Challenging heteronormativity in suburban high schools through “surplus visibility”: Gay-Straight Alliances in the Vancouver city-region

Abstract

Over 30 years ago, the first Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) were formed to undermine the hegemonic heteronormativity of public educational institutions in North America. Despite the challenges that these student clubs pose to the heteronormativity of school spaces, the practices they employ have rarely been examined by geographers. This paper, therefore, expands upon the interdisciplinary literature on GSAs from within education and a smaller geographical literature on education and sexuality by examining the practices of suburban public high school GSAs on the peripheries of the Vancouver city-region in British Columbia, Canada. It argues that GSAs in suburban secondary public schools play valuable social supporting and activist roles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S) youth as spaces of “surplus visibility” – a means of challenging invisibility through the generation of excessive presence. Using empirical examples from two case study peripheral municipalities (Surrey and Burnaby) six dimensions of GSA actions are examined to illustrate how surplus visibility is produced (through administration, decoration, participation, sociability, reconnaissance, and activism) but also how its ‘excesses’ are regulated.

Keywords:

• Canada
• Gay-Straight Alliances
• LGBTQ2S
• surplus visibility
• suburbs
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to James Chamberlain for his interview insights, educational leadership, and long-time LGBTQ2S activism. The permission that he and Alysha Kothlow granted for us to integrate and build upon ideas from their co-authored Major Research Paper was an invaluable starting point for this article.

Notes

1 While cisgender refers to people whose gender identity and expression align with the sex they were assigned at birth, cis-normativity refers to organizational structures and everyday practices that naturalize this category.

2 In Egale (2011) Canada Human Rights Trust published Every Class in Every School: The First National Climate Survey on Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in Canadian Schools. This study found that despite Canada’s strong track record on LGBTQ rights, youth remain immersed within heterosexist and homophobic school environments.

3 In 1997, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF, https://bctf.ca/) became the first teachers’ union in Canada to pass a motion to establish a program to combat homophobia and heterosexism in schools. They have since produced publicly available LGBTQ2S curricular resources, hosted professional development workshops, and supported LGBTQ2S staff and students through conferences and programming.

4 A straight ally is someone who identifies as heterosexual but who empathizes with and is compelled to use their heterosexual privilege to advocate for and support, LGBTQ2S people by working to combat homo-, bi-, and transphobia and heteronormativity as a means of contributing to positive social change (Lapointe 2015).

5 Teachers’ unions have played an important advocacy role in providing workshops to teachers on how to create and support GSAs.

6 The conventional history of American GSAs begins in the late 1980s with a pilot project in Los Angeles to protect gay and lesbian students from bullying that then influenced the formation of the first three Gay-Straight Alliances in Boston (Fetner and Kush 2008). However, Johnson (2007) documents how in 1972 students of colour at a New York City high school founded the first school-based gay group in the country, a neglected piece of LGBTQ youth activism history. GSAs were more widely adopted in schools across the United States in the early 2000s.

7 Opposition to GSAs may result in euphemistic names that downplay the nature of the organization (e.g., Rainbow Club; Respecting Differences; Social Justice Club). In the province of Alberta, for example, following the passing of Bill 24 (An Act to Support Gay Straight Alliances) into law in November 2017 (requiring that a school principal allow a GSA upon student request without parental notification of their child’s involvement) a legal constitutional challenge was mounted in the fall of 2018 by twenty-six non-compliant private faith-based schools concerned about the restricted flow of information to parents.

8 In their study of the emergence of GSAs in American public high schools, Fetner and Kush (2008) have determined that larger and more well-resourced schools in wealthier urban and suburban areas with a proximate visible LGBTQ community presence, politically liberal leanings, and anti-discrimination legislation are more likely to have GSA groups.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison L. Bain

Alison Bain is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at York University. She is the author of Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Linda Peake) of Urbanization in a Global Context (Oxford University Press 2017). She is currently the Principle Investigator (with Julie Podmore and Brian Ray) of "Queering Canadian Suburbs," a pan-Canadian research project on LGBTQ2S place-making on the periphery of Canada's largest cities.

Julie A. Podmore

Julie Podmore is a Professor in Geosciences at John Abbott College in Montreal. She is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor at Concordia University and a Research Associate of the Chair of Research on Homophobia at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Her research on Montreal's LGBTQ community has been published in many urban studies, geography and sexuality studies journals. She is currently a co-researcher on the "Queering Canadian Suburbs" project with Alison Bain and Brian Ray.