Museari: Art in a Virtual LGBT Museum Promoting Respect and Inclusion

Museari is an online museum dedicated to upholding human rights and sexual diversity through art, history, and education. Museari was born in 2015 and since then more than 70 exhibitions have been presented. This paper analyzes Museari's interest in teacher training, something that has been especially positive during the Covid-19 pandemic. The objective of the research is to reflect on the opportunity to use a virtual museum to address issues of art and education. For data collection, we used assessment instruments specific to the case study, such as diagnoses, discussions, focus groups, and participant observation. We highlight museum’s positive reception by the students, particularly the role it plays in overcoming stereotypes and conventional taboos to achieve inclusive environments.

An Approach for Providing LGBTI+ Education and Bridging the Language Gap

Intercultural education is acquiring great importance in today's education; among its considered elements, it is also starting to address gender/sexual identity as a way to counterattack prejudices and intolerant attitudes towards LGTBI+ people. However, it is still necessary to reconsider how to deal with these concepts from teacher training in an effective way so as to prepare these professionals to develop their work in an inclusive way. Teachers of English as a Foreign Language are ideal for addressing such concepts as the area allows relationships with several dimensions of life (e.g., literature, art, television). These teachers have to face the necessity to include LGTBI+ in their teaching practice, and to fight the language gap caused by social and economic disparities. This chapter revises how including the ESoPC approach in English teacher training helps integrate LGBTI+ issues to educate future generations in respect towards gender/sexual diversity and bridge the language gap.

O Impacto da Homossexualidade e da Homofobia na Adolescência / The Impact of Homosexuality and Homophobia on Adolescence

O presente trabalho tem a finalidade de mostrar a urgência na resolução dos problemas contextualizados sobre a homossexualidade e a homofobia na adolescência. Uma visão da perspectiva social e familiar do adolescente homossexual e que, de alguma maneira passou ou passa por situações homofóbicas decorrentes de sua escolha e orientação sexual. No cenário brasileiro atual, nos deparamos com inúmeras violências vividas e sofridas por diferentes grupos que compreendem a diversidade sexual. Esses fatos causam mudanças sociais que impactam, sobretudo, na vida dos adolescentes que definiram sua orientação sexual no âmbito familiar e social. Nesse artigo serão expostas o conceito de homossexualidade e homofobia, o princípio da proteção e os conflitos vividos face a discriminação que perduram em tempos atuais diante deste grupo. Muitas são as mudanças que protegem e amparam as vítimas de homofobia, entretanto, ainda podemos notar alguns aspectos negativos e que existem a milhares de anos dificultando todo o processo de aceitação e identidade da homossexualidade. Faz-se necessário, a correta abordagem do tema, no que concerne o respeito, a tolerância e os direitos dos adolescentes que fazem parte da diversidade sexual. Neste contexto, o trabalho foi construído a partir de pesquisas bibliográficas.---The present work has the purpose of showing the urgency in solving the contextualized problems on homosexuality and homophobia in adolescence. A view of the social and family perspective of the homosexual adolescent and that, in some way, passed through homophobic situations due to their choice and sexual orientation. In the current Brazilian scenario, we are faced with numerous violence experienced and suffered by different groups that understand sexual diversity. These facts cause social changes that impact, above all, the lives of adolescents who defined their sexual orientation in the family and social environment. In this article will be exposed the concept of homosexuality and homophobia, the principle of protection and the conflicts experienced in the face of discrimination that persist in the present times before this group. Many are the changes that protect and support the victims of homophobia; however, we can still notice some negative aspects that have existed for thousands of years, making the whole process of acceptance and identity of homosexuality difficult. It is necessary, the correct approach of the subject, with respect to the respect, the tolerance and the rights of the adolescents that are part of the sexual diversity. In this context, the work was constructed from bibliographical research.

ZAHED, L.-M. (2020). HOMOSEXUALITY, TRANSIDENTITY, AND ISLAM: A STUDY OF SCRIPTURE. CONFRONTING THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY. AMSTERDAM: AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

The book under review is authored by Ludovic-Mohammed Zahed (b. 1977), a French scholar of social psychology and the founder of Homosexuels musulmans de France, an association for gay and queer Muslims in France. With his work Zahed, who identifies as a feminist, gay Muslim and holds a position of an imam in an inclusive mosque in Paris, seeks to contribute to the expanding body of academic work that engages with issues of gender and sexuality in Islam. As his sources of inspiration, he names Islamic feminist scholars Fatima Mernissi (e.g. 1987; 2003) and Amina Wadud (1999; 2008), as well as a prominent scholar on sexual diversity in Islam, Scott Siraj Kugle (2010; 2013). If Islamic feminist studies have already evolved into an established field that has its roots in the 1980s, topics of homosexuality and non-binary gender identity in Islam have begun attracting scholarly interest only relatively recently. Particularly in the last decade, there has been a visible growth in the number of published works that have engaged with these topics from theological, sociological, and historical perspectives (e.g., Roscoe & Murray, 1997; El-Rouayheb, 2009; Habib, 2010; Shah, 2018). Challenging the premise that homophobia and misogyny are in compliance with Islamic ethical values, Zadeh’s book clearly draws on the arguments developed in these trailblazing works.

Border Regimes: Homophobia and LGBT Place Making in Six Ordinary Cities in Europe

European nation states increasingly hail LGBT identities as part of modern values; LGBT recognitions have become a symbol of secular achievements. Discourses around gay rights and sexual diversity are increasingly pitted against presumably homophobic and intolerant ‘others’. An increased intolerant and repressive attitude towards migrants and racialised minorities is justified by their supposed threat to exactly these values. LGBT people are finding themselves positioned as ‘border patrollers’ who can count as part of the modern liberal nation. This paper analyses 92 interviews with LGBT participants who live in six small and medium sized ordinary cities in Europe. It discusses how their fear of homophobia is evaluated according to perceived sexual and gendered norms and attitudes at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhoods are considered either LGBT friendly or unfriendly according to their socio-demographic characteristics that focus on social class and/or migration and that intersects with race, ethnicity and religion. Based on the findings, neighbourhoods are both a geographical and a cultural terrain that can be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes that discipline and produce the confines of the normative, the ‘modern’ and the ‘backward’. Not only are LGBT people positioned as border patrollers but their fear of homophobia is also expressed through bordering. The neighbourhood can then be understood, organised and contested through a sexuality discourse in the production of border regimes.

Sexuality education and early childhood educators in Ontario, Canada: A Foucauldian exploration of constraints and possibilities

Open conversations regarding sexuality education and gender and sexual diversity with young children in early childhood education settings are still highly constrained. Educators report lacking professional training and fearing parental and community pushback when explicitly addressing these topics in their professional practices. As such, gender and sexual diversity and conversations of bodily development are left silenced and, when addressed, filtered through heteronormative and cisnormative frameworks. Through a Foucauldian post-structural lens, this article analyses data from open-ended qualitative questions in a previous research study regarding early childhood educators’ perceptions on discussing the development of sexuality in early learning settings in an Ontario, Canada context. Through this Foucauldian post-structural analysis, the authors discuss forms of surveillance and regulation that early childhood educators experience in early learning settings regarding the open discussion of gender and sexuality. The authors explore how both the lack of explicit curricula addressing gender and sexuality in the early years in Ontario and taken-for-granted notions of developmentally appropriate practice, childhood innocence, and the gender binary – employed in discourses of sexuality education in the early years – regulate early childhood educators’ professional practices. The authors provide recommendations which critique the developmentalist logics – specifically, normative development – that are used to silence non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities in the early years, while articulating the need for explicit curricula for educators in the early years regarding gender and sexuality in young children.

(In)Visible (a)sexuality? Media discourses and representations on asexuality in Portugal

This article presents the result of a multimodal analysis of the representation of asexuality in Portuguese mainstream media. In Portugal, the media played a pivotal role in the relationship between the newly formed Portuguese asexual community and the wider audience. Media attention on asexuality in Portugal generated a discussion on how asexual people are represented, but also on social representations of sexual diversity in general. As a result, the Portuguese asexual community and LGBTQI+ movement were impelled to reflect on their activity and on the public image they wanted to send out. Therefore, the community had to make choices: which media to participate in; who participates; whose faces the message is associated to; to what extent the allies are to be taken into consideration; which types of discourses get privileged, and which become excluded. Amongst other public effects, the Portuguese LGBTQI+ movement started to acknowledge asexuality in documents produced by them. The corpus of materials on the subject grew, and asexuality left a significant footprint. The major tendency points towards a positive portrayal of asexuality that puts asexual people centre stage, owning narratives about themselves.

Scaling Gender and Sexual Diversity Policies in K-12 Schools

As policy debates concerning LGBTQ+ students and staff continue across the American education system, there is not a clear description of the prevalence of local policy protections, even in states with legislative mandates, nor a strong understanding of how to expand reform initiatives. After conducting a document analysis of policies with a statewide, representative sample of districts, this study uses Illinois as a case study to describe several educational policy levers to scale gender and sexual diversity (GSD) reforms across federal, state, intermediary, and local institutions. The results indicate all districts complied with top-down legislative mandates, but few policies referenced gender or sexual diversity if not state-mandated. A minority of districts enacted policies through administrative guidance (27%), often using language from a state intermediary organization. Results from the regression analysis suggest local factors, such as district size, per pupil spending, and rurality, contribute to adopting guidance, but not policy protections. This study indicates both top-down and bottom-up pathways matter for expanding GSD-related reforms.