Queer Joy and Failure in Gender and Sexuality Research and Practice

A bold and timely exploration of queer joy as both an experience and a method, this book offers a powerful intervention in gender and sexuality studies by theorizing queer joy not as merely pleasure, but as a radical practice shaped by failure, contradiction, grief, risk, and repair.

This book draws its argument from two major research projects: a study on queering sexuality education with over 80 in-service teachers in New Brunswick, and Pride/Swell+, a community-based participatory project involving over 300 2SLGBTQ+ people across Atlantic Canada. It investigates how queer joy circulates—through art, intimacy, activism, and chosen families—but also how it fails, revealing heartbreak, exclusion, and exhaustion within queer communities. By examining failure as integral to theorizing queer joy in research and practice, the authors illuminate how breakdowns can become sites of solidarity, transformation, and worldmaking. The book advances queer joy studies, offering new ways to think about pedagogy, research ethics, and queer futurity. Through reflection, analysis, and creative praxis, the book foregrounds queer joy’s messiness and entanglement with failure as a methodology for resistance and survival.

This book is intended for students and researchers in gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, education, and critical sociology. It also speaks to activists and artists interested in the intersections of queer joy, failure, and community-building within academic, educational, arts, and community spaces.

Casey Burkholder (she/her) is a bi femme Tier II Canada Research Chair in Social Justice in Youth and Child Studies and an Associate Professor at Concordia University.

Melissa Keehn (she/her) is a femme lesbian and assistant professor at the University in New Brunswick. Her current research focuses on the relationships between gender, sexuality, and social change, particularly as they unfold within school contexts.

Megan Hill (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Education at Concordia University. Her doctoral research is about intergenerational knowledge exchange between elders and children within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.