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Representing LGBTQ young people's activism
Abstract
Just over a decade ago, when we were high school students attending neighbouring Catholic schools in Ontario, Canada, we found ourselves embroiled in a highly publicized controversy about sexuality and education. As teenagers, we used media publicity as a central strategy in our organizing for the right to form gay–straight alliances in our publicly funded religious schools. At the same time, the media—and, later, sexuality scholars and educational researchers—used us, drawing on our experiences to tell particular kinds of stories about sexuality, youth, and religious schooling. Using autoethnography, queer theory, and critical studies of childhood and youth, we deconstruct these various uses of the Ontario Catholic school GSA controversy and their impact on our lives from our current vantage points as emerging scholars. First, we interrogate how notions of queer young people’s risk and resilience shaped our activism and its reception. Second, we explore how framing queer young people as heroes or victims produces exclusions. Finally, we consider what it has meant for us personally to grow up alongside representations of our activism as teens. We aim to trouble the idealization of LGBTQ young people’s activism by showing how the limited stories and subject positions available to LGBTQ youth, the stigmatization of meaningful intergenerational dialogue between LGBTQ adults and youth, and racist and anti-religious sentiment may prevent adults from understanding, supporting, and welcoming young people into LGBTQ activist movements.
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Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, our childhoods have been captured and preserved online, never to go away. But what happens when we can’t leave our most embarrassing moments behind?
Until recently, the awkward moments of growing up could be forgotten. But today we may be on the verge of losing the ability to leave our pasts behind. In The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn explores what happens when images of our younger selves persist, often remaining just a click away.
For today’s teenagers, many of whom spend hours each day posting on social media platforms, efforts to move beyond moments they regret face new and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Unlike a high school yearbook or a shoe box full of old photos, the information that accumulates on social media is here to stay. What was once fleeting is now documented and tagged, always ready to surface and interrupt our future lives. Moreover, new innovations such as automated facial recognition also mean that the reappearance of our past is increasingly out of our control.
Historically, growing up has been about moving on—achieving a safe distance from painful events that typically mark childhood and adolescence. But what happens when one remains tethered to the past? From the earliest days of the internet, critics have been concerned that it would endanger the innocence of childhood. The greater danger, Eichhorn warns, may ultimately be what happens when young adults find they are unable to distance themselves from their pasts. Rather than a childhood cut short by a premature loss of innocence, the real crisis of the digital age may be the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.
The Accepting Schools Act (Bill 13), which amends the Education Act of Ontario, Canada, passed in 2012 includes the directive that all publicly-funded schools, whether secular or Catholic, support students who wish to establish, name, and run gay-straight alliances (GSAs). This legislation was influenced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth activism and the events preceding Bill 13’s passage exemplify effective political mobilization by secondary school students in defiance of their schools. This article brings the voices of the youth activists, including one of its authors, together with news media and scholarly literature to reflect on the aims of this LGBTQ youth activism.
In this article, Jen Gilbert, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko explore the Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia, storytelling project that invited students, teachers, and community members in three US high schools to enter a private booth and share stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality and gender. While recent policy making and educational research have focused on links between LGBTQ sexuality and gender, bullying, and other risks to educational and social achievement, Beyond Bullying aimed to identify the ordinary stories of LGBTQ sexuality and gender that circulate in schools and that an interventionist framing may obscure. After offering an overview of the method in Beyond Bullying, this article connects narratives of LGBTQ desire, family, and school life to the intimate possibilities—who students and teachers are, who they want to be, and the social worlds they want to build—available to them in schools.
In this article I make a conceptual intervention in the idea that queer children and youth have needs that differ from those of other children and youth on the basis of their gender or sexuality alone, and that doing well by them requires adults to act on the basis of this difference. Namely, I examine the conflation of “fighting school homophobia” and “helping young queers.” I argue that making space for queerness in education is not the same as making space for queers, and that queer young people ought to be left alone. I offer two explanations for the conflation's persistence such that “leaving them alone” is generally unthinkable: one affective and one institutional. In the first instance, I read a short memoir through a recent queer theoretical account of childhood as queerness, and argue that the “queer child” is the vehicle of queer adult longing for origins. In the second instance, I show how in education the nebulous (queerness) tends to become concrete (homophobia) and therefore actionable (fight homophobia) because of the constraints of schooling as the singularity of education in the present. In the conclusion, I suggest that a twist on the liberal concept of individual rights may ironically provide a pragmatic means of moving beyond the flourishing of individual queers and toward the flourishing of queerness in schools, and offer some preliminary suggestions of what can be done if queerness was to become the beneficiary of anti-homophobia interventions in education.
This article engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education. I draw on these debates to consider how ‘progressives’ in sex education in the USA draw on and reinscribe religious/secular divides. I will consider the affinities, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate a secular worldview, in the context of sex education, and I will consider some of the consequences that ensue from this way of seeing. My aim is to demonstrate how the notion of secularism works to frame debates within the field of sex education.
This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theories “do” to ethnographic writing. Two related themes are elaborated in relation to how poststructural debates fashioned interpretive efforts: conceptual issues in the poststructural study of teaching and theoretical issues in the production of ethnographic narratives. Can there be an educational ethnography that exceeds the constraints of humanism? What if the ethnographer began not just to question the discourse of others but to engage the relation between the discourses that render ethnography intelligible and the ethnographic report?
Canadian public school authorities are busily producing gender diversity policies in order to meet their new legal responsibility to provide an environment free from gender identity and gender expression discrimination. These policies tend to offer specific guidance about how administrators and educators should respond to the needs of particular students: those who are (currently legible to school actors as) somehow transgender. Leveraging Claudia Ruitenberg’s writings on enacting a Derridean ethic of hospitality in education, however, I argue that it is ethical to not intend that policy, pedagogy, and curriculum address the needs of particular children and youth in order to do something about how gender rigidly organizes life in schools. De-centring these subjects does not mean doing nothing about this problem; it means doing something paradoxically impossible, yet ethical precisely because it is so impossible: preparing to welcome a student who may never arrive and who the teacher can never know, gender-wise, even and perhaps especially if there are out transgender students in one’s very own school. I offer three orientations to guide teachers, in particular, towards enacting this welcome: not seeking to know the transgender student in advance of their arrival, not trying to be a good teacher for transgender students in particular, and being wary of curricular representation as a strategy of welcome.
Although educational research and policymaking in the United States has generally framed LGBTQ youth and youth of color as mutually exclusive groups, LGBTQ youth of color are increasingly included in discourses surrounding school safety. These discourses tend to position youth as vulnerable, at-risk subjects who are passive victims of interpersonal homophobia. Using the theoretical frameworks queer of color critique and queer necropolitics, and a situational analysis mapping strategy, we analyzed GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey report, breakout reports on LGBTQ youth of color, and related advocacy efforts. These frameworks helped us consider how school climate research and policymaking relies on carceral logics that center and uphold whiteness. The GLSEN reports function as a form of embedded science that mobilizes individual understandings of violence and queer investments in punishment. We offer queer of color critique as a strategy for researchers and policymakers to get unstuck on school safety.
Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education is a study of the educational breakdowns, conflicts and controversies that emerge as sexuality circulates through the spaces and relations of schooling. I focus specifically on LGBTQ issues and argue that welcoming LGBTQ students, families, teachers and issues into education requires us to rethink our theories of sexuality. Beginning with the contradiction that sexuality poses both a limit and an incitement to education, I turn to psychoanalysis and queer theory to ask: how does sexuality come to bear on teaching and learning? Since sexuality fuels the love, curiosity and aggression that make up our engagements with knowledge, there can be no education without it; and yet education, in its practices, rules and in the relations that comprise schooling, is threatened by the wildness of sexuality. While sexuality pushes education to its limit, education must attempt to limit sexuality. Opening each chapter with a moment of conflict drawn from contemporary public debates on the strange workings of sexuality in schools–from efforts to censor LGBTQ literature from elementary schools to concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth to debates about the content of sexuality education–I explore the charged emotional and theoretical terrain underscoring these concerns. Engaging representations from fiction, film, the news, and my own experiences of these conflicts in teacher education, Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education is less interested in settling meaning on an impossible subject than in re-envisioning the grounds for thinking about sexuality and education.
Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible. Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants.
Originating in the United States, a Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) is an in-school student club whose focus is on making the school a safe space for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students and their straight allies by raising awareness about, and hopefully reducing, school-based homophobia. The ongoing struggle for GSAs in Canadian Catholic schools is one example of how clashes continue to be played out between Catholic canonical law and Canadian common law regarding sexual minorities. This paper draws upon Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction to analyze one particularly influential curricular and policy document entitled Pastoral Guidelines to Assist Students of Same-Sex Orientation from the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops. This paper posits that Catholic doctrine about non-heterosexuality functions as a Foucaultian Panopticon enabling Catholic education leaders to observe and correct the behaviour of non-heterosexual teachers and students that they deem runs counter to the values of the Vatican. This paper argues that successful resistance to the powerful disciplining regime of the Catholic school is possible.
Our aim in this conceptual work is to suggest, tentatively, some ways forward into the breach as teacher educators. Our hope is to make a few things possible. The first is a reengagement with questions of sexuality and religion in teacher education that neither begins with that which is legal nor ends with that which is sacred, and thus untouchable. We use, by way of illustration, a few suggestive anecdotes from our own scholarly experiences not as exemplars necessarily but rather as illustrations of possibility for the field which neither mark its limits nor trace its ultimate possibility. In some sense, we hope to write this conversation into existence and wish it so through our own successes and failures as teacher educators working to find ways to engage these particular risks educationally.
In 2015 the Gender Vectors research team received a major research grant to conduct research with and about transgender youth in the Greater Vancouver Area. A unique aspect of this research project involved combining social action research with the development of a prototype of a video game as a knowledge translation tool to depict the life experiences of trans youth. We draw on transformative gender justice theory to document and address the diminished life chances of and the need to promote resilience among trans youth in the region and more broadly, across Canada and the United States. This article provides an overview of the research project and concludes by identifying key insights relating to resiliency that resulted from 15 narrative interviews with transgender youth, focus group meetings with the Project’s Youth Advisory Council, and dialog from an intergenerational workshop for transgender youth and adult care/service providers and allies. These themes informed the creation of the prototype.
Research on the experiences of trans youth has generally emphasized their disparate risk for negative educational, housing, and health outcomes. While drawing attention to very real vulnerabilities, these depictions can represent trans youth as one-dimensional passive victims. Some recent research draws on resiliency theory and offers a strengths-based perspective highlighting the strategies trans youth employ and the resources they draw upon in the face of challenging circumstances. In this study, we look to the concept of situated agency as a way to understand how risk and resilience simultaneously characterize the high school experiences of trans youth. Through hearing their own accounts of daily life in a large urban public school district, we seek to understand their attitudes, behavior, and choices as strategies for coping, surviving and resisting the bureaucratic structures that create conflict by upholding traditional binary gender norms. In so doing, we seek to redirect the spotlight on the practices and systems that constrain trans youth agency—rather than the trans youth, themselves—as the most appropriate focus for intervention.
In this research article, Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández and Dominique Rivière examine the discursive frames that students and teachers in four specialized arts high schools in Toronto used in describing their schools as safe environments. The belief that arts high schools are safe is shared by students and teachers, particularly in relationship to LGBTTQ+ students, making these schools optimal settings for examining what safety means and how it is construed. The authors show how the assumption that arts high schools are safe is related to the larger social and cultural context in which each school is situated. By asking what it means to be safe, whose safety, and from what dangers, they aim to demystify the notion of safety, showing how it is related to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that can be traced to broader national discourses. Drawing on critical race theory, as well as the concept of homonationalism and the construction of exalted subjects, the article highlights the remarkably similar discourses through which both arts high schools and the liberal nation-state are construed as safe.
A bold and provocative look at how the nonprofit sphere's expansion has helped-and hindered-the LGBT cause What if the very structure on which social movements rely, the nonprofit system, is reinforcing the inequalities activists seek to eliminate? That is the question at the heart of this bold reassessment of the system's massive expansion since the mid-1960s. Focusing on the LGBT movement, Myrl Beam argues that the conservative turn in queer movement politics, as exemplified by the shift toward marriage and legal equality, is due mostly to the movement's embrace of the nonprofit structure. Based on oral histories as well as archival research, and drawing on the author's own extensive activist work, Gay, Inc. presents four compelling case studies. Beam looks at how people at LGBT nonprofits in Minneapolis and Chicago grapple with the contradictions between radical queer social movements and their institutionalized iterations. Through interview subjects' incisive, funny, and heartbreaking commentaries, Beam exposes a complex world of committed people doing the best they can to effect change, and the flawed structures in which they participate, rail against, ignore, and make do. Providing a critical look at a social formation whose sanctified place in the national imagination has for too long gone unquestioned, Gay, Inc. marks a significant contribution to scholarship on sexuality, neoliberalism, and social movements.
This book explores queerness in the context of changing economic, intellectual, sexual, and school terrains. Greteman proposes the concept queer thriving to imagine how queers might develop in-contestation to becoming normalized. This work and the work of queer thriving challenge various norms that have evolved over the course of queer theory’s history. To read queer thriving into the world takes the reader into investigations of the child, the seminar classroom, queer cultures, the history of AIDS, and emerging discourses on barebacking and PrEP. Queer thriving guides queers into a 21st century that does justice to diverse queer existences, past and present.
This book presents a history of queer erasure in the US public school system, from the 1920s up until today. By focusing on specific events as well as the context in which they occurred, Lugg presents a way forward in improving school policies for both queer youth and queer adults.
William Haver (1998) has written that educators “have very nearly agreed that the pedagogical enterprise is about the production of subjects” (349). Although there is little agreement about what sorts of subjects education aims to produce, he says, “pedagogy is the work of Bildung, a coming to subjectivity as jubilant and relieved self-recognition” (350). Whether educators understand the subject as developing according to a natural ontology or according to culture, the education of subjects is defined by a project to “elaborate the ‘systems of the world,’ to make sense, and to transmit the sense that it makes” (350). This development of subjects entails the production of knowledge and self-knowledge, or what I will call “intelligibility.” As children move through adolescence to adulthood, society expects that they will acquire knowledge of self and other (the world and their place in it will become intelligible to them) and that maturing youth will become intelligible to others, knowable as such and such. In this chapter, I explore this problem of intelligibility—not how we can attain it, but what it attains—as it relates to queer youth. The fraught knowledges that contribute to the construction of queer youth have implications for the interventions adults would create for them and for how queer youth come to know and understand themselves.
Despite recent progress in civil rights for sexual and gender minorities (SGM), ensuring SGM youth experience fairness, justice, inclusion, safety, and security in their schools and communities remains an ongoing challenge. In Growing into Resilience, André P. Grace and Kristopher Wells - co-founders of Camp fYrefly, a summer leadership camp for SGM youth - investigate how teachers, healthcare workers, and other professionals can help SGM youth build the human and material assets that will empower them to be happy, healthy, and resilient. Grace and Wells investigate the comprehensive (physical, mental, and sexual) health of SGM youth, emphasizing the role of caring professionals in an approach that that recognizes and accommodates SGM youth. Throughout, the authors draw upon the personal narratives of SGM youth, emphasizing how research, policy, and practice must act together for them to be able to thrive and fulfill their promise. Both a resource for those professionally engaged in work with sexual and gender minorities and a comprehensive text for use in courses on working with vulnerable youth populations, Growing into Resilience is a timely and transdisciplinary book.
In the course of research concerning the experiences of gay and lesbian teachers in public schools, I discovered that teachers often construct racialized explanations of potential homophobia in their schools, including the expectation that black and Latino coworkers, parents, and students were more likely to be homophobic. By taking an intersectional approach to these narratives as a case study in the discursive construction of race and sexuality, this article shows how racism and homophobia are mutually sustained in everyday talk. This process of racializing homophobia not only further alienates gay and lesbian teachers of color, it also reinforces racial inequality more broadly. In addition to racializing homophobia discourse, many white research participants used racial discrimination as a comparative rhetorical strategy to make sense of the discrimination they experience as gays and lesbians. While this strategy was purportedly useful for combating discrimination, it is also troubling. First, it assumes a false dichotomy between race and sexual identity that further erases the experience of queer people of color, who must contend with both kinds of discrimination. Second, it posits a false equivalence, when in fact the unique histories and operations of each kind of marginality resist such facile comparisons.
From concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth and battles over sex education to the regulation of sexual activity and the affirmation of queer youth identity, sexuality saturates the school day. Rather than understand these conflicts as an interruption to the work of education, Jen Gilbert explores how sexuality comes to bear on and to enliven teaching and learning. Gilbert investigates the breakdowns, clashes, and controversies that flare up when sexuality enters spaces of schooling. Education must contain the volatility of sexuality, Gilbert argues, and yet, when education seeks to limit the reach of sexuality, it risks shutting learning down. Gilbert penetrates this paradox by turning to fiction, film, legal case studies, and personal experiences. What, she asks, can we learn about school from a study of sexuality? By examining the strange workings of sexuality in schools, Gilbert draws attention to the explosive but also compelling force of erotic life in teaching and learning. Ultimately, this book illustrates how the most intimate of our experiences can come to shape how we see and act in the world. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
This article is concerned with interrogating what has evolved as “normal” representations of the schooling experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in literature concerned with social/sexual justice. It argues that these representations necessitate understanding LGBT within a binary of either “victims” or “heroes,” and this constitution obscures these young peoples’ lived schooling realities. In queer style, the article endeavors to expose the “normal” in these representations and consider their conditions of possibility for understanding LGBT students’ schooling experience within this dyad. It is proposed that this portrayal limits how we might understand LGBT students’ schooling experiences beyond this dualistic binary. To refuse this flat portrayal and lend complexity to it, the article draws on findings from a project around the sexual cultures of schooling that employed photo methods. Identifying inconsistencies between a participant's photo and her narrative explanation of it as an entry point for thought, Barad's concept of intra-activity is drawn upon to think through this binary problem. In this way, the article gestures toward an understanding of LGBT that is neither victim nor hero, nor some combination of both.
Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights.In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism--conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West--are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women's lives."Do Muslim Women Need Saving? "is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam--as well as a moving portrait of women's actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.
The GLBTQ research community has become, in some ways, bound to using quantification within their arguments about the changes that are being recommended for schools and the lives of GLBTQ youth. This article considers the rhetorical nature of quantification when arguing for such changes. This article draws from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educational Network’s 2009 National School Climate Survey report, a report that has become central to the discourses concerning GLBTQ youth, including use in television, news media, and academic research. This article begins by considering the nature of rhetoric and how quantification has come to play such an important part in social science writing and argumentation. The article then critiques how quantificational rhetoric is deployed as a tool of fear, guilt, safety and accountability as evidenced in the National School Climate report.
As the prevalence and negative effects of bullying become widely known, people around the world seem desperate to solve the bullying “problem”. A sizeable body of research about many aspects of bullying and a plethora of anti-bullying programmes and policies now exist. This critical policy analysis asks: how does Ontario, Canada’s bullying policy support and/or undermine critical democracy; and how does it reflect, support and further the interests of neoliberalism and/or neoconservatism? Findings indicate that the policy constructs the problem of bullying as a problem of individuals and a “behaviour for learning” problem. The policy also prescribes standardised responses to bullying incidents. We explore ways in which these constructions are undemocratic and unjust. The findings are particularly concerning because bullying policies are often viewed as innocuous by practitioners. This paper offers more than just critique by providing suggestions for how research and policies can become more just and equitable and how bullying policy may be enacted to support critical democracy.
Recent attention to youth suicides and violence framed as “bullying” has triggered a range of responses by schools and the state. In this article we locate and analyze the “gay wins” most noted in education, including the recent moves to establish gay-inclusive anti-bullying laws and policies, within a larger social justice framework to map contradictions. In particular, we question the efficacy of anti-bullying laws and ask how this initiative can mask the sources of punishing heteronormativity in schools and communities and potentially distract educators and others from identifying and addressing structural conditions that foster interpersonal forms of violence. We close by suggesting how and why a “queer” vision pushes those invested in LGBT lives to move beyond “equality” (or assimilation) as a goal for social justice struggles.
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