Becoming and belonging : negotiating non-heteronormative identities online and at school

This chapter reveals that belonging is an ongoing temporal project accomplished and enacted in multiple and shifting locations. Drawing on qualitative data, it reveals the material practices through which young people of diverse genders, sexualities and sexes produce and perform the ‘truth of themselves’. It shows they find spaces of belonging through digital social media and classroom pedagogies, along with everyday social practices through which possibilities for belonging are opened or foreclosed. It captures the desire and ‘longing to belong’ of queer young people, their search for the ‘truth of one’s self’ and the points of tension produced in the heteronormative practices of schooling and the multiple possible truths and selves produced in young people’s engagement with digital social media.