Resistance
The notion of resistance provides an important unifying thematic area to make sense of data that has emerged from our analysis (see [66, 67]). In examining youth cultures, researchers have considered the ways in which youth groups develop subcultures based on values opposed to or resisting the values of the dominant society. [67,68,69] These subcultures are considered forms of resistance through which some marginalized youth transcend negative stereotypes. [69,70,71] Research on youth cultures and marginalized youth has a long tradition both in the USA [72, 73] and in the UK [74,75,76], with much emphasis placed on the role of illicit drugs within these subcultures. [69, 77,78,79,80] While some research has examined smoking as a form of resistance for youth (e.g., [50, 67, 81]), less research has focused its examination on the ways in which tobacco use may be used by sexual and gender minority youth to cultivate an alternative definition of self-identity to resist discrimination and/or social isolation.
In one conceptualization of resistance, a clear power structure or “enemy” exists that a subgroup of youth is thought to fight against in more or less subversive ways. The “oppressor” might be patriarchy or institutionalized racism, or perhaps even a public health establishment that is perceived by some youth to be dominated by “crusaders” who do not always “tell the truth” [82]. In these cases, resistance to oppression may involve youth using “popular culture and aesthetic artifacts to fight against power” [66], and smoking may be one tool, albeit not that powerful, to exert some control over their lives through their activities. For example, SB, a 24-year-old queer woman who used to smoke, explains:
You have this radius suddenly of control, …where you’re taking up space with the smoking…, which is cool…showing passersby[s], this is the four of us. This is where we’re smoking right now. We’re talking. We’re socializing. This is kind of our area at this moment, which is really appealing for queer folks. Like, sending a message to passersby[s] who we don’t know, who might hate queers. …this is our space right now…we’re communing. We’re socializing, and we’re not alone. So, mess with us at your peril. And I’m sure there’s a big appeal to that in a lot of ways…It’s an aggression born of fear. It’s something that I say because I have been harassed as an individual for being queer…But there is a lot of strength in numbers. So yeah, […it’s] sort of a preemptive retaliation to people who would like to punish us.
Using cigarettes to control and occupy space emerged as a frequent pattern in participants’ narratives of smoking. Other scholars have highlighted meanings of smoking as control [50, 81, 83], for example, in terms of establishing a sense of control while living in circumstances of disadvantage [55, 84] or exemplifying emotional control [44, 56, 83, 85]. In our participants’ narratives, control often manifested in ways that emphasized a desire to exert control over an oppressor, like SB’s quote illustrates.
However, a clear enemy need not be articulated for a sense of resistance to be enacted [66]. For example, some participants’ narratives emphasized the deviancy socially ascribed to both queerness and smoking, powerfully linking the two so that together they functioned as a way to resist social marginalization. For example, Janet, a 25-year-old former smoker who identified her sexuality as queer, said:
For me, when I smoked, you have to go to a designated area. You’re already kind of the pariah or whatever. But, then, you bond with the other pariahs that are stuck in there. That was part of the appeal. Like, okay. Well, smokers, like, you have something to bond over by being excluded, (quick laugh) … It’s like, being gay is socially unacceptable for the longest time, but that doesn’t stop people from being gay. It just makes them form their own gay community. So, smokers are kind of, always been like their own community. Like, when I go to a group of smokers, it’s like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you’re doing out here…It’s something relatable. You know?
Here, Janet expresses how smoking serves to resist social isolation and cultivate community. Literature from critical research in the alcohol and drug fields illustrates the ways in which young people use particular commodities, like substances, as cultural markers to stake out their identities in opposition to mainstream norms. The association between youth cultures and “deviant” substance use has been noted by researchers as long ago as the late 1950s when Finestone published Cats, Kicks and Color [86], documenting the use of heroin, dress, style, and language among young African American drug users in Chicago (for additional work on youth cultures, substances and resistance (see [87]). Critical research on tobacco has also emphasized how some youth may adopt or maintain smoking precisely because it is positioned as a deviant behavior by the same institutional structures (e.g., normative health establishment) that may already alienate youth who experience other forms of social marginalization [50, 81, 84].
Survival
While resistance may be argued as a political response to hegemonic structures, surviving may be conceptualized as something more fundamental to life, something that is essential for getting through the day. Survival may be about an individual and their well-being, life versus death, not acting out against but instead surviving within, with no interpretation made about behaviors as related to resistance. Of course, some scholars have argued that just by virtue of surviving one “can signify a form of resistance” in an oppressive culture [47]. Nevertheless, and for the sake of argument, narratives from our studies illustrated several ways in which survival and smoking may be connected. The first is emotional survival.
Though youth often discussed potential long-term consequences of smoking, the short-term benefits associated with smoking for getting through the day-to-day, in terms of daily stress and anxiety, often outweighed concerns about future health. For example, Gigi, a 25-year-old trans woman who is trying to cut back on her smoking, noted:
Stress that I feel like I can’t control because it’s dependent upon another person, or another situation that is larger than what I have in my control…Because while I know that I can’t control it, I still desire to have answers, or to be able to control it. And I know that’s one thing that makes me want the enjoyment that comes from smoking. I know, [smoking] at least temporarily relieves that feeling, that’s what I associate it with.
Other participants’ narratives situated their smoking in terms of emotional survival within the context of coping with traumatic stress associated with everyday experiences with discrimination and marginalization. For example, Jen a 22-year-old former smoker, who identifies her sexuality as bisexual, talks about the value of smoking to survive within a heterosexist society. She plainly situates smoking as a tool for survival, something supported in literature on smoking among women living in circumstances of disadvantage [55].
[LGBTQ] people’s lives are really hard. Just going through it and making the most of it would probably mean having a cigarette once in a while, because I’m just going to do what I want in life. If what I have gone through hasn’t killed me so far, …the cigarette is probably not going to kill me. So it’s not really a high priority for a lot of people to think about…I think if you are not out with your family…If you have to act straight to get through…your friends, your family or colleagues, I think that adds a lot of stress to your life. And yeah, just seeing the kind of violence that is out there against LGBTQ people. It’s a really sad and emotional thing…So I think they are much more sensitive to that. Probably a lot more inclined to just want to push that to the back of your mind and smoke a cigarette, get rid of the ideas and move on with their lives.
Similarly, a 23-year-old current smoker, who self-identified as a gay cisgender man but did not provide a pseudonym, described a salient discriminatory experience in a clothing store around the age of 17 when he was trying on dresses for a school dance.
I picked up one of the long dresses. I said, ‘ma’am, can I try this on in the changing room? I want to see if this is gonna be my size, if it fits me’ … She said, ‘excuse me?’ ‘Well yeah, I want to try this on. I’m getting ready for prom. We’re here picking out dresses’. She said, ‘no, I can’t let you do that. These are for women’s only.’ Oh okay. I could have put that on the news, real quick. There would have been a whole problem, and she probably could have lost her job for discriminating against me….But, I decided to just put on the dress anyway. I was like ‘oh, it don’t fit (laughs). I think it’s gonna rip. Can you help me?’ The woman didn’t want to help. My friends were there, just laughing. We’re all laughing….It’s crazy to see how people are so close minded or judgmental, or non-accepting of someone who wants to express themselves as who they are…My feelings weren’t hurt, but I’m pretty sure someone else in that store, feelings could have been hurt, or someone could have been offended. And that’s the sad part. That made me want a cigarette. Like damn, you are that fucked up, to feel that way towards me. And to be rude towards me. You stressed me out. Now I need a cigarette.
Day-to-day stressors, varying in degree of severity in terms of their perceived consequences for mental and physical health, saturated participants’ narratives and were often explicitly linked to a need for smoking to cope.
Intimately connected to emotional survival is pleasure, which is a rarely discussed attribute of smoking despite its tremendous importance for smokers (e.g., [88]). For example, SB, introduced above, explained:
Being queer in a heterosexist society is very stressful. I’m willing to bet -- in fact, I can tell you definitively that a lot of substance abuse within the queer community is directly tied to that stress, to that sense of comfort and support that is difficult to find outside [in] the big brawn scary world. […] Just a sense of: this is something I can control. It feels good. I can come back to it. I have control over it. It’s something I can kind of take with me, when I go out into public. I can still carry the feeling at least…It’s addressing I think stresses and anxieties and self-loathing that we’re socialized to accept in ourselves […] I can’t change the society around me, but I can change the way I feel. So, it was a misguided attempt to really take control over how I felt in that society that seemed unwelcome of me.
Here, SB smokes because it “feels good” and she can “carry” that pleasurable experience as a possible protection from hate and as a palliative for “stress” and “self-loathing”. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars began to investigate pleasure and youth subcultures, where pleasure becomes a way to avoid or overcome the mundane of everyday life [89,90,91,92]. However, here and in the narratives of other participants, smoking as pleasure goes beyond just overcoming the mundane nature or routinization of everyday life, but also was emphasized as a tool for experiencing some pleasure within an inequitable and oppressive society that feels beyond one’s control.
Participants’ narratives also illustrated survival in terms of surviving socially. Literature in the tobacco field often talks about youths’ smoking in more passive terms, specifically by emphasizing smoking as a result of peer pressure. The implications of this interpretation, then, often results in individual-level prevention efforts that “focus on cognitive factors that mitigate the effects of peer group influences” [93]. However, narratives from our participants were more active, illustrating how smoking was less connected to ‘I smoke because my friends smoke’—though that was present in some narratives—and more connected to ‘I smoke to survive in social situations’. For example, in the next quote, we further see how Jen, quoted above, also strategically used smoking to connect with others.
My school was super conservative, really Christian…It was the exact opposite of me. So when I moved there, I was really just reaching out to anybody who had any progressive, liberal in their body and anyone who is atheist. What is kind of interesting, the ones that were more my type of people to talk to and have conversations with, smoked. So that was something I ended up picking up just to talk with them….
The emphasis here is less on peer pressure but instead on group solidarity and group identification. Of course, there is a literature supportive of this notion of sharing commodities and “intoxication” with others (see [94,95,96]) where the focus is not on peer pressure but instead on the sociability that is shared when a substance is consumed together. These are two very different interpretations on the role of substances of course, and these different interpretations are important, because while one emphasizes the agency of youth, the other sees young people as passive and easily able to succumb to peer pressure (for a further discussion and critique of notions of peer pressure see [97]).
In a context of social marginalization, the importance of group belonging also takes on additional meanings for our participants, where smoking facilitates entrée into certain groups where social acceptance is more likely. Similarly, in their study of disadvantaged and socially marginalized youth in Australia, Hefler and Carter [58] found that smoking served as a way for some socially stigmatized youth to adopt a “compromise” identity in what they perceived to be a less than ideal social context but which for some youth nevertheless “provided some sense of belonging” (p 11).
A mainstream and rationalistic interpretation of these narratives of survival might only consider smoking as a poor decision for coping with stress during this universal life stage that tends to be essentialized as a period of “stress and storm” [43, 98]. However, we would argue that it is also important to remember that youths’ experiences exist in the “here-and-now” and that for some youth, smoking is a particularly useful tool for alleviating feelings of anxiety and stress, particularly those stemming from discriminatory treatment and trauma. As such, emphasizing future health in tobacco control and prevention may do nothing to counter the value that some youth place on smoking for surviving and getting-by in the present.
Defense
Finally, narratives of defense appeared frequently in discussions related to youth perceptions about and reasons for smoking. In critical youth studies, discourses of defense (and survival, for that matter) emerged in response to critiques of resistance theory which argued that researchers’ interpretations of social practices as forms of resistance “imbued [them] with magisterial authority” and “carried the possibility of romanticizing specific cultural practices as ‘resistant’ which might also be sexist or racist or both” [47, 99]. When avoiding speculation about whether some of our participants’ narratives about smoking illustrate acts of resistance, patterns of defense emerged illustrating how smoking is used strategically as a form of self-protection. For example, participants often discussed smoking as a way of creating “safe” space around them to protect themselves from physical violence and harassment. For example, Marisol, a 22-year-old queer woman said:
…if I go out and I’m dressed up really femme and people will usually think like, she can’t defend herself or whatever. And I feel like when I smoke cigarettes – obviously there is this idea that you look tougher, that you can actually beat someone up, even though that is not true. So, I think – if someone is harassing me or if I want to scare someone away, for some reason I feel like smoking a cigarette will be like, ‘don’t mess with me.’ You know?... I could do this when I’m at a straight bar and I’m surrounded by straight people and straight men are harassing me and I’m just trying to basically make it seem like I could handle myself, so get away from me.
Participants frequently described how they capitalized on the symbolic meanings associated with smoking—e.g., as is the case with Marisol above, smoking as a sign of strength and toughness [44, 56, 83]—to protect their gendered bodies by creating symbolic “safe” spaces where they could more easily defend themselves from potential harassment. Though some research has emphasized the creation of spaces accepting of smoking in response to the stigmatization of smoking and arguably the smoker [8, 54, 60, 100], few studies have illustrated how smokers strategically use smoking to transform, at least partially, “unsafe” spaces into “safe” spaces as defense against homophobia or sexism. Relying on smoking for protection emerged not only for sexual minority women in heteronormative spaces, but also for women in spaces defined by gay men and for gender non-conforming participants in a multitude of contexts due to everyday threats of violence. A material object can shift “how an individual relates to and moves through “unsafe” space” [101]. In their synthesis of the literature on “safe spaces”, the Roestone Collective [101] argues that objects (like cigarettes for our purposes) can “alter the constitution of and possibilities for safe spaces,” and offer at least “incomplete solutions” for defending against the oppressive structural conditions in which some people find themselves (p 1360).
Narratives of defense also emerged with respect to participants’ desires to protect their own health through the very act of smoking, a perspective that at first glance conflicts with normative conceptualizations of health and how best to protect it. For example, Ana, a 20-year-old current smoker who identifies theirFootnote 1 gender as nonbinary trans and their sexuality as queer, explained:
Working class people, folks of color and queers and god forbid if you are all three of those things, you are going to be smoking. You are stressed out. There are not a lot of things that are accessible for you in terms of relief. Like, who can afford to get a massage every week? I can’t. Who can afford to get mental health care? Sometimes smoking a cigarette is the difference between…cutting myself or not. If I give myself that ten-minute break, I don’t do that reactionary thing. So sometimes I think it is a coping mechanism. Sometimes it’s the only one and it’s the best one that people have.
While participants in general were not unaware of the health risks that smoking posed, they nevertheless stressed the importance of smoking for mitigating serious mental health risks that they faced in the present. Sociologists involved in research on youth and substance use (tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs) have emphasized the tendency by researchers to portray young people as passive and risky and, therefore, irrational. Consequently, youth are often considered in need of protection from becoming the “victims of their own irresponsibility” [102]. However, given the variety of risks that some young SGM participants may find themselves facing in the “here and now”—such as mental health crises, sexist violence, or lack of access to health resources—smoking for these young people could instead be understood as an active and quite rational response. Thus, participants’ narratives from this study highlight they ways in which these youth prioritize meaningful short-term benefits associated with smoking, in defense of their physical and mental health, over the long-term physical health consequences that smoking may pose. Indeed, for many participants, negotiations around smoking and health consequences involve considerations of well-being that are much more complex and relative than can be recognized from the perspectives currently dominating tobacco control approaches.