Gay-Straight Alliances and Associations among Youth in Schools

This book examines the formation of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)—formal and informal—in public schools. These associations provide us with a way to think about intersectionality and tense encounters as spaces of possibility for new kinds of action, new kinds of learning, and newly emergent subjectivities. While such groups are not without problems, they enable a consideration of desire for connection across sexualities, genders, races, and knowledge. By examining subjectivity as a process of negotiation across and within differences in a particular institutional context, the traces of exclusions and gaps in these processes of identification become evident.  New formations bear the imprint of exclusions that precede them but also work to fracture divisions, to push at intersections among subject positions, and explore desires for connection and change.