Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask--What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure…

In this article, I examine the relationship between large-scale social discourses and local, school discourses as it plays out in conversations about gender and sexuality with and among teachers, specifically in the context of the passage of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act in California. Grounded in feminist…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide insight to the multiple ways that school leaders resist, avoid, or block LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, queer, and questioning) professional development for their staff and, thus, resist the conversations around school responsibility to these students and families. Research…

Homophobic victimization is a pervasive problem in U.S. schools that leads to negative outcomes for students. Those who experience homophobic victimization are at greater risk for avoiding particular spaces in school because they feel unsafe or afraid. Visible school security measures (e.g., security guards, metal detectors, and cameras) offer…

Scholars have become more attentive to lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual/queer/questioning (LGBTQ) topics as queer perspectives become increasingly prevalent in middle and high school environments. This study examines how educators navigate social and academic environments in order to incorporate inclusive pedagogical practices and cultivate safe…

This paper uses a case study approach to examine how the heteronormative nature of one middle school setting and classroom environment shapes the climate of safety, support and learning for LGBTQ students when they are engaged in studying a novel with a gay character. Heteronormative environments inform and shape positioning of and by students and…

Classrooms tend to be absolute spaces, places where fluidity is rejected and nearly everything--from people, to ideas, to practices and policies--is viewed and organized through binary logic. Because binary logic is implicitly accepted as the natural order in schools and the structures resulting from it are highly unmalleable, individuals who…

Negotiation of identity development in adolescence has implications that affect overall well-being. Spirituality and sexuality are two salient aspects of identity that are challenging for adolescents, especially those who identify as LGBT. Analysis of intersecting themes across two research inquiries indicated that school counselors and students…

Emerging evidence suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth experience disparate treatment in schools that may result in criminal sanctions. In an effort to understand the pathways that push youth out of schools, we conducted focus groups with youth (n = 31) from Arizona, California, and Georgia, and…

Homophobic victimization is a pervasive problem in U.S. schools that leads to negative outcomes for students. Those who experience homophobic victimization are at greater risk for avoiding particular spaces in school because they feel unsafe or afraid. Visible school security measures (e.g., security guards, metal detectors, and cameras) offer…

Employing social constructivist theories and the concept of abjection from gender studies, this article examines how and why a group of low-income, USA-born Dominican and Puerto Rican middle-school boys constructed masculine identities by invoking and repudiating homosexuality. Ethnographic data from a 2.5-year study indicate that the abjection of…

Little is known about how youth with LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) parents experience various forms of sexual stigma (i.e., homophobia and heterosexism). Previous studies have focused primarily on frequency of teasing and harassment; therefore, much less is known about how indirect and institutional types of sexual stigma play out in the lives…

This qualitative study used critical ethnography as a theoretical framework to investigate the social coping strategies of gifted and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in middle and high school. Twelve LGBTQ college students from a selective Southeastern university were interviewed and asked to retrospectively…

In conducting a study on the programmatic experiences of lesbian and bisexual preservice teachers, narratives of the silenced identity categories of participants led researchers to consider more queer approaches in their own research practices. In this article, we use queer theory and autoethnography to explore what queer research in teacher…

Interns in a US teacher education program were surveyed regarding their attitudes towards diversity, particularly issues of sexuality, their feelings of "cultural competence" around diversity, and the repertoires of practices and resources they feel prepared to draw on in their work with middle and high schools students (11-18 year…