Mollie V. Blackburn

Teaching Queer‐Inclusive English Language Arts

The authors argue for teaching queer-inclusive English language arts (ELA). They report on a study that surveyed high school personnel across the United States, revealing that very few people in charge of ELA curricula value such inclusion. In response to these findings, the authors offer “images of the possible” in which texts and methods that could be used in queer-inclusive ELA curricula are suggested. They advocate for teaching ELA that represents diverse people, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning, in a range of positionalities, as both insiders and outsiders in various texts. Such a curriculum is one way for all high school students to experience themselves amid “otherness,” or to experience the “other” in their midst. It is the vehicle for, and the echo of, a varied and varying society—a thesis-antithesis dialectic that eschews synthesis. In order to accomplish this, teachers must educate students to examine and experience the multiple and mutable constituents of identity and culture, of which sexuality is a critical, but hardly constant, constituent.

Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools: Possibilities and Limitations

This article reviews scholarship that represents urban students who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. It draws on empirical examples to illustrate prominent themes across this scholarship, including the homophobia they experience, the impact it has on their academic performance, and the activism it sparks. Finally, it considers implications for urban educators working with queer youth, specifically, the need to understand and be prepared to address multiple social and cultural issues that intersect with sexual and gender identities.

The Experiencing, Negotiation, Breaking, and Remaking of Gender Rules and Regulations by Queer Youth

ABSTRACT Earlier research positioned queer students as victims, and more recent scholarship positions them as agents. This study works to recognize and learn from the multiple subject positions of these youth by documenting subtleties regarding the experiences and negotiations of gender rules and regulations. When youth claim multiple subject positions, they are better able to identify, name, and work against oppression. Educators need to strive to make schools spaces where all students can engage in story lines that position them, and in which they position themselves, in multiple and variable ways so that they are more able to work for social change.

Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers

ABSTRACT This study examines LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses in five recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult books. The analysis brought scenes of violence and sex/love scenes to the fore. Violent scenes offered readers messages that LGBT people are either the victims of violence-fueled hatred and fear, or, in some cases, showed a gay person asserting agency by imposing violence on a violent homophobe. In contrast, sex and/or love scenes offered readers more nuanced messages about LGBT people. In some sex/love scenes, LGBT people are isolated by homophobia, internalized, or otherwise. In others, though, LGBT people are able to connect better with those who love them as a result of their unlearning or removal of transphobia and/or homophobia. If books with scenes of violence and sex/love are prohibited, then messages about how people connect to and distance themselves from one another by knowing and loving themselves are lost. We argue that teachers and librarians must understand the discourses that shape how they read and discuss LGBT-themed literature and know how to help students navigate these in ways that challenge but do not damage readers; this paper can facilitate such efforts.

Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT-Themed Literature: What Queer Literature Can Offer Young Adult Readers.

This paper retrospectively examines a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT)-themed books discussed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) and ally students and teachers across 3 years of an out-of-school reading group. Through a textual content analysis of a sub-set of these books, we examine what queer literature looks like, identifying qualities it shares, and considering particular resources and possibilities it offers readers that are distinct from the broader category of LGBT-themed literature.

Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media

This article reviews Drivers monograph, Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media, reporting on queer girls’ active engagement with television characters, films, lesbian magazines, online communities, and music. She explores the consequences of their engagements with these media on their lives and their understandings of popular culture and themselves.

‘I will not be a 17 year old virgin’: female virginity and sexual scripting in graphic narratives for teenagers

ABSTRACT This manuscript examines how YA graphic narratives represent sexuality with particular attention to the loss of virginity as experienced by girls and young women. It draws on the notion of sexual scripts, which are the socially learned strategies that signal what makes a situation sexual. Sexual scripts matter because of the expectations that are placed on, especially, teenagers. Through the lens of sexual scripts, we study four graphic narratives that portray young adult women losing their virginity, however they conceptualise that. The focal narratives are Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy, Ariel Schrag’s Potential, and Julie Maroh’s Blue is the Warmest Color. By looking at the texts through the theory of sexual scripting, these sexual relationships show that these contemporary females are more agentive than those seen in traditional media portrayals. However, they still adhere to many of rules of gendered sexual scripting, such as having men’s pleasure foregrounded. Ghost World and Ivy showcase heterosexual encounters in relationships that leave the young women unsatisfied. Potential and Blue is the Warmest Color contrast heterosexual relationships with loving lesbian relationships that provide a stronger emotional connection and greater physical pleasure. Thus, more opportunities for subverting potentially harmful ideologies still exist.

The power of multiple voices: A review of Beyond Magenta

ABSTRACT This review of Beyond Magenta talks about the collection of stories and photographs in some detail, acknowledges the weaknesses of the book, celebrates its strengths, and considers its potential in making the world a better place, particularly for noncisgender youth.

Supernatural, and Occasionally Queer, Youth

Battiss edited volume Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Popular Culture argues that supernatural youth in novels, television shows, and comics offer inspiration for marginalized adolescents, particularly those marginalized by heteronormativity. This argument is well supported by almost half of the chapters; those chapters are discussed in most detail in this review. Most of the remaining chapters are also discussed, albeit more briefly, in terms of their potential support of Battiss argument.

Looking back at the service delivery models of sex education in the United States: Adults with visual impairments report on their experiences:

This study investigated the sex education experiences of adults with visual impairments who attended either an itinerant or residential service delivery model during their school age years in the United States. We sought to answer the research questions through an online survey instrument that included quantifiable survey items. Findings demonstrate particular sex education content presented to participants in the school curriculum was more frequent for participants who attended residential schools. However, there were little or no meaningful methods or materials (e.g., role plays, explicit talk, tactile graphics, electronic materials, anatomically correct models) used by the participants in their sex education experiences regardless of their educational school setting. The information reported by participants in this study underscores the claim that more thorough and in-depth sex education is needed in all types of service delivery models that takes into account the needs of students with visual impairments.