Insights from an intersectional view of the self for non-heterosexual female youth workers

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of intersectional theory (Crenshaw, 1989; Winker and Degele, 2011) in understanding how youth workers name themselves in their everyday lives. An intersectional approach will assist youth workers in developing a clear understanding of their own self as they work with young people from diverse and challenging backgrounds.

This research takes a qualitative approach, using in-depth interviews with cisgendered, female lesbian, gay and bisexual respondents of different social class, religion, ethnicity and age about their everyday experiences.

Intracategorical and anticategorical intersectional approaches (McCall, 2005) were used to assist in understanding how these professionals chose to name themselves in their personal and working lives.

The youth work literature, although focussed on the importance of issues of diversity, has not engaged with the ideas of intersectionality. The focus on intersections of sexuality, as well as social class, religion, ethnicity and age, fills another gap in the literature where less attention has been paid to the “category” of sexuality (Richardson and Monro, 2012; Wright, 2016b). These findings will be useful for youth workers and for practitioners and their trainers from a range of professional backgrounds such as therapists, social workers, teachers and health care practitioners.