This book sheds light on how sexuality and gender intersect in producing heteronormativity within the school system in Iceland. In spite of recent support for progressive policies regarding sexual and gender equality in the country, there remains a discrepancy between policy and practice with respect to LGBTQ rights and attitudes within the school system. This book draws on ethnographic data and interviews with LGBTQ students in high schools across the country and reveals that, although Nordic countries are sometimes portrayed as queer utopias, the school system in Iceland has a long road ahead in making schools more inclusive for all students.

This book explores the narratives and experiences of LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming students around the world. Much previous research has focused on homophobic/transphobic bullying and the negative consequences of expressing non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming identities in school environments. To date, less attention has been paid to what may help LGBTQ+ students to experience school more positively, and relatively little has been done to compare research across the global contexts. This book addresses these research gaps by bringing together ongoing research from countries including Brazil, China, South Africa, the UK and many more. Each chapter examines results of empirical research into school experiences of LGBTQ+ students, and the experiences and perspectives of teachers and parents. All contributions are theoretically informed by aspects of queer theory and/or critical feminist theory, with additional insights from psychological, sociological and linguistic perspectives. Contributing chapters consider how educational workers may question socially sanctioned concepts of normality in relation to gender and sexuality in ways that benefit all students, and how they can ‘queer’ schools to make them less oppressive in terms of gender and sexuality. Expertly written and researched, this book is an invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers and students in the fields of education, sociology, gender studies and anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality studies.

This book brings together leading scholars researching the field of gender, sexuality, schooling, queer activism, and social movements within different cultural contexts. With contributions from more than fifteen countries, the chapters bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, education, and social movements in the Global North and South. The book draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions offering rich and multidisciplinary essays from scholars and activists in the field focusing on outreach work of QSM (Queer Social Movements) in schools, queer activism in educational settings, and the role of QSMs in supporting and informing queer youth.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the educational experiences of students, parents, and educators—transgender and cisgender—in the context of current debates about the inclusion of transgender people in schools. Drawing on critiques of cisgenderism and emphasising the importance of a whole-of-school approach, Transgender People and Education explores complex topics including sexuality education for transgender young people, teaching about gender diversity, the journeys of cisgender parents of transgender children, the experiences of transgender parents and educators in schools, and the role of cisgender administrators, educators, and school counsellors and psychologists in creating inclusive school cultures. Reporting on empirical analyses conducted by the authors, the book makes a unique contribution to thinking about gender diversity in schools and advocates for the broadening of educational approaches beyond narrow gender binaries.

This book advances a broad constellation of critical concepts situated within the field of queer studies and education. Collectively, the concepts take up a cross-section of scholarship that speaks to various political, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical concerns. Given the ongoing global centrality of sociocultural and political developments related to the topic of LGBTQ in the twenty-first century, the concepts in this volume and the issues raised by each contributor will have wide international appeal among researchers, scholars, educators, students, and activists working at the intersection of queer studies and education.

Offering an examination of educational approaches to promote justice, this volume demonstrates the necessity for keeping race, ethnicity, class, language, and other diversities at the core of pedagogical strategies and theories that address queer, trans, gender nonbinary and related issues. Queer theory, trans theory, and intersectional theory have all sought to describe, create, and foster a sense of complex subjectivity and community, insisting on relationality and complexity as concepts and communities shift and change. Each theory has addressed exclusions from dominant practices and encouraged a sense of connection across struggles. This collection brings these crucial theories together to inform pedagogies across a wide array of contexts of formal education and community-based educational settings. Seeking to push at the edges of how we teach and learn across subjectivities and communities, authors in this volume show that theories inform practice and practice informs theory—but this takes careful attention, reflexivity, and commitment. This scholarly text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, teachers, libraries and policy makers in the field of Gender and Sexuality in Education, LGBTQ studies, Multicultural Education and Sociology of Education.