Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0002-4112-5451
Abstract
In education scholarship, authors have increasingly called to center queer joy to disrupt the conventional deficit model that normally accompanies queer communities. However, in this paper, I argue that an exclusive emphasis on joy may risk instituting and normalizing a happiness duty that marginalizes negative affects and subjects. I propose queer grief not as an opposite, but as a constitutive shadow of joy. Drawing on theories of queer, trans, and crip negativity and the studies on loss, grief, and mourning, I critique the imperative to mobilize affect solely for future utility and teleological meaning. I contend that such mobilization-driven frameworks inadvertently render unproductive states, such as lingering silence, depression, and refusal, unrepresentable and ethically and politically void within educational inquiry. Instead, I advocate for an ethics of staying with grief in the study of education. By reclaiming negativity, this paper complicates the notion of holisticness in research and education, urging scholars not to look away from the arts of living through grief which remain illegible to the logic of joy itself.
Methodological Approach
Theoretical or Conceptual
DOI
https://doi.org/10.60808/h92w-qj41
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Sawata, A. (2026). Grief as a Constitutive Shadow of Queer Joy: Reclaiming Negativity and the Ethics of Staying for Education Research. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.60808/h92w-qj41
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Included in
Education Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
