‘It gets narrower’: creative strategies for re-broadening queer peer education

Abstract

Using collaborative performance ethnography in community- and school-based settings, sex education has the potential to challenge at-risk narratives for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) youth. This paper problematises the youth-led drama project Epic Queer to test the ‘queer’ potential of youth-driven initiatives at the school and community level, and to reject the singularity of victimised and ‘at-risk’ narratives so pervasive in sex education internationally about queer youth. By drawing on the It Gets Better Project as an example of widespread but narrowing social media texts encouraging normativity, deferred pleasure and a happiness narrative, this paper argues for the potential of performance-based arts engagement for re-expanding queer youth subjectivities.

Keywords::

• young people
• queer
• drama
• sex education
• media

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers at Sex Education for their careful readings and suggestions which have greatly improved both the conceptual and structural aspects of this paper.

Notes

^1. All names of participants used in this article are pseudonyms.

^2. The It Gets Better Project was established in 2010 in the USA to ‘inspire hope for young people facing harassment’ (IGBP 2012) due to sex and gender diversity.