“Is it good or bad to do anal?”: Failures in queer joy and sexuality education

Where does queer joy fail in the sexuality education classroom? In this article, we work through the productive problematic of employing a queer and pleasure-centered approach to teaching sexuality education in New Brunswick, Canada. Engaging participatory visual research methods and queer joy alongside 60 sexuality education teachers in five separate art-making workshops and online interviews, we describe the conditions when teachers seemed unable to access the language of queer joy, like when they teach in a conservative space, encounter shame and sex negativity, or when they lack the resources and guidance to feel confident to teach sexuality education. We propose that queer joy is a worldmaking project in sexuality education classrooms—that is most often experienced in tandem with resistance—and offers a futurity queered toward something joyfully different, including when it fails.