Queer punishments: School safety and youth of color in the United States

ABSTRACT

Although educational research and policymaking in the United States has generally framed LGBTQ youth and youth of color as mutually exclusive groups, LGBTQ youth of color are increasingly included in discourses surrounding school safety. These discourses tend to position youth as vulnerable, at-risk subjects who are passive victims of interpersonal homophobia. Using the theoretical frameworks queer of color critique and queer necropolitics, and a situational analysis mapping strategy, we analyzed GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey report, breakout reports on LGBTQ youth of color, and related advocacy efforts. These frameworks helped us consider how school climate research and policymaking relies on carceral logics that center and uphold whiteness. The GLSEN reports function as a form of embedded science that mobilizes individual understandings of violence and queer investments in punishment. We offer queer of color critique as a strategy for researchers and policymakers to get unstuck on school safety.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabrielle Orum Hernández

Gabrielle Orumf Hernández is a doctoral student of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison studying intersections of race, sexuality, and citizenship as they play out through educational policy in the United States.

Chris Barcelos

Chris Barcelos is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where they are affiliated with the Critical Ethnic and Community Studies and Latino Studies programs. They are the author of Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health (University of California Press, 2020).