Supporting LGBTQIA Students in “Every Heart a Doorway” by Seanan McGuire

[Spoilers—this portal world is loaded with spoilers—beware!]

I’m definitely late to the party on the novella, Every Heart a Doorway, that won the 2017 Hugo award. Recently, I was in a bookstore judging books by their covers when I picked up the third novella in the series because I liked its vibrant colors. I’m glad that I found it.

The protagonist, Nancy, is going to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, to live after her return from a portal realm.  All of the teens and children that live there have visited a variety of other portal realms (eġ. Wonderland).  Most are trying to return home.  However, the twist is that home isn’t where their families are. Rather, they believe that home was the realms they left. (Ultimately, I think that the real message by the end of the book is that home is actually living an authentic life—it could be in another realm or not. It’s taking ownership of one’s life.) The narrative of the book is a fast-paced, magical murder mystery set at a boarding school. The book both directly discussed LGBTQIA topics, as well as exploring the topics through metaphor. For purposes of this post, I’m going to reflect on the topic of diversity, specifically the LGBTQIA community.

Before returning to the novella, I’d like to share some statistics and information. You can go to this article from Pew Research Center called 5 Key Findings about LGBT Americans. This article by the Center for Disease Control (CDC)  in the United States looks at outcomes for LGBTQ youth. According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, LGB students were at increased risk for bullying and violence. In turn, this may have impacted their likelihood to be absent from school. Since these students are also at a greater risk for depression and suicide, the CDC website has a section on “What Schools Can Do.” Some examples including support groups. Outcomes were better for LGB students who were in schools that “had gay-straight alliances and policies prohibiting expression of homophobia in place for 3 or more years.”  The article includes a bulleted list of policies and practices that schools can enact to help students.

A couple of these practices are modeled in Every Heart a Doorway like “encouraging respect for all students and prohibiting bullying, harassment, and violence against all students” and “facilitating access to community-based providers who have experience providing…psychological services to LGBTQ youth.”  For example, the students in the book have group therapy sessions related to their portal realms and their feelings about returning to our world. This support was important because the teens often didn’t receive help from their families, who wanted them to be the individuals that they remembered before their disappearances. (And often, the families didn’t understand the children even before the disappearance.)

One of the most important aspects of encouraging diversity, tolerance, and acceptance is communication.  Although the action kept moving, the characters spent much time in dialogue, explaining their preferences for their portal realms, as well as their identities. For example, the protagonist, Nancy, is asexual. Through her reflections, as well as conversations with others, the novella explores the associated stereotypes and assumptions. But it’s also about the teens feeling comfortable as who they are: their personalities and their behaviors, including the clothes that they choose. People should embrace others differences while respecting others’ boundaries. The range of acceptable expressions and behaviors is much larger than our world of commercially-based gender tagging allows. However, there are limits to this if other people are harming others, which the book explores.

I’ve picked up the next two books in the series so I’m looking forward to reading Down Among the Sticks and Bones next.

Capacity in Zeynep Tufekci’s “Twitter and Tear Gas”

I’m feeling a bit rusty at writing blog posts right now. It’s been about six months since I last posted. Hopefully, I’m going to try to keep them shorter and post more frequently on a wider variety of topics.

Recently, I’ve been reading a great sociology book called Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Dr. Zeynep Tufekci. She studies social movements and technology. I’ve followed @zeynep, her Twitter handle, for years. While I’ve been exposed to some of her academic ideas before, it was great to read them in the extended format of a book. Twitter and Tear Gas is easy to read, and I think that non-sociologists would find the book highly relatable. In fact, she uses metaphors in a way that is reminiscent of literature. Also, she documents her travels to study social movements in many countries, which I think made the book engaging.

I marked up my copy—always a sign of great content. However, I’m going to focus on Chapter 8 on “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power.” The key hallmark of good sociology is asking the right questions. Tufekci asks important questions in this book like:

If numbers and energy do not tell the whole story, how do we measure a protest’s power? Why do some movements have little impact while others are potent agents for social change (191).

Tufekci outlines three different types of capacity in social movements: narrative capacity, disruptive capacity, and electoral/institutional capacity. While the other two types of capacity are important, I’ve been reflecting on electoral and institutional capacity since I read the book. It’s described as:

a movement’s ability to keep politicians from being elected, reelected, or nominated unless they adopt or pursue policies friendly to the social movement’s agenda, or the ability to force changes in institutions through both insider and outsider strategies (192-193).

One of the best aspects of Tufekci’s writing is how she contrasts worldwide, contemporary and historical social movements to illustrate these types of capacity. Lots of people I know have been becoming more politically active. An understanding of the difference between types of capacity might help them make skillful choices in directing their activities to help the social movements that they care deeply about.

If you want to read the examples related to capacity in Chapter 8, Tufecki’s entire book is available here through Creative Commons.  However, Tufekci makes a compelling case on her website as to why it’d be helpful for people to buy her book, which is what I did. I love the fact that this book is available for people who might not be able to afford it, like many of my students.

Finally, if books aren’t your cup of tea, then you might also find her Ted Talk from September 2017 called  “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click ads” particularly relevant, given how social media, especially Facebook, is in the news right now.  I just showed it to my social diversity and introduction to sociology students in the past few weeks, and they found it quite engaging and relevant. It led to student self-reflection on their social media usage. Soon, I plan to make some posts on what I’ve been reading in the past six months, as well as my thoughts on the Hugo nominees for this year.