Blogging Pedagogy - sexuality

Dealing with Discomfort in Classroom Discussions

Kate Stevenson — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:16:31 +0000

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Image Credit:

Miami Classroom by Fredler Brave, from Wikipedia

Looking through the tags on Blogging Pedagogy earlier this semester, Rhiannon Goad’s lone post tagged “trans*” jumped out at me. In my experience, graduate students talk a lot amongst ourselves about uncomfortable, uncertain, or potentially hurtful situations we encounter in our classrooms, but we don’t often write about them or discuss them with our faculty mentors. If you’re like me, Rhiannon’s post may not have brought up memories of experiences with trans* students specifically, but it probably brought up at least one memory of a difficult to navigate situation involving a fraught topic like race, gender, or sexuality in our classrooms. Thinking back on my own teaching experiences, I wonder when we as instructors should intervene in these situations, and how we can keep our classrooms feeling as safe as possible for all of our students while also keeping our discussions open and honest.

I can think of one good example of a classroom incidents when I had to decide whether or not to intervene because of something that a student said during a discussion. While we were talking about a novel assigned in a British literature course, one of my students raised her hand and described a character using a string of offensive words. Half of the class turned to stare at her; the other half looked down at their books, squirming awkwardly. At first, I froze too. Should I call this student out on her offensive statement? Should I continue the discussion as if nothing happened? Should I start a discussion about the terminology that’s acceptable in this classroom? Finally, I asked her to "clarify" what she had said, and under the disapproving gaze of her classmates, she used different words. Later I wondered: Did I do enough to make the classroom feel safe for my other students? Should I have confronted this student about the repercussions of what she said? Should I have spoken to her in class or outside of class? Should I have followed up with some discussion about what we all heard?

When possible, I try not to intervene in classroom discussions, especially with older, more talkative students like the ones in my current rhetoric class. Teaching the Rhetoric of Tourism, race and gender are common topics of discussion; students deserve the space to resolve disagreements and fully discuss "awkward" topics amongst themselves. And obviously, all of our students cannot be completely comfortable with what is said in the classroom one hundred percent of the time. But what are some things we can do to make our classrooms feel safe(r), in Rhiannon’s words, for most of our students most of the time?

1. Model the language that we want to see used in our classrooms. This means discouraging the use of derogatory language as well as correcting incorrect language. This has been especially important in my Rhetoric of Tourism classroom, where my students often come across inflammatory and offensive texts and grapple with how to describe other people's often bigoted opinions.

2. Admit that there are problems with race, gender, and sexuality that merit discussion. My students are fond of referring to racism as something that “used to happen” or that was an issue “back in the day,” and they tend to avoid mention of sexuality at all costs. As instructors, we can interrogate the tendency to avoid these issues instead of letting them be swept under the rug, and use current examples to remind our students that discrimination is not a thing of the past.

3. Hold everyone accountable. We all want to avoid confrontation with our students, but that doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with insensitive comments. When a student says something offensive or makes a generalization, question them: “Why do you say that?” “What makes you think so?” or even simply, “Always?” “Everyone?” can be effective ways to coax students into reflecting on their beliefs and experiences.

4. This means holding yourself accountable, too. Was I projecting some of my own discomfort and fear of confrontation onto my students in the literature classroom? Undoubtedly. It’s just as important to keep a dialogue open with ourselves as with our students, about what our own conscious or subconscious prejudices are, what we feel particularly emotional about, and what makes us uncomfortable and why.

5. Work on your own demeanor. As we’ve all experienced, discussions about topics like race, gender, and sexuality can quickly change the atmosphere of a classroom from relaxed to incredibly fraught. We should do our best to project openness and trust, not anxiety. We can try to model the behavior we’d like to see your students exhibit towards each other.

Foucault Vivant

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:05:30 +0000

Author:

Pearl Brilmeyer

Image Credit:

Bruce Jackson

Teaching Foucault to undergraduates can be a daunting task. However, I find that an enthusiastic group can handle short portions with ease when appropriately prepared.

As an instructor of sexuality studies, I regularly teach the introduction to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. While I've taught this text in the context of a rhetoric course on monogamy, this semester it grounded the historical unity of my course, Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture in the English Department. Notoriously difficult, this introduction is often misread due to the failure of scholars to pick up on Foucault's sarcastic tone, as he narrates the "history of sexuality," traditionally understood. In the past, I've had trouble conveying this tone to my students, who, like many of us have been taught that "theory" is serious stuff. This bias makes it difficult to get Foucault's jokes and miss the point that the "history" Foucault begins with is a kind of "story" we tell ourselves, as the French word "l'histoire" connotes.

I wanted to create a lesson plan that would lighten up class discussion and make transparant Foucault's joking tone. I also wanted to focus our discussion on the construction of historical narratives, and to talk about the relationship of narrative to history. This in-class assignment was designed to help students understand Foucault's theory of the "repressive hypothesis" by physicalizing the "story" he tells in the introduction of The History of Sexuality. Engaging with the humorous aspect of this introduction, students are asked to act out, in the fashion of the tableau vivant, scenes in throughout the parodic history Foucault seeks to overturn. In small groups students used the computers to find music to accompany their assigned paragraph/scene. We then performed them as a class, while I narrated the first few paragraphs of the text.

Image Credit: OldOnliner

In my class, I have a students with a range of familiarity with gender and sexuality theory--some are women's and gender studies majors and others have little experience thinking about gender and sexuality in a theoretical way. In general, the queer theory "pros" in class found the assignment a bit juvenile. Before the exercise, they pouted a bit about having to treat such a serious text in a silly manner and many expressed annoyance at having to perform in front of the class.

Others, particularly those for whom "theory" was a more foreign object, however, completed the assignment in good humor and discovered creative ways to represent various stages in Foucault's parody of the tale of Victorian prudishness from which we need to liberate ourselves. The performance ended with the final group ripping a piece of paper on which they had written "Freud"--a silly, but succinct way of conveying Foucault's call to move beyond the narrative of repression/liberation.

In general, there were a lot of laughs and the assignment helped students visualize the "history of sexuality" Foucault was attempting to counter in the rest of the book.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder