Author: genderanded

Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) are an Australian-based, international feminist collective committed to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. One of their interventions is Cite Club, an e-mail group where #FEAS send their works to one another and cite one another where possible. As part of our ongoing collaboration with #FEAS, each month GEA profiles a Cite Club publication on this blog. September’s Cite Club featured a Special Issues of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory edited by Helena Pedersen and Barbara Pini.

Educational epistemologies and methods in a more-than-human world

Pedersen, H. and Pini, B. (Eds). (2017) Educational epistemologies and methods in a more-than-human world [Special Issue]. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49:11, pp. 1051 – 1124.

Despite increasing calls amongst educational researchers to disrupt the privileging of the human in knowledge-making, many of us feel a strong sense of ‘cognitive dispossession’ (Braidotti 2017) when trying to let go of familiar ‘humanist’ concepts, thoughts and ontologies. Pederson and Pini (2017, p. 1051) note that these humanist approaches often ‘carry the epistemological promise that the world is accessible for us as researchers and possible to understand and conceptualize as a source of endless scientific knowledge production and accumulation’. When seeking to rid ourselves of humanisms epistemic orthodoxies, searching instead for ‘new’ post-humanist and post-anthropocentric paradigms, we can reproduce the same ‘illusions of control over our research process’ and reinforce the ‘machinery of thought-production’ (Pederson and Pini, 2017, p. 1051).

Collectively this Special Issue urges us to ‘push against “the given” in educational research in diverse and unsettling ways’ (Pederson and Pini 2017, p. 1053). The place of method and methodology is questioned. We are invited to revolt against the ‘belief that the method one chooses to guide research determines its truth, its legitimacy, its validity, and its trustworthiness’ and encouraged instead to play with methods that are ‘emergent with the research’ (Snaza and Weaver 2017, pp. 1056 – 63) or begin with ‘concept as method’ (St. Pierre 2017, p. p. 1087).

Analysis is also unsettled. Gough and Gough draw on their collaborative biographical writing to explore ‘what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry’ (2017, p. 1112). Mazzei and Youngblood-Jackson offer a different consideration of voice in their qualitative interview data: attributing it to a complex assemblage of human and nonhuman agents and challenging normalizing assumptions about ‘voice as simply spoken words emanating from a conscious subject’ (2017, p. 1090).

Cracking and rupturing conventional analyses of the over-coded world of young sexualities, Renold and Ringrose (2017) illuminate the complex ambiguities of phallocentric power relations operating in teen girls and boys digitally-mediated peer cultures. Their dynamic accounting draws on posthuman feminist theory to acknowledge yet deterritorialize the binary machines that hold in place ‘dichotomous offline-online social worlds, risky “victims” and abusive “perpetrators”, and heteronormative gender bifurcations which tether masculinity to boy bodies and femininity to girl bodies’ (Renold and Ringrose 2017, pp. 1075 – 76).

Whilst Renold and Ringrose emphasize radical uncertainty and the power of the not-yet as a means of rupturing dominant codes, Wallin’s paper views the uncertainty of planetary futures as a ‘painful reminder of the limits, contingency, and impermanence of our human existence’ (Pederson and Pini 2017, p. 1053). He argues that educational pessimism, resonating with the current climatological crises, may offer a new disposition from which to ‘reassess the ideals of progress and optimism that continue to regulate pedagogical expression’ within the ‘ambit of affective capitalism’ (Wallis 2017, p. 1108). By pushing questions of educational research into such ‘insecure territories’ this Special Issue addresses a range of complex issues and spotlights some of the shifts catalyzed by thinking ‘beyond the fantasy of human control’ (Pederson and Pini 2017, p. 1051).

Written by Kim Beasy and Loren Dyer

In Australia, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) young people report high levels of bullying, harassment, and discrimination at school, resulting in negative educational and health outcomes. Previous Australian research has identified significant need for LGBTI-inclusive schooling environments. Our project will investigate these environments by drawing on the voices of school staff to construct an interactive web-based resource which will further support school staff in creating inclusive environments.

The website will be based on data collected as a part of a partner project conducted in Tasmania, Australia. This project currently underway is being conducted by the University of Tasmania in partnership with the state’s gender, sexuality and intersex support and education service ‘Working It Out’ . A number of school staff from around the state are being interviewed about supporting LGBTI students in Tasmanian schools. Researchers are seeking to explore the needs of school staff in creating and sustaining inclusive school environments and how school staff already support LGBTI students.

We will use the data generated from these interviews to create a web-based resource about the knowledge, attitudes and approaches of school staff to LGBTI-inclusive teaching practice and school cultures. We hope through this project to explore alternative ways of communicating practice and engage teachers in culturally responsive pedagogies.

We will be focusing on the way that language and bodies are used in creating safe and inclusive spaces in schools. While information about gender and sexuality is important, teaching practices in culturally responsive pedagogies extend beyond the need to transmit information. Teaching in ways that are inclusive of diverse sexualities and genders involves a vast range of strategies for creating language-based spaces. In this project, we are interested in these strategies and how they can be communicated to others. We are also interested in what these language spaces might look like, and how they might be considered ‘safe’ and ‘inclusive’. We would particularly like to explore a way of communicating that shows how language-based safe spaces might work.

When looking at the public resources available to teachers and students through government and non-government organisations in Australia, we found that they are mostly print-based. Brochures, posters and websites use exemplars and suggest practices in ways that are designed to inform people about gender and sexuality diversity rather than communicating the indirect techniques for creating safe spaces. The resource we will develop will be interactive – it will allow visitors to navigate multiple narratives about teaching practices in a way that allows them to create their own space, going beyond ideas of safety. We plan to develop the website with gaming and multimodal design techniques; using words, images and abstract spatial representations to reflect the power of language and the spaces created by language.

The website will be a prototype – we hope to expand it in the future to include student voices and experiences as well. We hope that our website will actively engage its users in a critical interpretation of other people’s experience of practices of inclusion, and act as an access point for a collation of current understandings and techniques in regards to inclusive pedagogies.

This post has been a while in the making, there have been other drafts, many engaging and reflective email exchanges about form and content, and many personal and professional life events both uplifting and challenging since we met in June. But the luxury of time to reflect on our first institutional visit and what has come out of it has been important. The visit itself – to host and be hosted in the home institution of a colleague with whom we are building new partnerships, both professionally and personally, with few strings attached – is a rare and significant intervention in a ‘rankings’ and ‘output’ world. Metrics, workloads, and casualization make different forms of academic identity and ways of knowing more or less possible. Here we are challenged to imagine, and work towards ‘alternative’ educational futures and to re-think concepts of futurity that themselves turn (back) on neo-liberal, reproductive, and (hetero)normative temporal logics.

When reporting back on what was done, what was found out and what was achieved, as is now so often required, we, as academic sometimes lapse into grand statements of world-changing impact and findings ‘found’. Often, questions of transformation around sexual politics and identities form a narrative of progressive change, but what is also found woven through the same works is an accompanying narrative of partial ‘stasis’, or ‘lack of change’ (Ekins and King, 2006: 222). Sex education in particular is messy field, where sex and relationship education is neither consistent nor systematic. There are still many inconsistencies surrounding the provision of sex education in schools, even tough it is globally accepted that young people have a right to school-based sexuality education (WHO, 2010). And there are huge gaps between official sexuality education and diverse young people’s lived experiences (Sundaram and Sauntson, 2016).

We want to be modest, and mindful, of the work underway, aware too that there is much more to come and be shared in conversations between institutions, across borders, lost in policies, and found in quieter sustained conversations. There is much we have been ‘translating’ in our conversations across our Chinese-Scottish locations. Here is a brief version of where-we-are-now, in moving near and far:

Prof. Yvette Taylor hosted Dr. Lauren Misiaszek at the University of Strathclyde from 12-16 June, 2017. To continue to develop this project and explore future funding opportunities to advance its agenda, the visit included various meetings together and with colleagues in education, sociology, and the humanities, as well as a meeting with faculty-level leadership to discuss the Gender and Education Association (GEA) Fund and these future possibilities. We discussed grant proposals drawing on many of the themes of our Fund project, and continued some of these discussions in the Strathclyde Feminist Research Network, and the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (FWSA) conference held at Strathclyde. Lauren also participated in two invited Strathclyde lectures, further connecting to the larger GEA and/or Strathclyde community of faculty and students, and submitting her chapter ‘China with “foreign talent” characteristics: a “guerrilla” autoethnography of performing “foreign talentness” in a Chinese university’ to the edited collection Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures (Taylor and Lahad, eds, 2018).

This chapter resonates with Pereira’s (2017) analysis of the importance of ‘being modern and foreign’ in relation to credible and authoritative epistemic status.

Aware of our implicatedness in being ‘modern and foreign’, we then traveled to participate together and individually in GEA 2017 at Middlesex University in London, which allowed us our first experience of presenting this project publically together (purposefully, simply titled ‘Developing critical feminist sex education in teacher training institutions (Scotland and China): a discussion on our 2016/2017 GEA Fund project’), and of receiving feedback on our initial work. We also continued to meet about our next steps. Since the visit, we have learned we received one of the grants – pilot funding around the pedagogical practice of council circles from the University of Newcastle (Australia), called Gender-Health-Education Council (GHEC): Global Pedagogies for Practitioners. We are considering how this project may provide focus for the participants (including community partners, students, and colleagues) in our Fund project this coming fall semester. Simultaneously, we have begun to plan Yvette’s visit to Beijing Normal during Spring 2018.

But, what does all of this mean for us?

We have had freedom to think about our own process and tough questions at the core of our work, including how do we…:

• continue to evolve our project, both theoretically and methodologically, in response to current events and/or (inter)national agendas around sex education? What about writing about them in a blog like this when our work is in progress and the topics are considered ‘sensitive’, a term we are exploring?
• respond to the pressures to embody ‘global capital’? To promote our project as “global”?
• find meaning early-mid/mid-trajectory in professional settings? For us, this was about the reflective experience of getting to reflect together after Strathclyde seminars and meetings, preparing and presenting together for the first time, for those unexpected moments of rethinking the ‘taken for granted’ of the conference space, and for long, uninterrupted conversations outside the formal setting
• build slow, simmering partnerships that can outlast grant cycles?

Universities ‘internationalise’ in marketing themselves as global institutions, competing to attract elite international students and hyper-mobile staff, establishing transnational partnerships and ‘satellite’ campuses. Concurrently HEIs are implicated in the maintenance of racialized borders whether in the monitoring of the immigration status of (some) staff and students, in the statutory duty to engage with ‘counter terrorism’ agendas such as ‘Prevent’ in the UK, and in the enduring and often unmarked whiteness and coloniality of curricula and disciplinary cannons. Likewise, ‘equality and diversity’ are increasingly institutionalized, in initiatives such as Athena Swan, yet it is clear that while HEIs measure and market their ‘happy diversity’ (Ahmed 2009) and institutional commitments to ‘diversity’ can be non-performative in practice (Ahmed 2012). Not unrelated, to return to our first question above, the drive to include diversity on school curriculum can be a specific neoliberal drive to get this ‘right’ as a matter of measurement (e.g. fewer teenage pregnancies as a measure of success) and technocratic efficiency. Again, we see the problematic return to, and perhaps inevitable use of, liberal notions of progressiveness and recognition (Binnie, 2011).

We pause on what the next steps of the project will look like: Will there be a shift in the sense of what sexuality studies is doing, beyond proliferating more case study examples? Will there be generational and geographical tensions or resolve in having ‘been there and done that’ (Arondekar and Patel, 2016) or in being ‘new for some but very old for others’ (de Sousa Santos, 2012?) Recognizing the work that is being done to challenge and orient away from historically dominant research landscapes, we will continue to ask, in the context of this sexual health education project, what kinds of pedagogies and methodologies are needed to resist and rework educational borders and barriers? How does the project balance material, concrete interventions from the local to the international while simultaneously considering how to shift?

Investigators:  

Fellow sci-fi fans may remember the TV series Heroes, in which ordinary people develop superpowers. Their mission centres on one character, Claire Bennet, a high-school cheerleader with the power to regenerate herself. The superheroes’ mantra is, ‘Save the cheerleader, save the world’.

Claire’s precise role in world-saving I can’t explain, because I stopped watching (along with most of the rest of the audience) before the seasons played out, but the mantra stayed with me. Claire Bennet came to mind as I began to think about my latest research exploring girls and leadership, because she embodies so many of the qualities of the successful girl discourse – a discourse that, like her, is proving remarkably resilient.

Saving the world (market)

In similar fashion to the ways girls are seen as the key to advancing progress in developing countries, girls in the global North are an increasing focus of attention as the solution to gendered inequalities in decision-making roles. Pre-loaded with girl-power and post-feminist narratives of women’s success in making change, the ‘can-do’ girl of the affluent West is tasked with the mission of saving the world through taking charge of it.  At the same time as The European Commission and The World Economic Forum are raising concerns about the slow progress toward gender equity in power, calls are being made, post global economic crash, for more ethical, careful and connected forms of leadership to avert future disasters of a similar nature. These forms of leadership are popularly gendered as female, as for example in the Lehman Sisters hypothesis. Both political and corporate discourses are thus coalescing around girls as the potential leaders who can deliver a more equal and therefore more secure future. In short, to avert disaster the free market looks to the fearless girl rather than to regulation.

Saving the cheerleader

A quick search of Twitter throws up programmes, websites, and motivational speakers galore all promising to empower girls and develop their capacity for leadership. Among the most prominent is Ban Bossy, which extends Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In corporate feminism to address girls through mobilising celebrities and providing advice and resources to encourage leadership aspirations. The model of leadership it offers reproduces and revivifies some of the central tenets of neoliberal postfeminisms with its emphasis on self-regulation, its focus on individual and capitalist solutions to gender inequalities, and its privileging of entrepreneurship. ‘Change the world!’ the Ban Bossy Leadership Tips for Girls brochure advises, because ‘running a campaign gives you amazing practice for speaking and marketing yourself as a leader’.

While under neoliberal governmentality female citizenship is redefined and redirected away from political participation and towards self-actualisation through consumer citizenship, girls’ leadership campaigns do focus on addressing gendered inequalities through developing a public role; however, the inequalities are represented as barriers to personal ambition rather than as social ills in themselves. As such they are surmountable through the development of skills in self-sufficiency, networking and public speaking. The kind of agency girls’ leadership campaigns promise is not equally accessible to all; like many aspirational discourses aimed at young women, it exhorts girls to believe in themselves and to work hard, offering the promise that they can achieve their goals with sufficient commitment and by creating an attractively branded self. As well as a glossing over of structural barriers, there is a lacuna in popular girls’ leadership promotions where strategies for fostering solidarity, collectivism and activism should appear in order to address them. The girl leader fit for salvation here is Grainne McMahon’s good ambassador, not her shadow twin, the angry activist.

I’m with her

Power, as Mary Beard has noted, is “an elite thing, coupled to public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called ‘leadership’, and often, though not always, to a degree of celebrity”. It is this relationship with visibility and celebrity that is foregrounded in interventions around girls and leadership. Hillary Clinton framed her 2016 presidential campaign as an exercise in girl-empowerment; Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Michelle Obama are pledging to Ban Bossy, while here in the UK, Edwina Dunn’s The Female Lead project has produced a glossy book of 60 ‘amazing women from around the world’ pitched at schools. It could be argued that projects like Dunn’s and Sandberg’s are long overdue – a recent study for the World Association of Girls Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) suggests that girls struggle to name female leaders they admire, and that they are far more likely to identify men as successful leaders.  Access to role models is popularly held to be the key to the development of girls’ leadership aspirations. However, the holding up of celebrities and highly visible role models as the answer to overcoming barriers to leadership for girls is problematic. Young people are consistently instructed that they should not base their aspirations around celebrities. Even when celebrity role models are offered to them, the ways in which girls are expected to admire such models is heavily policed within celebrity discourse itself.

Celebrity aside, the incentives to developing a visible role/public voice in terms of leadership for girls are scant – we are witnessing a rise in public misogyny particularly directed at women politicians and campaigners, especially BME women, on social media.

At the same time, traditional media sources continue represent women leaders in demeaning, diminishing and stereotyped ways – by coincidence, as I start to write this blog with BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today news programme on in the background, the (male) presenter describes the (female) prime minister’s Brexit negotiating tactics as ‘showing a bit of leg’. The (male) politician being interviewed responds without raising objection.

The research

In this project, together with my colleague Hannah Yelin, I seek to gain understanding of l the gendered nature of popular discourses of leadership, to explore girls’ engagements with highly visible women leaders in global media texts, and to gain insight into how these relate to their own ideas, identities, experiences, and imagined futures.  I am undertaking the first phase this autumn, with the support of the GEA. This involves conducting a series of group interview/workshops in schools across England with girls aged 14-15. Participants will discuss ideas about leadership, and then go on to create digital social media collages in dedicated closed groups. These collages will form a visual archive for later comparison in wider European settings.

We launched the project with an event this summer: Who Runs the World? Girls, Celebrity and Leadership, where we had brilliant papers from Heather Mendick,  Janet Batsleer & Grainne McMahon, and Anita Biressi followed by a lively roundtable. As well as sharing some initial findings on the GEA site, we will be holding a public engagement event in 2018 exploring some of the implications. To find out more about the project contact Michele Paule.

When I was 13, I took a train to Birmingham with a friend. The train conductor came to inspect our tickets, before handing them back he lifted up our t-shirts and stamped our belly buttons. He returned to the driver’s cabin, laughing.

This and many other memories of bodily intrusions have been on my mind this week as the words ‘me too’ reverberated across social media.

In response to growing reports of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “Suggested by a friend: If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Since Sunday friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances (mostly women and non-binary people) have been sharing their stories of being groped, grabbed, leered at, cornered, flashed, stalked, violated, raped.

Me too. These words have a history.

In 2006 Tarana Burke founded the ‘me too’ movement to aid survivors, particularly young women of colour, in communities where sexual assault services were under-resourced or non-existent. In a statement about ‘me too’ Burke told Ebony Magazine, “it was a catchphrase to be used from survivor to survivor to let folks know that they were not alone and that a movement for radical healing was happening and possible.”

In the aftermath of renewed discussions about sexual assault in Hollywood, the words have picked up pace as a feminist hashtag. #MeToo has sparked conversations and connections, opened up wounds, been left unspoken but nevertheless felt and incited anger and frustration.

A growing body of literature documents how feminist hashtags can provide ‘comforting solidarities and connections between strangers’, as well as entry points to wider feminist communities (Keller, Mendes and Ringrose 2016, p. 12; Williams 2015). However, they can also draw upon, and rearticulate, long-standing inequalities within feminist activism (Khoja-Moolji 2015). For example, the initial credit given to Milano rather than Burke for #MeToo perpetuated the diminishment of black women’s experiences and work within feminism (Hill 2017).

Like others (see here, here, here), I questioned what the hashtag was doing and who it was for. I wondered why the onus was on women to reveal their pain and worried about friends who had shared raw experiences. At times it felt blasé to me – ‘of course we’ve all been sexually harassed and/or assaulted, who is this news to?!’ At others I felt angry as close male friends fumbled their attempts to acknowledge the problem – ‘How do you still not get it?!’

Before I had the words to describe how sexism shaped my world, I had many ‘me too’ moments with girl friends. Conversations that, as Sara Ahmed notes, can act as a ‘drip, drip’ and eventually a flood as you connect your experience with the experience of others (Ahmed 2017, p. 30). I have epic friendships built on this ‘releasing of the pressure valve’ (Ahmed 2017, p. 30). Most notably my best friend Tari with whom a friendship began 13 years ago over shared experiences of ‘coming out’: for her as a mixed race woman, for me as a lesbian.

Of course, ‘women may have common situations and experiences, but they are not, in anyway way, the same’ (Braidotti 2011, p. 156).

This week Tari’s #MeToo post drew attention to the fact that the world has never really respected and understood her body as her own. Her rights to bodily autonomy have been impeded not only by the men who’ve assaulted her, but the women and men who have touched her hair without permission or shouted ‘afro!’ at her in the street.

In my #MeToo post I nodded to the fact that my most recent experiences of sexual harassment have been from men on the gay scene (Tari has also experienced this). Men who tickled my crotch as they walked past me or squeezed my boob, acts that both intimidated and made me feel unwelcome in a space that was supposed to be safe.

The phrase ‘Me Too’ works as a refrain, to draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept, a scoring over of the world’s repetitions, that marks and expresses territories (Youngblood Jackson 2016). Its recurrence weaves together communities of solidarity and simultaneously maps the persistence over time of the sexual violence that elicits it. Each utterance is different from the other, branching off and connecting territories; what we call ‘patriarchy’, ‘misogyny’, ‘heteronormativity’, ‘racism’ or ‘white privilege’. These deeply entrenched territories are marked out by repeating forces of domination and control.

Me Too. These two little words channel the enduring felt force of subjugating systems, the ways they minimize and diminish us. Yet, they also exceed these systems. Me Too.

With each repetition, the ‘refrain becomes more and more mobile, going somewhere – destination unknown’ (Youngblood Jackson 2016, p. 20). Bertelson and Murphie (2010, p.145) remind us that refrains are ‘not just closures but openings to possible change’. With this in mind, I want to end by considering how the intensified situation of a feminist hashtag might be put to work in schools. How might we harness the energy of #MeToo in a way that enables young people to safely and creatively challenge gender inequalities and oppressive gender norms?

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Gender Equality Leadership in Schools (GELS)

Hosted by the Gender and Education Association, GELS helps educators and young people raise awareness of and address gender inequalities. One way in which this work is being taken up in schools is through student-led feminist clubs. Hanna Retallack, an intersectional feminist teacher and researcher, notes that these collectives provide vital space for young people to ‘discuss the issues denied to them by the curriculum’, including the ‘intersectional inequalities that lie at the root of sexual violence and harassment, as well as the structural injustices affecting them both personally and politically’ (Retallack 2016, para 7).

AGENDA: A Young People’s Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter

Calling out sexual and gender inequalities is not without risk. Utilising the powerful potential of creative methods, such as the visual arts, poetry & theatre, can enable young people to make the personal political without revealing too much of themselves. The interactive Welsh tool-kit AGENDA is packed full of inspiring art-activisms that can help young people engage with all too frequently silenced issues. Developed by Professor Emma Renold and young people in Wales, the toolkit has equality, diversity, children’s rights and social justice at its heart.

Do you have thoughts about the pedagogical potential of hashtag feminism in educational institutions? Consider writing us a blog, we’d love to keep this discussion going.

References

Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bertelson, L. and Murphie, A. 2010. An ethics of everyday infinities and powers: Felix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain. In: Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (eds). 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New Yor: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Keller, J., Mendes, K., and Ringrose, J. 2016. Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture. Journal of Gender Studies [Online]. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1211511 [Accessed 20 August 2016].

Khoja-Moolji, S. 2015. Becoming an “Intimate Publics”: Exploring the Affective Intensities of Hashtag Feminism. Feminist Media Studies 15(2), pp. 347 – 350.

Williams, S. 2015. Digital Defense: Black feminists resist violence with hashtag activism. Feminist Media Studies 15(2), pp. 341 – 344.

Youngblood Jackson, A. 2016. Potentializing a Deleuzian Refrain. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5(4), pp. 20 – 23.