Safe but not safe: LGBTTIQA+ students’ experiences of a university campus

This article explores an apparent contradiction in LGBTTIQA+ students' narratives around how safe they feel on campus. While declaring they feel ‘safe’ and supported by other students and staff, participants’ narratives contain a myriad of examples indicating they feel ‘unsafe’. These incidents emerge during photo-elicitation interviews where participants discuss photos they have taken of being LGBTTIQA+ on campus. This talk reveals episodes of name-calling, fear of coming out, lack of gender-neutral toilets and inclusive practices for pursuing discrimination. Instead of dismissing the discrepancy between these examples of discrimination and participants’ declaration that they feel ‘safe’ as illusionary, we seek to understand what this might reveal about the nuances of queerphobia’s operation on campus. We argue that participants’ state of feeling simultaneously ‘safe and unsafe’ is reflective of inconsistencies in their institutional treatment. While the university they attend actively supports LGBTTIQA+ students with a ‘Zero tolerance for discrimination’ policy, this campaign is not underpinned by structures and processes that are truly inclusive. The way participants feel represents an embodied materialisation of discrepancies in this institutional approach. The study reveals the complex way queerphobia operates, enabling institutional actions to be responsive, and yet, still discriminatory.