Sorting Out the Sort

Abstract

This letter documents the conversations of a participatory action research team consisting of one doctoral student and eight New York City high school students. The letter documents the process of creating the instrument that was used to collect data from other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and questioning students. The dissertation research seeks to understand the language, policies, and behavior about sexuality and gender expression in schools, and LGBTQ young people's interpretations of them. Using Foucault and Butler to explain how young people interact with norms of sexuality and gender in contingent and contextualized ways, the researchers began to think about the discourses around sexuality and gender with a more historicized and complex lens and to examine subjectivity within those discourses. The researchers elected to use a modified Q sort to understand the intersection of the school community's attitudes and beliefs with individual student attitudes and beliefs, ultimately to understand LGBTQ students' sense of belonging in their schools.