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. Previously, Casey worked as an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick (2017-2024). In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance&activism, gender, sexuality, DIY media-making, art production, queer joy, and participatory archiving, Casey engages in research for social change through participatory visual approaches to local issues with 2SLGBTQ+ youth, adults, elders and teachers. She is the co-founder of the Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, and is the PI of Pride/Swell+ and SexualityNB.

Melissa Keehn (she/her) is a femme lesbian and assistant professor at the University in New Brunswick. Before changing careers, she was an art and social studies teacher at a rural high school in New Brunswick. Her current research focuses on the relationships between gender, sexuality, and social change, particularly as they unfold within school contexts. A key strand of her work engages with sex education, exploring how curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher practice can either reinforce or disrupt dominant norms around sex, gender, and sexuality.

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. She recently completed her master’s at Trent University, where she wrote a SSHRC-supported thesis titled Queer Crip Generativity. Megan is an active member of the JOY Lab and a research assistant on Pride/Swell+. In her spare time, Megan sometimes works at a queer youth summer camp developing accessible and joyful programming.