'Fallen Angel': making a space for queer identities in schools

This paper is an examination of an artwork produced by a sixth-form student who explores the prohibited spaces of queer lives. She does so through the production of an installation, a dominant format in contemporary art, in which space is a central semiotic vehicle. Rather than choosing a confessional strategy, she distances herself from her own emerging lesbian identity by imagining these spaces from the subject position of a young gay male. This process enables her to engage audiences in questioning the historical and social structures that reproduce heteronormativity without falling into the tropes of popular confession. With reference to the work of Judith Butler, I analyse how the student enacts and reconfigures representations of gender and sexuality to afford a space for the construction of queer identities.