Answering calls from recent literature reviews of scholarship at the juncture of rural education and queerness to move beyond deficit narratives and take up more complex theorizations of space and place, this article considers the complexities of K-12 teachers' queer educational advocacy in relation to both rurality and region. Drawing from a two-year study that combined practitioner inquiry and ethnography, the article focuses on teachers in rural Southern schools, examining how they described the dynamics of being from or not from the community where they taught mattered for their queer advocacy. Our findings suggest the intertwined importance of both the epistemic and relational as part of teachers' activist placemaking. In order to make these arguments, we draw from theorists challenging the notion that space and place are neutral backdrops and who instead suggest they are ongoing practices and thus open to being made and remade in ways that are more just and affirming for queer people and practices.

This article examines a public library board meeting in a small Southern U.S. town with the goal of understanding local discourses about sexual and gender diversity amid increased challenges to LGBTQIA+ and BIPoC-themed books. Drawing on theories intertwining place, power, and identity, we analyze how arguments for and against censoring LGBTQIA+ materials are insidiously imbued with discursive practices part of, but not exclusive to, white Christian nationalism. Our analysis identifies three key discursive placemaking practices of white Christian nationalism that community members used: instilling fear, enforcing exclusions, and narrating temporalities (pasts, presents, and futures). Findings reveal that speakers-despite opposing ideological positions about LGBTQIA+ life-constructed a vision of their community influenced by whiteness and Christian nationalist ideologies. This analysis offers new pathways for understanding how public spaces become sites of contestation where multiple trajectories of power and identity converge, with implications for advocacy toward more inclusive and just library spaces.

This article examines a public library board meeting in a small Southern U.S. town with the goal of understanding local discourses about sexual and gender diversity amid increased challenges to LGBTQIA+ and BIPoC-themed books. Drawing on theories intertwining place, power, and identity, we analyze how arguments for and against censoring LGBTQIA+ materials are insidiously imbued with discursive practices part of, but not exclusive to, white Christian nationalism. Our analysis identifies three key discursive placemaking practices of white Christian nationalism that community members used: instilling fear, enforcing exclusions, and narrating temporalities (pasts, presents, and futures). Findings reveal that speakers—despite opposing ideological positions about LGBTQIA+ life—constructed a vision of their community influenced by whiteness and Christian nationalist ideologies. This analysis offers new pathways for understanding how public spaces become sites of contestation where multiple trajectories of power and identity converge, with implications for advocacy toward more inclusive and just library spaces.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of book challenges in educational contexts in the United States. Books representing sexual and gender diversity have been particularly targeted, as have books by and about people of color. Further, many states restrict or censor curricula and discussions of sexual and gender diversity, as well as race, ethnicity, politics, and history. Inspired by previous scholarship on censorship describing it as a knot intertwining knowledge with power, we turn to three "knots" with respect to anti-LGBTQIA+ censorship: access, protection, and moral panic, all prominent themes in conversations-both mainstream and scholarly-about censorship. In these conversations, access to particular content is restricted under the guise of protecting youth, and in order to get this work done, a moral panic is induced. We argue, however, that censorship is less about restricting access to texts and curricular and conversational content and more about making sorts of places where certain people, even types of people, can exist and others cannot. The importance of thinking about censorship as placemaking is that it is not the only sort of placemaking available. Placemaking is contested terrain. Just as some people are making communities where some knowledge of gender, sexuality, and race are (un)knowable, (un)speakable, (un)intelligible, (in)actionable, and (im)possible, others are knowing, speaking, and acting possibilities into existence. Doing so, though, requires reflection on the present in relation to the past and future; it demands that we engage in deliberate placemaking.

In this article, we describe an interpretive framework for teachers and teacher educators to use when engaging with two areas of English language arts curriculum and research – ruralness and queerness – as they work alongside readers of young adult literature. Too often rural communities and queerness are characterized as opposed if not incompatible. This binary—i.e., urban-as-queer-affirming and rural-as-queerphobic—has become so common that queer theorists have developed the term metronormativity to name and interrogate this ideology (Halberstam, 2005; Gray, 2009; Herring, 2010). Having lived and taught in rural and small town communities, we are concerned that metronormativity can, at times, go unrecognized if not uninterrogated in educational research. By offering a framework for teaching and analyzing literature in classrooms and teacher education classrooms, we encourage readers of queer young adult literature to ask questions about how and why ideas about spaces and sexualities become naturalized ideologies that are accepted as truth. Such questions matter not only for queer youth in rural contexts. Instead, they offer productive ways to think about literature and its relationships to life for readers in urban, suburban, and other contexts regardless of their sexual identities.

School-based supports, such as LGBTQ+-themed curriculum, invite opportunities for challenging oppression with respect to gender and its intersections with other identities such as sexuality and race. However, more understanding is needed regarding how literacy educators might leverage these opportunities. This article describes how intimacy, oppressive actions, and activism functioned in relation to one another in an LGBTQ+-themed literature course at a grassroots public charter high school for the arts in a mid-sized Midwestern city. The larger study, from which this article is derived, is a hybrid of ethnography and practitioner inquiry. Therefore, this study draws on field notes, transcribed video recordings of class, transcribed audio recordings of interviews, and student assignments related to a young adult novel. Our analysis of gendered power relations suggests that oppression can hinder intimacy, intimacy can hinder activism, but intimacy can also foster activism. With the goal of leveraging opportunities to challenge gendered oppression, we argue that students and teachers must navigate intimacy and intersecting structures of oppression to enact activism.

Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography inquiring into how students and teachers read, wrote, and talked about gender and sexual diversity at a Midwestern U.S. high school, this article presents two illustrative ethnographic cases from a co-taught sophomore humanities course (grade 10) combining English language arts and social studies, cases featuring students writing about the child as an epistemic figure. The implications of this argument suggest the importance of educators questioning rather than naturalizing ageist power relations through their pedagogical techniques and curricular representations, which in turn can challenge or reify broader age-based epistemic injustices undergirding anti-trans and racist legislation and policy in and beyond the United States.

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time's multidimensionality but also its multidirectionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.

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Part of a larger yearlong ethnography at a comprehensive, public high school in a Midwestern city in the United States, this article explores a telling case from a bookclub that was part of the school's Genders and Sexualities Alliance. Approaching curriculum as a question of what knowledges are valued in education, in this article I describe the layers of epistemic practices that youth in the bookclub co-constructed and the consequences of these practices for oppressive values with respect to sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and language. The telling case features youth talking about young adult author Saenz's sexuality, his novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and whether and how (literary) authors' identities affect their writing (of literature). My analysis of the case explores epistemological phenomena related to literature, curiosity, authenticity, #OwnVoices, and author-reader relationships, which I consider through critical, especially queer and trans, theoretical perspectives about epistemology, transparency, and opacity. The findings have implications for educators working to disrupt oppressive, anti-LGBTQ+ epistemologies in schools in an effort to encourage humanizing curiosity, promote compassion, and foster joy among and for LGBTQ+ students.

A subset of educators who coauthored NCTE’s “Guidelines for Affirming Gender Diversity through ELA Curriculum and Pedagogy” consider the implications for classroom practice.

In recent decades, there has been important growth in queer and trans studies in educational research, with independent subfields emerging in K-12 and higher education. Though scholars in each area have generated valuable knowledge, these subfields have developed in parallel rather than in conjunction, with each subfield having its distinct foundational literature, methodological and theoretical traditions, research questions, premier research journals and conferences, and so forth. Although this trend has helped build knowledge about educational experiences in K-12 and higher education separately, it has also resulted in disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in the larger field. The edited volume sought to intervene by bringing together a range of emerging and established scholars in K-12 and higher education research who focus on queer and trans studies. It features groups of scholars from across these two subfields collaboratively writing to address knowledge gaps and how to bridge them. This introduction describes the state of queer and trans studies in education and offers an overview of the chapters to come. This edited volume emerged from a two-year collaboration among K-12 and higher education queer studies scholars, and the chapters in this volume came from those conversations. The conversations, collaborations, and thinking that took shape during that extended, intensive collaboration gave rise to the pieces included in this volume.

In this essay, two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, this article extends queer literacies and queer pedagogies scholarship by exploring the frictions and resonances between strategies of inclusion and queering. While inclusion strategies emphasize using expanded representations of sexuality and gender, such as of LGBTQ+ life, queering approaches often trouble inclusion through, for instance, questioning normativities and epistemologies and embracing partiality, uncertainty, and crisis in learning. To unpack interconnections between inclusion and queering, I present an ethnographic case of a lesson in a sophomore humanities course, focusing on the teacherly moves of an English language arts educator leading an instructional conversation about a nonfiction article describing intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class with respect to food insecurity. Engaging Ahmed's (2006) queer theorization of orientations, I develop the heuristic of literacy (dis)orientations to describe the layered mixture of classroom literacy performances challenging and reifying oppressive values regarding intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The teacher disoriented students away from (homo)normativities regarding knowledge of LGBTQ+ communities and reoriented them toward and around nuanced, intersectional understandings of queer and trans life. However, these anti-oppressive possibilities were limited by orientations around a banking model of education and binaries. This ethnographic case suggests that educators sanctioning literacy orientations toward intersectional LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum presents possibilities for liberatory social change insofar as they disorient students away from education-as-banking and epistemological binaries and reorient them around alternative ways of knowing, specifically intersectionality as a queering epistemology.

In the conclusion, the editors provide their analyses of the themes that have been attended to in the edited volume’s chapters. The conclusion chapter articulates how bridging the gap present in queer and trans studies can prove to help move these areas of research forward. Moreover, they outline recommendations for researchers and educational practitioners hoping to utilize the lessons from this text in their work. The conclusion also incorporates the editors outlining additional areas of exploration that can be further examined from this interdisciplinary perspective.

Previous scholarship about LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum has tended to focus on teachers' perspectives and drawn on binaries such as presence/absence. Extending past research, this article describes the experiences of youth, primarily but not exclusively LGBTQ+ youth, with LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum with respect to intersecting identities and power relations, specifically, sexuality, gender, race, and class. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography at a public, comprehensive high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, I focus on one literacy learning context, a cotaught sophomore humanities course combining English and social studies. Taking up intersectionality's epistemological, ontological, and ethicopolitical commitments, the findings describe three sets of intersecting social dynamics that mattered for youth's classroom experiences and ultimately the liberatory (im)possibilities of LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum: (1) queerness, disclosure, and agency; (2) social capital, class, and race; and (3) homonormativity, race, and outness. These findings offer implications for understanding the relations between LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum and classroom and school climate.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.