Aunties, Aunts, and Tías: The Forgotten Othermother Supporting and Housing LGBTQ Youth

Abstract

Research on youth can miss important aspects of their lives if this work focuses only on the parent-child relationship. This focus can also overlook Black feminist interventions to understanding the roles of othermothers and can miss how nonparental relatives such as aunts may provide support, housing stability, and safety for youth. On the basis of a mixed-methods longitudinal study with 83 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth in South Texas and the Inland Empire of California, the authors intervene through examining how aunts’ supportive practices shape LGBTQ youth’s experiences of housing stability and safety. The findings empirically demonstrate how LGBTQ-supportive aunting practices, such as educating other family members about LGBTQ people and housing an LGBTQ nibling, actively challenge cisheteronormativity. This study moves forward research on family processes by not focusing on parent-child relationships or LGBTQ “families of choice” to instead examining how aunts can support LGBTQ youth, disrupt cisheteronormativity, and prevent LGBTQ youth from becoming unhoused.

A life course perspective on sexual minorities: Implications for the study of homophobic prejudice and discrimination

“…Further, little is known about the role of non-parental relatives in the lives of sexual minorities, though recent interview research on gender and sexual minority youth has found that extended family members (i.e., aunts, uncles, cousins) often play a supportive role in their lives (Robinson et al, 2023;Stone et al, 2022). As the number of sexual minority grandparents increase (due to rises in the number of same-sex led families with children), more research will be needed to understand the effects of these relationships (Orel & Fruhauf, 2013).…”