xi Introduction : Public Feelings and Youth Sexualities Susan Talburt Transgender bathroom wars (Drum 2016)? Dance protests at the White House to support trans youth (Nichols 2017)? Former Democratic con- gressman Anthony Weiner sexting a teenage girl (Weiser and Rashbaum 2017)? A Columbia University undergraduate carrying a mattress around campus as her senior project to protest the university’s handling of the sexual-assault case she filed (Crocker 2017)? Undocuqeer youth coming out as LGBTQ and undocumented in the United States (Perez 2015)? A reality show, I Am Jazz, whose star is a transgender teen deliberating sur- gery (Stone 2017)? A college student commits suicide off the George Wash- ington Bridge following a cyber-outing (Parker 2012)? These are just a few narratives of the contemporary U.S. landscape. This collection analyzes contemporary intersections of two sites of sig- nificant social concern, if not anxiety: youth and sexuality. Youth sexuali- ties historically and contemporarily are fraught topics, involving psychology, medicine, education, juvenile justice, child welfare, the media, parents, and youth themselves. Public feelings about youth sexualities shape, and are shaped, by expert discourse, the media and popular culture, and spaces and relations of everyday living in local, national, and transna- tional social, cultural, and political contexts. These volumes juxtapose flows of the felt dimensions of adult and insti- tutional discourses, policies, and practices as they respond to and would govern youth sexualities with youths’ experiences of their sexual subjec- tivities, identities, perspectives, cultural practices, actions, and activisms. How do public feelings participate in shaping youths’ and adults’ experi- ences and thinking across domains, such as policy, research, schools, state
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