Interrupting heteronormativity in Mexican schools: Alignments, twists and sexual diversity

Abstract

This paper examines what happens when an ethnographic and story-telling research method, was launched on the grounds of three educational institutions. We asked school and university members to step into the storytelling booth and tell a story “about sexual diversity”. We collected nearly 700 stories and over 200 hours of participant observation. Stories where polysemic and heterogenous and spoke of a diversity of topics, within which two positions were clear: respect and recognition. Both positions deployed different understandings of sexual diversity, as well as overt forms of hostility. We found that the storytelling booth forced the school's community to forge new and compelling relationships to our object of study, because our work interrupted heteronormative alignments.

Keywords

• Ethnography
• Narrative research
• Heteronormativity
• LGBTQ sexuality
• Higher education
• Sexuality education