Education that always already links genderism with racism and classism

In my formulation (see the definitions below the header), gender-normativity involves the qualifiers 'locally' and 'momentarily or perpetually'. I think that it's important to be clear on what I mean by including these qualifiers, and this is excerpt from my upcoming AERA conference paper spells out the main reason why I include them: doing anti-genderism in coalition with other anti-oppression projects.

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I use the terms genderism, gender-normativity and gender non-normativity to denote a project that differs from the approach I have discussed. I define genderism as the pervasive and systemic belief in male/masculine and female/feminine as the only natural and acceptable gender identities and expressions. Gender-normativity is the privileged state lived, whether momentarily or perpetually, by those whose genders perceptibly 'fit' with locally-derived norms of (usually but not always) masculinity for those assigned male and femininity for those assigned female. On the other hand, gender non-normativity is the oppressed state lived, whether momentarily or perpetually, by those whose genders do not fit locally-derived norms for their assigned sex. In these definitions, the spatial qualifier ‘locally’ and the temporal qualifiers ‘momentarily or perpetually’ align with two reasons why I have found it necessary to generate or reclaim (see Airton, 2009a; 2009b) this terminology.

First, the spatial qualifier ‘locally’ names gender as inextricable from race and class. As a white gender non-normative queer, it is all-too-easy for me to elide my whiteness and, in the history of my family, my consequent middle-classness by highlighting the social traumas of my youth and the harassment that I face in clothing stores or on the bus. Because I have my parents’ whiteness, I will perpetually have access to the liberal space of higher education where my gender non-normativity will always flourish. Similarly, in asking students to name a new source of oppression in their lives (genderism), I am responsible for ensuring that white students do not elide their white privilege in the process. I do anti-racism and anti-genderism at the same time by keeping ‘gender’ local.

In my framing of it, ‘gender is generous’. The meaning of ‘generous’ is two-fold. First, if your gender accords with the norms of your community, you are given certain rights and freedoms there. Second, if you are of the dominant culture (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Anglophone, male/masculine or female/feminine and Christian) your rights and freedoms follow you everywhere. This is because your culture controls how power relations are structured through discourse and representation. Everyone has a local context wherein they are gender-normative and we have all had to learn how to do that gender-normativity. The gender-normativity privileged by the dominant culture, however, is only available to a few by virtue of their race, class, sexuality, etc. and the degree to which these are legible.

I will now move on to the temporal qualifiers ‘momentarily or perpetually’. These invoke the critical importance of examining one’s own experiences of gender-normative privilege or gender non-normative oppression, however fleeting these may be. In my experience, education on gender beyond the binary often begins with definitions of Other identities such as transsexual, transgender or intersex. This is intended to provoke students into realizing that gender is more than man or woman. In reality, however, most people who occupy these Othered spaces firmly identify as men or women. Homophobia and transphobia are consequently identified as the oppressions that police the boundaries between these Others and Ourselves. Even if we broaden homophobia and heterosexism to include their terrible effects upon heterosexuals who are momentarily or perpetually read as queer, their associations with queerness still preclude heterosexual students from naming themselves as subjected to them. And while transphobia denotes a gender-based oppression, it is only invoked if the recipient is transgender or transsexual, whether or not they live or identify as trans and are so perceived by their oppressors (c.f. Lamble, 2008).

Anyone can do gender wrong and suffer the consequences, but these rarely named as flowing from a gender-based oppression to which everyone is susceptible (see Airton, 2009b). By contrast, within an anti-genderist framework everyone is at one time or another gender non-normative and subject to genderist oppression or coercion for this failure to conform. I required new concepts that separated gender and sexuality with which to prompt largely gender-normative and heterosexual pre-service teachers to look critically at their own genders and name the processes that brought them to that – usually – male or female place. This is necessary for students to recognize the contingent nature of all genders, particularly their own. In direct opposition to the dominant mode of gender in teacher education that sees the individual as expert on everyone else’s gender while simultaneously denying that gender is individual, an anti-genderist pedagogy foregrounds the individual. My doctoral research will explore whether students of anti-genderist pedagogies understand themselves as contingent instead of model gendered subjects and, as anti-genderist teachers, whether they try to combat genderist hegemony in their classrooms.

glbtT-Siqq? Education for gender/sexuality justice that is also anti-racist

Last night I went to a lecture by Beverly Jacobs, President of the Native Women's Association of Canada who is also involved with the Sisters in Spirit project. The lecture titled "Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women" was phenomenal, humbling and pedagogically supreme. I felt like the inseparability of tradition and critique in Beverly Jacobs' lecture delivered a slap in the face to white racist and neo-colonialist commentators like Margaret Wente who dismiss thousands of years of knowledge and nation-building among the hundreds of nations that were intentionally (and which continue to be) eradicated under the Eurocentric colonial project.

Listening to Beverly Jacobs discuss the ceremonies and traditions of her clan (Mohawk Nation Bear Clan in Six Nations Grand River) particularly with regard to women and their centrality to any conversation on the impacts of continued genocide against indigenous peoples in Canada, at one point I began to ruminate on the imperative for specificity when including issues or concepts from the histories and/or knowledge bases of various indigenous peoples into anti-oppression organizing and education. More specifically, I have long been questioning the wisdom of tacitly white anti-homophobia organizations incorporating the T-S for 'two-spirit' in the alphabet soup acronym that is often represented like this: GLBTT-SIQQ.

I am concerned that organizations which have not worked on their race politics could enjoy a feel-good multicultural sensation when they include "two-spirit" in the list of identities to be itemized in, for example, a workshop. In my experience, definitions of this term enact a slippery pan-Indianism that hooks up with the problematic non-indigenous deployment of other terms such as 'shaman'. If 'two-spirit' is indiscriminately thrown into in an anti-homophobia educational context participants could leave carrying the erroneous notion that every 'tribe' has (or 'had' - in the tradition of colonial anachronism) 'a shaman' and, with the addition of two-spirit, that shamans 'have/had elements of both male and female'; such romanticized logic is often used to demonstrate how in some contexts trans people or queer people are/were universally 'revered' or 'given a special place in the tribe'.

In tune with Beverly Jacobs' injunction to last night's attendees to know whose land we are on as well as the traditions of those peoples, I would guess that people in the various educational contexts wherein I have encountered 'two-spirit' as part of the alphabet soup acronym, if they do know whose territory they are on, would likely not know whether 'two-spirit' carries any meaning for the nation whose territory it is.

In situations wherein I have to deal with the acronym and explain its components, my solution as someone who primarily identifies as a white anti-racist person while doing anti-homophobia education is to leave out the 'T-S' and, if asked about it, to offer the above critique of its inclusion in an sexualities/LGB mandate. I am not overly happy about this solution, but I think that it is better than giving participants a 'nugget' of colonial generality that they could henceforth feel entitled to wield as an interesting tidbit to 'liven up' the usual conversation on minority genders and sexualities.

I also do not wish to imply that the T-S is the only area of contention in the alphabet soup debates around what inclusion in the acronym means. Emi Koyama at Intersex Initiative Portland has a great piece about adding the I for intersex wherein she argues that the issues faced by intersex people are not bound up in sexuality-based organizing and fundamentally are not well-served by this inclusion. This is notably the case because inclusion in the acronym leads to the assumption that intersex people are, on the one hand, queer and, on the other, necessarily identify as 'intersex' within an identities-based framework for political organizing. The reality, that many if not most intersex people are heterosexual and male or female-identified, is obscured the association with the GLBT, etc. moniker.

There are also several critiques out there of the inclusion of the T for transgender and/or transsexual (depending on a facilitator's or organization's interpretation). An excellent anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique thereof is offered in Dean Spade's article "The nonprofit industrial complex and trans resistance".

And finally, I haven't even begun to address the particularly racist and colonial strangeness of including T-S in the Canadian context with its generally Eurocentric and orientalist aptitude for fetishizing all things indigenous...