Finding Home in a Hopeless Place: Schools as Sites of Heteronormativity

ABSTRACT

For this study, we operated with a critical theoretical understanding of schools as sites of (cis)heteronormativity, which led us to question the impact of heteronormative schooling environments. We used data from the 2017 national Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System to examine the self-reported experiences and feelings of high school students with gay or lesbian, bisexual, or questioning identities. Additionally, we used a quantitative intersectional approach to juxtapose the lived experiences of queer youth in the data with our own counternarratives. Our findings indicate that queer students experienced sadness and/or hopelessness, which was predicted by unsafe schooling experiences and signs of mental health trauma and exacerbated by intersecting marginal identities (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender). Our counternarratives suggest that LGBTQIAA+ youth may experience dissonance among their sense of belonging, home, and identity that is caused by the oppressive cis-heteronormative structures of their schooling systems, which may negatively impact their mental health. Although this dissonance is ever-present, we argue that queer and trans students resist these cis-heteronormative structures through homing, which allows these students to create a more equitable environment for themselves and others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Cisgenderism is an ideology that promotes a binary (male/female) notion of gender assigned at birth (Lennon & Mistler, 2014).

2. This quote is from Gibson (2017).

3. Cis-heteronormativity is the ways the world operates and assumes binary gender and a heteronormative, nonqueer sexuality (Lugg, 2003; Meyer, 2007). We use heteronormativity and cis-heteronormativity interchangeably throughout this article to speak to the ways schools attempt to combine both gender and sexual identities in a binary fashion, and often prioritize the feelings of cisgender and heterosexual students.

4. The CDC cautions that treating “not sure” as a sexual minority category may ignore cases where students did not know what the question or other responses meant. Furthermore, New Jersey; Wyoming; Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, South Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; San Bernardino, California; and Seattle, Washington did not include sexual identity in the 2017 survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Simi Cohen

Sarah Simi Cohen is a first-generation, low-income, queer fourth-year doctoral student of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin. Their work centers student experiences in higher education, neoliberalism, LGBTQIAA+ identities, and mental health in schooling systems. Sarah’s research investigates student experiences of trauma in higher education, lived experiences of queer and trans students, and how the history of higher education impacts students today.

Bryan J. Duarte

Bryan J. Duarte is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. Their research interests take a critical (and queer) policy analytical approach to examining the relationships between principals and teachers in under-resourced schools amid neoliberal school reform. Previously, Bryan taught eighth- and ninth-grade history and English for five years.

Jennifer Ross

Jennifer Ross is a bilingual educator in the Austin area of Texas in her eighth year of teaching. She earned a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy from The University of Texas at Austin, where her participatory action research project centered around inclusive practices for LGBTQ students and their families. Her research interests include critical qualitative research, issues of immigration, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and social justice.