Geographies of Home: Adolescent Girls', Trans', Non-Binary Youths' Sexual Wellbeing in the GTA During COVID-19

This thesis examines how sexual wellbeing is related to the home as a spatial site during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. We conducted five virtual focus groups (n=34) with those who identified as adolescent girls’, trans’, or non-binary youths’ in the GTA between April-June 2021. We inquired about home, privacy, and sexual wellbeing during Canada’s third wave. Sessions were transcribed using Zoom and coded using an inductive framework with NVivo. Using intersectionality theory and embodiment theory, this research analyzes how youth’s diverse identities shape their understandings and experiences of sexual wellbeing. We found youth needed spaces where they were not only unseen, but importantly, unheard. Additionally, white youth cited the bedroom as the best space for sexual wellbeing practices, but BIPOC youth felt the bedroom was only their best available option and still found they had to negotiate privacy. We also found BIPOC and sexual minority youth often had to resort to physical boundary negotiations. I map place and self to the queer home, intergenerational home, and single parent home to understand how space is relationally defined. I argue McRobbie and Garber’s (1976) bedroom culture concept can be expanded towards an intersectional analysis and coupled with increasing ICTs. I argue sound as an important piece of boundary-work that reveals the way youth construct space during precarious times. I also expand on Hernes’ (2004) concept of physical, social and mental boundary-work to include sound as a fourth type, straddling amongst. This research shows how privacy, gender and sexual identities were negotiated at home in times of extreme uncertainty, highlighting how implications of home as a ‘place’ during the pandemic, constructs sexual wellbeing. I conclude with suggestions for supporting adolescent sexual wellbeing, inside and outside the home, during and after COVID-19.