which they describe first how difficult their experiences in high school were and, second, how fulfilling their life is now as both an out gay couple and as parents. Savage released the video amid a spate of youth suicides in the USA, most notably that of Billy Lucas, an out gay Indiana high school student, and Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student who was identified posthumously as gay, along with several other young people who had killed themselves in the months leading up to Clementi’s death and the dissemination of Dan and Terry’s video (McKinley, 2010; Parker-Pope, 2010). ‘‘The main thing I wanted to come across from this video is how different my life is, how great my life is, and how happy I am in general,’’ Savage told The New York Times (quoted in McKinley, 2010). ‘‘It gets better’’ became the rallying cry of the movement, which was reflected in the hundreds of videos mimicking Dan and Terry’s frame that emerged in the weeks, months, and years that followed. At least on the surface, ‘‘It Gets Better’’ (hereafter IGB) videos echo the same message to LGBT youth: don’t kill yourself, because your life will improve, and you will be happy. Among the most prominent of IGB video-makers were USA President Barack Obama, sitcom and Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris, Glee actor Chris Colfer, pop star and American Idol contestant Adam Lambert, and personal finance guru Suze Orman. Ultimately, these videos became just one component of a larger IGB media empire that includes a foundation, which manages a YouTube channel of IGB videos, as well as a book, speaking engagements, an hour-long MTV episode devoted to IGB and an MTV television series in which Savage dispenses sex advice to college students called ‘‘Savage U.’’ It is difficult to quantify the reach of IGB videos, because of the limits of YouTube’s organizational framework, which allows for videos to be posted, deleted, and reposted (theoretically, infinitely). However, some key figures speak to its broad consumption. An IGB video for the Google Chrome browser has over 2 million views in addition to its dissemination on broadcast and cable primetime television; singer Ke$ha’s video has nearly 2.5 million views as of April 2013. The IGB YouTube Channel alone, which does not include the hundreds of IGB videos not formally categorized by the IGB Project Foundation, has 48,234 subscribers and 3,881,678 views as of 14 April 2013. Over 79,000 people follow IGB on Twitter. IGB has over 300,000 ‘‘likes’’ on Facebook. The IGB Project, according to its Facebook profile, ‘‘works to show LGBT youth the levels of happiness, potential,

Grzanka and Mann

371

and positivity their lives will reach.’’ IGB has been hailed as a remarkable, grassroots social justice project – ‘‘an important moment for the gay rights movement’’ – and one that thrust the related issues of bullying and queer youth suicides into an international conversation on sexuality and mental health (Cover, 2012; Stelter, 2010). Happiness, potential, and positivity are at once innocuous and cliche´ messages of hope that coalesce with self-help and pop psychological discourses that pervade contemporary American culture as part of what Sara Ahmed (2010) calls ‘‘the happiness industry.’’ The promise of happiness, as she describes it, is normative and disciplining, if not obviously nefarious. Owing to the overwhelmingly positive popular reception of IGB and its spin-offs (e.g. Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation), we were compelled to explore the discourse on IGB; ‘‘It gets better,’’ as a phrase alone, says little about what this highly affective and political campaign intends to accomplish or even the social and/or psychological problem(s) it seeks to address. From our positions as queer sociologists of sexualities who found ourselves suddenly surrounded by IGB discourse, we wondered: what is ‘‘it,’’ what exactly ‘‘gets’’ better, and what does ‘‘better’’ look like? To whom, specifically, is IGB addressed, and how is this imagined consumer of IGB videos constituted by the videos themselves? Does IGB have deconstructive potential, or does it reflect – rather than disrupt – intersecting heterosexist, racist, and classist ideologies of sexual identity and mental health? What are the affective contours of IGB, and how do affect and politics interface in IGB videos? As Ahmed has reflected, one of the primary challenges to critical engagement with the happiness industry is plainly stated: don’t we all really want to feel better? Our argument is drawn from our critical discourse analysis (CDA) of IGB videos produced between 2010 and 2012, including the most-watched IGB videos on YouTube and some barely seen videos by non-public figures/celebrities more recently uploaded (Clarke, 2005). Both authors watched more than 100 videos prior to selecting the 30 that would constitute the core sample of our analysis. Because both authors were familiar with IGB and came to the videos with a developing critique, we opted against taking a grounded theory (GT) approach to analysis, per the theoretical interests of GT research (Clarke, 2005; Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Fassinger, 2005). Nonetheless, we borrowed several procedures from GT and Clarke’s situational analysis (SA) method in an effort to resist having our assumptions and preconceptions of IGB preclude an empirically driven analysis. First, our analyses were deeply informed and organized by Clarke’s explication of CDA’s Foucaultian roots: ‘‘[CDA] is predicated on a Foucaultian analytics of power wherein power is potentially productive as well as controlling and destructive, and circulated at every level of action and interaction – preventing, enabling, serving as a resources, flowing sometimes wildly about’’ (Clarke, 2005: 150). Drawing directly from Clarke, we foregrounded three questions: (1) Where did this text come from? (2) What work is it intended to do in the world? And (3) how so? Furthermore, we concentrated on two dimensions of IGB discourse in our analysis as explicated by Clarke, inspired by Jaworksi and Coupland (1999):

372

Sexualities 17(4)

the production of identities and subjectivities (i.e. subject making) and the production of ‘‘power/knowledge, ideologies and control through discourse’’ (Clarke, 2005: 155). Next, we used purposive sampling to select a group of IGB videos that satisfied the following criteria: (1) a range of videos from the earliest to the most recent, (2) a diversity of videos from both celebrities and unknown contributors, and (3) videos whose creators represent a range of sexual and gender identifications. Through our analysis and affirming the interpretive utility of purposive sampling, another unanticipated category emerged: videos made by individuals or groups of individuals versus videos created by organizations, namely for-profit corporations. The first author then conducted a preliminary content analysis of the videos, which was audited by the second author (see Table 1). Next, memoing was employed by both authors to generate key themes and rhetorics emerging in the videos guided by the questions and concerns outlined earlier; memos where shared, edited and integrated. Situational maps and positional maps were used, per Clarke’s recommendations for SA, to chart relevant social actors and discourses. Our iterative, dialogic SA procedures directed our attention to (a) the rhetorical structures of IGB videos, and (b) their management of suicide and mental health as it relates to queer identities and lives. Notably, because SA attends to the implicated actors and actants (both individual and collective, e.g. Dan Savage and the Human Rights Campaign), major contested issues (e.g. is suicide the result of bullying?), discursive constructions of nonhuman actants (e.g. mental illness, LGBT rights movements) and related discourses (e.g. bullying, same-sex marriage, Dan Savage’s syndicated sex advice column) in the situation of inquiry, the larger context of IGB as a sociocultural phenomenon was always implicated in our analysis of individual videos and the sample as a whole. Based on our analysis of these videos, we argue that IGB reiterates neoliberal cultural ideologies (Duggan, 2003; Melamed, 2006) vis-a`-vis the psychopolitical construction of queer youth suicide.1 Through the deployment of what Jackie Orr (2006) theorizes as ‘‘PSYCHOpower,’’ these IGB videos serve to reinscribe heteronormative ideology about sexual (and gender) identity and mental health, which emerge co-constitutively. Furthermore, IGB works to compel queer youth to respond to heterosexist violence with a psycho-social refashioning of pain, depression, anxiety and, indeed, suicide into inactive hope, introspective resilience, personal fantasy, and political complacency that locates the ‘‘problem’’ – and solution – of suicide in the imagined young queer subject of the early 21st century. Moreover, while IGB is remarkable for its cultural impact (Goltz, 2012), we find that most of the IGB videos we analyzed are unexceptional in their relationship to dominant discourses on mental health in general and suicide in particular. Through the psychopolitical re-citation of identity development and survivor narratives of childhood and adolescent trauma, these IGB videos work to engender a neoliberal form of sympathetic affect that shapes the content and boundaries of contemporary queer identities. By positioning suicide as the dis-ease in need of a cure, we argue that these IGB videos transform the social problems of homonegative youth

Jeff & Joe’s Wedding in California [IT GETS BETTER] A Message from Secretary Solis and DOL – It Gets Better Human Rights Campaign Staff: It Gets Better ‘‘It Gets Better’’ – American Institute of Bisexuality Outserve BAF: It Gets Better (Deployed US Military) First Transgender Prom Queer – It Gets Better! It Gets Better – Chaz Bono It Gets Better, A transexual woman speaks out! Samantha Lauzon It Gets Better Transgender – Janet Mock

Title

2:25

2:04

6:10

3:19

2:29

1:08

2:35

2:56

2:51

Political leaders

Employees

Bisexual

Not categorized by IGB

Transgender

Transgender

Transgender

Transgender

Length

Not categorized by IGB

Group/ Category

Table 1. ‘‘It Gets Better’’ video sample.

12 May 2011

10 Oct 2010

7 Oct 2010

6 Jun 2011

20 Jan 2012

9 Dec 2010

9 Nov 2010

26 Nov 2010

20 Jul 2012

Date

97746

84129

60113

44467

38362

26637

13365

8881

44

Views

M/F/Trans

M/F

>10

>10

1

1

1

1

MTF

MTF

FTM

MTF

M/F

M/F

>10

5

M

Gender

2

No. of Persons

Black

White

White

Latina

Multiracial

Multiracial

Multiracial

Latina/ Multiracial

White

Race

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

No

No

Yes

No

Celebrity/ Public Figure

(continued)

http://youtu.be/g0tFt-vRUE

http://youtu.be/ EHmD6a7fIpc http://youtu.be/ FJYhFUMQQis

http://youtu.be/8ccOdEOO2M

http://youtu.be/ a_QpSsvO7-I

http://youtu.be/ aGXCC9VCMF4

http://youtu.be/ SIVSrGz7N7E

http://youtu.be/ wW8rRHmDx3Q

http://youtu.be/ 8npx-StOtbE

Link

Grzanka and Mann 373

It Gets Better: Apple Employees Secretary Clinton: ‘‘Tomorrow Will Be Better’’ Sassy Gay Friend: It Gets Better

It Gets Better at Brigham Young University Glee’s Max Adler: It Gets Better

It Gets Better: Jane & Laura It Gets Better: Suze Orman It Gets Better, says Kate Bornstein NOH8 Campaign speaks out to say, ‘‘It Gets Better’’ Televangelist Oral Roberts’ gay grandson says ‘‘it gets better’’ Gay Cop, Gay Marine – IT GETS BETTER!

Title

4 Oct 2010

5 Apr 2012

16 Nov 2010

14:57

0:46

9:37

1:50

Not categorized by IGB

Military, service members and veterans Schools and colleges

2:34

2:48

Political leaders

Not categorized by IGB

6:04

25 Oct 2010

1:40

Straight allies

Not categorized by IGB Employees

10 Nov 2010

5:33

Transgender

9 Oct 2010

19 Oct 2010

13 Apr 2011

1 Oct 2010

2 Nov 2010

2:30

Lesbian

5 Dec 2010

Date

3:20

Length

Lesbian

Group/ Category

Table 1. Continued.

707629

564395

490146

475553

447999

264840

157,684

134756

129564

125057

106721

Views

1

M

W

M/F/Trans

>10 1

M

M/F

>10

1

M

2

M

M/F

>10

1

MTF

F

F

Gender

1

1

2

No. of Persons

White

White

Multiracial

White

White, Latino (1) & Asian (1)

White

White

Multiracial

White

White

White

Race

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Celebrity/ Public Figure

(continued)

http://youtu.be/ sCfKCEPd2uo

http://youtu.be/ iWYqsaJk_U8 http://youtu.be/ zXBpW8GCDtY

http://youtu.be/ aHfM_iV-554

http://youtu.be/ Ym0jXg-hKCI

http://youtu.be/ICZnayVEX0

http://youtu.be/ KYa0wi4XzeI

http://youtu.be/ 4BGtS_sedUk http://youtu.be/ mbECOomyr-0 http://youtu.be/ JxhZJJAGjW0 http://youtu.be/ epYOIExJxIQ

Link

374 Sexualities 17(4)

3 Oct 2010

26 Oct 2010

21 Oct 2010 21 Sep 2010 5 Oct 2010

2 May 2011

1:55

6:08

7:36

0:59

1:37

3:08

8:32

1:04

1:31

Employees

Gay

Gay

Political leaders Gay

Not categorized by IGB Not categorized by IGB

6 Oct 2010

1:22

Not categorized by IGB Not categorized by IGB Employees

18 Oct 2010

4 Oct 2010

19 Oct 2010

Date

Length

2276697

2245512

1820801

1346761

1338785

1140275

871598

771441

756976

710344

Views

M/F/Trans

>10

F

M/F

>10

M

M

M

1

2

1

1

M

M/F

>10

1

M

M

Gender

1

1

No. of Persons

White, Black

White

White

Black

White

White

Multiracial

White, Asian

White

White

Race

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes

Yes

Celebrity/ Public Figure

http://youtu.be/ 7skPnJOZYdA

http://youtu.be/ A_QVknV-M6U http://youtu.be/ HzcAR6yQhF8 http://youtu.be/ 7IcVyvg2Qlo http://youtu.be/ DV4EmSviDfQ

http://youtu.be/ pYLs4NCgvNU http://youtu.be/ 5RKmnAJ3ZWM

http://youtu.be/ iPg02qjL40g

http://youtu.be/ l3Y52kD0G2c

http://youtu.be/ D0OeSs870ys

Link

Note. Videos are sorted by number of views (ascending). ‘‘Group/Category’’ refers to groupings made by the ‘‘It Gets Better’’ YouTube Channel, if the video was included in the Channel. ‘‘Date’’ denotes date of upload to YouTube; views are current as of July 15, 2012. ‘‘No. of Persons’’ denotes the number of people who appear in the video (up to 10).

Google Chrome: It Gets Better

Neil Patrick Harris’ Message to Gay Youth It Gets Better: Facebook Employees It Gets Better: Google Employees Chris Colfer for the Trevor Project – It Gets Better Adam Lambert: ‘‘It Gets Better’’ President Obama: It Gets Better It Gets Better: Dan and Terry It Gets Better: Ke$ha

it gets better – zachary quinto

Title

Group/ Category

Table 1. Continued.

Grzanka and Mann 375

376

Sexualities 17(4)

violence and structural dynamics of sexuality- and gender-based inequality into the personal responsibility of queer youth to take it upon themselves to refashion their otherwise ‘‘precarious’’ lives – to get better (Butler, 2004).

Suicide and modernity In these IGB videos, queer youth suicide is constructed both concurrently and complementarily as psychological and sociological, which runs somewhat counter-intuitively against the biomedicalization of mental health that has been intensifying since the second half of the 20th century (Clarke et al., 2003). Biomedical discourse on mental health offers biogenetic explanations and solutions for essentially all psychological problems, positioning the ‘‘secret’’ of mental health in the human brain and the scientific disciplines that have access to that brain (Dumit, 2004; Orr, 2006, 2010). But suicide has long been in the public and academic interest (Cover, 2012; Durkheim, 2007 [1897]; Wray et al., 2011), and its genealogy as a modern construct is inextricable from the ways in which we understand the very fabric of the social and the psyche. While it may be tempting to describe the transformation of suicide as a linear trajectory from sociology to psychology from the 19th through the 20th century, the intersecting histories of sociology, psychology, and psychiatry’s treatment of suicide reveal a more complex, nonlinear narrative (Cover, 2012; Erwin, 1993; Orr, 2006; Wray et al., 2011). Psychopoliticized sexuality, as we illustrate later, serves an affective capacity that makes a simultaneously psychological and sociological interpretation of suicide legible. The origin story of sociology, notably, is intertwined with the constitution of suicide as a uniquely modern social problem. Founding sociologist Emile Durkheim (2007 [1897]) saw suicide as symptomatic of social unrest and normlessness, which he famously theorized as ‘‘anomie.’’ To Durkheim and the emergent social scientific discourse of the late 19th century, suicide represented one of the most compelling social problems of industrialization and the modern nation state (see also Foucault, 2006 [1973–1974]). Though few contemporary sociologists would follow Durkheim’s method or even his conclusions about the nature and causes of suicide (Lemert, 2008), his work left the sociological community with an enduring legacy: a positivist ontology of suicide (Wray et al., 2011). Durkheim developed sociological positivism through the relocation of suicide from the realm of the individual to the realm of the social. He employed statistics to posit the suicide rate as the unit of measurement that would reveal the impersonal and stable truth of a problem that should be considered foremost a disease of the social. Knowing suicide and knowing the social world were, to Durkheim, essentially the same problem. Durkheim, who himself struggled with mental illness (Lemert, 2008), found Truth in suicide. Durkheim’s isolation of mental illness in the social body appears to have been rejected over the course of the 20th century with the ascension of modern psychology and psychiatry in the USA (Goffman, 1961, 1969) and then with the progression of biomedicalization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries

Grzanka and Mann

377

(Clarke et al., 2003; Orr, 2010), though his influence has a kind of ‘‘haunting, seething presence’’ (Gordon, 1997) in sociology, specifically, and broader discourse on suicide in popular culture (Wray et al., 2011). Orr’s (2006) genealogy of panic, which traces the mutations of Talcott Parson’s interpretation of Durkheim and the advent of structural functionalism and psychotropics in the middle half of the 20th century, challenges a reductive storytelling that would lead us to believe that suicide used to be social and now is psychological and/or psychiatric. Contemporary discourse on suicide – indeed, discourse on psychopathology more broadly – relies on at least two poles of what Orr calls ‘‘PSYCHOpower.’’2 ‘‘In part conceptual kin and strategic ally of biopower (Foucault, 1978), PSYCHOpower operates through psychological monitoring, measurement, and discipline, administering order in the unruly psychic realms of perception, emotion, and memory,’’ explains Orr (2006: 11). Foucault defined biopower as technologies of the self and apparatuses of institutional control directed at both the body and the population, which he referred to as the ‘‘poles’’ of biopower. Psychopower, likewise, is directed at these two poles: by, through, and beyond the mind and collective representations of the population (i.e. who ‘‘we’’ are). Though Orr derives her concept of psychopower through a study of panic, the discourse on queer youth suicide in IGB also offers a case study in psychopower and the contours of neoliberal ‘‘structures of feeling’’ (Williams, 1977). Though psychiatrists and psychotherapists today do not ‘‘treat’’ suicide at the social level, contemporary mass-mediated discourse on queer youth suicide reveals a construction of suicidal thoughts and behavior to be both a social and a psychological disorder, which draw at least in part on medico-scientific discourse on LGBT individuals and suicidality (Erwin, 1993). Specifically, recent research, dialogue, and debate on the suicides of presumed3 queer youth in the USA reflect, on the one hand, a production of suicide as a weakness of the individual to withstand the realities of the social (in this case, heteronormativity and homonegativity), which manifests itself discursively as ‘‘bullying.’’ Cover (2012) explains, drawing on Erwin’s (1993) genealogy of research on lesbian and gay suicide, that the 1980s saw a wave of queer activists and medical professionals sometimes working in concert who recognized the high rates of suicide and self-harm among queer people. They ushered in a phase of social and medical research on suicide that ‘‘effectively re-figured sexuality-related suicide as a social fact in Durkheim’s terms by suggesting that social intolerance and homophobia were internalised, thereby leading to self-hatred and self-destructiveness’’ (Cover, 2012: 38). Cover cites Eric Rofes’s (1983) I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves and the 1989 US Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Youth Suicide as key epistemic moments that shifted ‘‘opinion from the idea that homosexuality was essentially abnormal, instead introducing the ways in which a number of factors were causal in the suicides of gay men, including shame resulting from blackmail and exposure, pressures around coming out and closetedness, isolation and ostracism’’ (Cover, 2012: 38). Sexuality, in other words, comes to distinguish queer suicides from other forms of mental illness and self-destructive behavior, thereby providing a key link between the psychological and the social. This psycho-social construction of

378

Sexualities 17(4)

queer suicide coincides with a kind of collective, moral panic over the perceived anomic state of queer youth. This panic is evidenced by massive media campaigns in the USA against queer suicide – exemplified by IGB but also including the Trevor Project and the Born This Way Foundation – despite conflicting empirical evidence on the prevalence of queer youth suicide (Cianciotto and Cahill, 2012). These media projects, on the one hand, constitute a diseased social body as their targets. But these discourses on queer youth suicide, which stress the profound affective ramifications of ‘‘bullying’’ on the emotional life of queer people, do not abandon a pathologization of the individual in exchange for a critique of the structural dynamics of heternormativity – suicide is not merely a ‘‘social fact.’’ Instead, as we will elaborate, the psychopolitics of queer youth suicide concurrently target the social and the psyche. IGB and related projects insist that queer youth should, as a social unit, take responsibility for their circumstances, ‘‘empower’’ themselves and tough it out through the horrors and violence of bullying about perceived non-normative sexual orientation and gender performance in the interest of a ‘‘better’’ futurity. The discourse on psychopathology and self-help that pervade popular rhetoric about mental health simultaneously (but not contradictorily) locates the ‘‘problem’’ of queer youth suicide in the individual who is not personally strong enough – for characterological, psychopathological, and/or biogenetic reasons – to endure the normal, developmentally appropriate challenges of society (e.g. bullying, legal, and extra-legal discrimination, etc.) even if those challenges take the form of trauma. The discursive practices of IGB, in particular, proffer an ontology of suicide as both a social and psychological problem and offers both psychopolitical and neoliberal ‘‘solutions.’’

Narrativizing IGB: Directives and testimonies It is notable that the IGB videos we analyzed are nearly uniform in terms of their narrative structure, and this is reflected in two styles that dominate the videos: (1) directives, which appear in every video, and (2) testimonies, which appear in most. In what follows, we provide representative examples of these styles, with emphasis placed on where the texts come from, work they are intended to do in the world, and how they accomplish this work. In terms of directives, the speakers in the videos command queer youth not to ‘‘give up,’’ to ‘‘hang in there,’’ to ‘‘be true’’ to themselves, to ‘‘be who you are,’’ to ‘‘just stick with us,’’ and ‘‘to reach out to someone,’’ and so on, at the same time that they assure said youth that they ‘‘know what it’s like,’’ particularly if the speakers are themselves LGBT or ‘‘different’’ in some ‘‘other’’ way, as in the case of President Obama. Samantha Lauzon, a transwoman, for example, explains that getting better is a ‘‘job’’: It’s your job to make sure that you’re OK. It’s your job to make sure that when you wake up in the morning that you’re going to be going to bed and waking up the next morning. Ending your life now is never the answer.

Grzanka and Mann

379

A gay man who works at Google directs his viewers accordingly: And, like all of the stuff you’re experiencing in school and stuff you’re going through, tons of people go through that, but it’s definitely not worth it to not persevere through it. It would be really bad for you to want to end your life at that point, because it’s so early on and there’s so much more to life . . . Just don’t do it. I don’t know what else to say.

Directives sometimes coincide with empathy while communicating an affective register of softness, like that of a sympathetic advisor, therapist, or close friend, as in Lauzon’s video. Other times, however, directives are accompanied by an insistence that borders on anger and rage, as if the IGB video-maker is scolding his or her viewer. Suze Orman, who has built a brand around dishing out tough financial advice, does not abandon this tone in her IGB video; she speaks to her viewers in a manner similar to how she addresses consumers who have accumulated excessive debt: My message to you is this: just stick with us. People are listening to you, people are supporting you, people want you to be who you are. And if you could just have faith that things will change and stick in there, I promise you that it will get better! Is it going to be easy? No. Nothing in life is. Is it worth the struggle? It is. There is nothing better in life to be who you are . . . I ask you to hang in there. I ask you to accept our support. And I ask you to just give it time, because, in the end, it really does get better.

Orman’s professional success, which she spends time outlining in her brief 2:30 minute video, is central to her argument. In self-identifying as the ‘‘personal finance expert of the world!’’, the implied neoliberal ideology of Orman’s treatise connects financial success to positive affect and self-actualization. Adam Lambert likewise uses his professional success as a pop music performer and his anger to appeal to his viewers. He describes himself as the target of bullying and expresses resentment that, from his perspective, he is viewed in popular culture solely in terms of his sexual orientation: ‘‘It’s all gay, gay, gay, gay, gay.’’ He cites how he is called ‘‘faggot’’ and ‘‘gross’’ in the comment sections of online new stories about his success, but argues that caring about such insults only gives the ‘‘ignorant’’ more power: You have to be strong, and you have to pay attention to the positive. And, in doing so, you will push through and you will rise up and you will live your life to the fullest. It gets better, but it’s up to you.

The substance of these directives explicate a prime objective of IGB – the responses it explicitly seeks to elicit from its consumers. However, the affective dynamics of the instructions also cohere into a neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility that renders agency to the burden of the suffering. Cliche´s such as ‘‘at the end of the day,’’ repeated twice in Lambert’s 1:30 minute video, reverberate

380

Sexualities 17(4)

throughout these videos and cohere with a dominant socio-cultural discourse; moreover, in these instances, cliche´s reinforce the paradox that while suicidal queer youth have support (e.g. from celebrities, anonymous corporate employees and unknown YouTube video-makers), they are responsible for accessing that support. As McCarthy enumerates, neoliberalism structures social life in terms of market logic and metaphors, where individual social actors are compelled to maximize their agency in terms of profits and fulfill their calculated potential in the social marketplace of competition: ‘‘state policies synchronize with cultural practices to apply market-based individualism as a governmental rationale across the institutions and practices of everyday life’’ (2007: 21). Though neoliberalism structurally shores up identity-based systems of inequality, such as racism and heterosexism, by way of resource stratification (i.e. upward distribution of wealth), economic deregulation, and dismantlement of social welfare programs, neoliberalism effectively conceals such dynamics through rhetorics of multiculturalism, post-identity politics, and individual empowerment, which are the most salient tactics in IGB discourse (Duggan, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Melamed, 2006) and which broadly inflect corporate media (Couldry, 2008; Grazian, 2010). In IGB, pertinently, heterosexism and its myriad consequences are the social structures that make such a project appear necessary, and yet discussion of heterosexism as an oppressive social structure itself is largely elided in these videos in exchange for discourse on individual bullies and the individual bullied people who must find ways to ‘‘rise above’’ such forms of torment. Likewise, queer people are constructed to experience ‘‘bullying’’ in similar ways, effectively obfuscating the significance of other systems of oppression, namely race, class, and gender, in the constitution of heterogeneous queer lives (Bowleg, 2008; Collins, 2005; Johnson and Henderson, 2005). The IGB videos in our sample inflect a kind of declarative demand on the presumably suicidal viewer: don’t do it. They draw upon popular (commercial) self-help discourse that is inextricable from neoliberal market rhetorics and logics, including bootstrapping, competition, and entrepreneurship (Couldry, 2008). This logic imbues itself into the actual grammar of the videos and their slogan: ‘‘it’’ remains an empty signifier, in place of more descriptive and substantive language (e.g. ‘‘heterosexism,’’ ‘‘structural violence’’); ‘‘gets’’ is a verb that can describe both time, as well as possession (e.g. ‘‘getting paid,’’ ‘‘getting what I deserve’’); and ‘‘better’’ describes value, which – in these IGB videos – almost always includes love and partnership by way of marriage and long-term dyadic monogamy college education, moving to cities, having children, cultivating a prosperous career, and consuming things, such as clothes. Halberstam’s (2005) critique of classism and racism in the representation of queer cultural geography resonate through IGB, because particular kinds of queer lives and spaces are pathologized (e.g. the rural) while others (e.g. the urban) are valorized. Once viewers do what they are told (i.e. wait, seek support, let time pass, etc.), they are promised virtue and success by way of neoliberal versions of queer utopia. The substance of this ‘‘better’’ life is communicated through testimonial, the second dominant narrative structure of the videos.

Grzanka and Mann

381

Stories of survival – testimonials or ‘‘confessionals’’ – are ubiquitous in these IGB videos. They are a hallmark of Foucault’s (1978) theory of surveillance culture from which biopower draws so much of its strength; furthermore, testimonials echo the cornerstone of Foucault’s ‘‘repressive hypothesis,’’ the hegemonic narrative in which some superior force (i.e. the bourgeoisie, heterosexuals) is thought to be dominating (i.e. ‘‘repressing’’) a subordinated group (i.e. perverts, homosexuals). When using testimonials, it is typical for speakers in the videos we analyzed to begin with a testimony before shifting into directives. Reverberating the frame of 12-Step programs and biblical conversions (Augustine, 1999; James, 1999 [1902]), the IGB testimonial is offered from the perspective of the ‘‘better,’’ and, as such, is constructed as an incentive. In order to acquire the things that IGB video-makers have, the viewer must resist his [sic] problematic psychology, life history, and his inappropriate responses to heterosexist, as well as racist, classist, and looksist, torment – just as the IGB video-makers did. And then, free of repression, ‘‘Tomorrow sex will be good again’’ (Foucault, 1978: 7). For example, before telling viewers that it gets better, a gay man at Google connects the pain of his closeted identity to both his family and its geography: You’re sitting in your house. It’s a small town. You can’t; you feel this magnetism, like you’re never gonna get out, you’re never gonna go anywhere, and it really draws you in. And you feel like there’s no hope, that there’s no one who will ever understand you. I am a software engineer now at Google, and I just want to tell you straightforward that things get so much better.

Sara, a lesbian mother from the Facebook employees’ video, says: Even though I had friends who were gay and people who were open, you still think that you’re the only one that’s going through exactly what you’re going through. You think you’re going to lose your friends, you’re gonna lose your family, I’d get kicked out of the sorority, no one from high school was ever gonna like me again.

Likewise, a transwoman (who is not identified by name in the video) at Google explains the pain of her childhood in terms of geography: I’m a transsexual woman, I grew up in rural Canada in really conservative surroundings, rather conservative family, went to a pretty conservative school, and when I was growing up, it was all about conforming, fitting in and doing what was expected of me. I was never even able to think about issues like my gender identity or sexual orientation until I grew up. In my high school it was: fit in.

These videos contain an array of testimonials about the challenges of growing up gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans*.4 These figures are older—people for whom things have ‘‘gotten better’’ by way of migration and assimilation into heteronormative society. Of course, most of the video-makers are not heterosexual (i.e. 24 out of

382

Sexualities 17(4)

30 here feature at least one person who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or trans*), but their assimilation has taken on aspects of what Duggan (2003) calls a neoliberal social formation: ‘‘homonormativity,’’ which denotes contemporary gay and lesbian subjectivities that embody middle-class, White, heterosexist values (see also Murphy et al., 2008). Homonormativity signifies more than passive acceptance of normative social structures; to the contrary, Duggan explicates homonormative discourse as a sustained commitment to promoting hegemonic systems of inequality. The testimonials signify the pain and even agony of life as a closeted, isolated queer youth; they do not testify to forms and strategies of resistance, which collectively constitute what Clarke (2005), drawing on Foucault (1978), calls a site of discursive silence. Silence, in discourse, is less the lack of meaning than a space of meaning making around what can and/or should be said and known. There is no explicit discussion in the videos we analyzed of challenging heterosexism. In fact, in some videos, such as the corporate employees’ videos, heterosexism is not named but implicitly referenced as the responsibility of individual heterosexist actors to manage, and for the bullying target to leave behind when he grows older, moves to college, develops a career, and so forth. This is centrally important to the neoliberal psychopolitics of IGB insomuch as it renders heterosexist attitudes inevitable and enables the heterosexist norm to remain intact while producing new, complacent ‘‘survivalist’’ norms for (presumably) queer teens. Jenna, a self-identified gay woman at Facebook, explains: I’m pretty proud of who I am, and if I show you who I am and you don’t like it, it puts the responsibility back on you to actually have to decide how to deal with me, but I don’t have to be the one to carry it.

Chaz Bono, best known for being Cher’s transgender son and a contestant on ‘‘Dancing with the Stars,’’ testifies to the circumstances of his life that changed, allowing him to avoid, if not actively resist, discrimination, violence and emotional pain: ‘‘When you get a little bit older and have a little bit more resources, you’re gonna find other wonderful people who are different just like you.’’ Alex, a British White man at Google, describes getting better – in this case, acceptance from his family of origin – as something that just magically happened: Then this one Christmas, mum went out and bought me some clothes, and they were like super tight and super gay, and I realized that things were better, and from that point forward things have been a lot cooler with my parents.

In IGB videos by employees at multinational corporations and celebrities, the material rewards of surviving the perils of youth are described in some detail, but the pathways by which these things have been acquired remain unspoken. An explication of race, class, and gender privilege would likely complicate and potentially dismantle the presumed power of the testimonial and its neoliberal foundations: ‘‘The ‘truths’ of neoliberalism would be unacceptable if stated openly, even if

Grzanka and Mann

383

their consequences unfold before our eyes every day’’ (Couldry, 2008: 3). Accordingly, these actors presume college, migration to urban areas, uppermiddle-class status and obtaining a partner to be developmental givens. Though neoliberal logics broadly do rely on agency-defined ‘‘bootstrapping’’ narratives, the survival narratives in these IGB videos do not actually articulate any bootstrapping that might be essential elements of developing ways to endure, manage, or resist heterosexism in the everyday life of queer youth. Progress, success, and achievement just happen. In this sense, the collective psychic life of queer youth is identified as socially constituted by heterosexism, but positioned as the harsh psychological responsibility of the queer subject. Suicide, then, is the material-semiotic failure of queer youth to persevere (Haraway, 1997).

The subjectification of queer youth Reconstituting psychological theories of development and psychoanalytic-infused renderings of childhood trauma (Cover, 2011), the IGB videos we examined are preoccupied both with their viewers’ ages and consistently insist on the pre-sexual, pre-actualized nature of their young queer identities. For example, an unnamed gay male Google employee explains: I remember when I was younger, I had four brothers, and it’s not easy to be gay when you have four brothers, because there’s like so much masculinity in the house. I remember sitting in my bedroom when I was young and feeling this dread knowing, like, someday I have to tell my family, or I have to tell somebody. That alone was enough to terrify me.

His family provides no space for his emerging identity, and he describes his family life as a source of profound pain. Another gay Google employee describes the aftermath of his depressing prom experience, which was supposed to be a quintessential teenage moment: [After prom] I drove away, and I drove to the side of the road in my car, and I started crying, just thinking about how screwed up everything is. I didn’t know what to do with my life.

Samantha Lauzon, describes the agony of high school: ‘‘I dealt with so much flack and so much stuff that more often than not, I went home (from high school) crying.’’ In an IGB video that ‘‘Jeff and Joe’’ made after their wedding, Jeff appeals to his viewers by way of explicating his lack of hope or imagination during his youth: 10 years ago, if you’d have told me that I’d meet the man of my dreams and that we’d live together, and that we would get married on the beach in front of all our family, all our friends, I would have thought you were crazy. And that’s exactly what happened,

384

Sexualities 17(4)

and it’s better than I could have ever dreamed possible. It gets better. It gets way better.

Another Google employee insists, ‘‘If I could tell myself at the age of 14 what I would have wanted to have heard from an older person is that it does get better and that you deserve that. You deserve an awesome education. You will be loved by somebody; somebody will love you back.’’ In these emphatic appeals to the unique emotional pain of LGBT youth, the IGB narrators specify childhood and teenage years as a temporary state of negative affect, which Cover (2011) delineates as a cornerstone of queer subject-making. Actor Zachary Quinto, who was not publicly out at the time he uploaded his IGB video in 2010, says, ‘‘There are thousands of other teens and young adults who are struggling to find a sense of identity and belonging in a chaotic and often unforgiving world.’’ The most precarious time of life in terms of happiness is that which precedes formal adulthood. Accordingly, youth is the time where IGB directs its attention. Almost exclusively, these IGB filmmakers insist that youth is the worst (trans* activist Kate Bornstein’s video is a notable exception discussed later), and therefore the most psychologically risky. Another Google employee asserts, simply, ‘‘There is no where to go but up. This is temporary.’’ Ironically, as Cover explicates, this normative ‘‘re-cognition’’ of childhood memory, in which out queer adults ‘‘remember’’ always knowing they were queer, also does the affective work of essentializing queer-ness as a permanent artifact of identity: something that is always there, if also always problematic. These children, teens, and young adults have not yet ‘‘gotten better’’ – so they do not love and they are miserable. This has a two-fold and somewhat contradictory affect/effect: we can talk about them because they are pre-sexual (i.e. these young people are not constructed to be having queer sex) and youth sexuality is not socially palpable, but it is precisely their pre-sexual lives that make them suicidal.5 Foucault’s work on the history of psychiatry (2008 [1973–1974]) is an important reminder of the salience and consequences of age, generally, and youth, particularly, in contemporary mental health discourse. In these lectures, he argues that psychiatric power, which here is an early theorization of one specific kind of biopower (Foucault, 1978), targeted the family increasingly in the early 1800s: The control of posture, of gestures, of the way to behave, the control of sexuality, with instruments for preventing masturbation, etcetera, all penetrate the family through a disciplinarization which develops during the nineteenth century and the effect of which is that, through this disciplinarization, the child’s sexuality becomes an object of knowledge within the family itself. And as result of this the child will become the central target of psychiatric intervention. (Foucault, 2008 [1973–1974]: 124–125)

Foucault explains that it is unsurprising that the modern mental institution, with its newfound obsession with children’s psychopathology, comes to resemble a home. He characterizes its organization, at least in late 19th-century Europe, as a utopian

Grzanka and Mann

385

simulacrum of the bourgeois family. In the following decades, as Freud’s ‘‘talking cure’’ locates neuroses in the early stages of human development, psychiatric power increasingly targets childhood in two ways, according to Foucault: (1) the family provides psychiatry with a source of material, both bodies and capital, through the supervision, training, detection, pedagogy, and therapy of children, which is motivated because, (2) psychiatry insists that all mental unhappiness and illness is rooted in youth. And so continues this logic that a healthy family, made healthy through engagement with psychiatric disciplines, allows for the catharsis and expulsion of early childhood and adolescent trauma and, subsequently, the production of healthy, functioning bourgeoisie children. In the Facebook employees’ IGB video, Sara exemplifies this logic when she insists that she needs queer youth to get better for the sake of her own family: I need you youth . . . I need you to stay around. I need you to make this world a better place for my daughter. I don’t want her to ever, ever think twice about not telling people that she has two moms. So if you’re out there and you’re struggling, I need you to stay around, because I need you. I need your help. I need you to be your authentic self and just make this world better for my little girl.

What exactly qualifies as the ‘‘authentic self’’ is left up to the viewer, but Sara makes it clear that getting better coincides with this authenticity. Personally (i.e. psychologically) feeling better and continuing to live is presumed by Sara to have socially transformative potential, particularly for future children and their queer families. In the videos that we analyzed, it was only Hillary Clinton’s that referenced suicides of teens who were ‘‘gay or presumed to be gay.’’ The videos serve to posthumously label, name, codify and produce gay suicidal subjects, as if making them come out from beyond the grave will have ‘‘positive’’ political, psychological, or otherwise sociological effects on consumers (and even producers) of IGB videos. One video, in particular, is actually addressed to the dead: Christian evangelist Oral Roberts’s gay grandson speaks to his gay uncle, who committed suicide. Rhetorics of strength and perseverance serve to contrast the living listeners of IGB videos with their dead counterparts, who lacked the psychological strength and social resources to continue to live. In other words, the dead are not afforded the opportunity to ‘‘get better,’’ which should be reason enough for the viewer to keep living. As such, IGB also feels necropolitical, the term Mbembe (2003) theorizes to describe the violence of contemporary geopolitics that take up death as both their infinite goal and practice. IGB is necropolitical to the extent that it is preoccupied with the semiotic ghosts of ‘‘gay’’ teenagers (Gordon, 1997). Accordingly, the management of the social and the psyche (i.e. psychopower) in IGB discourse seems inextricable from the necropolitical management of death: the ever-present specter of past suicides that must be made and remade in the image of neoliberal social politics. These suicides should not be forgotten; indeed, the affective power of IGB is predicated on the collective, moral panic

386

Sexualities 17(4)

around these suicides. Rather than repress the memories of dead youth who have ended their lives, IGB takes up these suicides as affective objects to be multiplied, managed, and spoken about ad infinitum (Foucault, 1978). The necropolitical contours of IGB’s relationship to queer youth suicide serve as the exigency and justification for IGB’s existence, so suicide can never be forgotten. But not all suicides are as important as others. Indeed, in a familiar script in which racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants, those outside the USA, and the working class are strategically marginalized in American narrativizing of sociocultural crises (Parks, 2010), IGB’s inception and acceleration suggest a racialized, classed, and gendered logic in which the White, middle-class, gay, cisgender male youth suicides are implicitly considered the most horrific deaths, and therefore the ones that most warrant intervention. Queer theorists, including Puar (2012) and Nyong’o (2010), have argued that the termination of these White gay lives, particularly Tyler Clementi’s suicide after alleged harassment from Dharun Ravi, his Asian Indian immigrant roommate, catalyze such intense affective responses in the mass media because of their racial, class and gender implications: ‘‘Part of the outrage generated by these deaths is based precisely in a belief that things are indeed supposed to be better, especially for a particular class of white gay men,’’ (Puar, 2012: 151). As Nyong’o (2010) elaborates: I think there is a bit of a queer salvific wish going on in the ‘‘It Gets Better’’ videos, which exhibits a similarly melancholic refusal to work through the grief that might come with the recognition that it doesn’t always get better, that in many ways its gotten a lot worse in this country, and that making a YouTube video, reaching out a hand, each one teaching one, or any of the other individualizing modes or participation which sentimental culture makes defines as ‘‘doing something,’’ isn’t always going to cut it.

On the other hand, the murders of queer people of color, such as Sakia Gunn, a 15year-old African American lesbian, are relegated to the cultural periphery because of their presumed inevitability and persistent invisibility (see Keeling, 2009). The dominant logic follows that some queer lives are more precarious – and indeed more or less precious – than others. In one of the most unusual and profound images we found in IGB videos, American soldiers in occupied Bagram in Afghanistan created a cardboard sign that reads ‘‘It Gets Better’’ and placed it on a large piece of artillery, carrying the sign throughout the occupied region (see Figure 1). In these acts, the out queer soldiers symbolically link the domestic, cultural politics of neoliberalism to the globalized, militaristic neocolonialism that characterizes neoliberalism’s more macrosociological affects/effects (Harvey, 2005; Melamed, 2006; Pieterse, 2007). The well-intentioned soldiers nevertheless communicate a message that further specifies those for whom things might get better, while queer youth in Afghanistan, whose lives are eviscerated by USA imperial ambitions in their country, are not included – and are perhaps unimaginable as subjects. This anti-intersectional ideology exacerbates the elision of

Grzanka and Mann

387

Figure 1. Screen capture of ‘‘Outserve BAF: It Gets Better (deployed US military)’’ video. Source: Obtained via YouTube (http://youtu.be/a_QpSsvO7-I).

intersecting structures of inequality that contribute to the pain and suffering of queer people worldwide who attempt to take their own lives or are murdered. In this video’s discursive frame, racism, classism, and xenophobia most certainly do not get better.

The affective economy of queer youth suicide In terms of our argument, IGB may be read as a neoliberal, psychopolitical project. These IGB videos communicate a complex, multifarious narrative. A dominant slice of this discourse, however, reiterates a directive, punitive message about queer subjectivities and mental illness that (a) hyper-emphasizes the significance of agency and behavior modification; (b) elides the impact of structural dynamics in the constitution of queer youth subjectivities and life circumstances; (c) relies upon an ‘‘affective economy’’ (Ahmed, 2004) of mental health that places responsibility on the sufferer to relieve one’s suffering through complacency with oppression and assimilation into heteronormative social structures while (d) promising a fantastical gay futurity of happiness and success rooted in hetero-monogamous family systems, White middle-class values and the accumulation of capital, which Duggan (2003) calls homonormativity. Though by many measures IGB is possessed of powerful affective resonance with its consumers, professional advocates, and the broader popular sphere as a ‘new,’ important intervention in the lives of depressed and suicidal queer youth (Goltz, 2012), we find the actual substance of these IGB videos to be more reflective than original, more reinforcing than challenging, and more normative than counter-hegemonic. By replicating forms of power and privilege in an affective economy of queer youth suicide, IGB is able

388

Sexualities 17(4)

to ‘‘solve’’ a crisis of its own making. ‘‘Queer youth suicide’’ is rendered an epidemic of failure: failure to capitalize on the inevitable success of White, middleclass gay subjectivity, and remedied by way of the psychopolitical construction of queer suicide.6 Halberstam has recently made an important contribution to queer theorizing around the concept of ‘‘failure,’’ and argued that failure contains symbolic power to transform understandings of queer lives and to subvert heterosexism: I argue that success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulations. But these measures of success have come under serious pressure recently . . . If the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy critique of static models of success and failure. (Halberstam, 2011: 2)

Failure, Halberstam argues, is something that queers ‘‘do and have always done exceptionally well’’ (2011: 3). Though suicide is certainly not an example of the kind of failure neither Halberstam nor we wish to cultivate, challenging the discourse on queer youth suicide as one of a reductive failure to survive heterosexism can open up new ways of thinking about how queer youth – indeed, queers of all ages – creatively ‘‘wander, improvise, fall short’’ and negotiate the ‘‘cruel’’ complexities of life in neoliberal times (Couldry, 2008; Halberstam, 2011: 25). And by rethinking what constitutes ‘‘success’’ in the era of early 21st century neoliberalism, we may elucidate new strategies for challenging the psychopolitics of the happiness industry, which rigidly construct what count as worthwhile, livable queer lives (Ahmed, 2010; Cover, 2012; Fields et al., 2012). Our analysis has foregrounded a dominant narrative in these IGB videos at the expense of other strands of the broader discourse on queer youth suicide, including meaningful sites of resistance. For example, in the IGB video we analyzed by transgender artist and activist Kate Bornstein, Bornstein devotes several minutes of her brief, five-minute message toward reflecting on how she is often unsure that ‘‘it’’ does get better. Another project might direct attention at the varied counterdiscourses, particularly emanating from communities of color and transgender activists, including the ‘‘Make It Better’’ project, which work both to critique IGB and to suggest alternative ways of undermining heterosexism and intersecting forms of oppression (e.g. Fields et al., 2012). Likewise, because of IGB’s anchoring in American popular culture, our analysis is centered on the nexus of US sexual and psycho-politics, which contemporary queer scholarship has stressed do not explain all sexual and mental health discourse worldwide (e.g. McCormack, 2012, 2013). Finally, the central claims of our analysis are limited to a purposively derived sample (Corbin and Strauss, 2008; Fassinger, 2005): there are thousands of IGB videos, and we focused on 30 (mostly prominent ones) here. However, our systematic, empirically driven analysis extends earlier contributions from queer theorists that rely on anecdotal readings of IGB videos to critique the project

Grzanka and Mann

389

(e.g. Nyong’o, 2010; Puar, 2012). We did not analyze personal responses to IGB, systematic reception of IGB by queer youth or the experiences of IGB videomakers, though future empirical projects should. We certainly do not suggest here that IGB lacks polysemy or the potential to engender positive affect, and more research is needed to assess the actual potential of IGB and related projects to systematically intervene in heterosexism and the suffering of queer people of all ages. And though Goltz asserts that queer theory and critical theory-informed interrogation of IGB ‘‘works to shut down rather than thoughtfully complicate’’ the discourse on queer youth suicide (2012: 3), we take seriously IGB’s possibilities as a tool for social justice. We do, however, assert that the ‘‘better’’ imperative of IGB warrants sustained critical inquiry, and we have argued one specific axis of criticism that could be framed as an interruption in the otherwise resounding celebration of IGB in the mass-mediated public sphere. Psychopower, in particular, provides a useful, counter-hegemonic framework with which to articulate this intervention. Albeit heterogeneously, the IGB discourse highlighted here transforms queer youth suicide into the psychosocial pathology of those for whom a ‘‘better’’ life is too elusive; video-makers direct the suffering to the harsh logics of contemporary neoliberal social politics as the therapeutic path to getting better. In the neoliberal marketplace of diversity (Grzanka and Maher, 2012), in which being queer is something to be capitalized upon rather than recognized as co-constituted by and within intersecting systems of oppression, IGB says: hang in there, good times are just around the corner. Sexuality, of course, is what comes to distinguish queer youth suicides from all others. Nonetheless, despite its reception as a social justice project (Stelter, 2010), much IGB discourse refuses an interrogation of sexuality as a system of inequality or a pragmatics of resistance (Seidman, 1997), leaving ‘‘it’’ – heteronormativity – as something that is unlikely to get better at all. Acknowledgements A version of this article was presented at the Crossing Boundaries pre-conference workshop on sexuality studies and the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, both of which were held at the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting in August 2012. We would like to acknowledge the audiences at both of these events for their helpful and constructive feedback, particularly CJ Pascoe and Mary Gray. We also thank Jackie Orr for her invaluable comments on an earlier draft.

Notes 1. We use the term ‘‘queer youth’’ here as an category that is inclusive of diverse sexual minority and gender nonconforming identities, not necessarily in the political sense of the term ‘‘queer’’ as anti-heteronormative or radical (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1999). IGB discourse tends to deploy the more circumscribed term ‘‘gay youth,’’ as noted by Puar (2012). 2. Orr capitalizes ‘‘PSYCHO’’ as part of her literary performance of panic in Panic Diaries. Here, we will use standard capitalization.

390

Sexualities 17(4)

3. Many of the young people who committed suicide did not identify as ‘‘gay,’’ ‘‘lesbian,’’ or other minoritized sexual or gender identity categories, but they are often presumed to be gay because they were the targets of bullying that is primarily organized around nonnormative gender performance; see Pascoe (2007). 4. We use the term ‘‘trans*’’ to be inclusive of the diverse identities and self-representations of individuals who do not identify as cisgender or with the gender they were assigned at birth. 5. In some respects, this discourse of pre-sexual queer youth is consistent with a broader dominant discourse on teenage sexuality as documented by sociologist Sinikka Elliott (2012). In Elliott’s analysis of her interviews with US parents, she found they construct their own adolescent children as young, immature, and asexual – not interested in or knowledgeable about sex, yet. 6. Perhaps un-coincidentally, the Trevor Project’s 2008 anti-suicide campaign directed at gay youth was titled, ‘‘I’m Glad I Failed’’ (see Weavil, 2008).

References Ahmed S (2004) Affective economies. Social Text 22(2): 117–139. Ahmed S (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Augustine (1999) Confessions (trans. H Chadwick). New York: Oxford University Press. Bowleg L (2008) When Black + lesbian + woman 6¼ Black lesbian woman: The methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research. Sex Roles 59(5/6): 312–325. Butler J (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Cianciotto J and Cahill S (2012) LGBT Youth in America’s Schools. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clarke A (2005) Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Clarke AE, Mamo L, Fishman JR, et al. (2003) Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness and U.S. biomedicine. American Sociological Review 68(2): 161–194. Collins PH (2005) Black Sexual Politics. New York: Routledge. Corbin J and Strauss A (2008) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Couldry N (2008) Reality TV, or the secret theater of neoliberalism. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30(1): 3–13. Cover R (2011) Recognition and re-cognition: Lesbian/gay identity and the discourse of childhood memory. Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review 7(3): 205–215. Cover R (2012) Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? Farnham. Ashgate Publishing. Also available at:http://lib.myilibrary.com?ID=366653(accessed 5 August 2012). Duggan L (2003) Twilight of Inequality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dumit J (2004) Picturing Personhoods: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim E (2007 [1897]) On Suicide. New York: Penguin. Elliott S (2012) Not My Kid: What Parents Believe About the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers. New York: New York University Press.

Grzanka and Mann

391

Erwin K (1993) Interpreting the evidence: Competing paradigms and the emergence of lesbian and gay suicide as a ‘‘social fact.’’ International Journal of Health Services 23(3): 437–453. Fassinger RE (2005) Paradigms, praxis, problems, and promise: Grounded theory in counseling psychology research. Journal of Counseling Psychology 52(2): 156–166. Fields J, Mamo L, et al. (2012) The beyond bulling project. In: Crossing Boundaries, Workshopping Sexualities mini-conference on sexuality studies in sociology, Denver, CO, 15–16 August. Foucault M (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I. (trans. R Hurley) New York: Vintage Books. Foucault M (2008) Psychiatric Power: Lectures of the College de France, 1973–1974 (trans. G Burchell). New York: Picador. Goffman E (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Goffman E (1969) The insanity of place. Psychiatry 32(4): 357–388. Goltz DB (2012) It gets better: Queer futures, critical frustrations, and radical potentials. Critical Studies in Media Communication. iFirst article, 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/ 15295036.2012.701012. Gordon A (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grazian D (2010) Neoliberalism and the realities of reality television. Contexts 9(2): 68–71. Grzanka PR and Maher J (2012) Different, like everyone else: Stuff White People Like and the marketplace of diversity. Symbolic Interaction 35(3): 368–393. Halberstam J (2005) In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam J (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway D (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. New York: Routledge. Harvey D (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. James W (1999 [1902]) The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: The Modern Library/Random House. Jaworski A Coupland N (eds) (1999) The Discourse Reader. London Routledge. Johnson EP and Henderson MG (2005) Introduction: Queering black studies/‘‘quaring’’ queer studies. In: Johnson EP and Henderson MG (eds) Black Queer Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–17. Keeling K (2009) Looking for M—: Queer temporality, Black political possibility, and poetry from the future. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15(4): 565–582. Lemert C (ed.) (2008) Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, 4th edn. Denver, CO Westview Press. Mbembe A (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40. McCarthy A (2007) Reality television: A neoliberal theater of suffering. Social Text 25(4 93): 17–41. McCormack M (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. McCormack M (2013) Critical reflections on making an impact in sexualities research. Sexualities 16(1/2): 240–241.

392

Sexualities 17(4)

McKinley J (2010) Several recent suicides put light on pressures facing gay teenagers. The New York Times 4 October. From LexisNexis Academic Available at:http://www.lexis nexis.com(accessed 19 August 2012). Melamed J (2006) The spirit of neoliberalism: From racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism. Social Text 24(4 89): 1–24. Murphy KP Ruiz J Serlin D (eds) (2008) Queer Futures (Racial History Review) Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nyong’o T (2010) School daze. Bully Bloggers 30 September. Available at:http://bullyblog gers.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/school-daze/(accessed 18 February 2014). Orr J (2006) Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Orr J (2010) Biopsychiatry and the informatics of diagnosis. In: Clarke AE, Mamo L, Fosket JR, et al. (eds) Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 353–378. Parker-Pope T (2010) Showing gay teenagers a happy future. The New York Times 22 September. Available at:http://www.lexisnexis.com(accessed 19 August 2012). Parks S (2010) Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture. New York: Ballantine Books. Pascoe CJ (2007) Dude, You’re a Fag. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pieterse JN (2007) Neoliberal empire. In: Denzin NK and Giardina MD (eds) Contesting Empire, Globalizing Dissent: Cultural Studies after 9/11. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, pp. 78–92. Puar JK (2012) The cost of getting better: suicide, sensation, switchpoints. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(1): 149–158. Rofes E (1983) I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Seidman S (1997) Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stelter B (2010) Campaign offers hope and help to gay youths. The New York Times 19 October. Available at:http://www.lexisnexis.com(accessed 19 August 2012). Sullivan N (2003) A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press. Warner M (1999) The Trouble with Normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weavil B (2008) Executive director of the Trevor Project, Charles Robbins, discusses the ‘‘I’m Glad I Failed’ campaign. Out Impact. Available at:http://www.outimpact.com/ activism/executive-director-of-the-trevor-project-charles-robbins-discusses-the-im-glad-ifailed-campaign/#axzz21HEr3jtc(accessed 1 September 2012). Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wray M, Colen C and Pescosolido B (2011) The sociology of suicide. Annual Review of Sociology 37: 505–528.

Patrick R Grzanka, PhD is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and affiliate faculty of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. In August 2014, he will join the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee as an Assistant Professor. His interdisciplinary research explores emotions, mental health, and social inequalities, particularly how emotions become contested objects in science and popular culture. His first

Grzanka and Mann

393

book, Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (Westview Press, 2014) traces the origins and contemporary frontlines of scholar-activism that critiques how social inequalities are created and organized along multiple dimensions of difference, namely race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. His research on sexual orientation in psychotherapy was funded by a 2012 National Science Foundation grant, and his work has been published in a wide range of scholarly journals, including Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Counseling Psychology, and American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience. Emily S Mann, PhD is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University. Effective August 2014, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. Her research examines the regulation of sexual and reproductive practices across multiple institutional contexts; an example of this work was recently published in Gender & Society. She is currently working on a book project that explores how Latina/o youth navigate diverse forms of social control in the context of social inequalities as they make difficult decisions about their sexual, reproductive, and educational lives.