Climate control teaching about Gender and sexuality in 2003 - Introduction - issue contents

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by J. Elizabeth Clark, Erica Rand, Leonard Vogt

We are writing our introduction to this special cluster issue on teaching about gender and sexuality just after The Bachelorette picked Ryan the poet-fireman, but only so he could propose to her--she could choose him, he could write poetry, but he still got to name that future. Meanwhile, a new season of Survivor features teams divided by sex, with scripted buzz-boosters about whether female skills might trump male strength, and why the women dumped the bikinis when the men weren't around; no one to attract without the bio guys, right? Sex, gender, and sexuality: tweaked here and there, but seemingly oh so stable or at least so our "reality" vendors try to reassure us.

Yet issues for teaching gender and sexuality in K-12 and college and university classrooms--where Women's Studies Programs have been sometimes renamed, often under contest, with "Gender" added to or substituted for "Women's"--have changed greatly over time, with the extent and nature of those changes depending on geographic, social, cultural, and political location. For example, while some schools have "Safe Space" programs for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and Title IX, now somewhat precariously, guarantees access for women athletes, many issues still abound like the heteronormative practices of "prom." For example, the Gay and Lesbian Student Education Network (GLSEN) reports that Grady Roper, an art teacher at Katherine Ann Porter School in Wimberley, Texas, was fired when his students produced a "controversial" art piece which he defended. Terrence Stutz of The Dallas Morning News wrote, "The art in question was a 30-by-10-foot mural painted by his students in the main hallway of the cha rter high school. The colorful mural contained numerous images--but some parents and school board members objected to a 2-by-2-foot section that showed two men kissing" (http://www.glsen.org/templates/news/record. html?section=12&record=936).

This anecdote suggests both how far we have come--how many students were putting gay men on murals twenty years ago?--as well as the difficulties people in schools face, not just from the residue of old values but from the effects of new retrenchments changing the socio-political landscape, especially since the election of President George W. Bush. We are living in dangerous times. Women face the very real danger of losing Roe v. Wade; unmarried mothers are being forced into marriage to keep their public assistance; Bush nominated conservative Jerry Thacker, who publicly referred to HIV as the "gay plague," for the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS; and surely there is no end in sight for the ridiculous policy; linked to sex-ed funding during the Clinton years, of promoting abstinence-only sex education and promotion of heterosexual family values. We could go on and on about how these selected domestic issues and their possible legal ramifications affect the national perception and lived experi ence of gender and sexuality. These attacks roll back the serious advances that have been made through the civil rights struggles for gender and sexual equity, despite a few gains, like the Sexual Orientation Non Discrimination Act, recently passed in New York State, which guarantees legal protection from discrimination in jobs and housing--a victory that indicates, in its shortcomings, how far we need to go, since its proponents refused to add to the act's wording protection from discrimination based on transgender status.

In general, the national climate presents an extremely negative framework for teaching gender and sexuality; even as female access to education is touted as a sign of a civilization and modernity absent in allegedly oppressed barbarian lands requiring liberating U.S. intervention. As the authors of Transnational Feminist Practices against War point out--without in any way minimizing difficulties women face regarding education and other resources--such a formulation obscures not only the traditional gender roles promoted for U.S. citizens by post-9/11 patriotism, but also the contribution of the U.S. and other countries on the supposed civilized side of the opposition to the conditions in which women live elsewhere. As they note, for instance, "many women in Afghanistan are starving and faced with violence and harm on a daily basis not only due to the Taliban regime but also due in large part to a long history of European colonialism and conflict in the region." (1)

Meanwhile, gender and race restrictions to education in the U.S. continue to get pushed through as activists struggle to mobilize on so many fronts. For instance, two days before February 15th, the international day of action against Bush's proposed war on Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR4, which would cut from 12 to 4 the number of months that welfare recipients can attend college in a 24-month period.

These are some of the contexts from which students enter our classrooms, often without the ability to distinguish between the concepts of and the differences between gender and sexuality. Sometimes they hold onto prescribed roles like lifelines in class discussion. In the radical classroom we do many things, and where critiques of race, ethnicity and class can threaten our students' sense of self, throwing in what can sometimes be perceived as yet another attack may be as far as students can go. When students experience a convergence of critiques that threaten so much of their complete identity, they tend to want to hold onto something-that something is often gender and sexuality. Yet some students also bring to our classrooms critiques, knowledges, and self-conceptions about gender and sexuality that expand our possibilities. In one first-grade classroom in Philadelphia, a hetero-promoting/presuming teacher asked her students to say whom they wanted to marry (how creepy is that?). One girl responds: "If I'm straight, I want to marry David; if I'm gay I want to marry Emily." (Maybe the teacher learned something when the parents she called to report the "problem" were not, in fact, troubled.) In a state college in Maine, a trans student organizes a panel of other trans-identified people to educate his class. These two anecdotes, among the many we could cite, show how teaching about gender and sexuality is slowly transforming education nationally (and globally!) in urban and rural places. We intend here to participate in that work.