Years before we even imagined this special issue, we, Ryan and Stephanie, were both working in the United States to resist anti-queer and anti-trans efforts and to queer critical literacies in educational spaces. We met while we were both literacy education doctoral students with K-12 teaching backgrounds, each living in a U.S. state where there were – and still are – multiple anti-lgbtqia+ and anti-equality laws and policies shaping everyday life and educational contexts (hrc n.d.; Lambda Legal n.d.; Sonoma 2022). In the years that have followed, there have been continued efforts across multiple nations and U.S. states to oppose and even illegalize queer and trans topics in educational spaces, including in pk-12 and higher education settings – with a significant upswing in these oppressive legislative and policy efforts since 2020 and into the present.
Nonetheless, as educators we have worked and continue to work against homophobic and transphobic legal and policy landscapes, often in collaboration with other activist educators (e.g., Blackburn et al. 2010; Blackburn et al. 2018; Shelton & Brooks 2021; Shelton & Lester 2022). Perhaps unsurprisingly given our shared background in English language arts education, we often used texts, print and otherwise, as part of these efforts (e.g., Schey & Uppstrom 2010; Shelton 2022) and given our location in literacies studies, we still understand texts to be resources for transformational social change, as Freire (1987) argues, for reading the word and the world, which always entails ‘a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it’ (p. 35). It is in this tradition that we approach critical literacy and critical media literacy. However, although there is growing work in queer and trans literacies scholarship (for a recent review, see Blackburn & Schey 2017), less research has been done in queer and trans critical media literacies, although there are important examples (Shrodes 2021; van Leent & Mills 2018).
In this special issue, we seek to extend and complicate scholarship in critical media literacies not only by attending to lgbtqia+ topics but also through exploring what queer and trans epistemologies, ontologies, theories, and methodologies might offer for media education, specifically when engaged with critical literacies. It is in this sense that we think of queer(ing) and trans(ing) critical media literacies. In the remainder of this introduction, we begin by situating the special issue in the contemporary educational and media context, focusing especially on legislation and policy that has been aggressively homophobic, transphobic, and racist. We then offer an inchoate theorizing of queer(ing) and trans(ing) critical media literacies, which we approach through the notion of civic media ecologies. Finally, we close with an overview of the articles featured in this issue.
1 Homophobic, Transphobic, and Racist Educational and Media Contexts
1.1 Legislating Anti-lgbtqia+ Education
Garnering international and national attention, Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ bill (fl hb 1557 2022) in the U.S. was signed into law just as we began to plan this special issue; the law ‘prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity’ at multiple grade levels. Twelve other U.S. states concurrently proposed similar legislation, with each effort working to illegalize even the acknowledgement of lgbtqia+ people, communities, or realities in schooling. As of the last voting cycle in late 2022, six U.S. states had established laws that censored discussions of queer and trans people and topics (map n.d.), with additional states that had not passed such laws anticipating (re)introducing versions of these bills in upcoming legislative sessions (Yurcaba 2023).
Queer and trans communities in other sections of the globe faced similar attempts to legislate lgbtqia+ erasure and anti-queer bigotry. In Europe, members of Poland’s Parliament authored a measure that would ‘remove books, lessons, and ban student participation in events or clubs that are lgbtq affirming’ (Levesque 2022, n.p.). Meanwhile, a range of other nations, including Romania, Hungary, Russia, and Guatemala considered similar laws that would prohibit portrayals of lgbtqia+ people and families in educational settings (Thoreson 2022). Although the details of specific legislation changes month by month, if not more quickly, these examples illustrate widespread efforts to harm queer and trans people – particularly queer and trans children, youth, families, and educators – through controlling and censoring information, fostering an climate of fear and intimidation, and encouraging individualized and localized harassment of, if not attacks on, queer and trans people.
1.2 Illegalizing Trans-Affirming Practices in and Beyond Education
As part of these ever-increasing anti-lgbtqia+ efforts, there has been an enormous upswing in specifically anti-trans legislation worldwide. ilga-Europe, an organization that tracks ‘political, legal and social change’ affecting lgbtqia+ people across Europe and Central Asia determined that 2020–2023 has marked substantial shifts in lgbtqia+ rights, with positive trends for lgbq people, but consistent anti-trans bills proposed and passed in multiple nations (ilga-Europe 2022 n.p.). For example, the United Kingdom, which had long ranked well on ilga-Europe’s Rainbow Index that tracks lgbtqia+ rights, fell more in its rating than any other ilga-Europe country, partly because U.K. lawmakers initially excluded trans people from a conversion therapy ban and vetoed a Scottish law that would have simplified legally changing one’s gender (Konotey-Ahulu 2023). Spain drew international attention, too, because though the country ultimately did pass a law that made the legal process of changing one’s gender more accessible, the nationwide debates on the effort were tension-filled and coincided with a significant upswing in anti-trans hate crimes (Lombrana 2022). In reflecting on these and other similar legal shifts, the Executive Director of ilga-World noted a consistent global trend towards ‘weaponizing’ trans issues politically and creating an ‘atmosphere […that] has been quite hostile towards trans people’ (Konotey-Ahulu 2023, n.p.).
The U.S. has mirrored these unfortunate efforts to legislate transphobia and cisgenderism.
During the 2022 nationwide legislative session, Arizona (az sb1138 & az sb 1165), Kentucky (ky sb83), Minnesota (mn hf 3843 & mn hf4282), Oklahoma (ok sb2 & ok sb1100), Pennsylvania (pa hb972), and numerous other state legislatures drafted and advanced anti-trans bills. These efforts included proposing laws to deny trans youth access to gender confirming health care and athletic activities in ways that affirm their gender identities. Simultaneously, K-12 school districts and community libraries faced censorship of books featuring trans characters and themes. A number of these proposed bills became laws, including a particular set of anti-trans policies signed into law in Alabama that not only illegalized trans students having access to gender affirming bathrooms and school facilities (al hb 322) but also bans classroom conversations about both sexual orientation and gender identity (hb 322), forces educators and school personnel to ‘out’ queer and trans children to their parents and guardians (al sb 184), and illegalizes gender affirming health care with the threat of multiple years in prison for health care providers who serve trans patients (sb 184). At the time of this writing, there are already new anti-trans bills being drafted and presented by state legislatures, including one of Tennessee’s very first proposed law for 2023 – being considered in both of its congressional bodies – working to deny trans children with gender affirming health care and punish health providers who support these children and their families (tn sb 1; tn hb 1).
These multiple policies, bills, and laws directly affect trans and queer children’s and youths’ school experiences, all trans and queer people’s safety and access to basic resources and rights, while also censoring trans- and queer-affirming curricula and sometimes even carry provisions to terminate educators at all levels of education who dare ignore these decrees. The effect is that schools become legally mandated hostile anti-lgbtqia+ environments, and the very systems presumably constructed to protect human rights oppress some of the most vulnerable.
1.3 Banning ‘Divisive Concepts’: Illegalizing Intersectional Approaches to Sexuality, Gender, and Race
Related, as multiple states’ representatives proposed anti-lgbtqia+ laws, multiple states have simultaneously worked to erase considerations of intersectional identities and interlocking structures of oppression, specifically race and racism. Often packaged with laws such as those described earlier, these legislations explicitly prohibit discussions and curricular materials on ‘divisive concepts,’ including considerations of topics such as racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, alongside lgbtqia+ issues (e.g., Alabama hb 312; Georgia sb 344; Iowa hf 802; South Dakota hb 1012; Tennessee hb 2670) across both pk-12 and collegiate contexts. Within the U.S., from 2021 to the present, 42 of the 50 states have worked to illegalize schools engaging in discussions of race and racism in critical and historically accurate ways (Schwartz 2023), including bans on teaching Critical Race Theory and including books on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, legislative and policy efforts that have amplified anti-Blackness in particular. By the conclusion of the 2022 legislative cycle, multiple states had established laws that ‘further regulate how the nation’s teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and issues of systemic inequality in the classroom’ (n.p.).
Despite the fact that anti-lgbtqia+ and racist legislation and policy have been largely intertwined and the fact that ‘we do not live single issue-lives’ (Lorde 1984, p. 138), much discourse about these laws and policies has focused on one or the other. Commonly, legislation has been referred to as ‘Don’t Say Gay’ (a descriptor that we note erases transphobia) or ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ bills on the one hand and ‘anti-crt’ bills on the other. These single-issue framings are simultaneously inaccurate and problematic. Women of Color feminist scholars and activists have long emphasized the interlocking, co-constitutive, matric nature of oppressions, a situation described through the metaphor of intersectionality (Combahee River Collective 2015; Crenshaw 1991; Lorde 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa 1981/2015; Smith 2000). Queer of Color theorist Ferguson (2004) has argued not only that single-issue, discrete framings of oppression are inaccurate but also that these framings reinforce oppression through masking and hiding their operation. Indeed, Collins (2004) and Gill-Peterson (2018) provide historical analyses of the U.S., explicating how definitions of sexuality and gender, respectively, were created through white supremacy and anti-Blackness, such that sexuality and gender are always already racialized. Thus, in considering either the anti-lgbtqia+ or anti-Black characteristics of laws and policies but not both together, there is a danger of reifying both, an issue that needs greater attention, meaning that there is a need to make educational and activist responses meaningfully and substantively intersectional.
1.4 Pushing Back: Queer(ing) and Trans(ing) Critical Media Education
Hope is not lost, however. Within this landscape, educators, scholars, communities, and institutions resist, push back, and foster alternatives. A range of professional education organizations, including the European Higher Education Area (ehea), American Educational Research Association (aera), and National Council of Teachers of English (ncte) have weighed in, citing the importance of academic freedom, including the ability to engage in difficult and controversial topics, as foundational to participation in global communities and to meaningful education at every level. This special issue seeks to explore the ways that queer(ing) and trans(ing) critical media literacies are essential in responding to these anti-lgbtqia+ and white supremacist efforts across the globe and in educational contexts. Queer and trans scholarship and pedagogies are inherently disruptive, non-normative, and political, and so the authors in this issue consider what queer(ing) and trans(ing) critical media literacies might do and mean for educators and students. And, because these concerns are global and often intertwine the illegalization of queer and trans topics and people with efforts to ban critical engagements with issues such as racism, nationalism, and ableism, these authors emphasize intersectional engagements with queer and trans critical media literacies as they explore and employ agency in the milieu of anti-queer and anti-trans efforts.
2 Toward Queer and Trans Theorizations of Civic Media Ecologies
We are editing a special issue about queer and trans perspectives on critical media literacies in part because we believe that queer and trans epistemologies, ontologies, theories, methodologies, and practices can offer unique and generative insights into broader conversations about media and literacies education. While not wanting to suggest that there is any singular or fixed notion of what queer and trans theorizations of media education are or should be, we offer an initial sketch of queer and trans civic media ecologies as a framework that unifies the compelling insights from the individual articles collected here. To do so in this section, we begin by summarizing common conceptions of media and critical media literacies, highlighting lgbtqia+-focused scholarship on these topics. We then turn to explore the concept of ecology as an addition and alternative to the concept of literacy for media education. Finally, we close by extending concepts from queer and trans studies – specifically worldbuilding and embodied knowledges – and applying them to civic media ecologies.
Although not a monolithic or uncontested concept, media literacy has been commonly defined as ‘the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages across media contexts’ (Nichols & LeBlanc 2021, p. 390; see also, Aufderheide 1992; Christ & Potter 1998; Livingstone 2004). In such a framing, media education has often emphasized the importance of teachers and students learning to identify the shortcomings of media information, representations, and practices, such as recognizing instances of bias or misinformation. Complementarily, it has posited the importance of students becoming producers or creators who challenge media information, representations, and practices and construct alternatives.
Emphasizing the importance of attending to power, other scholars advocate for critical media literacy, which ‘has to do with providing individuals access to understanding how the print and nonprint texts that are part of everyday life help to construct their knowledge of the world and the various social, economic, and political positions they occupy within it’ (Alvermann et al. 2018, pp. 1–2; see also, Baker-Bell et al. 2017; Jocson 2017; Morrell 2012). Focusing on queer critical media literacies, scholars (Shrodes 2021; van Leent & Mills 2018) have argued for understanding classroom pedagogies and youth media practices – those in and beyond schools – with respect to the interconnections between cisheteronormativity and lgbtqia+ identities on the one hand and on the other multimodal, digital, and screen-based textual practices. Contributors to this special issue extend, complement, and complicate this early work in queer critical media literacies by offering rich theoretical and empirical perspectives.
In a media and sociopolitical context, such as in the United States, of increasing anti-lgbtqia+ misinformation, animus, and aggression if not violence, critical media literacy practices are vital, especially in staging critical, activist interventions into an oppressive media milieu and local contexts of reception. While acknowledging and valuing such contributions, Nichols and LeBlanc (2021) push back against the use of literacy as an idiom for media education, especially because an emphasis on representation ‘obscure[s] the nonlocal, non-human relations that help constitute and animate the digital media environment’ (p. 404), including material dimensions such as hardware and natural resources or computational dimensions such as algorithms. They argue for the importance of attending to platforms and infrastructures more broadly, reviving the idea of ecologies from earlier in media education’s U.S. and U.K. history, a concept that also resonates with the history of literacy studies (e.g., Barton 1994). Their move toward ecologies is generative, especially in how it can expand critical media education’s attention to scale, attend to human and non-human assemblages, and emphasize performative dynamics as important sites for analysis and action, including but not limited to questions of representation. Thus, we understand a move toward queer and trans civic media ecologies to be a generative one for research, theory, and practice in media and literacies education.
While a comprehensive overview of queer and trans theories is beyond the scope of this introduction, we note that both theoretical traditions have attended to questions of power, liberation, and the social with respect to gender, sexuality, and their interrelations with other identities and axes of power. Under this broad umbrella, we engage with two specific theoretical concepts from queer and trans studies we view as generative for critical media and literacies education and further develop an ecological framework in queer- and trans-specific ways. Our approach here is not intended to be comprehensive or definitive but rather gestural and exploratory. We consider from queer theory worldmaking and from trans theory embodiment and knowledge.
Drawing on Goodman’s (1978) theories of worldmaking and James’ (1977) Marxist theories of futurities, queer of Color theorist Muñoz (1999) describes queer worldmaking as a performance praxis that connects the future and the present. He argues that there are queer futures already existing in the present through what he terms disidentificatory performances that ‘disassemble that sphere of [majoritarian] publicity and use its parts to build an alternative reality’ (p. 196). Rather than existing as epistemological energy, Muñoz argues that worldbuilding is performative, occurring through iteration and reiteration. Here, we connect with Nichols and LeBlanc (2021) who pose performativity as a central theory for understanding civic media ecologies. We are particularly interested in the worldbuilding and futurity elements that queer theories bring to this view of critical media education. Drawing on Mirra and Garcia’s (2020) work about speculative and hence future-oriented civic literacies, Nichols and LeBlanc suggest that foregrounding a ‘new’ or ‘lived’ civics in media education can promote direct political action and center youth practices and radical imaginaries. By integrating performative theorizations of queer worldmaking to this framework, there are opportunities for understanding people’s navigation of civic media ecologies that work within, on, and against these ecologies, that, in Muñoz’s terminology, are disidentifications (see also, Schey 2020; Shrodes 2021). Consider, for instance, Vera et al.’s (this issue) documentation of queer and trans community members in South Carolina creating and disseminating health information. Their acts deconstructed information barriers and contributed to their communities’ possibilities to be healthy and flourish, a critical material and embodied act of creating a different world that occurred through media but traveled beyond its boundaries. Shelton et al. (this issue) similarly document queer worldmaking, albeit through focusing on the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We understand these community members and gamers to be leveraging the ecological dimensions of media – using but moving beyond representation – to foster new queer lifeworlds.
Although queer and trans studies have often been closely related, so too have they had important differences (e.g., see Ellison et al. 2017; Keegan 2020a; 2020b; Stryker 2006). For instance, Keegan (2020a; 2020b) argues that in contrast with performativity and worldmaking, trans studies emphasizes embodiment, narrative, and self-revelation, and Stryker (2006) problematizes antinormative tendencies in queer theory when used to analyze and deny trans people’s embodied self-knowledge of gender. Such insights point out the limits of antinormative, deconstructive tendencies in queer theory and in turn push critical media education in alternative but nonetheless productive ways, such as by problematizing the centrality of performativity to theorizing of civic media ecologies. For instance, a trans theoretical approach to media education might critique media education’s implicit reliance on a framework emphasizing youths’ need to acquire knowledge through media education or educators as knowing more or better than youth. Alternatively, a trans civic media ecology emphasizes the embodied knowledges trans and gender diverse youth already have and recognizes the complexities and limits, even dangers, of representation and visibility as a political and liberatory practice (e.g., Gossett et al. 2017; Hayward 2017; Nicolazzo 2019). For instance, Shrodes et al. (this issue) describe trans youth using social media to learn about anti-trans ideologies in a private context and rehearsing responses so they would be better prepared when they encountered these dehumanizing ideologies, quite likely directed at them, in public in their everyday lives. Such engagement with media is not about learning skills for analyzing media per se or facilitating the circulation of trans representations but rather about learning more about how their embodied self-knowledges related to broader ideological configurations and interlocking structures of domination.
Although here we highlight only two theoretical resources from queer and trans theories, specifically worldbuilding and embodied knowledges, there are many more generative avenues for queer and trans studies to contribute to critical media education. We offer these as two suggestive avenues for exploring queer and trans approaches to civic media ecologies, and we encourage other scholars to extend our admittedly exploratory and gestural discussion here and point readers to the contributions of this special issue for further examples.
3 An Overview of Queer(ing) and Trans(ing) Critical Media Literacies in This Issue
The authors contributing to this special issue offer a diversity of engagements with queer(ing) and trans(ing) literacies and pushing back against the aggressive anti-queer and anti-trans vitriol that threatens students, teachers, education, and even global society. As the authors note, in their criticism of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation, an underlying effect of these lawmakers’ efforts is to weaponize genders and sexualities to illegalize critical literacies and control who has agency within – and beyond – education. Policies, bills, and laws that work to undermine and erase legal rights for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized individuals – often under the rhetorical guise of protecting never-endangered notions like ‘parental rights’ and ‘religious freedom’ (e.g. Nguyen & Melhado 2023) – work to weaponize gender, sexuality, race, and critical education, while controlling who does and does not have agency and autonomy. This special issue explores ways that queer(ing) and trans(ing) critical media literacies might both critique and disrupt these efforts by putting literacy practices in conversation with queer and trans theoretical concepts.
The issue opens with Susan W. Woolley’s ‘Queer Critical Media Literacy and Possibilities for Counterhegemonic Pedagogy’ emphasizing that ‘critical media literacy questions the connections between power, information, and education, and asks us to consider the circumstances related to the production of a text, such as why a text was created, for whom, how, and by whom.’ Doing so, Woolley argues, enacts a critical media literacy pedagogy that not only fosters means for students and educators to meaningfully analyze media but to equip students to participate in media production itself, in order to craft counterhegemonic learning and literacies. This paper opens the issue because it centers the degrees to which educational strategies might intentionally undermine the very practices that work to dismantle critical literacies and queer- and trans-affirming education.
Leonard D. Taylor, Dion T. Harry, and Reginald A. Blockett’s ‘Black Queer Fugitivity: Agency, Language, and Digital Joy’ extends the opening discussion of literacy as agency by centering fugitivity as Black resistance to anti-Black, anti-queer, and anti-trans efforts. They consider virtual, historical, and physical spaces as sites of racist cisheteronormative violence and emphasize that Black queer fugitive acts such as queeruption and worldbuilding offer agentive liberatory potential. By focusing on Black queer joy in literacies, and exploring a range of texts, including Black queer linguistics, Black musical artists, and Black Twitter, they emphasize the degrees to which Black queer literacies resist and subvert the white supremacy inherent in anti-queer and anti-trans politics, to engage in worldbuilding that centers refusal, creativity, and liberatory joy.
Extending similar themes of liberatory joy and creativity through the digital, Stephanie Anne Shelton, Carlson H. Coogler, and Venus Watson’s ‘Queer Worldmaking in Animal Crossing and the Implications for Critical Media Literacies’ considers lgbtq+ affirming worldmaking and activism through lenses of critical media literacy and video games, focusing on the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In describing in-game gender elasticity and player-created lgbtq+ communities through the game, they outline possibilities for virtual and community spaces of queer expression and joy. In doing so, they help open up queer critical media literacies beyond traditional schooling spaces, emphasizing capacities for political agency and self-expression.
Addie Shrodes, Claire Coyne, Diane Chen, and Kathryn Macapagal’s ‘‘I Want to Know What People Are Saying’: Trans Youth Learning Critical Media Literacies to Negotiate Hate on Social Media’ offers a discussion centering trans youths’ voices, needs, and empowerment regarding their racialized gender identities. Shrodes et al. point out that, in the milieu of online racist anti-trans hate, these youth are determined to have agency and critical media literacy skills in order to not only make sense of, but to disrupt, these ideologies. Digital cultures, while certainly oppressive and problematic, also offer these youth opportunities to explore gender, sexuality, and race in community with other queer and trans people. Social media, Shrodes et al. argue, extends beyond racist anti-lgbtq+ hate to facilitate trans youths’ sense of belonging and to empower youth activism.
A. Nick Vera, Vanessa L. Kitzie, and Travis L. Wagner discuss queer-affirming literacy practices in relation to the health field in ‘Queer Mediated Practices as a Method to Center and Sustain Critical Health and Media Literacies.’ The authors point out that critical media literacies extend well beyond educational and youth-based settings and include queer-affirming health care practices, too. By specifically exploring how community health workers might resist forces that inhibit queer-positive health services, they emphasize the degrees to which critical media literacies have broad implications across disciplines and communities.
Mark Vicars and Sarah Tartakover’s ‘Creating Relating Stories: Fragmentation the Social Fabric of Heteronormativity through Critical Media Literacies’ explores Australian youths’ participation in a community steam program during which they were invited to consider a social justice issue about which they cared deeply. One Year 7 student group chose to understand and represent gender identities through animation, which they designed to support primary grade children’s discussions. The paper highlights the degrees to which critical media literacy skills not only empower students but provide them opportunities and means to connect with and build communities through their collaborations, while engaging with lgbtq+ topics in thoughtful and powerful ways.
This special issue concludes with thoughtful reflections and futurity-focused dreaming in Bishop Owis’s ‘Dreaming of Shared Futures through the Pedagogical Impulse of Care.’ Revisiting the issue holistically, Owis notes the opportunities that critical media literacies offer to disrupt white supremacy, colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy. The article emphasizes that dreaming of collective futures rooted in care, counterstories, and celebrations of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and/or racialized scholars’ work helps to disrupt, reject, and rewrite oppressive legislation and policies.
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