Getting stuck in: navigating the sticky stuff of sexualities and social justice in higher education

In the contemporary socio-political moment, rife with reactionary discourse, the authors confront the “sticky” stuff of sexualities in re-storied embodied narratives of sexual and gender identities in the field of higher education. To augment an understanding of how LGBTQIA+ social justice in education has been experienced, two cisgender gay men and one gay, gender queer person describe how the everyday re-negotiation of power hierarchies has, across the authors' three situated accounts, involved re-facing the spectral presence of surviving/survival. This study employs a collaborative autoethnographic approach, informed by dialogic inquiry, to examine the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ educators and how wellness is collectively experienced, negotiated, and reconstituted through the lens of Responsible Well-Being as a social justice praxis. Drawing on cross-national dialogue and place-based perspectives from Australia and the U.S., the authors narrate how structural entanglements in educational domains are being used to re-establish or collapse distinctions between “us” and “them”, “insiders” and “outsiders”, “health” and “pathology”, and “public” and “private”. The paper examines technologies of management and governance, and how interventions of reciprocity and relational care can mitigate encounters of unbelonging, emotional alterity, and abjection. This paper contends that, whilst navigating institutional and ideological constraints, an affective labour of survival is enacted. The authors foreground the framework of Responsible Well-Being as a social justice praxis to analyse, strengthen, and collectivise personal well-being through collective action to resist erasure and foster belonging; to recreate institutional spaces, and reimagine higher education as a site of radical possibility and transformative justice.