Tending Toward Friendship: LGBTQ Sexualities in School

• In Event: 58.076 - From Verbal Aggression to Physical Violence: LGBTQI Experiences, Everyday Oppression, and Queer Battle Fatigue

Abstract

The prevailing conversation about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) issues in education frames LGBTQ sexuality and lives almost exclusively as problems of bullying, harassment, mental health, or academic underachievement. According to this framing, students are struggling, teachers are failing, and schools are functioning at a profound deficit. The construction of “LGBTQ youth” as victims of bullying and at risk of self-harm has prompted widespread legal and policy reform and held school boards and school leaders accountable for the safety of all students. However, this framing runs the risk of making room for LGBTQ lives in schools only on the condition that our lives are associated with pathology, injury, and risk. Beneath and beside these narratives lie other quieter and more ordinary stories of friendship, family, and desire that shape students’, teachers’, and administrators’ understandings and experiences of LGBTQ sexualities and lives.

This paper explores these narratives through a collaborative, multi-media LGBTQ storytelling research study, The Beyond Bullying Project. In this study, we wanted to invite these quiet and ordinary stories into the school, noticing the conditions under which these stories emerge and how they draw upon and re-write the more familiar narratives about the vulnerability of queer youth. In this paper, we look at stories of friendship and turn to Michel Foucault and his short, evocative 1981 interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In this interview, and in other late writings, Foucault heralds “new relational modes” incited by sexuality. In our study, this term, “new relational modes,” gestures toward unexpected and novel configurations in the school, including friendships, alliances, intimacies—all broadly conceived. How do these relationships—these moments in which people, identities, and selves bump up against others—inform students’, teachers’, and administrators’ understandings of their own relationships to LGBTQ people and, just as important, to LGBTQ sexuality?

Author

• Jen Gilbert, York University