Abstract
Gay-Straight Alliances and Associations Among Youth in Schools examines the formation of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)—formal and informal—in creating spaces to rethink subjectivity as relational and embedded in diverse spaces and practices. As such, these associations of and through difference 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 in registers across sexualities, genders, races, and knowledges. 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 and alliance become evident. New formations, in other words, 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.
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Notes
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Mayo, C. (2017). Introduction. In: Gay-Straight Alliances and Associations among Youth in Schools. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59529-4_1
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