Queer Social Movements And Outreach Work In Schools

This book brings together leading scholars researching the field of gender, sexuality, schooling, queer activism, and social movements within different cultural contexts. With contributions from more than fifteen countries, the chapters bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, education, and social movements in the Global North and South. The book draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions offering rich and multidisciplinary essays from scholars and activists in the field focusing on outreach work of QSM (Queer Social Movements) in schools, queer activism in educational settings, and the role of QSMs in supporting and informing queer youth.

The first book of its kind in North America, Queering Social Work Education combines LGBTQ history and personal narratives from a diverse range of queer social work educators and students with much-needed analyses and recommendations. This book will help readers develop awareness, dismantle prejudice, and contribute positively to the future of social work education, research, policy, and practice.

This book stories social movements on the margins. Foregrounding historically silenced, dismissed and ignored Aboriginal, young, voiceless, and intersex Australian activists, the book theorizes how movement away from exclusionary praxis at the margins can offer renewed hope. Using diverse and creative forms of research underpinned by storying, social movement and critical race theoretical knowledge with a commitment to social justice, this book will be of interest and value to scholars of cultural studies, Indigenous studies, education, human geography, political sciences, and sociology.

Offering a vital, critical contribution to debates on gender, sexuality and schooling in South Africa, this book highlights how South African educational practices, discourses and structures normalize cisheteronormativity, along with how these are resisted within schools and through contemporary forms of activism. Not only does it add fresh insights to the existing research literature on gender, sexualities and schooling, it also underscores the valuable contributions of queer and transgender social movements, which have made influential legislative, teaching, learning and support contributions to education. Drawing on ethnographic research with queer and transgender activists, teachers, school managers, parents and school attending youth, the book provides everyday real-life quotes and observations offering a deeply critical contribution to the debates on gender and sexualities, education and activism. Using spatial and affect theories, it troubles the assumptions that frame this field of research to make a novel contribution to the national and international literature and research. The book provides research-based insights for thinking about and calls for informed action to challenging cisheteronormativity within and beyond schools.

Queer Studies and Education: An International Reader explores how the category queer, as a critical stance or set of perspectives, contributes to opportunities individually and collectively for advancing (queer) social justice within the context and concerns of schooling and education. The collection takes up this general goal by presenting a cross-section of international perspectives on queer studies in education to demonstrate commonalities, differences, uncertainties, or pluralities across a diverse range of national contexts and topics, drawing a heightened awareness of heterodominance and heteropatriarchy, and to conceptualize non-normative and non-essentialist imaginings for more inclusive educational environments. Collectively, the chapters critically engage with heteronormativity and normativity more generally as a political spectrum, over a broad range of formal and informal sites of education, and against a backdrop of critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism as the frameworks through which "achievable" social change and belonging are fostered, particularly within educational settings. Taken together, the chapters assembled in Queer Studies and Education invite researchers, scholars, educators, activists, and other cultural workers to examine the multiplicity of contemporary (international) work in queer studies and education with readers' interpretations of queer's deployment across the chapters forming the compass for which to arrive at fresh insights and forms of (queer) critical praxis.

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.

In the wake of a global wave of mobilisation, this book offers an unprecedented interrogation of protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism. Using international case studies, it develops an intersectional analysis of protest camps and tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency.

This open access book engages with the concept of reproductive justice by exploring case studies of struggles around abortion in the context of rising anti-genderism, religious fundamentalism, and ethno-nationalism. Based on rich qualitative data offering in-depth analyses from different geographical, political and cultural contexts, the book explores how reproductive justice is understood, contested and given meaning. Chapters further develop the Black feminist concept of reproductive justice in a critical dialogue with postcolonial theory and explore the strength of transnational feminist practices. This book thus offers a fresh approach to the issue of abortion by engaging with contemporary political and cultural processes, and it expands the narrow notions of women’s rights, particularly notions of property rights over bodies, towards an analysis of the political economy of social reproduction and how it affects bodies that can be pregnant. This volume will be of interest to scholars with interests in reproductive justice, anti-gender politics, and religious fundamentalism.