School,Online Communities and Creative Workshops as Spaces for Non-normative Pre-teen Gendered and Sexual Cultures

Introduction

This is a 12-year-old student’s description of an artwork in which they explored visions for an inclusive and affirmative world of gender and sexual diversity. It was made by a sixth grader, Atlas, who was a part of a group of friends including two other students, Noora and Julia. ¹ We first met the group in one of our arts-based ‘Friendship workshops’ (originally ‘Kaveripaja’ in Finnish), where we have explored themes related to gender, sexuality and power together with elementary school children. Since the mid-2010s, we have worked with more than 200 pre-teen school students in these workshops.

As we worked with Atlas, Julia and Noora and their nine 12- to 13-year-old classmates, what stood out was the trio’s powerful, iterative reflections of non-normative gender and sexuality that emerged during our engagement with them. One of the students, Atlas, identified themselves as a lesbian demi-girl, which, for them, referred to not being completely a girl or a boy and to being romantically interested in girls. Halfway through the workshops, they also asked us to call them by a gender-neutral name—different from the one in their school register. These thoughts stood in sharp contrast to others that we have come across more often, which mostly reflect dominant notions of heterosexuality or the desire to project the so-called right kind of masculinity, femininity or more normative forms of youth peer relationality (Puutio et al., 2022).

Earlier research on youth gender and sexuality has shown how especially girls experience pressure to consume sexually charged media products, implement culturally established femininity, construct and maintain heterosexual relationships and settle for being targets of boys’ admiration. In literature, these societal pressures to express culturally ideal, often only legitimated forms of gender and sexuality are referred to as cisnormativity and heteronormativity (see, e.g., Gansen, 2017; McBride & Neary, 2021; Renold, 2013). In recent years, research addressing the gendered and sexual peer cultures of young people has grown, as an increasing number of studies have focused on different kinds of romantic and/or sexual relationships as well as on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) youth (Bragg et al., 2018; Lehtonen, 2021; O’Flynn, 2016; Taavetti et al., 2020; Varjas et al., 2013). Despite this, there is still a lack of research examining young people’s relationalities which transgress hetero-/cisnormativity in the transition to adolescence (see, however, Neary, 2021).

This research gap may be because themes related to pre-teen gender and sexuality are often characterized by the ideas of developmentalism, childhood innocence and moral panic regarding non-binary and non-heterosexual youth (Hawkes & Dune, 2013; Kennedy, 2022). In addition, these themes have been primarily approached through human-centred, talk-based methodologies, which can make it challenging for young people to explore these topics. However, a growing body of feminist new materialist and posthuman work (see e.g., Allen, 2013, 2018; Marston 2020; Renold, 2019) has begun to explore new methodological, ethical and ontological possibilities of mapping youth sexualities in expansive ways.

We join this scholarship by employing creative, arts-based approaches in exploring young people’s views on gender, sexuality and power in the less-studied elementary school context. While we creatively worked with Atlas, Julia and Noora, they began to openly articulate their non-binary and non-heterosexual experiences and their visions for increasing gender and sexual equality at school. As they were sharing their thoughts, it became clear how the expressions of gender and sexuality could emerge in different ways in two vital life spheres discussed by the young people—school and online communities. We became interested in exploring how these spaces operate; although they might seem distinct or even separate from each other, they act together in co-constituting pre-teen gender and sexuality.

Thus, drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) work on feminist geography and Karen Barad’s (2007) new materialist relational ontology, we examine how school and online communities work as emergent material-discursive spaces for pre-teens. Furthermore, we focus on the ways in which these spaces foster and maintain transgressive ideas of gender and sexuality while being simultaneously entangled with mainstream assumptions about them. By attending to space, we join the spatial turn in youth studies, which has started to consider space as an influential dimension of youth (Farrugia & Wood, 2017). With our analysis, we strive to illuminate how non-normative gendered and sexual cultures take shape in the threshold of adolescence and how pre-teens can be supported to express their gender and sexuality in transgressive ways.

Mapping Spaces for Pre-Teen Non-Normative Gendered and Sexual Cultures

Our research is informed by feminist new materialist scholarship on youth peer cultures, which approaches gender and sexuality as always emergent, ongoing processes mediated across discursive, material, temporal, corporeal and affective terrains (Allen, 2013; Bragg et al., 2018). Inspired by this field of research, we consider pre-teen gendered and sexual cultures entangled within broader webs of peer relations, as part of which they manifest as multidimensional gendered, sexual and romantically toned expressions and activities, such as touching, playing, talking or joking. Although young people’s relationalities are theorized as contextually contingent with fluctuating coordinates and porous boundaries (Allen, 2013), they typically form through or against dominant cis-/heteronormative practices that follow the common idea of gender-dichotomy and the mutual attraction of boys and girls (Hawkes & Dune, 2013; Renold, 2013).

In this article, we utilize the notion of ‘non-normative gendered and sexual culture’ to describe the webs of material-discursive relations and gendered expressions that differ from mainstream cis-/heteronormative assumptions, and the terms ‘non-binary’ and ‘non-heterosexual’ to articulate this non-normativity in relation to gender and sexuality. The non-normative gendered and sexual cultures of youth can emerge, for instance, as momentary movements in and out of gendered categories or in delicate ruptures of the regulations of mainstream gender and sexuality (Bragg et al., 2018). The nature and power of these expressions vary, and they may be intertwined with gender, sexuality or both.

Phenomena such as gendered and sexual cultures are always entangled (Barad, 2007), and located in time and place (Allen, 2018). In Finland, the rights of LGBTIQ+ youth are currently a topical subject due to the government processing new legislation concerning trans rights. However, even after these planned legal reforms, gender confirmation will not be possible for underaged citizens, which can be considered a violation of children’s rights (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 2022, p. 83). Despite the current societal debate about legislations concerning trans minors, and the Finnish curriculum—which states that the societal mission of national basic education is to promote gender equality and support students’ gender and sexual identities (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014, p. 16, 28)—schools still generally operate as spaces that discourage youth gendered and sexual embodiments and regulate them in ways that are cis-/heteronormative (Berg & Kokkonen, 2020; Taavetti et al., 2020). Like in other Western contexts (Gansen, 2017; Renold, 2013), gendered and sexual normativities are embraced and reproduced in Finnish school peer groups through gendered hobbies, gestures, clothing and accessories and through maintaining heterosexual relationships between students. Deviating from these mainstream peer practices often leads to social embarrassment, violence or exclusion (Berg & Kokkonen, 2020; Lehtonen, 2021; Puutio et al., 2021).

Western schooling systems typically constitute young people’s material-discursive worlds in ways that require conforming to the gender dichotomy, such as using binary toilets and locker rooms or participating in gendered group activities (Woolley, 2015). While being aware of the diversity and the individual experiences contained in the subgroups of ‘youth’ and ‘LGBTIQ+ youth’, research shows how non-heterosexual and non-binary students tend to experience these normative practices in schools as being restrictive (Taavetti et al., 2020; Woolley, 2015). These customs are causing them, for example, to hide their gender and sexuality and withdraw from gendered activities or heterosexually toned games between their peers (Berg & Kokkonen, 2020; McBride & Neary, 2021). Due to these existing normative expectations and the lack of systematic, age-appropriate sexuality education that considers LGBTIQ+ communities, non-heterosexual and non-binary students are often left to make sense of their own gender and sexual expressions without support and to educate their peers and adults about gender and sexual diversity (O’Flynn, 2016; Taavetti et al., 2020).

One important peer platform for gaining knowledge on gender and sexuality are online communities, which provide chances for young people to seek out information on those topics and, in the process, exceed the limits of sexuality education provided by school authorities or legal guardians. Furthermore, online communities allow their users the possibility to explore and express gender and sexuality anonymously and be less restricted by norms pertaining to domains of everyday life (Kennedy, 2022; Marston, 2020). During the last two decades, a growing number of digital platforms have enabled the development of non-binary and non-heterosexual youth social networks, which allow peer support, a sense of belonging and safer spaces for members to think about gender and sexuality and express them in other spheres of life (Craig & McInroy, 2014; Varjas et al., 2013).

In addition to more traditional discussion channels, gender and sexuality are addressed and experimented upon in social media through different subcultures, such as creating homoerotic fanfiction, designing non-binary gaming characters and playing as them and assimilating the identity of a fictional character (Fielding, 2013; Kukka, 2021). While online communities can spark varied forms of gender and sexuality, their uncontrollability and anonymity may also expose youth to violent content, homophobic or transphobic harassment, cyberbullying and sexual violence (Varjas et al., 2013).

Even though young people’s worlds are permeated by cultural normativities that capture some of them tightly in their grips, they also express creative curiosity, critical reflexivity and actively reform dominant relational practices (see Bragg et al., 2018). Children and youth maintain but also constantly question and negotiate gendered and sexual norms in their peer cultures by, for example, opposing gendered group divisions, dressing in ways that differ from the mainstream or by keeping distance from heterosexual relationships between peers (Gansen, 2017; Puutio et al., 2021; Renold, 2013). However, these transgressions of normative classifications often remain unnoticed or without approval, which is why they threaten to remain subsumed by dominant cis-/heteronormative cultures.

This contradiction between school and youth’s other spheres of life calls for such approaches that acknowledge the diverse explorations that young people engage in, the knowledge they hold and the meanings they make. Over the past few years, the research and pedagogical praxis that draws on new materialist creative and co-productive methodologies has explored ways of providing students with the space to address gender and sexuality and to think and develop more expansive and ethically sustainable ways of being and relating. For example, innovative arts-based methodologies have enabled youth to reflect their gender and sexual diversity (Bragg et al., 2018; Marston, 2020; Puutio et al., 2021), address sexual harassment in pre-teen romantic relations (Huuki et al., 2021) and work on students’ experiences of gendered and sexual injustice to advocate for change (Pihkala et al., forthcoming; Renold, 2019). These creative approaches also guide our research methodology.

New Materialist Arts-based Methodologies in Exploring Pre-teen Gender and Sexuality

The data used in this article connects to our long-term work with pre-teen youth on the themes of gender and sexuality in their peer cultures. It is part of an extensive arts-based research praxis and a series of creative Friendship workshops with students, but its exact time frame is not disclosed to protect the anonymity of the participants. ² The data was produced in two stretches. First, Atlas, Julia and Noora, together with their nine classmates, participated in one of our creative workshops, which were organized during two consecutive five-hour school days in a space outside of the school premises.

During the workshops, we used multimodal creative activities based on movement, talking, writing and crafting. The students were first invited to ponder themes related to gender, sexuality and power in their relationships and then to express their ideas on what needs to change in their peer relations to make them more ethically sustainable. To uncover more positive relational potentialities by the end of the workshops, the participants were encouraged to imagine and reflect upon affirmative visions for what would make peer cultures safer and more inclusive.

The methodological praxis informing the workshops draws on feminist new materialist arts-based childhood and youth research (Allen, 2013; Marston, 2020; Renold, 2019). Thus, we have approached the materiality, methods, bodies and activities of the workshops as multi-agential entanglements and have carefully composed them in a way that could create ethical conditions to positively, yet critically explore pre-teen gender and sexuality (Pihkala et al., forthcoming). The workshops acknowledge the fragility inherent in such entanglements—that is, a layer of sensitivity and unknowability which is always present in compositions that invite participants to creatively address issues of gender and sexuality (Pihkala et al., forthcoming). While the research obtained approval from the ethics committee of the University of Oulu, ² we have paid careful attention to ethics in the design of the workshops. This has included, among other things, the planning of the activities and how they invite students to share their experiences and turn them into hopes and visions of how to make their relationships to become safer and more equal. Furthermore, we established multi-professional collaboration with schools and other professionals to maintain ethically sustainable settings for students to address their thoughts and experiences (Huuki et al., 2021). We constantly emphasized the voluntary nature of their participation and the fact that the students can address the topics from their own starting points without any assumptions of how these phenomena should look or feel. Participants could share their experiences and artworks anonymously or choose not to, and we paid close attention to giving students practical examples about how the things they have shared might be exhibited later and the ways they might become part of our research.

With Atlas, Noora and Julia, the constellation of the workshops generated powerful reflections on non-normative gender and sexuality, which differed from the sudden outbursts and fleeting moments in which these topics have usually come up while working with pre-teens in school-related settings. The reflections of the group of friends were also such that they were taken up with the class teacher and worked further with the group during two follow-up visits that the first author, Eveliina, made in Julia, Atlas and Noora’s school located in a white middle-class semi-rural town in Northern Finland. ³ At that time, Eveliina spent time with the students for two school days, engaged in school practices, and organized the trio of two-hour-long arts activities and group interviews in a separate school space. In the creative sessions, Eveliina, Atlas, Noora and Julia focused on the things that students found important to them, such as social media, well-being at school, friendships and crushes. They crafted two-sided puzzles with stickers, drawings and text to illustrate the different sides of their identities online and in daily school life while simultaneously talking about their experiences. At the end of the workshop sessions, Atlas, Julia and Noora were offered an opportunity to continue addressing the themes with the school curator if they chose to do so.

The data and materials on which our analysis is based were produced during the two five-hour art workshops and two six-hour school visits. The data consists of processes of making a series of crafted artworks addressing the students’ peer experiences and different life spheres from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, screenshots the students took to present their social media accounts and fieldwork notes and audio-recorded discussions from the workshops and school visits.

Invoking Space to Analyse the Transgressive Possibilities of Gender and Sexuality

During the art making, Atlas, Noora and Julia reflected on how the possibilities to express gender and sexuality differed depending on where they were and who they were with. For example, their crafted puzzles describing their ‘everyday me’ at school were associated with actions considered traditionally as feminine and features, such as ‘being good at school, being a girl, having a girl’s name, being kind and calm and having blonde hair’. In the puzzles presenting their ‘online me’, the forms of expression were more diverse: ‘being talkative, having a tomboy style, being a demi-girl and being a lesbian’. As we delved deeper into how pre-teens could navigate through various life spheres, we learned how school and online communities were significant spaces that facilitated gender and sexuality expression but operated in distinct ways. Considering these spaces and the experiences the group shared, we began to ‘think with’ previous research that explored spatiality as critical to the material-discursive landscapes of young lives (Allen, 2018; Farrugia & Wood, 2017), and reconsidered the idea that only human actors are responsible for producing social identities and relationships. Thus, the everyday experiences of Atlas, Noora and Julia, new materialist ontology and previous research conceptualizing the spaces of young people led us to analyse how pre-teen spaces, school, social media communities and our Friendship workshops acted in producing non-normative gendered and sexual cultures.

In the spatial analysis, inspired by Massey (2005), school and online communities are regarded not as separate backdrops of human actions but as ongoing intertwined relational networks produced through complex connections of temporal, local, social and material elements, such as ordinary objects, today’s youth and contemporary Northern Finnish towns life. Following Barad’s (2007, p. 180) new materialist insights, space can be seen as formed through the dynamics of intra-activity, which are constantly (re)configured in terms of how mutual constitutions of entangled agencies come to matter. In Barad’s relational ontology, intra-actions are considered as performative—that is, through iterations, they produce differences and form material configurations of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 184). Thus, bodies, spaces and materiality do not simply take their place but are emergent; they work to produce material meanings of gender and sexuality in pre-teen lives and participate in their becoming and non-becoming (Barad, 2007).

This conception of spaces as performative and emergent material-discursive entanglements also guides our analysis. In the first two analytical sections, we examine how school and online communities are constantly coming together with other entities and co-constituting possibilities for pre-teen non-normative gendered and sexual relationalities. Here, we focus particularly on the flux and flow school and social media entanglements create for navigations and ruptures of gendered and sexual norms and the alternative visions and ways of being they enable. To consider and encourage the transgressive gendered and sexual practices in young people’s everyday lives, in the third analytical section, we focus on our creative workshops as a space for expressing gender and sexual diversity to draw insights for the development of more supportive spaces in young people’s daily lives.

Non-normative Gender and Sexuality within the Interfaces of School

In line with earlier research addressing LGBTIQ+ youth’s experiences in Finnish educational settings (Berg & Kokkonen, 2020; Lehtonen, 2021; Taavetti et al., 2020), the material-discursive space of the school seemed to offer a barren landscape for non-normative gender and sexuality, regardless of educational policies in Finland, which oblige elementary schools to discuss these themes (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014). Rather, the school space mainly operated in co-constituting the norms of gender and sexuality as a part of daily structures and facilities. For instance, the restrooms and changing rooms were designated only for girls and boys, and there was no information about gender- and sexuality-related topics publicly available for students. Atlas, Julia and Noora shared with us how the obligatory schooling activities were often assigned to girls and boys, leaving non-binary students with only two dichotomous options to choose from.

The trio described how mainstream gendered ways of being materialized in school peer groups: boys and girls were regularly divided based on their assumed gender, and the relationships between them were often sexualized by other students. Moreover, girls and boys hardly spent any time together in informal situations. As previous studies indicate (Huuki et al., 2021; Puutio et al., 2022; Renold, 2013), this entanglement of schooling facilities, practices, materiality, gendered bodies, and cultural assumptions produced gender-based power hierarchies, in which girls have limited opportunities to act and belong. The gazes, gestures, and comments of the popular boys could weigh the girls down and affect their use of space and everyday objects to the point that it was practically impossible for girls to approach boys on equal terms, as Noora explained:

The boys always like… sit on our desks and steal our pens from our pencil cases. And I hate it when they stare at us or put their coats on our racks. They have their own, so they do it on purpose!

In these moments, the students’ personal belongings, the school furniture, the free time before lessons start and the flows of gender and sexuality intra-act and form a gendered and sexualized space permeated by dominant forms of masculinity. As Massey (2005, p. 144) illustrates, these common spaces ruled by masculine forces regulate the ways in which girls can look, move around and be present in space. In such strongly gendered and unequal peer groups, non-binary and non-heterosexual youth tend to have fewer possibilities to act and belong than their cis-/heterosexual peers (O’Flynn, 2016).

However, despite these oppressive masculine power flows, we noticed how minor disruptions to the mainstream heteronormativity could also emerge. Elaborating on Noora’s description of boys stealing their coat racks, Atlas noted:

Yeah, but they don’t put their coats on my rack. And I just didn’t care when they stared at me, so they don’t anymore.

The comment above captures how transgressive gender and sexuality materialize in moving away from hetero-femininity. Although the school space was ladened with oppressive flows of heteronormativity, Atlas’ gender nonconforming body as well as the lack of attachment and ‘not caring’ about heteronormative cultural practices produced a disruption to the space, opening a possibility for them to ignore the evaluating looks of the boys and keep their coat rack to themselves. Further- more, since the school space is dominated by forces of hetero-masculinity, non-normativity can manifest itself as a more straightforward counterforce to the heterosexism: Noora and Julia shared how Atlas could ‘go and say something to the annoying boys’ when they were staring at the girls or ‘talk back to them’ when the boys were publicly referring to the girls as ‘stuff’.

Non-normative relationalities did not emerge only as distancing from hetero-masculine control or as a counterforce to that. We learned how within these entanglements of spaces, materiality, bodies and everyday practices, the cis-/heteronormative imperatives could momentarily widen, producing transgressions of the prevailing gendered zones. These ruptures surfaced in unacknowledged moments, when adult-led activities and timetables were not keeping the students focused on ‘intellectual concerns’ (Allen, 2013). For instance, lunch queues formed by the students themselves and the transition from class to break time made it possible for non-normativity to materialize as momentary disruptions to the mainstream gendered system that separate alleged girls and boys. In these times, Atlas could suddenly jump from the girls’ group to the boys’ to have a relaxed discussion for a short while.

Similarly, the woodcraft class was characterized by the freedom to transgress gendered structures of the material space. The absence of fixed seating order and the constant movement of students and staff between different workspaces created an opportunity for Atlas to move around and work with the boys and thereby disrupt the prevailing cis-normative gendered order, which Eveliina witnessed Atlas doing. In these unacknowledged spaces, the objects, conversations, activities and aspirations from young people’s broader life circles and relationships—such as the ones taking place online—could find room as part of the schooling practices and temporarily challenge the cis-/heteronormative rule of the official school space.

Despite the material-discursive school evoking non-normative relationalities through moments of resisting cis-/heteronormative power hierarchies and rupturing gendered orders, the heteronormative undercurrent of the school affected how pre-teen romantic relationships and friendships could occur. Young people’s gendered bodies and heteronormative assumptions of romantic relationships came together to affect the possibilities for non-heterosexual relationalities. These normative assumptions extended to wider realms of young people’s lives, as seen in this peer experience Atlas shared:

I was once talking with my classmate Rasmus when others shouted at us ‘cc’ [a cute couple]. I said nothing, but it bothered me, so after school, I sent Rasmus a message saying that I wasn’t interested in him in that [romantic] way because I was dating a girl.

Atlas’s description shows how pre-teen gendered bodies, informal chatting and cultural expectations of heterosexuality evoked romantic name-calling from their classmates. This entanglement occupied the space with a heterosexual charge, distributing it over Rasmus and Atlas based on their assumed genders and sexualities. It was so strong that it almost overruled possibilities for non-heterosexuality, which could only emerge away from the material school spaces and times in private messages in a social media space, which made correcting the hetero-assumption possible. While the relationships between alleged girls and boys were mainly ladened with heterosexuality, Atlas’s story implies how in these entanglements of gender, sexuality and (peer)cultural practices of the school, possibilities for other kinds of romantic relationships can open as well:

We were all good friends with Mona and Sara first, but it all changed when we [Atlas and Mona] started dating. Now Sara can get jealous or feel left out when we are holding hands or texting privately. I have been trying to solve things by walking with all three of us hand in hand and inviting both to hang out. But it’s hard now when Mona and I are dating and want to do things as just the two of us.

In this entanglement of school and pre-teen sexuality, the non-heterosexual romantic gestures, such as holding hands in the schoolyard or sending private texts, intra-acted with assumptions of friendship. This seemed to reduce the possibilities for non-heterosexual relationalities. As a part of the reconfigurations of relational practices and ways of speaking that regulate which relations can be romantic the school and other spheres of life came together to form a space where the possibilities for non-normative gender and sexual expression could vaguely emerge, yet they still remained restricted by dominant relational norms.

Online Communities as a Collective and Curious Space for Gendered and Sexual Relationalities

As indicated, the school functions as a space where the possibilities of non-normativity are momentary, subtle and fleeting. Despite this, non-normative gender and sexuality emerge through persistent and recurring flux and flow of what is sedimented in the structures and what is desired. The aspirations young people have gain strength from other everyday spaces, such as online communities, including Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok, as we learned in discussing these issues with the group.

The social media platforms Atlas, Julia and Noora were using allow for individual and group chatting and for visual content to be shared, commented on and edited. These spaces, which enable their users to communicate through nicknames and to choose what they want to share, produce multiple possibilities for the communication of sensitive, sexuality-related themes in youth peer cultures (Marston, 2020). Even though these spaces might also expose LGBTIQ+ youth to harassment (Varjas et al., 2013), the students in this study spoke only positively of these online platforms. For example, for one of them, online communities had made possible to pursue their favourite hobby—creating photographed stories with plastic, collectable human-like figures, or ‘doll-figures’—and they participated in LGBTIQ+ youth online communities which were inspired by the dolls.

Influenced by Barad (2007), we consider these communities as a social media-doll-hobby entanglement of which dozens of young people from all over the country were a part. Through intra-actions of the dolls, social media applications, phones, cameras and young people, the entanglement operated in producing and supporting young people’s non-normative gendered and sexual cultures through constituting knowledge and offering peer support. Whereas Atlas, Noora and Julia said that their school provided only little information on LGBTIQ+ communities (and mainly drawn from the students themselves), on social media they learned several concepts and had many experiences related to gender and sexuality, which strengthened their gender and sexual being and becoming (Kennedy, 2022). As we were talking about online communities with the trio, they started to enthusiastically introduce the concepts that they had learned there. They shared a great variety of terminology, such as ‘demi’, ‘trans’ and ‘dead-name’, the latter referring to a name that a person was no longer using, according to the group.

For these students, not only did social media communities intra-act with dolls, technology, young people and concepts related to gender and sexual identities to generate information about LGBTIQ+ concepts and experiences, but they also produced peer support and creative visions, which were entangled with non-normativity. In one instance, when talking about young people’s online activities with the group, we got to see one of their social media accounts, consisting of a fictive storyline about three plastic figures, which all belonged to LGBTIQ+ communities. Each picture was accompanied by several comments from other users praising the dolls’ clothing, poses and relationships. These posts can be thought as a part of social media-doll-hobby entanglement, in which the human-like figures, anonymity provided by the nicknames, publicity produced by the social media photo-sharing features, and young people’s ponderings of gender and sexuality intra-acted producing multiple gendered and sexual meanings.

As in Barad’s dynamics of mattering (2007, p. 180), these online posts influenced other patterns of relating and being, which created the ongoing enfolding of gender and sexuality in the communities; members were encouraged to explore and express their gender and sexual aspirations, and this encouragement became carried to other spheres of their life. Thus, engaging with fictional doll characters online intra-acted with the young people’s reflections on gender and sexuality in their everyday school spaces making the pre-teen spaces merge and nourish one another: carrying out normative gendered expectations became possible through the doll characters with their imaginary stories and identities, and, simultaneously, the non-gender-specific names could be adapted to online nicknames or everyday use. Furthermore, the alternative dressing styles of the dolls could inspire young people to wear similar clothes themselves.

Compared to school, online communities acted as a space where the possibilities and limits of everyday life related to age and corporeality—how you should dress, look and make romantic or sexual gestures as a sixth grader—are expanded through the doll figures, social media anonymity, and support from the LGBTIQ+ youth community. This made the manifestations of non-normative gendered and sexual cultures stronger: Atlas’ dolls were described as high school students, not sixth graders. They had pastel-coloured hair and outfits that differed from traditional gender norms, such as loose-collared shirts, vests and straight pants. As the social media-doll-hobby entanglement worked in widening the bodily boundaries of pre-teen lives, it also facilitated the exploration of non-normative gender and sexuality in more concrete and powerful ways. The dolls vividly manifested young peoples’ non-heterosexual relationalities: two of them were using English feminine and gender-neutral pronouns she/her and they/them, and they were openly dating and posing together in several pictures kissing and lying on the ground or holding hands. Although the collectable characters come to life only in online spaces, the communality, relational potentialities and broader vocabularies they enable travel with pre-teens to school. This movement perhaps means collisions with mainstream cis-/heteronormative practices, yet gendered and sexual aspirations, along with the experiences found within and from different youth spaces, become entangled, producing fleeting, non-normative disruptions in the mainstream relationship cultures.

Friendship Workshops in Enabling and Supporting the Communication of Transgressive Gender and Sexuality

As the entanglements connected to school and online communities illustrate, young people’s relational navigations emerge within given frameworks, where historical continuums, cultural suppositions, material players and adult-led practices determine the limits within which pre-teen gender and sexuality can form and shape. Alongside school and online communities, our creative workshops acted as a kind of ‘intermediate space’, where the school’s routines, schedules, material facilities and cultural normativities became blended with our carefully constructed art-making composition.

The workshops included activities of multiple modalities that allowed the students the possibility to explore gender and sexuality in their peer relations little by little and to communicate their feelings through speech, movement, writing and art (Pihkala et al., forthcoming). Along with their peers, Atlas, Julia and Noora first engaged in arts-based exercises to orient themselves to the themes at hand and then continued—individually and as a group—to address their experiences more in-depth. In the workshop space, artwork from previous workshop participants was also on display, depicting experiences related to the themes at hand. This composition of materiality and making allowed the young people to approach the issues from their own starting points and pointed their attention towards issues important to them, as Eveliina captured in her research notes to happen with Atlas, Noora and Julia:

The group of friends was drawn by a poster describing a short film about a romantic relationship with two boys, which was made by four 11-year-old girls. We decided to watch the film together and then started doing another arts exercise. Simultaneously, we discussed social media communities, which inspired Julia, Noora and Atlas. During this informal conversation, I asked about the short film and whether that was a common thing in their experience that boys could be interested in boys romantically. They said that they had several online friends who ‘are gay, but it isn’t a big deal’. When the discussion turned to homosexuality, the atmosphere tensed, and Julia and Noora started giggling nervously, glancing at Atlas. At this point, Atlas brought up that they had a girlfriend.

This research note illustrates how the workshop space, which consisted of human and material actants and carefully designed activities, evoked expressions of non-heterosexuality. According to Massey (2005, p. 68), the uniqueness of every space is that there are specific connections of inter-(or intra-) relations within which spaces are set and what is made of them. Hence, a space loaded with artwork expressing pre-teen gender and sexuality, the range of material-discursive activities and lingering over the short film steered the joint reflections towards the theme of non-heterosexuality and paved the way to addressing it. The poster and other artwork were not there by accident; they served to connect the space to a broader field of young people’s experiences for others to intra-act with. As Atlas, Julia and Noora continued working with the activities, they curled up in a quiet, comfortable corner with pillows and dim lighting to ponder the themes with Eveliina. The material composition of the workshop played an active part in affording an informal, more relaxed and less-school-like space to explore these issues more privately. Intra-actively, then, the workshop space helped the group to discuss sexuality, as if giving them permission to address sensitive topics that might otherwise remain hidden under cis-/heteronormative assumptions.

As Eveliina continued to work with Atlas, Julia and Noora, their reflections around non-normative gender and sexuality continued, as Eveliina’s research notes show:

I noticed Julia using the name Atlas instead of the name written on Atlas’ nametag. When I asked about the name, Atlas said that it was their nickname and that they also used it online. A few weeks earlier, they had told their family and closest friends that they would like to be called Atlas because they thought of themselves not completely as a girl or a boy but as ‘something in between’. I asked if they also wanted to be called Atlas in the Friendship workshops. They said ‘yes’, so me and Atlas made them a new name tag together.

In the moment Atlas came to change their name tag, the cis-normative schooling practices of ‘being a girl’ and ‘having a girl’s name’ that the trio described ‘leaked’ into the workshops and came together with the space and its openness to students’ experiences. In the workshop space, the composition of materiality and activities, Atlas’ earlier experiences, the encouragement from Eveliina and the opportunity to use a name tag intra-acted, making it possible to get a grasp on Atlas’ wish for a non-gender-specific name and to take that wish seriously, which strengthened flows of non-normativity. The process of making, crafting, and talking that enabled the exploration and expression of non-normative gender materialized in the name tag, and as it did so, it came—at least potentially—to echo the non-normative expression more widely for other workshop participants.

During the last activity, where students were invited to share what their ideal relationships would look like through art, Atlas communicated their visions about the validity of love regardless of sexuality or gender. This seemed to draw force from the iterative process: watching the video, talking with Eveliina, Julia and Noora, and changing their name tag. After further conversations with Atlas, it became apparent that the school staff was not yet aware of their identity as non-binary and non-heterosexual. Although the support of LGBTIQ+ young people coming from adults cannot be taken for granted (Kennedy, 2022; Taavetti et al., 2020), the desire stemming from Atlas to present the work, our previous cooperation with the teacher and his interest in participating with his class in our workshops provided us with a sense that should we take the issue up with the school, it would be engaged with in ethical and careful manner. Thus, Atlas and Eveliina jointly decided to introduce the artwork to the class teacher in a separate room. The response of the teacher was encouraging, and the art-making process allowed Atlas, the teacher and Eveliina to come together to discuss how Atlas would like to be treated in their class and how they would want non-heterosexuality and non-binarism considered in their school in general. In this way, the workshop entanglement was able to extend to the school and its cis-/heteronormative practices. Perhaps these fleeting and subtle possibilities for expressing pre-teen gender and sexuality gain force from safe companions who seize young people’s thoughts and wishes and together with them strive for change.

Concluding Point

Based on this study and previous scholarship on the school experiences of LGBTIQ+ youth (see, e.g., Lehtonen, 2021; McBride & Neary, 2021; O’Flynn, 2016), we argue that schools mostly act on constituting and strengthening normative flows of gender and sexuality. Therefore, the students’ transgressive expressions of those can emerge only in the ruptures of mainstream gendered structures and power hierarchies and as entangled with heteronormative assumptions of friendship and romance. Compared to school, online communities offer a more fruitful ground for non-normative explorations of youth gender and sexuality. Entangled with human and non-human elements, such as phones, social media applications, collectable figures, young people and their personal interests, online communities have the capacity to enable transgressive expressions of gender and sexuality through creative visions and connections to wider terrains of LGBTIQ+ cultures.

The experiences of Atlas, Noora and Julia show how pre-teen everyday spaces come together in forming and shaping non-normative gendered and sexual relationalities. Most of the spaces encouraging transgressive gender and sexual expression lacked the presence of adults, and the trio told how the adults in their lives were often unaware of these spaces or the activities they enabled. Young people may even spend years of their lives in the process of being able to express their gender and sexuality openly because their everyday spaces do not offer them access to topical vocabulary and information, they lack LGBTIQ+ representations and non-binary facilities, and they are not provided communal support from peers and adults (Kennedy, 2022). Intriguingly, spaces like the Friendship workshop can become meaningful in this context, as they enable the expression of transgressive gender and sexuality through art-making, iterative activities and multi-channel reinforcement. Even though this case study could only provide a glimpse into how non-normative gender and sexuality traversed normative school facilities and practices, it illuminated how those expressions can be supported and carried forward in the context of school.

Although the group of friends reflected on their hopes of making their everyday spaces more ethically sustainable in terms of the expression of gender and sexuality, the development of gender-inclusive spaces should not be the responsibility of youth alone. So that we could recognize and nourish young people’s multiple ways of being, doing and becoming, their everyday spaces should be directed to encourage diversity and equality, which is also referred to in Finland’s curriculum (Finnish Board of Education, 2014, p. 28). This is a challenge to the adults who accompany youth in different life spheres—such as educators, instructors, scholars and legal guardians—to promote safer grounds to explore and express gender and sexuality. In order to establish such spaces, we should turn to those material-discursive entanglements that already promote non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality in young people’s lives. By drawing from these, we can enable other spaces for young people, like Julia, Noora and Atlas, to explore and express their gender and sexuality and to discuss with their peers, as well as with educators, researchers and decision-makers, about how these themes could be addressed in ethical, encouraging ways.