Don't Say Lesbian!

In this article, we describe how we encountered queer joy, failure, and ambivalence in two participatory artmaking sexuality education workshops with teachers from a rural community school in New Brunswick, Canada. Writing together as two queer femme sexuality researchers, we ask: What does it mean to talk and think about sexuality education in a context of queer erasure and antiqueer and anti trans political violence? Looking back on our facilitation practices engaging rural sexuality education teachers in participatory visual methodologies, we use workshop discussions and visual data to facilitate a critical reflection on our fieldwork experiences. Here, we describe the downplaying of queerness and
pleasure in our workshops, the conservative community norms
framing the edges of our facilitation practices, and note how participants created resistive spaces of inquiry through their artmaking. We argue that sexuality research co-facilitation in resistant settings at times necessitates mutual repair, solidarity, and care. Our findings also reveal something about the complications of doing fieldwork in rural communities as two queer femme researchers, and of the nature of sexuality education in New Brunswick more generally.

Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09518398.2026.2640849