Queer Youth In The Province Of The Severely Normal

Gloria Filax explores how youth identities have been constructed through dominant and often competing discourses about youth, sexuality, and gender, and how queer youth in the province of Alberta negotiated the contradictions of these discourses. She juxtaposes the voices of queer young people in Alberta with discourses that claim expert knowledge about young people's lives. She also explores what queer youth have to say about their lives in relation to renditions of homosexuality from the Alberta Report, a weekly magazine published in the 1990s that, despite its fiscal marginality, had significant impact on social values in Alberta.

Essays explore the contemporary contexts, activism, and cultural productions of queer youth and their communities.

The authors in this book use the metaphors of invisibility and visibility to explore the social and school lives of many children and young people in North America whose complexity, strengths, and vulnerabilities are largely unseen in the society and its schools. These “invisible children” are socially devalued in the sense that alleviating the difficult conditions of their lives is not a priority—children who are subjected to derogatory stereotypes, who are educationally neglected in schools that respond inadequately if at all to their needs, and who receive relatively little attention from scholars in the field of education or writers in the popular press. The chapter authors, some of the most passionate and insightful scholars in the field of education today, detail oversights and assaults, visible and invisible, but also affirm the capacity of many of these young people to survive, flourish, and often educate others, despite the painful and even desperate circumstances of their lives. By sharing their voices, providing basic information about them, and offering thoughtful analysis of their social situation, this volume combines education and advocacy in an accessible volume responsive to some of the most pressing issues of our time. Although their research methodologies differ, all of the contributors aim to get the facts straight and to set them in a meaningful context. New in the Third Edition: Chapters retained from the previous edition have been thoroughly revised and updated, and five totally new chapters have been added on the topics of: *young people pushed into the “school-to-prison” pipeline; *the “environmental landscape” of two out-of-school Mexican migrant teens in the rural Midwest; *the perceptions and practices, in and outside schools, that construct African American boys as school failures; *negative portrayals of blackness in the context of understanding the “collateral damage of continued white privilege”; and *working-class pregnant and parenting teens’ efforts to create positive identities for themselves. Of interest to a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners across the field of education, this compelling book is accessible to all readers. It is particularly appropriate as a text for courses that address the social context of education, cultural and political change, and public policy, including social foundations of education, sociology of education, multicultural education, curriculum studies, and educational policy.

This anthology of 19 articles documents the pain & misunderstanding that lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgendered people have experienced in the very recent past and demonstrates the real progress, both in theory & in practice, that has been made in the struggle for equity & social justice. The articles include autobiography, testament, fiction, poetry, and traditional personal & analytic essays, from authors with different intellectual perspectives: human rights, social reform & human justice, feminist, liberationist, and queer theory.

This pioneering collection provides, for the first time, an international and transdisciplinary reflection on youth, history and queer sexualities and genders. Since the 1970s there has been an explosion in research focusing on LGBTQ history and on the lives of LGBTQ young people, but these two research areas have seldom been brought together explicitly. Bridging LGBTQ historical scholarship and contemporary queer youth cultural studies, this book marks out pathways for thinking more about youth in LGBTQ history and more about history in contemporary understandings of LGBTQ youth. Examining histories from the nineteenth century through to the recent past, contributors examine queer youth histories in continental Europe, Britain, the United States of America, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Growing up in post-World War II Alberta in a stable, loving home, Tom Symington didn’t feel that he was “different.” Evading early pressures of romance and sexual exploration, repressing instances of name-calling (“femmy”), and hostility from schoolmates, Tom was almost able to believe in a world that valued the rights and freedoms of all citizens. From Calgary to Sierra Leone to France, this candid, heartbreaking memoir braids the evolution of gay rights in Canada with the life journey of one individual. Following high school, as Tom entered university and became a teacher, he was forced to reconcile his sexual orientation with the prevailing social and legal environment in Alberta, Canada, and the world beyond. As decades passed, “femmy” merged with “gay,” “queer,” and “LGBTQ+ community” in a rallying movement and an enduring struggle towards pride and self-acceptance against the current of societal expectations and discriminatory legislation. Not So Normal is as much a coming-of-age odyssey and a celebration of selfhood as it is a grave reminder that there is still much work to be done in the realm of human rights, and an urgent call to action to recentre love in our increasingly diverse and divisive world.

There is a complex relationship between performance, youth, and the shifting material circumstances (social, cultural, economic, ideological, and political) under which theatre for children and youth is generated and perceived. This book explores different aspect of theatre for young audiences using examples from theatrical events globally.

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.