ABSTRACT
Queerness can be understood as a radical act of resistance and refusal rooted in the margins. One only need to recall images of ballroom culture as it existed alongside the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome epidemic and a lack of sociopolitical support or, more recently, beautiful images of couples celebrating the opportunity for their relationship to finally be legally affirmed by the US government to see how the margins are always already productive bloom spaces, teeming with both resistance and hope. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once described the knowledge of these realities as “indelible, but not astonishing, to anyone with a reason to be attuned to the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives”. The landscapes of schools that excuse and justify the despoiling of queer lives do not, as many scholars have documented, exist in a vacuum.
