Queer Youth in the Province of the "Severely Normal"

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

The book’s focus is on young adults in Alberta, the province of the
“severely normal,” in Ralph Klein’s words. The work, which is
based on Filax’s Ph.D. thesis, is short and its five chapters only
loosely linked. Although the author interviewed 12 adolescents,
including three females, their narratives are not central to the volume,


but rather interwoven among the individual essays.

Alberta has had the most homophobic government in Canada, characterized
by politicians like Stockwell Day. It was also the home of the most
homophobic news magazine in North America, Alberta Report, which died in
2003. The weekly was distributed at no cost in all Alberta schools;
Filax demonstrates that schools failed in dealing with non-conforming
sexuality. As elsewhere in Canada, queer youth are deprived of any
historical or cultural knowledge of themselves. As Filax notes, “the
largest risk factor for sexual minority youth is not their queerness
but, rather, living in a heteronormative world.”

The author considers herself an ethnographer reviewing queer youth
culture, but the essays making up this volume are theoretical and
analytical explorations. They range from a focused analysis of the
Alberta Report’s homophobia to a discussion of Canadian law’s
construction of the homosexual. Much of the volume is devoted to
revealing the intersection of discourses on homosexuality with the
social construction of “youth.” She convincingly deconstructs the
sociologists’ creation of “adolescence,” a fantastical (the
author’s adjective) construct that denies youthful sexuality. The
author persuasively points out the tight conceptual formation that links
body, behaviour, and sexual practices as a heavy burden born by queer
youth.

An impressive range of written sources informs the work, but with only
25 endnotes, most references are found in the text. Unfortunately, some
references, such as that to the work of Marlene Smith, are not present
in the bibliography, the only site where readers might locate
publication data in this arrangement.

Filax’s work throws up a challenge to traditional sociology and will
be of interest primarily to social scientists.