Research Online at MacEwan :: Browsing by Author "Wright, JJ (Jessica)"

Browsing by Author "Wright, JJ (Jessica)"

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The appropriation of sex education by conservative populism
(2020) Bialystok, Lauren; Wright, JJ (Jessica); Berzins, Taylor; Guy, Caileigh; Osborne, Em
Curriculum change involves struggles among political actors and interest groups, and those efforts related to sex education have been noted for their particularly vexatious character. When Doug Ford was elected Premier of Ontario, Canada in 2018, he immediately repealed the comprehensive health curriculum of 2015 and attempted to muzzle teachers during the 2018–2019 school year, only to unveil a strikingly similar “new” curriculum for 2019–2020.This article analyses Ford’s treatment of sex education as part of a conservative populist agenda. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we divide the government’s approach into six components that illustrate how anti-elitism and fact-bending drove curriculum policy. Our analysis contributes to discussions in curriculum studies and educational politics by connecting the recently ascendant political ideologies in the West with the already contentious area of sex education.
Courage catalysts: creating consent culture on campus: a toolkit by students, for students
(2021) Burnham, Julia; Clarkson, Levi; DesRochers, Jacob; Dunne, Catherine; Gabriele, Carina; Garcia, Jaye; Glaspey, Tayler; Gray, Mandi; Gupta, Radhika; Irvine, Taylor; Javed, Kainat; King, Zoe; Kuzmyk, Emma; Magaji, Vatineh; Malankov, Chenthoori; McKay, Alannah; Perry, Nell; Prévost, Francis; Snow, Aubrianna; Toner, Jackie; Wong, Tia; Wright, JJ (Jessica)
Being a student at a post-secondary institution (PSI) comes with many challenges: balancing academic commitments, maintaining a social life on and off campus, working, and family responsibilities—to name a few things. On top of these pressures, more than 71% of Canadian students experienced or witnessed unwanted sexualized behaviours while completing their degree. Though there’s been decades of activism and research to prevent and address gender-based violence (GBV), we still have a lot of work ahead of us to prevent GBV on campus and to meet the needs of survivors at PSIs. If you’re coming to this toolkit frustrated about the pervasiveness of violence on campus, know you are not alone. In fact, this toolkit was designed by diverse student advocates from across Canada who felt a similar frustration. We became involved in advocacy work for a variety of reasons, such as witnessing injustice, supporting our friends in the aftermath of GBV on campus, or navigating sexualized violence ourselves. We had an incredible opportunity to collaboratively create the kinds of tools we wished we had when organizing on campus, and we hope it will be helpful to you. If you are someone who strives to see a growing consent culture at your PSI, this guide will walk you through tools that may help you reach that goal.
Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Manuel, Caitlin A.
Although frequently relegated to the periphery in conversations about gender-based violence prevention, the disabling impacts of traumatised subjectivity both affect survivors’ abilities to fully participate in sex and contribute to survivors being more than twice as likely to be sexually (re)victimised compared to peers without trauma histories. In this paper, we seek to crip and queer approaches to gender-based violence prevention, particularly consent education, by learning from 2SLGBTQ+ and disabled trauma survivors’ affective experiences of queer, crip sexual joy and the radically messy ways in which they establish their own care networks for deeply pleasurable sex through the principles of disability justice. Refusing pathologising understandings of survivors as those who need to be cured, we highlight traumatised subjectivity as emblematic of the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in sex as well as the possibilities for caring, consensual sex that moves beyond the concept of consent employed in colonial, neoliberal capitalist societies’ binary (Yes/No) consent laws. Drawing on the work of crip and queer theorists such as Mia Mingus, Alison Kafer, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, and J. Logan Smilges, we reveal how disability justice principles, such as interdependence, collective access, and access intimacy, offer transformative understandings for anti-violence efforts.
‘Just say no’: public dissent over sexuality education and the Canadian national imaginary
(2019) Bialystok, Lauren; Wright, JJ (Jessica)
Scholars of sexuality have argued that ‘moral panics’ about sexuality often stand in for broader conflicts over nationality and belonging. Canada has spent decades cultivating a national image founded on multiculturalism and democratic equality. The Ontario sexuality education curriculum introduced in 2015 drew audible condemnation from a variety of groups. Drawing from Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Race Theory, we argue that the public discourse surrounding these protests exposed the limits of Canadian pluralism, fuelling a meta-debate about the ‘Canadianness’ of recent immigrants and the incompatibility of liberal values with those of non-Westerners, especially Muslims. We explain this in terms of contextual factors such as Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic school system and anti-Muslim xenophobia in the post-9/11 era. Our analysis speaks to the importance of intersectional social justice efforts as part of the movement for comprehensive sex education.
Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic: a national survey of gender-based violence services at Canada’s post-secondary institutions
(2022) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Abji, Salina
The COVID-19 pandemic was described as an “unprecedented time” for post-secondary institutions (PSIs) across Canada. Campus closures, the pivot to virtual classrooms, and new health and safety measures have left a significant mark on campus life. While the impacts of COVID-19 on learning and research were often the focus of campus measures, less attention has been paid to how the pandemic affected the work to address and prevent sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) at PSIs. Yet we know that GBV is a global problem that has been categorized as a “shadow” pandemic by the UN, and that PSIs have a significant role to play in GBV prevention education, response, and policy/research leadership on this issue. To help bring more attention to the impacts of COVID-19 on GBV education and response efforts at PSIs, the Courage to Act project initiated a national survey of GBV frontline workers and others involved in GBV efforts at PSIs. Courage to Act is a national initiative focused on addressing and preventing GBV at PSIs in Canada. Leveraging our network of 3500 stakeholders and over 170 of Canada’s top GBV experts and advocates, Courage to Act conducted two surveys, one in 2021 and 2022. Both surveys invited participants to comment on the impacts of COVID-19, as well as innovations and priorities for addressing and preventing GBV at PSIs moving forward. A total of 104 participants responded, mostly frontline GBV workers on campus, but also administrators and students involved in this work. While the results of this community-based research study were not representative of all campus communities, there were important themes that emerged in our analysis. We extrapolated from these themes to identify six major “lessons from the pandemic” for PSIs to consider. These lessons provide insight into how the movement to end campus GBV can build back the momentum for preventing and addressing GBV that was lost due to COVID-19.
“The loving queer gaze”: the epistemological significance of queer joy
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Falek, Joshua
This article contends with queer joy as an epistemology to highlight an affective experience that grounds a basis for revising dominant approaches to sexual ethics. Drawing on findings from a mixed-methods study with 100 2SLGBTQ+ young adults from Canada and the US, we argue that queer and trans people mobilize queer sexual joy as an epistemology of script breaking that led participants to explore freedom and play, enjoy novel forms of care and communality, and to challenge oppression. We found that 2SLGBTQ+ young adults are undermining dominant sexual cultures which perpetuate gender-based violence through cisheteronormative logics of objectification and dominance. Rather than simply producing misery, normative sex and gender regimes produced a disorientation among 2SLGBTQ+ young adults which was fruitful for breaking sexual scripts and developing approaches to sex and relationships grounded in greater authenticity, creativity, reciprocity, play, and joy. We propose that by taking queer joy as a way of knowing, we may learn how queer and trans people negotiate the performativity of gender and sex, their own bodily knowledge, and the epistemic injustices that have precluded this knowledge from being valued. Pushing against the “joy deficit” in sociology that constrains the field to the study of the misery that minority communities face, this paper not only demonstrates what sociologists might learn from the texture of queer and trans lives, but also how these lessons can help to undermine cisheteronormativity as a root cause of gender-based violence.
Non-binary youth and binary sexual consent education: unintelligibility, disruption and possibility
(2023) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Greenberg, Ellis
This paper theorises the ways in which non-binary gender is rendered invisible through binary Yes/No sexual consent education. Judith Butler’s framework of gender intelligibility is drawn upon to consider the absenting of non-binary youth from consent education. We suggest that the undoing of the hegemonic colonial gender binary also be a project of consent education. Consent education is often taught through a highly gendered lens underscored by the ‘miscommunication hypothesis,’ which posits normative binary gender roles as the underlying cause of sexual violence and fails to account for how non-binary youth experience and navigate consent. Furthermore, we examine how binary Yes/No consent education negates non-binary gender by rejecting the grey area of consent. The dismissal of grey area experiences is problematic for non-binary youth as ambiguity around consent may be more prevalent amongst non-binary people due to increased experiences of trauma and the common experience of gender dysphoria. Despite this invisiblisation, non- binary people have formulated their own modes for navigating sexual pleasure and consent. We call for more research into how non-binary youth are invisibilised by binary consent education as well as how these youth are challenging normative consent and reimagining sexual cultures that centre interdependence, mutual pleasure, and care.
Queer joy-centered sexuality education: offering a novel framework for gender-based violence prevention
(2024) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Falek, Joshua; Greenberg, Ellis
2SLGBTQ+ people face disproportionately high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) compared to cisgender heterosexual people. Scholars have predominantly responded to this violence by reporting on victimization, which homogenizes queer and trans life as misery. To avoid reproducing this joy-deficit, we propose a novel approach that centers queer sexual joy. As rape culture is symptomatic of cisheteronormativity, queer sexual joy is a useful analytic with which to subvert GBV. Drawing on findings from the Queer Sexual Joy project, a mixed-methods study involving 100 young adults from Canada and the US, we introduce six recommendations for a framework to focalize queer and trans sexual joy in GBV prevention education, including: 1) containers for safety; 2) communication strategies; 3) bodily autonomy; 4) trauma-informed, anti-oppression, 5) pleasure; and 6) dissociation and grounding practices. We propose that GBV education rooted in queer sexual joy would reorient all youth from hegemonic sexual scripts and provide a frame for more just sexual cultures.
Social media and mobilizing change for community impacts: results report
(2022) Vigor, Jana; Wright, JJ (Jessica); Campbell, Karen
Social media has become a pivot for individual level activism and community level change. This collaborative project between the Canadian Women’s Foundation and the McGill iMPACTS project investigates the connections between social media and action for social change in the context of sexual assault on Canadian post-secondary campuses. Along with a panel discussion hosted on June 22, 2022, this report is the final knowledge dissemination component of the project’s three phases. An interdisciplinary literature review on feminist social media use, gender-based violence (GBV), and campus responses to rape culture was developed during the first research phase. The second phase involved connecting with key informants and conducting in depth interviews. This third phase has resulted in this report, summarizing 12 key informant interviews conducted with anti-violence organizers, student activists, and frontline staff working at post-secondary institutions (PSIs) across Canada. The interviews offer insights into how feminist organizers use social media platforms to educate, build movements, and support survivors of sexual violence.
Speak out: addressing 2SLGBTQ youth dating violence: lessons on how to support 2SLGBTQ youth who face dating violence in Canada
(2022) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Zidenberg, Alexandra M.; Fraser, Ley; Peter, Tracey; Jakubiec, Brittany; Cameron, Lee
There are many ways that 2SLGBTQ youth navigate healthy relationships and find joy in their relationships with friends, family, and partners (Asakura, 2019). However, from the available Canadian research, it is known that 2SLGBTQ youth have an equal or greater chance of encountering dating violence when compared with their cisgender and heterosexual peers, particularly if they are multiply marginalized (Dank et al., 2014; Martin-Storey, 2015; Reuter & Whitton, 2018; Smollin, 2011). Recent research from Exner-Cortens et al. (2021) found that one in three Canadian adolescents had experienced dating violence, and the prevalence rates were highest for nonbinary youth. This increased risk of dating violence can also be linked with systemic violence (i.e., cisheteronormativity, settler colonialism, and ableism), which perpetuate dehumanization and translate into interpersonal violence (Abbas, 2022). Despite the increased risk of dating violence for 2SLGBTQ youth, the resources they turn to are not well-informed about issues such as transphobia and homophobia (Quinn & Ertl, 2015).
Speak out: lessons on how to support Canadian 2SLGBTQI youths who face gender-based violence
(2023) Wright, JJ (Jessica); Zidenberg, Alexandra M.; Fraser, Ley; Peter, Tracey; Cameron, Lee; Jakubiec, Brittany
2SLGBTQI youth are at disproportionately high risk of experiencing gender-based violence compared to their cis-heterosexual peers, although there is a gap in research explaining why as well as what this violence looks like. Part of the explanation relates to ongoing homophobia and transphobia; however, more research is needed to understand 2SLGBTQI youths’ feelings of safety within their communities, their experiences of violence with partners, and their help-seeking behaviours. Given the limited Canadian research, the Speak Out project was undertaken. The Speak Out project is a multi-phase project with Phase 1 encompassing a survey of youth across Canada about their experiences of gender-based violence. From across Canada, 292 youths were recruited and asked to complete a survey on gender-based violence. The survey covered four domains related to violence (physical violence, emotional abuse/control, sexual violence, virtual violence) participants experienced, experiences with help-seeking, and connections to the 2SLGBTQI community. Most youths had connections to the broader 2SLGBTQI community and were open about their identities, but many reported being discriminated against based on their gender expression (50%) and sexual orientation (43%). Of the participants who answered questions related to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, very few reported any incidents. More youths reported virtual violence via text messages (34%), making them afraid to ignore phone calls or other contact (18%), and surveillance of their social media (18%). These results contribute valuable knowledge on the experiences of Canadian 2SLGBTQI youths and have important implications for both education and frontline service provision.
Trauma-informed consent education: understanding the grey area of consent through the experiences of youth trauma survivors
(2022) Wright, JJ (Jessica)
Sexual consent education has emerged in recent years as the most popular method of preventing gender-based violence. Yet, the concept of consent used in much contemporary programming problematically oversimplifies sexual exploration and the power dynamics it is imbued with by asserting that consent is as simple as “Yes” or “No.” The messiness of sexual negotiation or the ‘grey areas’ of consent that youth may experience are left unaddressed. By examining the experiences of youth trauma survivors through a trauma-informed lens, the limits to binary consent education become clear. I draw on empirical data from nine open-ended interviews with Canadian youth trauma survivors to demonstrate how a trauma-informed lens may be implemented in consent education. I argue that educators should include understandings of consent which falls outside the Yes/No binary in order to adequately address youth survivors’ vulnerability to sexual (re)victimization. I examine how three of the psychosocial impacts of trauma, dissociation, hypersexuality, and struggles with acquiescence, refuse the binaristic model of consent and should be considered for trauma-informed consent education. While education alone cannot end rape culture, addressing the grey area of consent in consent education may help reduce preventable harm for survivors, as well as youth more broadly.

Browsing by Author "Wright, JJ (Jessica)"

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