Intimate Possibilities: The Beyond Bullying Project and Stories of LGBTQ Sexuality and Gender in US Schools

Abstract

In this article, Jen Gilbert, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko explore the Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia, storytelling project that invited students, teachers, and community members in three US high schools to enter a private booth and share stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality and gender. While recent policy making and educational research have focused on links between LGBTQ sexuality and gender, bullying, and other risks to educational and social achievement, Beyond Bullying aimed to identify the ordinary stories of LGBTQ sexuality and gender that circulate in schools and that an interventionist framing may obscure. After offering an overview of the method in Beyond Bullying, this article connects narratives of LGBTQ desire, family, and school life to the intimate possibilities—who students and teachers are, who they want to be, and the social worlds they want to build—available to them in schools.

A Sociological Critique of Youth Strategies and Educational Policies that Address LGBTQ Youth Issues

“…The present study extends this earlier work by critically considering how discourses of vulnerability influence youth and educational strategising, and their role in constituting particular subjects of youth policy who are deemed to be universally "at risk" by virtue of their LGBTQ identification (Talburt et al 2004). While there is an increasing body of scholarship that challenges the conflation of LGBTQ identities with victimisation and vulnerability (e.g., Airton 2013;Driver 2008;Formby 2015;Savin-Williams 2005;Gilbert et al 2018), to date there has been little published research which critically examines the discursive and material effects of these discourses as they circulate in public policy, especially in an Irish context where LGBTQ policy and research are in their infancy.…”

“…On the one hand, educational institutions provide the setting within which teacher-pupil and pupilpupil interactions take place but they also act as institutional agents through which various structures, policies, rules, practices and rituals which produce and reproduce gender are enacted (Kuzmic 2000). From this vantage point, we need to take seriously the role that schools themselves play in creating the conditions where bullying flourishes if we are to meaningfully address the prevalence of these behaviours in education (Duncan 2013a, b;Gilbert et al 2018;Payne and Smith 2016). Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a body of literature that adopts an explicitly sociological perspective on the problem of bullying (e.g.…”

“…This narrative highlights LGBTQ youths' susceptibility to homophobic or transphobic bullying and their "at riskness" for a range of associated negative mental health outcomes such as self-harm, depression and suicidality. The present article-which locates itself within the sociological tradition-seeks to contribute to an emerging literature which is critical of the discursive construction of LGBTQ youth as invariably "at risk" of bullying, victimisation and mental health difficulties (Airton 2013;Harris and Farrington 2014;Gilbert et al 2018;Jones 2013;Marshall 2010;Monk 2011;Rasmussen 2006;Talburt et al 2004;Talburt 2010). It operates from the premise that discourses constitute rather than merely reflect material reality, thereby shaping or structuring how we think about LGBTQ experiences and subsequent possibilities for action (Allen 2014;Fields 2008).…”

“…1 Specifically, I seek to problematise gender and sexuality-based anti-bullying approaches that are justified in terms of the apparent "vulnerability" or susceptibility of LGBTQ youth to a range of negative mental health outcomes, including self-harm and suicidality. Drawing on recent educational and youth-related developments in an Irish context, I interrogate the discursive and material effects of anti-bullying interventions that have become unthinkable without depictions of suffering, suicidal LGBTQ teens (Airton 2013;Driver 2008;Formby 2015;Savin-Williams 2005;Gilbert et al 2018).…”

Gender, Sexuality, and Bullying Special Issue Editorial

“…Through such work, we are invited to think outside individualised framings of the bullying/victim binary to inquire into the normalised processes of gender and sexuality socialisation, how they enable gender-and sexuality-based bullying with differential, intersectional effects (Payne and Smith 2013;Ringrose and Renold 2010;Pascoe 2011). We are provoked to think 'beyond bullying', as the Beyond Bullying Project 1 does, to inquire into the complex, ordinary stories that interventionist bullying frameworks might obscure (Gilbert et al 2018). We are also encouraged to engage with the messiness of this terrain; to notice how we are all implicated in bullying and how, while accountability and responsibility matter, they 'cannot be located in a specific individual, nor a specific event, place or time…neither are they virtues, straightforward or easily apprehended (Rasmussen et al 2017).…”