“The Only Orange Park Bench”: Using Photo Elicitation to Explore Campus Experiences of LGBTIQA+ Students

Abstract

Photo methods have been recognized as a queer research method with the capacity to uncover the mundane and ignored experiences of daily life. This study uncovered experiences of contradiction for LGBTIQA+ students at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand. The image of a lone orange bench (when other benches are brown) on the outskirts of campus captured one of these contradictions from a participant who declared campus was “welcoming” as a cisgender gay man. However, when later talking about what the bench represented, he explained it was like “queer students”: “It should be celebrated for its uniqueness, but actually, it was really isolated and alone.” Photos, and associated narratives, draw attention to cisheteronormativity’s more nuanced forms, including an absence of nonbinary bathrooms and queer spaces for LGBTIQA+ students and a cisheteronormative process for addressing discrimination. It is argued that a broader definition of, and response to, LGBTIQA+ discrimination is required.