Constructing and Contesting Discourses of Heteronormativity: An Ethnographic Study of Youth in a Francophone High School in Canada

Abstract

This article explores the possibilities and impossibilities of establishing queer discursive spaces within a minority-language high school. Data examined here are from a three-year study of language and identity in a Francophone high school in Ontario, Canada. As two members of the larger research team, we draw on our close observations of teenage students as they interacted with their peers at school events and in corridors and classrooms. The article analyses the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity-which privilege heterosexuality-were reproduced as well as contested in students' interactions within three domains: the general student population, a friendship network of five socially marginalised female students, and the lives of two gay male students. The analysis indicates that the heteronormative discourses produced and reproduced by the students had a silencing effect on gay male students but, paradoxically, created space for some straight female students to "play-act" lesbianism as a counter-hegemonic discourse. The findings highlight the irony of this school's motto-"Unity in diversity"-in relation to young women and queer youth in particular.