Queer Joy and Failure in Gender and Sexuality Research and Practice

In this book launch, we'll offer a 30 minute talk where we begin to explore queer joy as both an experience and a method. Queer Joy and Failure in Gender and Sexuality Research and Practice 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. The book draws its argument from two major research projects: a study on queering sexuality education with over 80 in-service teachers in New Brunswick called SexualityNB and Pride/Swell+, a community-based participatory project involving over 300 2SLGBTQ+ people across Atlantic Canada. It investigates not only 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, we foreground queer joy’s messiness and entanglement with failure as a methodology for resistance and survival.

We will engage the audience in a Q&A following the talk, and offer participants the opportunity to engage in a collage workshop in response to the prompt, "What has failure in queer joy taught you?" 

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

Casey Burkholder

Casey Burkholder (she/her) is a queer femme Tier II Canada Research Chair in Social Justice in Youth and Child Studies and an associate professor at Concordia University. In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance and 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

Melissa Keehn (she/her) is a femme lesbian and assistant professor at the University of 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

Megan Hill (she/they) is a PhD candidate of 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 an 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.