Queer Kids and Social Violence: The Limits of Bullying

Edited by QuERI directors, Elizabethe Payne and Melissa J. Smith

Authors in this volume critique and confront mainstream bullying discourse, which is the dominant paradigm for repairing LGBTQ youth experiences of victimization and school exclusion. Through research on how bullying shapes policy and practice, authors demonstrate that this discourse fails to encompass the diversity and complexity of queer youth school experiences, or account for how and why bias-based aggression occurs. Authors illustrate the dangers of reductive approaches to creating safer schools, particularly in current contexts of rising bias-based bullying and threats to queer inclusive K-12 policies and practices. Writers offer strategies and opportunities to engage with queer youth in ways that are humanizing and have more realistic potential for counteracting discriminatory policies. 

Contributors: Ana María Amigo-Ventureira; Durell M. Callier; Cristyn Davies; Renée DePalma; Tania Ferfolia; Jessica Fields; Jen Gilbert; Tristan Gleason; Dominique C. Hill; Angela Ingram; Laurie Gutmann Kahn; Cris Mayo; Mollie McQuillan; Aoife Neary; C. J. Pascoe; Elizabethe Payne; Victoria Rawlings; EJ Renold; Jessica Ringrose; Kerry H. Robinson; Melissa J. Smith; Dorte Marie Søndergaard; Cris Townley; Jacqueline Ullman; Boni Wozolek.

Available October 2025 from University of Minnesota Press.