LGBTQ Students Representing Otherness Through Visual Art

• In Event: Bound by Bullying: Exploring the Limitations of LGBTQ Bullying Discourse Through In-Schools Experience and Research

Abstract

To date, research giving voice to LGBTQ youths’ school experiences has predominantly focused on victimization at the hands of individual bullies and their perspectives on school climate. Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that stories of individual victimization would be central to LGBTQ students’ representations of school experience. However, QuERI Arts-in-Action projects indicate that overt acts of bullying are not emblematic of how LGBTQ students experience their otherness in school spaces. To better understand how LGBTQ students understand their own positionings in school spaces, we must explore how they make meaning of their school culture—where they continuously bump into institutional value systems that privilege gender conformity and heterosexuality (Author, in press).

This study explores the experiences of two arts-in-action educators/artists/researchers with bringing a queer visual art and identity workshop project into 15 public high schools in Upstate New York. Students were given canvas and a range of art supplies with the prompt to represent their school experience as a LGBTQ/A student. Data include field notes from each teaching session, 200 pieces of visual and textual artwork created by LGBTQ and Ally youth, and autoethnographic reflections by the educators. The project aimed to utilize art as a medium to engage LGBTQ/A students in conversations about their school experiences, and project design reflected the belief that “strategies for art making that are active and socially engaged enable students to make use of the methods of communication that they already possess but feel disempowered to use” (Watson, 2012). Visual culture and democratic art education principles provide key tools for empowering LGBTQ students to utilize their own experiences as resources in the creative process and provide “permission” to bring these ideas into the classroom. Art curriculum encompassing themes of power, ideology, representation, seduction, gaze, intertextuality and multimodality provides opportunities for learners to examine their identity in school, community, and society (Duncum, 2010) and begins to help students understand the cultural context for their experiences of marginalization.

Findings reveal that none of the 200 pieces of visual and textual art created in this project included a representation of an individual bully or bullying incident. Students’ imagery typically demonstrated loneliness and isolation, a single figure, with the eye looking square at the viewer. Text invoked otherness through “us and them” constructions. Resistance to the expectations of dominant and school cultures for heterosexual romance and gender conformity were expressed through images of forbidden love, symbols of marriage equality, hearts and tears. The tensions between choosing the safety of the “closet” versus the “freedom” of being “out” in school was also addressed through student imagery and their marginalized status was countered through declarations of equality and “sameness.” These images suggest that students experience a hostile school climate not as the result of encounters with an individual bully, but rather through a process of systemic othering intrinsic to the school culture. Understanding their experiences in this way calls for a deeper system of redress than the simple intervention in anti-LGBTQ behavior most often associated with acts of bullying.

Author

• Kristin Goble, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater