Queer(ing) joy: Interrogating deficit approaches to gender and sexuality education in New Brunswick, Canada

Abstract

This qualitative and article-based dissertation examines how queer joy confronts pervasive deficit framings about queer and trans youth in schools in New Brunswick, a small and rural province in Atlantic Canada—offering insights into the challenges, affordances, and broader implications of inciting joy in spaces that routinely perceive queer and trans youth through a lens of perceived lack: lack of joy, community, desire, complexity, and even personhood. In it, I engage in a document analysis of local policies, resources, press releases, government discourse, instructional materials, and curriculum related to gender and sexuality education in the province’s school system—looking at what they generate, where they operate, whom they fail, and what is absent from their promises as an inclusive framework. Then, I consider queer joy as a better conceptual possibility in view of this analysis, positioning joy as the counter to these educational structures and broader political incursions against queer and trans youth in schools. My study also reflects that possibility in action, drawing on two participatory visual workshops and accompanying focus-group interviews with four 2SLGBTQIA+ youth involved in a Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) from a rural New Brunswick high school, where we reflected on their experiences in the province’s school system. This dissertation highlights how current gender and sexuality education in New Brunswick can be both repressive and supportive, and foregrounds ways that queer and trans youth are living, queering, and figuring out new ways of doing things that surpass what current educational practice and policy assumes.