531 - CRIPPING CISHETERONORMATIVITY: LGBT+ VISUALLY IMPAIRED YOUTH'S SELF-ADVOCACY FOR LGBT+ RIGHTS

Session: P_D05S002 - Poster Session 2 - Division 5
AUTHORS:
Ubisi Lindokuhle (Lindokuhle ~ Johannesburg ~ South Africa)
Abstract text:
Despite South Africa's progressive constitutional protections, LGBT+ learners with disabilities remain largely invisible within policy, pedagogy, and sexuality education discourses. These youth not only face dual marginalisation—on the basis of disability and queer identity—but also structural silences around their sexual rights. In an educational system that is predominantly heterocentric, ableist, and pedagogically repressive, participants demonstrate agency and resistance, creating affective and discursive spaces where their identities can be affirmed. This study explores how visually impaired LGBT+ youth navigate, resist, and challenge cisheteronormative norms in South African schools for the blind. Drawing on crip theory—a critical framework that interrogates the intersections of disability, normativity, and sexuality—the research centres the voices of 15 LGBT+ youth from four schools through focus group discussions. Their narratives disrupt dominant able-bodied, heterosexual schooling logics and reveal both the psychological toll of erasure and the resilience embedded in peer solidarity, humour, and everyday negotiation of power. This research challenges existing pedagogical frameworks that pathologise or exclude queer disabled bodies and calls for inclusive, participatory approaches to comprehensive sexuality education. Crip theory, in this context, proves vital in highlighting the ways in which normativities are both embodied and resisted.