“I’ve Come Out . . . As Almost Everything”: Middle-Grade Students Reading and Responding to LGBTQ+ Literature

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 1:45 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Resisting Curricular Flattenings Through Expansive Literacy Structures and Interventions (Table 11)

Abstract

This paper traces the responses of sixth grade students to the LGBTQ+ middle grade novel The Best at It (Pancholy, 2019) as the text was taught in their ELA classroom. Considering the ways students re-established and disrupted dominant LGBTQ+-centered discourses, we examine how issues of gender(s), sexuality, and intersectionality became salient within a middle grades classroom experimenting with social justice-oriented pedagogies. Findings explore how student responses to the focal text struggle to consider the novel’s protagonist’s intersectionality, while the book also afforded students the opportunity to “play” with sexuality and build co-conspiratorship within their ELA classroom.

Authors

• Marisa Segel, Boston College

• Kyle P. Smith, University of Michigan