‘When joy comes your way, you have to grab it!’ Troubling how queer joy features in the lives of LGBT+ school-attending youth in South Africa

Abstract

Recently, the concept ‘queer joy’ has gained interest in LGBT+ scholarship in the West. I use this scholarship as an entry point to explore how school-attending LGBT+ youth express joy and how joy serves as a form of resistance against gender and sexuality norms in educational settings. While I prioritise a focus on joy, I do not overlook the existing South African research on the adverse experiences of LGBT+ youth but explore how LGBT+ youth talk about joy as resistance and liberatory praxis against cisheteronormative power. I draw on in-depth interviews from a larger project with 18 LGBT+ school-attending youth from a range of South African schools, aiming to understand their cultural worlds and how broader cultural meanings and practices influence their experience of gender, sexuality and everyday schooling. I conducted all the interviews, which were subsequently subject to both thematic and within-case and cross-case analysis. The findings reveal a nuanced understanding and interpretation of joy, which I have organised into two parts. Participants portray joy as socially produced and circulatory, rather than as having any interior quality. They explain how school structures, discourses and practices reinforce social norms and differences, which determine the circuitous nature of joy. Second, the findings emphasise queer joy as a catalyst for social awareness through cultural and reflective practices and a springboard for resistance and social change. On the face of it, the findings signal directions for leveraging joy to address normative power and school climate, as well as for repurposing it within curriculum and educational practice.