Queering the Classroom

Most Praxis programs include some sort of “job” type aspect, either working for an organization, or observing a classroom of students, or something else along those lines. As Staceyann Chin tells us about “Girls who are only straight at night, hardcore butches be sporting dresses between 9 & 6 every day.  Sometimes she is a he, trapped by the limitations of our imaginations.” (Stayceyann Chin “Feminist or a Womanist” (transcribed) .") This is why Gen/ Sex praxis would have to be different. Because working with LGBTQ advocacy programs, working for people who are openly gay, or anything of the like is so different than just seeing these “Girls in tight dresses, who drag with moustaches” living their lives openly. No one can see sexuality on paper or read gender. You can see and read theories on these but there is a devastating confinement of the potential for learning by keeping things all books and discussion. There is definitely something about putting yourself physically into a space with what you are learning about that takes it to another level. 

Our class represents several different races, different economic backgrounds and ages, but we are all feminists of a kind. We already know that categories are constraining and they rob people of their basic human rights on a daily basis. We know that sexuality is a spectrum and that gender is a mere performance. It’s the 15 yr old boy from Wyoming who has feelings for his best guy friend but can’t bear to be “gay” that needs this class. It’s the homophobic fundamentalist who doesn’t feel gay people are “god’s people”. Not until these people take classes in Gender and Sexuality programs will there be a chance for the LGBTQ community to be embraced fully by society. It’s that boy who grows up in Texas on a ranch who becomes president and “might hate his own daughter if she were gay” ("Dear Mr. President") that needs to be in these classes. I think the focus of the program should be along the same lines of how scientists pushed the teaching of Evolution in classes. People are not going to want their highschoolers learning about gender and sexuality as diversity just like they didn’t want their white boys and girls taking classes with black children. But if we ever want society to change and if we want to continue the movement of the Gender and Sexuality program we can not just stick to educating the educated about this. Coming from an area with little to no understanding for anyone non-WASP I am acutely aware of the pandemic of ignorance that is drowning the united states in hypocrisy and violation of the fundamental ideas of Separation of Church and State, Human and Democratic Rights.("Fundamental Principles of the Constitution.")

The best part of this class was the final projects. This is because Gender and Sexuality is as Paul Grobstein described during our first weeks in this course, ‘A series of stories that need to be constantly changed with new observation’  (Grobstein) My main frustration of the course was that we were hearing from people who had stories of the movements and ideas that lead to our how Gender and Sexuality are perceived today, but no one from today. When we did our final performances we were the present voices, coming into our class and talking about Gender and Sexuality as it is now. Where our ideas of feminism, perceptions of labelling, etc come from. For me, that took what we had been learning all term and put it in the context of where Gender and Sexuality belong: in people who are living it now. With a program that is changing so constantly, ideas that were once groundbreaking can sound mundane at best in only a few years. Looking back to the forum posts that I’ve read, I find the ones that tell me something about my classmates personally, and don’t just regurgitate some theory we learned from an author to be the most refreshing. This is because we have a class of current thinkers with great ideas. We are the women who are going to change the way people see, teach and react to Gender and Sexuality. To leave this knowledge go untapped would be a great waste. Posting papers and discussion online is a wonderful way to incorporate current thinkers into the discussion without having to break the ever-bearing ceiling of the time constraint of a 3hr/wk class.