"There's a lot of DIY joy": Elevating queer joy with 2SLGBTQIA+folks in Atlantic Canada

In this article, we reflect on experiences of gender euphoria and do-it-yourself (DIY) queer joy during a collage-making workshop with an intergenerational group of 2SLGBTQIA+ participants and researchers. The workshop is part of a larger participatory visual research project called Pride/Swell±an initiative that has been bringing together queer and trans people from across Atlantic Canada to make art since 2020. During an in-person workshop with 40 participants in 2023, we made collages in response to the conditions which gave rise to pleasure, euphoria, and joy. Through our artmaking, participants and the project’s research team shared that joy often emerged through queer self-expression, chosen families and communities, and by having an affirming experience. We also found collage-making acted as a resistive practice and that too became an expression of joy. As scholarship begins to respond to the joy deficit in sociological research, our aim is to add to these conversations by exploring how participatory visual research production creates conditions for queer joy and euphoria to emerge. At the same time, we also highlight the moments during our workshop where queer joy failed – reminding us that queer joy, as praxis, needs to be further complicated and theorized.