While debates may rage around issues of sexuality, sexual identity and sexuality-based rights, if we are to believe what we hear from some of our political leaders and sections of the media, concerns over sexuality itself should be settled outside of schools. Sexuality, they would argue, is too mature, too controversial and quite simply a biological fact that has no relevance to schooling.However, disturbing stories and statistics point to the significant challenges faced by students, and these surely warrant attention.

With this in mind, this chapter examines some of the questions that often arise when talking about sexualities: Are gender and sexuality the same thing? Is sexuality ‘all about sex’?And what does school have to do with any of this? By unpacking some of the emergent literature in the field, the chapter will suggest that dominant discourses around sexualities ߝ in this case, heteronormativity ߝ are up for challenge.

Marked in many ways by uncertainty, the most interesting narratives of the early twenty-first century in Southern Latin America show signs of an irregular though constant rebelliousness, mostly embodied by women and transvestites. However, they also take into account the failures of the previous era and even suggest new representations for violence. Undoubtedly these narratives therefore outline series that connect on political levels that have remained apparently separated. These aesthetic experiences – that surface together with those feminist movements that have grown stronger in Latin America in the last years – contest genealogies, traditions, and families by inverting them or even creating new ones; by presenting other imaginations, unexpected bonds embodied by heterogeneous and thus dangerous contacts. Aware of time lapses, feminism interrupts any lineal narrative, and by reviewing the past, it recreates the political-aesthetic scenes and figures of the present, while gauging the measure of displacements and resistances. In this framework of political-aesthetic renewal that infuses the new century, we focus on certain literary scenes that bring out the fact that the textual and sexual archive of literary tradition and culture has been turned on its head. The expansion and problematization of literature from a female standpoint becomes an unprecedented cultural phenomenon that makes visible other forms of affects and bodies.

The period of exploration of North America by various European nations manifested an intense moment of cultural, political, economic, and environmental change. Often marked by violence, Europeans failed to understand the gendered practices of the Indigenous population, which often liberated women from the confines of marriage and allowed for a spectrum of sexual identities and practices. European explorers, endowed with a sense of masculine dominance, given their role as captains or brave soldiers, confronted not only a vastly different gendered terrain and site of sexual fluidity but their own masculinity struggles with Indigenous men. As Europeans imposed religious mores and situated European customs as civilized and superior, explorers and settlers disrupted Native identities and power structures. This chapter asserts that the various conflicts and challenges encountered within the landscape of the New World can and should be considered through the lens of eroticization, sexuality, and gender. Often these contests of power disadvantaged women and sexualities that failed to conform to Christianity. These literal and psychological sites of struggle laid the foundation for future colonization and dramatically impacted and altered understandings of the colonial experiment.

Trish Salah contextualizes the broad post-2010 emergence of transgender fiction in a longer history of earlier trans and queer fiction and theory while arguing that “trans genre writing” has found recent prominence as a new minor literature. Particular challenges have led trans writers to innovate at the levels of language and aesthetics, perspective (collective, but not homogeneous), and genre, among others. Moreover, these works thematize and challenge norms and imperatives of empire, race, history, visibility, and geography.