Challenging heteronormativity in suburban high schools through “surplus visibility”: Gay-Straight Alliances in the Vancouver city-region

Over 30 years ago, the first Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) were formed to undermine the hegemonic heteronormativity of public educational institutions in North America. Despite the challenges that these student clubs pose to the heteronormativity of school spaces, the practices they employ have rarely been examined by geographers. This paper, therefore, expands upon the interdisciplinary literature on GSAs from within education and a smaller geographical literature on education and sexuality by examining the practices of suburban public high school GSAs on the peripheries of the Vancouver city-region in British Columbia, Canada. It argues that GSAs in suburban secondary public schools play valuable social supporting and activist roles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S) youth as spaces of “surplus visibility” – a means of challenging invisibility through the generation of excessive presence. Using empirical examples from two case study peripheral municipalities (Surrey and Burnaby) six dimensions of GSA actions are examined to illustrate how surplus visibility is produced (through administration, decoration, participation, sociability, reconnaissance, and activism) but also how its ‘excesses’ are regulated.