"Yeah, I'm Gay": What Can Queer and Trans Young People Teach Us About Queer Joy Studies in Schools?

This study explores how queer and trans youth construct their lives in relation to narratives of crisis and resiliency in schools. It seeks to contribute to the emerging field of queer joy studies, which challenges portrayals of queer and trans individuals as subjects of adversity. I facilitated two participatory collage-making workshops and two focus group interviews with four queer and trans students from a rural high school in New Brunswick, Canada, to learn more about how these young people shape and were shaped by their school's constructions of them. Through their collages and conversations, the youth resisted simplistic celebrations and alarmist constructions of themselves-foregrounding ambivalence and active social lives while challenging normative constructions of gender and sexuality within their school. My work with these young people suggests that educational policy and practice have overdetermined what life looks like for young queer and trans people in New Brunswick schools. Further, I argue that queer joy can emerge as a powerful framework for understanding and teaching when it foregrounds the everyday and often contradictory realities of 2SLGBTQIA+ life.