Adela C. Licona

Students’ Perspectives on LGBTQ-Inclusive Curriculum

Implementing curriculum that is inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people has the potential to create an equitable learning environment. In order to learn more about students’ experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, 26 high school students with diverse racial/ethnic, sexual, and gender identities were recruited from the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) Network in California. Students participated in focus groups conducted by telephone by GSA staff, sharing their experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in school. Qualitative coding methods, including grounded theory, were used to identify themes and interpret students’ responses. Data revealed that LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum was most often taught in social sciences and humanities courses as stand-alone lessons. LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum rarely met standards of social justice education, though opportunities for critical conversations about systemic oppression regularly emerged. For instance, teachers often failed to intervene in LGBTQ bullying and missed teachable moments conducive to inclusive curriculum. Some students learned positive LGBTQ lessons and highlighted the ways such curriculum reflected their identities and created a supportive school climate. Implications for equitable education are discussed.

Informing sexuality education through youth-generated anonymous questions

This paper examines a comprehensive sexuality education programme, Health Education for Youth (HEY), which incorporates anonymous questions about sex and sexuality that participating youth generate into the curriculum. HEY utilises a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to inform the programme, its facilitation and the incorporation of participant questions into the curriculum. This paper describes the theoretical and methodological frameworks; curriculum content and use of anonymous questions; programme and participant characteristics; and types and content of questions asked by youth. Findings indicate that young people utilise their agency to ask important sexuality questions and are concerned about similar types and content of questions regardless of programme setting. The benefits of using a social ecology framework, decolonising perspectives and feminist methods to guide curriculum content and session facilitation are discussed along with the value of incorporating anonymous questions about sex to create sexuality education that is youth driven and youth relevant.

Latin@ Immobilities and Altermobilities Within the U.S. Deportability Regime

In this article, we explore how racialized constructions of a “Latin@ threat” serve as ideological underpinning for the practices of the U.S. deportability regime and also fuel broader practices of policeability, with consequences for Latin@ mobilities and immobilities. Drawing from ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with Latin@s in Perry, Iowa, we discuss “the border within” as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the U.S. heartland, explore imposed mobilities and immobilities, and also recognize tactical immobilities and altermobilities undertaken by Latin@s.

From Afro-Sweden with defiance: the clenched fist as coalitional gesture?

Abstract Anti-racist activist Maria Teresa “Tess” Asplund, who is Afro-Swedish, became known around the world in 2016 when a photograph of her stepping out in front of three hundred marching neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement went viral on social media. Tess raised her clenched fist in protest, as part of a counter-demonstration. The recognizability of her clenched fist as an act of protest struck a chord with anti-racist activists and movements around the world as the photograph of her lit up the Internet. In this article, we examine Asplund’s action as an expression of the current racial climate in Sweden, while at the same time tracing the viral and transnational circulation of her image across multiple-publics and mediaspheres to investigate how her solitary presence and her clenched fist function relationally and rhetorically.

Trans(affective)mediation: feeling our way from paper to digitized zines and back again

ABSTRACT Zines emerged as quintessentially print texts, with paper forming the vulnerable, palpable body of the text. Efforts to digitally archive zines promise to increase access to them and to extend their political projects. Particularly for minoritarian communities, digitization resonates as an urgent process with radical potential. Alongside such possibilities stand concerns about what it means and, particularly, how it feels to transform zines from paper to digital modes. Through engagement with the Queer Zine Archive Project and the POC (People of Color) Zine Project, we argue that transmediation of print zines into digital artifacts is rife with affective dynamics. In relation to these affective dynamics, we take a reflexive stance of ambivalence—not indifference, but rather a strongly felt set of disparate, sometimes dissonant or contradictory pulls toward and away from digitization. We offer the concept of trans(affective)mediation as an intervention that treats print zines and digital zines as distinct and distinctly affective domains, with distinct possibilities and constraints, coherences and incoherences, and intensities. Additionally, trans(affective)mediation names the third space between print and digital that calls for our care and understanding if we are to appreciate and even participate in the politics of queer, POC, and queer POC zine cultures.

Argentina: Stories for a Nation, and: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (review)

The weekend that I finished reading these texts, the film adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s 2004 novel My Sister’s Keeper was released. It was against the backdrop of Coates’s, Flavin’s, and Harwood’s work that I viewed the film, which deals with the consequences of a mother’s choice of using ART so that she could give birth to a “donor baby” that would keep her ill daughter alive. I am certain that each of these texts, as well as the film, would make a fine addition to a unit on women and reproduction in an upper-division course. These authors’ exploration of women’s reproductive lives will provide students with a lively exchange of ideas and concepts.