Gay-Straight Alliances and Associations among Youth in Schools

"The youth featured in this book model honesty in their self-reflections and critical examinations among LGBTQ+ youth about what identities are privileged, left out, and what new possibilities for identity have yet to be explored. I hope my students preparing to be school administrators can learn how to be reflective about their own intersecting identities, and understand why students need to do the same." (A. J. Welton, Associate Professor, Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) "Mayo draws from humanities based discourses on subjectivity, relationality, and affect, emphasizing the spatial and temporal dimensions of identification. Youth here continuously navigate curiosity, desire, and difference in the making and unmaking of sexed, gendered, raced, classed, placed and sexual identities, alliances, and associations." (Lisa Weems, Associate Professor, Cultural Studies of Education, Miami University of Ohio, USA) "Intersectionally blending theory, pedagogy, and lived experience, Mayo takes us into the multi-layered complications of Gay Straight Alliances: the students present, those absent, and the politics at play, addressing intersectional identities, queer/allied youth of color, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth." (sj Miller, Deputy Director of Educational Equity Supports and Services, Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, USA)

These associations provide us with a way to think about intersectionality and tense encounters as spaces of possibility for new kinds of action, new kinds of learning, and newly emergent subjectivities.This book examines the formation of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)—formal and informal—in public schools. These associations provide us with a way to think about intersectionality and tense encounters as spaces of possibility for new kinds of action, new kinds of learning, and newly emergent subjectivities. While such groups are not without problems, they enable a consideration of desire for connection across sexualities, genders, races, and knowledge. By examining subjectivity as a process of negotiation across and within differences in a particular institutional context, the traces of exclusions and gaps in these processes of identification become evident.  New formations bear the imprint of exclusions that precede them but also work to fracture divisions, to push at intersections among subject positions, and explore desires for connection and change.