Conference Program

Despite increasing legal protections, LGBTQ+ students remain among the most vulnerable groups within educational settings, facing persistent discrimination, exclusion, and emotional distress. Recent studies continue to identify LGBTQ+ youth as particularly exposed to violence and marginalization within schools (Harris et al., 2021; McBrien et al., 2022). In Europe, recent data indicate a concerning rise in school-based bullying against LGBTQ+ students (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2024). While numerous policies and interventions have been developed to address these issues, critical scholarship highlights that school violence is often framed as the result of individual behaviours rather than as a structural phenomenon embedded in institutional cultures and norms (Ferfolja, 2007; Payne and Smith, 2013).

In response to these limitations, this paper examines LGBTQ+ students’ school experiences from a relational and institutional perspective that situates them within a broader cisheteronormative logic shaping everyday school life. Specifically, the study focuses on the experiences of non-heterosexual boys and trans and non-binary students in secondary education in Catalonia. The research adopts a youth-centred qualitative approach (Bragg, 2010), combining the use of Relief Maps (Rodó-Zárate, 2014) and focus group discussions with a total of 285 students aged between 12 and 17 from 16 public secondary schools. Relief Maps were used to explore students’ perceptions of comfort and discomfort across different spaces and identity axes, while focus groups provided a collective space to deepen the narratives emerging from these visual mappings.

The findings reveal how students’ experiences are shaped by multiple mechanisms of regulation related to gender and sexuality that operate through what Payne and Smith (2013) conceptualize as gender policing. Among non-heterosexual boys, hegemonic masculinity is often enforced through peer dynamics such as homophobic language, mockery, and humour, which function as mechanisms for reinforcing gender boundaries and hierarchies (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Rawlings, 2019). These dynamics position heterosexual masculinity as the normative and desirable form of masculinity within school contexts.

For trans and non-binary students, experiences of discomfort are particularly associated with specific school spaces such as changing rooms, bathrooms, and physical education settings. These spaces not only reproduce binary gender norms through their architectural organization but also through the social interactions they enable, including exclusion, questioning of gender identities, and cisnormative microaggressions (McBride and Neary, 2021).

Overall, the study highlights the multidimensional role of school spaces in shaping students’ experiences, demonstrating how both spatial arrangements and everyday interactions contribute to the reproduction of cisheteronormative hierarchies. By foregrounding youth voices and analysing how school institutions (re)produce hegemonic identity models, this research calls for moving beyond individualizing approaches to school violence. Instead, it argues for addressing the structural dynamics through which gender and sexuality norms are enacted in schools, while promoting a feminist ethic of care and shared responsibility in educational practice. In doing so, the paper highlights how students’ everyday experiences shape their possibilities for recognition, belonging, and participation within school communities.