Pandemic Possibilities? Queer and Trans Sexuality and Gender During Lockdown

• In Event: Affects, Intimate Literacies, and (Re)Imagined Curricular Possibilities

Abstract

How has the experience of living through the pandemic lockdown shaped young people’s understandings of their gender and sexual identities? This paper draws on an ethnographic storytelling project with two Toronto high schools conducted during COVID. We considers how COVID and the social, emotional, material, and pedagogical effects of the pandemic created contexts for gender and sexual experimentation. In the absence of face-to-face schooling, in the midst of pandemic losses, and isolated in their homes with their families, young people’s sexual and gendered identities came under scrutiny. What do I want? Who do I want to be? How can I feel at home in this body? These questions found new space to breathe for some young people living under lockdown.

Authors

• Jen Gilbert, York University

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto Scarborough

• David A Pereira, University of Toronto

• Thomas Frattaroli, York University