Education and affinity? pedagogies of sexual citizenship in LGBTIQ youth support videos

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for youth frame identity, sexuality and normativity within broader contexts of support and sexual citizenship. It focuses on online video resources for young people produced in Australia by the LGBTIQ support and curriculum advocacy organisation Safe Schools Coalition Australia and by the Minus18 Foundation. Developed as part of the larger All of Us educational package, these videos are explicitly pedagogical, presenting the viewer with ‘real life’ experiences from a range of young Australians. We consider the work the All of Us videos do in engaging with concepts of sexual citizenship, particularly as they seek to help young people navigate multiple forms of belonging and support. Of special interest is a series of tensions between normalising tendencies and the complexification of identities, communities, intimacies and belongings. While the videos may be perceived to operate within largely normative conceptualisations of sexuality, they explore ways of building affinity, peer support, and alternative ways of being that extend well beyond the logics usually offered by these frameworks.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTIQ youth
• social support
• pedagogies
• peer-created video
• interactivity

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to those who contributed to the Belonging and Sexual Citizenship among Gender and Sexual Minority Youth (‘Queer Generations’) research project as study participants. We thank Geraldine Fela, Jess Gilbert, Kirsty Herbert, Max Hopwood, Toby Lee, Christy Newman and Clare Southerton, who worked as research associates on the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rob Cover http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8815-2126

Peter Aggleton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5966-4969

Notes

1 We use the term LGBTIQ in this paper to refer collectively to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and ‘otherwise queer’ persons, communities and organisations. The term is, of course, problematic as it risks erasing specificity among its member identities. It is also not always seen as inclusive of new, and proliferating gender and sexual identity categories, terms and labels, which according to some accounts are in the hundreds (Cover 2019). To that end, we also use the phrase ‘gender and sexual diversity’ to describe broadly the manifest ways in which many young people perceive themselves as ‘not straight’ or ‘not cis-gendered’, while acknowledging that the term LGBTIQ continues to be used across many supportive resources, websites and curricula and remains in popular currency.

2 The It Gets Better videos were begun by North American columnist Dan Savage in 2010 in response to a spate of reported queer youth suicides in September and October of that year. The video series encouraged supporters, allies, organisations and corporate bodies to upload videos to YouTube that provided support to young people by attempting to convey examples that life will improve subsequent to graduating from school. The videos aimed to invoke ‘hope’ rather than ‘knowledge’ as a remedy to suicidality and shame. See Cover 2012, chapter three.

Additional information

Funding

The research described in this article was undertaken as part of the Belonging and Sexual Citizenship among Gender and Sexual Minority Youth (‘Queer Generations’) research project, funded under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP150101292). The views expressed are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Australian government or the Australian Research Council.