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Abstract
This article describes the dramaturgical process—the telling, adapting, and performing of personal stories—as a method for accessing how youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) construct and present complex identities. Using data collected during an extended case study with the About Face Youth Theatre, an organization that works with LGBTQ youth on the dramaturgical process, this article focuses on the ways in which youth engage with complex issues of identity by telling their personal stories in community contexts and adapting others’ stories for performance.Through a narrative analysis of the stories as they were originally told, and a conversational discourse analysis of an adaptation session among a small group of youth, supplemented with reflections from participating youth, this article highlights the ways these practices can support identity development. The author finds that the evolving relationship between master and individual narratives provides great leverage for understanding how LGBTQ youth construct identities. This narrative process demonstrates that detypification is the mechanism by which LGBTQ youth work toward building a viable social identity. This study concludes by reflecting on the similarities between detypification and the developmental processes of other groups of marginalized youth.
Keywords identity development, narrative, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning youth
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