Pre-teens explore and express other than cis- and heteronormative forms of gender and sexuality in their peer relations. Despite this, these ‘non-normative’ ways of being and doing often threaten to drown under mainstream assumptions that follow the common idea of gender-dichotomy and the mutual attraction of boys and girls (Hawkes & Dune, 2013). Although the national curriculum outlines that schools should support the development of students’ gender and sexual identities (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014), particularly non-binary and non-heterosexual youth tend to find the school's practices cramped and are often left to ponder these issues by themselves in their other life spheres (Kennedy, 2020). The aim of this study is to focus on youth everyday spaces, and to look at how they come together in shaping pre-teen non-normative gendered and sexual cultures.

To do this, the research draws on case study, which was implemented in Northern Finland and consists of an arts-based case study of a group of three 12- to 13-year-old students. As we worked with the group of friends and their nine classmates, what stood out was the trio’s powerful, iterative reflections of non-normative gender and sexuality that emerged during our engagement with them. As they were sharing their thoughts with us, they especially discussed two life spheres as vital for expressing gender and sexuality: school and online communities.  We became interested in exploring how these spaces operate; although they might seem distinct or even separate from each other, they act together in co-constituting pre-teen gender and sexuality.

Earlier research on young people’s gender and sexuality has focused on their romantic and/or sexual relationships as well as on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) youth (Kennedy, 2020; Lehtonen, 2021). Despite this, there is a lack of research examining young people’s relationalities which transgress hetero- and cisnormativity in the transition to adolescence (see however Neary, 2021). In addition, these themes have been primarily approached through human-centred, talk-based methodologies, which can make it challenging for young people to explore these topics. In recent years, a growing body of feminist new materialist and posthuman work (see e.g., Allen, 2018; Renold, 2019; Taylor, 2013) has begun to explore new methodological, ethical, and ontological possibilities of mapping youth sexualities in expansive ways. We join this scholarship by employing creative, arts-based approaches in exploring young people’s views on gender, sexuality, and power in the less-studied elementary school context.

Firstly, we turn to ask, how school and online communities are constantly coming together with other entities and co-constituting possibilities for pre-teen non-normative gendered and sexual relationalities. Our intention is to focus particularly on the flux and flow school and social media entanglements create for navigations and ruptures of gendered and sexual norms and the alternative visions and ways of being they enable. Secondly, to consider and encourage the transgressive gendered and sexual practices in young people’s everyday lives and draw insights for the development of more supportive youth spaces, we focus on our creative workshop space and ask how it acts as a space for expressing pre-teen gender and sexual diversity.

The data was produced in two stretches together with three Northern-Finnish students. First, the students participated in our creative Friendship workshops together with their nine classmates. The workshops were organised during two consecutive five-hour school days in a separate space outside the school premises. The activities included movement, talking, writing, and crafting, and were designed to invite the children to ponder themes related to gender, sexuality, and power in their relationships and then to express their ideas on what needs to change in their peer relations to make them more ethically sustainable. As the constellation of the workshops generated powerful reflections on non-normative gender and sexuality in a group of three friends, us and the trio were keen on continuing the work after the two-day long workshops ended. In the second part of the data generation, one of the authors visited the students in their school which was located in a white middle-class semi-rural neighbourhood in Northern Finland. In two separate six-hour school visits, one of the authors first spent time with the students for two school days, engaged in school practices, and organised the trio of two-hour-long arts activities and group interviews in a separate school space. The data consists of processes of making a series of crafted artworks addressing the students’ peer experiences and different life spheres from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, screenshots the students took to present their social media accounts and fieldwork notes and audio-recorded discussions from the workshops and school visits. As the group of friends emphasised how the possibilities to express gender and sexuality differed particularly in two of their essential life spheres – school and online communities – we began to ‘think with’ previous research that explored spatiality as critical to the material-discursive landscapes of young lives (Allen, 2018), and reconsidered the idea that only human actors are responsible for producing social identities and relationships. We combined Doreen Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of spaces as intertwined relational networks with Karen Barad’s (2007) new materialist insights to view spaces as performative and emergent material-discursive entanglements, which produce material meanings of gender and sexuality in pre-teen lives. Thus, the pre-teen everyday experiences, new materialist ontology and previous research conceptualising the spaces of young people led us to analyse how school, social media communities and our Friendship workshops acted in producing non-normative gendered and sexual cultures.

Based on our findings and previous scholarship on the school experiences of LGBTIQ+ youth (see, e.g., Lehtonen, 2021; Neary, 2021) we propose that as schools mostly act on constituting and strengthening normative flows of gender and sexuality, the students’ transgressive expressions of those can emerge only in the ruptures of mainstream gendered structures and power hierarchies and as entangled with heteronormative assumptions of friendship and romance. Compared to school, online communities seem to offer a more fruitful ground for non-normative explorations of youth gender and sexuality. Entangled with human and non-human elements, online communities have the capacity to enable transgressive expressions of gender and sexuality through creative visions and connections to wider terrains of LGBTIQ+ cultures. Intriguingly, our Friendship workshops seemed to operate as sort of an intermediate-space, as they enabled expressions of transgressive gender and sexuality through artmaking, iterative activities, and multichannel reinforcement. In the material-discursive workshop composition, it became possible for diverse gender and sexual expressions to be openly articulated and extend to school and its cis-/heteronormative practices. The results underline the meaning of space in forming and shaping pre-teen diverse gender and sexual expressions and relationalities. Furthermore, they offer insights in those material-discursive entanglements that already promote non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality in young people’s lives. By drawing from these, we can enable educational spaces for pre-teens to express their gender and sexuality and to discuss with their peers, educators, researchers, and decision makers, about how to address these themes in ethical, encouraging ways.

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