Troubling the discourse of the victimization of queer youth in Icelandic and South African education

Abstract

The homophobia and hostility experienced by queer learners in Icelandic and South African schools are well documented. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer youth (16–19 years) in Iceland and South Africa, this paper aims at understanding how queer youth navigate heterosexist and homophobic school spaces and create some positive spaces. The findings highlight that queer youth employ various social and discursive strategies to (re)position themselves as agentic subjects. They counter heteronormativity by drawing on what we define in this paper as “queer capital”, which entails deploying various social and discursive strategies to establish some kind of distinction within the school and in their interaction with peers. Humour, parody, and active resistance, as well as finding ways to escape the regulatory mechanisms of gender, and relating easily to both genders, are examples of the social/discursive strategies employed by our participants and discussed in the paper. The paper then concludes with implications for research with queer youth.