Isn’t this just about lesbians? Teaching hegemonic geographies of sexualities and genders here and now

ABSTRACT

While feminist and queer pedagogic literatures can celebrate the inclusion of “other lives”, and the successes of their endeavours, this paper seeks to focus on the “here” and everyday hegemonies of heterosexualities and masculinities and the “failings” inherent to teaching practices. When engaging Irish and UK students in learning about geographies of genders and sexualities teaching about hegemonies seeks to perform a political pedagogy of questioning privilege from our positionings. The teaching that I discuss is informed by student and popular presumptions about places such as Ireland and the UK as “sorted” and, indeed, “leaders” in terms of progress about sexualities (and gender identities). Such presumptions not only create specific geopolitical regimes, but have specific classroom manifestations. In this paper, I reflect on my presumed “outness” and deliberate non-namings in shared/communal spaces, extending the discussion of “here” to include how personal-institutional-national nexus create, and are created by, teaching spaces. Thus, the paper explores diverse possibilities for teaching social difference and how pedagogies are always geographically created.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• gender
• gay
• LGBT
• feminism
• queer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The focus of this paper is on teaching around sexualities, but also gender identities, including trans, intersex and other genders. Thus, this paper pertains both to sexualities geographies and gender/feminist geographies.

2. It should be noted that national contexts are also important, throughout this century the UK has been moving towards tolerance and acceptance of particular forms of sexual and gender identities, a significant shift from the era of Section 28 in the 1990s, which “banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools” (Browne and Bakshi, 2013). In Ireland 2015 saw the passing of same sex marriage by two-thirds of the population in a referendum and in 2018 the removal of the 8th amendment enabling broader access to abortion in the Republic.

3. In both Brighton and Maynooth, widening access to University education, state school educated, non-traditional students from diverse class and increasingly ethnic backgrounds was and is core to the Universities missions. Brighton became a University from being a polytechnic after 1992, and as such was not seen as “prestigious” in the imaginings and ranking of Universities in the UK. Maynooth became a University in 1997. However, despite its “new” status is one of the seven Universities. The higher education system also contains Institutes of Technology and colleges of further education. Students in Brighton join specific degrees, such as BA Geography, BSc Environmental Science, whereas in Maynooth students start on broad degrees, such as Arts degrees and then specialize in their final years. In Maynooth, I have taught at final year and Masters levels, in Brighton I taught first-third years. In Brighton, students had relatively restricted choice in the first year and then a full range of choices in the final year. Maynooth students final year options are open to a range of choices within and beyond Geography. In Maynooth, modules tend to be taught individually or perhaps between two people, in Brighton team teaching was more common until specialist modules in the final year which tended to be taught predominantly by one individual.

4. These were generic human geography modules, which included “social geography” as a section. It was often the first time that students encounters issues such as class, race, gender, and sexuality as geography and very often this was seen as Sociology.

5. The National Student Survey is an annual survey of students in the final year. Departments and Universities need to encourage a specific response rate to reach particular thresholds. The response rates alongside the responses by students to questions regarding lectures, feedback, library and support services create ranked tables both by department and institution. These tables are made public and appear to have an important influence in how prospective students choose their course. As funding is directly tied to student numbers, this can mean departments are seen as unviable.