Queer joy-centered sexuality education: offering a novel framework for gender-based violence prevention

Abstract

2SLGBTQ+ people face disproportionately high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) compared to cisgender heterosexual people. Scholars have predominantly responded to this violence by reporting on victimization, which homogenizes queer and trans life as misery. To avoid reproducing this joy-deficit, we propose a novel approach that centers queer sexual joy. As rape culture is symptomatic of cisheteronormativity, queer sexual joy is a useful analytic with which to subvert GBV. Drawing on findings from the Queer Sexual Joy project, a mixed-methods study involving 100 young adults from Canada and the US, we introduce six recommendations for a framework to focalize queer and trans sexual joy in GBV prevention education, including: 1) containers for safety; 2) communication strategies; 3) bodily autonomy; 4) trauma-informed, anti-oppression, 5) pleasure; and 6) dissociation and grounding practices. We propose that GBV education rooted in queer sexual joy would reorient all youth from hegemonic sexual scripts and provide a frame for more just sexual cultures.

Keywords:

• 2SLGBTQ+ youth
• sexuality education
• consent
• gender-based violence
• queer joy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Egale Canada for collaborating on the study represented in the paper, particularly Dr. Brittany Jakubiec, Amanda Wong, Kendall Forde, Shain Lambert, AQ Hui, Tamara Touma, and Jennifer Boyce. Thank you also to project assistants Elliot Fonarev, Noelle Kilbraeth, Molly Boyd, and Japnish Kaur for their help with the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Recently, there have been proposals to center euphoria (Mann et. al, 2024) or pleasure (Fine & McClelland, 2006) in sexuality education. While these are important areas of enquiry, euphoria, pleasure, and queer joy are all theoretically different and their analyses cannot be easily extrapolated onto the others. We focus on queer sexual joy specifically in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Notes on contributors

JJ Wright

JJ Wright is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at MacEwan University on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Alberta.

Joshua Falek

Joshua Falek is a Ph.D. Candidate at York University in the Department of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies in Toronto, Canada.

Ellis Greenberg

Ellis Greenberg is a Masters of Education Candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.