Conference Agenda

Drag Queen Storytimes for children have, in recent years, become a highly contested arena of educational and sociopolitical struggle. This article conceptualizes these events as a form of performative critical pedagogy that challenges normative assumptions about gender, identity, and childhood, while simultaneously opening imaginative spaces for children’s self‑positioning, diversity experiences, and encounters with non‑normative embodiments. From an educational and subject‑didactic perspective, the article examines which learning objectives—such as fostering identity development, recognition of difference, diversity awareness, and norm‑critical thinking—are explicitly or implicitly activated through these formats. Particular attention is given to the pedagogical potential of aesthetic experience and performative irritation, understood as catalysts for reflection, emotional engagement, and the destabilization of rigid gender binaries.

Methodologically, the article draws on a qualitative synthesis of existing international scholarship on drag performance, drag pedagogy, and Drag Queen Storytime, with a specific focus on how these works conceptualize pedagogical relations, learning processes, and the role of embodiment in education. This literature review is complemented by a theoretical integration with gender pedagogy and queer‑feminist educational theory, enabling a deeper analysis of how drag-based formats intersect with broader debates on diversity, inclusion, and the politics of childhood. By bringing these strands of research into dialogue, the article identifies central pedagogical mechanisms—such as performativity, ambiguity, relationality, and norm critique—that underpin the educational value of Drag Queen Storytimes.

At the same time, the article addresses the forms of resistance that these events provoke. Discourses of “premature sexualization,” moral panic, and alleged threats to children reveal how deeply gender‑political conflicts are entangled with societal power relations, cultural anxieties, and anti‑gender mobilization. These lines of conflict are interpreted not only as political reactions but also as didactic challenges that require educators to engage with controversy, rather than avoid it. The article argues that such resistance should be productively integrated into pedagogical reflection—for example, by thematizing norms, making exclusions visible, and fostering children’s and educators’ tolerance for ambiguity. Ultimately, Drag Queen Storytimes are presented as critical educational practices that contribute to democratic education by enabling encounters with difference, challenging hegemonic gender norms, and strengthening children’s capacity for critical, reflective, and empathetic engagement with the social world.

Across European secondary schools, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual and gender minority students experience an accumulation of minor slights that appear routine but affect learning, wellbeing, and belonging. This study analyses how microaggressions and minority stress were embedded in Slovenian secondary schooling and how peers and professionals either sustained or interrupted these processes, including the movement of incidents and rumours between online platforms and school. The framework draws on minority stress theory, research on microaggressions and school belonging, and treats resilience as a social and institutional process. Three questions guided the analysis: What specific forms and settings of minority stress and microaggressions did LGBT+ students report, and how were these shaped by social and school context? Which processes and strategies of resilience did LGBT+ students use in response? How did non-LGBT peers and school staff understand their roles and practices, and in what ways did current attitudes and actions contribute to climates that were supportive or stressful?

The study assembled three perspectives within the secondary school environment. LGBT+ young people described negotiating visibility in settings where silence was treated as neutrality and where managing disclosure required continuous effort. Cisheterosexual peers reported situations that made informal rules visible in practice, including teasing and slurs linked to appearance, clothing, speech, or presumed identity, the spread of rumours and outings without consent, deliberate exclusion, and physical aggression. Teachers, counsellors, and other professionals reported on recognition and response, perceived competence, available support, and organisational constraints. An online questionnaire with tailored modules was administered to 136 LGBT+ and 584 cisheterosexual respondents aged 18 to 29 who reported retrospectively on secondary school, and to 187 members of school staff who completed the staff module.

Three empirical patterns oriented interpretation and implications. Visibility and concealment coexisted in structured ways. Many respondents reported LGBT+ classmates, while non-disclosure among LGBT+ students remained widespread and disclosures to staff were rare. Microaggressions were common and included teasing and slurs, rumours and outings without consent, exclusion, and instances of physical aggression. Classroom talk sometimes conveyed negative signals about LGBT+ topics, and heteronormative assumptions often organised lessons as if all students shared the same identities and family forms. Safety concerns clustered around relationships and locations, with reports of worry about safety, feelings of threat in spaces such as corridors and changing rooms, and avoidance of certain routes. These dynamics help to explain concealment as daily work and the need for predictable support.

Family climates added another layer. During secondary school, many respondents encountered negative or absent discussion of LGBT+ topics at home, which made school responses especially consequential for students who could not rely on support elsewhere. The study identified where pressure accumulated and how schools could ease it within existing arrangements. This could be achieved through a short staff protocol that names typical microaggressions and sets a simple sequence from recognition to minimal documentation and support, by building three or four question check-ins into routine tutor or counselling meetings so that diffuse patterns come into view without extra paperwork, and by ensuring that restorative options sit alongside disciplinary procedures where harm is serious, while referral routes are known and discreet so that help is accessible without unnecessary disclosure.

Although grounded in Slovenia, the patterns and measures are relevant across European secondary education systems operating under time constraints and public scrutiny, and across interlinked digital and school settings. The research formed part of the national ARIS project Z7-60184, and this paper reports survey findings from the broader mixed-methods study.

This post-qualitative queer study explores how queer novice English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in Chile navigate heteronormative school environments during their critical novice years of teaching. Drawing on Foucault's theories of subjectivation and panoptic surveillance (Foucault, 1982, 1983, 2008), Butler's conceptualization of gender performativity (Butler, 1988, 1993, 1997), and Ahmed's queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), this research examines how institutional power shapes educators whose bodies and subjectivities are perpetually "out of line" within educational spaces designed for straight paths.

The study addresses a significant gap in current educational research: while policy initiatives provide novice teacher support (CPEIP, 2024; Ministerio de Desarrollo Social y Familia, 2016), they fail to account for the intersecting identities that fundamentally shape professional experiences. For queer EFL educators specifically, this oversight is compounded by dual pressures: local school heteronormativity and global English language teaching discourses that carry implicit Western, cisgender, heterosexual assumptions (Holliday, 2008; Melo Panigatti, 2025). Despite incremental progress in LGBTQIA+ rights in Chile (Movilh, 2024), educational institutions remain largely silent on issues concerning queer professionals, particularly educators. State-led induction programs define novice teachers solely by years of service, ignoring intersecting identities like gender and sexual orientation that significantly shape professional and personal experiences (Rojas et al., 2019; Astudillo Lizama, 2023).

The research question guiding this study is: How do queer novice EFL teachers (re)signify the processes through which their gendered subjectivities are produced in Chilean schools? The general objective is to explore the (re)signification of how queer novice EFL teachers' gendered subjectivities are produced in Chilean schools, with particular attention to the ways institutional discourses and everyday interactions shape their sense of belonging and professional adaptation during their first years of teaching. Three specific objectives guide this inquiry: (1) examining the challenges, strategies, and forms of resistance queer novice EFL teachers employ to navigate heteronormative or cis-normative school environments; (2) analyzing how queer novice EFL teachers resignify their experiences in relation to their emerging teacher identity as self-constituted practices of resistance; and (3) reviewing existing literature to understand how institutional conditions constrain and/or enable queer novice EFL teachers' negotiation of subjectivity and belonging.

This research employs queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006; Vitry, 2021) as its methodological framework, utilizing two sequential data production methods with 5-7 Chilean queer EFL novice teachers. The first data production method consists of individual walking interviews (Kusenbach, 2003; Bartlett et al., 2023) along participant-selected routes, where prompts adapted from the Canadian project Queering the Map (LaRochelle, 2017) elicit reflections on embodied navigation of heteronormative spaces, bodily regulation, and identity negotiation. The second method involves two collective pottery sessions (Ong et al., 2020; Malafouris, 2023) following guided art-making through conversational prompts about teacher subjectivity formation, and intuiting visual display through re-oriented reflection on their ceramic pieces.

This study anticipates documenting embodied strategies queer novice EFL teachers employ to survive heteronormative institutional spaces. Analysis is expected to reveal how panoptic surveillance operates through regulatory agents (Foucault, 2008; Troman, 2000), compelling educators to preemptively adjust gestures, speech patterns, and appearance (Ball, 2003; Robertson, 2022). The research is expected to expose gaps in Chile's formal school induction programs (Ayala et al., 2015; Flores, 2019), demonstrating how generic support structures function as mechanisms of exclusion for teachers whose identities disrupt heteronormative assumptions (Davis, 2020; Ferfolja, 2014; Toledo & Maher, 2019). By centering the resignification of queer novice EFL teachers' experiences, this study contributes to expanding the scope of ELT and teacher education research, foregrounds often-silenced voices (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2017), and challenges the hetero- and cis-normative assumptions that continue to structure school cultures and teacher education programs.