Coming out, heteronormativity, and possibilities of intercultural learning in a Google Hangouts telecollaboration

This study offers an account of the coming out by Amy, a 20-year-old student of Japanese in Boston who has 'been out to most' as a cisgender lesbian woman, to Yoko, a 19-year-old student of English in Tokyo who experiences culture shock with Amy's revelation. The data originated from an exchange on Google Hangouts that was part of a US-Japan telecollaboration project. Our goal is to examine the impact of this coming-out event on the students' experience of the virtual exchange and on their long-term cross-cultural understandings of LGBTQ+ issues and sexual diversity. We first analyze how Amy and Yoko managed the critical event discursively. We then examine the participants' retrospections collected at the end of the project and again about 5 years later. We find that the two students co-constructed the coming-out event as one of transforming culture shock into a mutual opportunity for interpersonal bonding and intercultural learning. Nevertheless, they also reproduced stereotypical constructions of the US as a country that is open to sexual diversity and Japan as a country where queer lives are invisible. We call for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities and gender and sexuality diversity in language pedagogy and research.