(GAS5a) Worldbuilding In and Around Schools: Mapping the Struggle over Gender and Sexuality I

Homophobia and transphobia are rapidly spreading across North America and the globe, evidenced by shifts in public discourse, educational policy, and legislation that contribute to the structural, discursive, and physical violence faced by 2SLGBTQ+ people. This rise in hate is reflective of the ongoing ‘culture wars’ concerning gender and sexuality, of which schools have been a critical battleground. Using a sociological lens, this session will examine the ways in which anti-2SLGBTQ+ sentiment and the current sociopolitical climate of rising hate are being reinforced and resisted related to K-20 educational institutions. The session aims to outline how discourses of gender and sexuality are being mobilized in and around schools to uphold an increasingly rigid cisheteropatriarchal status quo, as well as trace how queer and trans youth and their allies are resisting hate and mapping new, more just worlds. Tags: Education, Gender, Sexuality

Organizer: JJ Wright, MacEwan University; Chair: JJ Wright, MacEwan University

Presentations

Ash Catonio, University of Toronto; Lee Iskander, University of British Columbia

The Possibilities and Disappointments of Queering School for our Younger Selves: Worldbuilding as Educated Hope

For decades, educational spaces have been critical battlegrounds for both anti-2SLBGTQ+ hate and resistance. As blatant acts of homophobia and transphobia continue to colour the academic terrain, the potential for a queer education fostering joy and creativity often feels beyond reach. The faculty at SSHARC, Sydney’s Social Science and Humanities Research Centre at the University of Sydney, took up this challenge of creating a queer schooling experience that reaches towards more just futures for students and teachers alike. We attended the inaugural Hunt-Simes Institute of Sexuality Studies (HISS) in February 2023. The institute brought together Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows, early-career and established researchers in “a queer-led classroom model of embodied learning and knowledge building” to revisit the experience of school from and through a queer perspective. The provocation of HISS was that queerness could be found in the quotidian structures and practices of schooling if queer students and queer teachers were to come together in a reimagined version of the curriculum and rituals of schooling that cultivate creativity, joy, collaboration, and play. Instead of listening to talks and presenting our research, we attended science and drama classes, danced, and ate together, went on field trips and to prom, and posed for school photographs - all while thinking through questions of gender, sexuality, identity, and our positions as sexuality scholars. The institute was also timed to coincide with Sydney’s Mardi Gras and the WorldPride Festival, their spirit of celebration and community weaving into the goals and atmosphere of our HISS classroom. In this paper, we draw on the narrative journal reflections we each wrote before, throughout, and after the institute. We interweave our reflections with queer theory to explore the promise and provocation of HISS alongside its successes, messiness, and disappointments. Thinking with Muñoz (2009) and Love (2007), we explore how HISS’s promise of an opportunity to revisit and re-do the school experiences that might have been harmful, painful, and isolating to our younger selves raised new emotional stakes. What happens to the social hierarchy at queer school, or the distinctions between students and teachers? What roles might a queer school foreclose, and what new ones could it make available? What possibilities emerge when we centre identity, intimacy, and joy in the classroom? What does it mean when we feel the opposite of what was intended - loss instead of joy, vulnerability instead of safety, rejection instead of belonging? Is a queer education really possible? Drawing on Muñoz (2009), we conceptualise HISS as a utopian project that constantly transported us to a “then and there” - the “then” of our past school experiences and “there” to the potentiality of the queer high school education we had never received. In practice, our experiences of HISS were diverse and mixed, often involving a blend of joy, hope, anxiety, loss, and, sometimes, the shame of feeling bad when the intended effect was clearly pride, playfulness and inclusivity - what Love (2007) calls “feeling backward.” We are left with a sense of the messiness that can emerge when the provocations and promises of “queer” meet the routines, emotional terrain and social hierarchies of “school” (Cavenaugh, Alexander, and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2023). Our paper extends the literature on queer pedagogy (Bryson and de Castell, 1993; Britzman, 1995; Luhmann, 1998; Mayo and Rodriguez, 2019; Quinlivan and Town, 1999), queer generations (Morris, Greteman and Westrate, 2022), and sexuality in school (Author, 2014; Greteman, 2018). Conceptualising queer school as a utopian project, we imagine the ways it actively resists current realities of schooling as contentious, isolating, and even dangerous for 2SLBGTQ+ students and teachers. This paper shows how queer pedagogy can offer an “educated hope” for more just schooling experiences and better worlds through its continual evocation of a “then and there” (Muñoz, 2009), even if it also occasionally disappoints in the present.

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Non-presenting authors: Hannah Maitland, York University; Jen Gilbert, University of Toronto; Madelaine Coelho, University of Toronto

JJ Wright, MacEwan University

Queer and Trans Joy as Disruption to Rape Culture

2SLGBTQ+ young people are facing a climate of rising homophobia and transphobia, which has resulted in increased rates of gender-based violence (Goetsch, 2023). Queer and trans youth already experience disproportionately high rates of gender-based violence compared to their cisgender heterosexual peers (Jaffray, 2020). Sociological scholars have predominantly responded to this violence by reporting on victimization, which is understandable given that sociology is a study of social inequities, however, the focus on victimization has had the effect of homogenizing queer and trans life as misery. To avoid reproducing this joy-deficit (Shuster and Westbrook, 2022), I propose a novel approach that centers queer and trans joy in gender-based violence prevention education. As rape culture is symptomatic of cisheteronormativity, queer and trans sexual joy offer a useful analytic with which to subvert gender-based violence. In this paper presentation, I examine how queer and trans sexual joy represents a disruption to rape culture and offers lessons for a transformative framework for gender-based violence prevention education, particularly sexual consent education. Drawing on findings from The Queer Sexual Joy Project, a mixed-methods study involving 100 2SLGBTQ+ young adults aged 18-35 from Canada and the US, I will argue that queer and trans sexual joy disrupts rape culture and that these ruptures to the white nationalist, able-bodied, able-minded, cisheteronormative status quo can inform transformative, liberatory gender-based violence education and particularly sexual consent education. The Queer Sexual Joy project involved two focus groups, one-one-one interviews, participatory visual arts-based workshops (cellphilming (or short films created on phones) workshops, and two surveys. Analysis was completed using a grounded theory approach. A code set was developed iteratively, and the data set was re-coded as needed on Dedoose. Highlighting participant voices, this paper presentation will first examine what queer and trans sexual joy is, articulating the importance of the themes of safety, play, authenticity, and “intercreativity.” I will also discuss the barriers that participants encountered to queer and trans sexual joy and how they found their way to these experiences of embodied joy despite these barriers. I also explore how participant’s experiences of queer and trans sexual joy were healing. 75% of survey respondents identified as sexual violence survivors, and almost all other participants discussed surviving gender-based violence. Survivors in the study who had had sex with other 2SLGBTQ+ survivors articulated how they were much more supported by these partners and experienced much more embodied pleasure during sex compared to sex with partners who were cisgender heterosexual men. Queer and trans sexual joy offers many lessons for creating sexual cultures that reject the cisheteronormativity underlying rape culture and cultivate more just, mutually pleasurable sexual cultures. During the presentation, I will also touch on how the lessons from The Queer Sexual Joy Project may be practically implemented into gender-based violence prevention education.

LJ Slovin, University of Toronto

Trans youth and the labour of world-building

For decades, caring adults have understood trans and gender-nonconforming youth as especially at-risk in schools. As a result, they have worked to create inclusive policies to accommodate, protect, and safeguard these young people from the increased challenges they are presumed to encounter. This presentation offers that accommodation approaches in schools participate in narrowly defining a particular form of trans identity as the only or ‘right’ way to be trans. Drawing on scholarship from queer and trans theory, youth studies, and the field of education, this presentation questions an investment in legibility and visibility as incontrovertible paths to safety and progress for trans and gender-nonconforming youth. Many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth are missed and excluded by these policies and practices because their genders and lives do not align with whitewashed, colonial, and ableist societal expectations of transness. Based on a yearlong ethnography in a high school alongside youth who were rarely recognized as trans, this presentation explores the often-unnoticed labour youth performed as they worked to exist and thrive, regardless of whether others understood them. Trans and gender-nonconforming youth worked hard every day to navigate the transphobic elements of East City High, a large urban high school in Western Canada. However, they likewise performed the labour of world-making, which was aimed at creating other, queerer spaces in the school where they could exist outside and in rejection of adults’ narrow ideas about gender. Thinking alongside Tourmaline, Stanley, and Burton’s concept of trapdoors as well as José Muñoz’s work on queer utopia, I consider the myriad forms of care work that youth engaged in to not only navigate the cisheteronormativity of East City High but to make queer and trans worlds of their own. I explore youth’s creation of trapdoors , queer and trans utopias that already exist yet were rarely noticed by adults in the school. The youth built these physical and imaginary worlds as important spaces of escape and refuge where they could explore and engage with their genders and each other more expansively. This presentation highlights one of these worlds: the tech booth. I examine how youth daily worked to invite expansive genders in school, demonstrating the potential and importance of educational spaces that want trans youth to be present. I call on educators to cultivate a desire for youth to be and grow up trans by turning away from ideas of risk and concern. This is the critical labour youth performed as they explored and lived in their gender-nonconformity. They engaged in this labour because they cared – about themselves, their genders, and the trans communities they were building together at the school. Through their care and their labour, they show us that different, queerer worlds are possible in schools. In fact, they are already happening, if we know where to look.