Queer Joy as a Pedagogy of Resistance: Reimagining Gender-based Violence Prevention with LGBTQ+ Student Educators

• In Event: Wellness, Healing, Joy, and Resistance at the Intersections of Racial, Gender, and Sexual Identities

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a participatory action research project with LGBTQ+ peer educators from a Canadian university’s gender-based violence prevention centre. The study centers queer joy as a pedagogical resource for dismantling cisheteronormative sexual scripts—racialized, ableist, and rooted in settler colonialism—that normalize women’s and non-binary people’s “unconscious endurance” of unwanted or inequitable sexual encounters. Focus groups informed co‑created curricula aimed at decentering cisheterosexual male entitlement and fostering reciprocal, pleasure‑centered cultures. Participant reflections revealed how dominant heterosexual scripts pervade even egalitarian relationships, sustaining emotional labor, sexual inequities, and violence. Grounded in feminist, queer, anti‑racist, anti‑ableist, and anti‑colonial pedagogies, the research shows how centering queer joy can transform prevention.

Author

• JJ Wright, MacEwan University