A Light In Dark Times: In Overt Defense of Trans-Affirming Spaces in Education

The authors use graphica to explore the roles of visual culture in the production of gendered norms and the recent proliferation of anti-trans bills in the United States. They present an argument that bodies, gender, and sexuality are always-already among the material-discursive world with which we all entangle and learn with every day. Educators can integrate children’s and youth’s everyday lived experiences with visual culture to analyze and interrogate the bodied impact it has on them as individual people and as a collective society. This kind of body and gender-focused analysis is important all the time in an effort to create affirming spaces for everyone in education, but it is absolutely critical to the well-being of trans and gender nonconforming youth and educators in these dark times.