Opening Spaces: A Gay-Straight Alliance’s Efforts to Build Inclusive Spaces in a Public School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Transgressing National Boundaries, Troubling LGBTA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Allies) Histories, Identities, Sexualities

Abstract

This paper analyzes an episode in the ongoing production and negotiation of space in a diverse working class high school in a major city in the Northeastern USA. Theories of discourse and spatiality and methods of discourse analysis are utilized to explore how a self-identified student activist and her peers struggle to (re)form the space of the school hallway by posting and tearing down images on the bulletin board maintained by the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. Central to this struggle over images is the question: Which sexual identities and relationships will be recognized in the space of the hallway and, more generally, in the space of the school?

Author

• Ross Emmerson Collin, Manhattanville College