Building Queer Joy through Participatory Collage-Making with 2SLGBTQIA+ Youth in New Brunswick


Melissa Keehn, University of New Brunswick; Casey Burkholder, University of New Brunswick

How do queer and trans youth mobilize queer joy amidst escalating educational and political hostilities? Queer joy is a resistive strategy that gestures away from the deficit–the suffering queer–and toward the productive, the joyful (Wright, 2023). Amin Ghaziani (2024) writes, “marginalized groups struggle and suffer–from the crushing forces of capitalism to a core of whiteness, belt buckle encounters and blackface, institutionalized homophobia and systemic inequalities–but they also find moments of joy” (p. 206). This is the joy we center in our work: A joy that seeks out pleasure during devastation, one that dreams about more livable futures in a ruinous present. By imagining queer joy in this way–productive, radical, and embodied (Duran and Coloma, 2023; Shuster and Westbrook, 2022; Tristano Jr., 2022)–we can use it as a tool to address the oppressive educational norms and policies that are currently inciting violence on queer and trans youth in schools. In New Brunswick, the recent amendments to the province’s 2SLGBTQIA+ school inclusion policy by the provincial Conservative government has instigated a wave of moral panic and public debate about the lives and rights of trans and queer kids in schools (Silberman, 2023; Warick, 2023). Queer joy responds to this destructive educational climate–one that attempts to minimize and erase queer childhoods–and mobilizes something different. We are two white educational researchers: Casey is a cis, bisexual university professor and Melissa is a cis esbian graduate student. Between October 2023 and November 2023, we engaged 250 high school students in four separate participatory collage-making workshops across New Brunswick: At a rural high school in Nackawic, at a trans youth conference in the town of Riverview, and at two provincial Francophone and Anglophone 2SLGBTQIA+ youth conferences in the cities of Saint John and Fredericton. Using participatory visual methodologies, we prompted youth participants to think about queer and trans joy in schooling and community spaces and asked them: What do you want to say about queer and trans joy in schools? What does this joy look like now and what might queer joy look like the future? The four workshops were part of a broader SSHRC-funded study called Pride/Swell+: an intergenerational art, activism, and archiving project that brings together queer and trans children, youth, adults, and elders from across Atlantic Canada to engage in art and media production and archive 2SLGBTQIA+ pasts, presents, and futures. During the four workshops, we wondered: What can we learn about queer joy when we make collages together? How might we access this joy through art production? We noticed the youth participants making new communities with others around them as they made things together. They used the collage materials to speak back to the real violence found in their schools and to show us where queer and trans joy exists, through their worldbuilding, romances, and resistance (see Figure 1). During the workshops, we also noticed that the teachers present shifted the research space–and that this has implications for how queer joy exists and is noticed in classrooms and schools. Ultimately, we argue that queer and trans youth communities in New Brunswick mobilize queer joy as a felt, lived, and embodied emotion and strategy (see Figure 2) against and despite the province’s harmful educational policies and school practices.

This paper will be presented at the following session: