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Becoming and Belonging: Negotiating Non-heteronormative Identities Online and at School

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Interrogating Belonging for Young People in Schools

Abstract

This chapter reveals that belonging is an ongoing temporal project accomplished and enacted in multiple and shifting locations. Drawing on qualitative data, it reveals the material practices through which young people of diverse genders, sexualities and sexes produce and perform the ‘truth of themselves’. It shows they find spaces of belonging through digital social media and classroom pedagogies, along with everyday social practices through which possibilities for belonging are opened or foreclosed. It captures the desire and ‘longing to belong’ of queer young people, their search for the ‘truth of one’s self’ and the points of tension produced in the heteronormative practices of schooling and the multiple possible truths and selves produced in young people’s engagement with digital social media.

Thanks to Dr Emma Keltie for her contribution to my nascent knowledge about digital cultures and digital labour, and to Dan Perell for challenging me to make more explicit theoretical connections between my work on neoliberalism and queer lives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Growing up Queer study included a national online survey of 1230 young people aged 17–26, and interviews and focus groups conducted in 2012 with young people who identify as gender and sexuality diverse. The study was developed in partnership with the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre.

  2. 2.

    All quotes in this chapter are from the Growing up Queer: issues facing young Australians who are gender variant and sexuality diverse (2014) study. They have not been individually identified, consistent with the final report.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia

    Peter Bansel

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  1. Peter Bansel
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Correspondence to Peter Bansel .

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  1. The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Christine Halse

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Bansel, P. (2018). Becoming and Belonging: Negotiating Non-heteronormative Identities Online and at School. In: Halse, C. (eds) Interrogating Belonging for Young People in Schools. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75217-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75217-4_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75216-7

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