Suicide Notes Written in Homeroom: From Queer Battle Fatigue to the School-to-Coffin Pipeline

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

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of Queer Battle Fatigue (QBF), a construct used to describe the effects that queer youth and their allies experience from daily encounters with homophobia and the School-to-Coffin pipeline for LGBTQ students. The result of writing with four teenagers (an out lesbian, two trans teens and an out bi-sexual), this paper explores the multiple ingresses to queer youth depression and suicide through schooling and the daily exhaustion of living with/in QBF. What follows is not only how their narratives serve to counter dominant understandings of the everyday life of queer youth in schools but also an enactment of agency as they openly discuss the difficult topic of student suicide, schooling and Queer Battle Fatigue.
These narratives are intended to present the pressures of being an out LGBTQ student as it relates to notions of being and becoming in school. The author’s argument is twofold. First, the author contends that LGBTQ student narratives are central to dialogues about intersectionality and counternarratives. It is argued that as students experience being and living an existence of “in-between”, adults should be most attentive as these are often the moments where queer youth frequently experience thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Second, counternarratives based on sexual orientation, in this case from lesbian, female bisexual and male transgender youth positionalities, serve to deepen understandings about the possibilities and challenges regarding gender, gender identity and its expressions for fe/male identified youth. The counternarratives presented in this paper show how the challenges encountered in relation to questions of gender (in all its forms of expression and identity), are significant to questions of resistance and resilience and student agency at the intersection of schooling and suicide.
Perhaps most significantly, these narratives provide an understanding that all adults involved in education—including teachers, teacher educators, administrators, counselors and school psychologist—are necessarily (un)knowing participants who actively contribute to ongoing homophobia and, by extension, Queer Battle Fatigue and LGBTQ youth suicide. Queer Battle Fatigue among LGBTQ youth and the school-to-coffin pipeline is shaped and maintained within heteronormativity that positions LGBTQ students at the nexus school rhetoric, a system that is socio-politically designed the fail at-risk youth, and normalized homophobia. As suicide rates continue to skyrocket among queer youth, acknowledging and attending to Queer Battle Fatigue and the school-to-coffin pipeline is critical to children’s ontological and physical safety. The points raised here are all the more horrifying precisely because they are so mundane—it is next to impossible to stop everyday violence that is accepted as normal. Until we do, constructs such as Queer Battle Fatigue and the school-to-coffin pipeline is not only an unfortunate reality but something in which we are all unwitting participants. Its acceptance is inexcusable. However, it will take more than hypervigilant attention and talk to interrupt the perpetuation of the self-fulfilling process that is the school-to-coffin pipeline.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Loyola University Maryland