“If You Raised a Boy in a Pink Room … ?” Thoughts on Teaching Geography and Gender

Abstract

This article draws upon the author's experiences with designing and teaching a lower-level undergraduate course, Geography and Gender. It is proposed that there is a relative lack of resources available for conducting geography courses on gender, feminism, and/or sexuality and as such, this article addresses issues of text selection, course format, and evaluation measures. This consideration of course format is interwoven with a look at the challenges and, at times, discomforts of incorporating feminist pedagogies and open-ended discussions in the undergraduate classroom in order to teach gendered and sexed geographies.

Key Words:

• gender
• feminist pedagogy
• classroom discussions
• classroom discomfort

Acknowledgments

I thank Marcia England for sharing her successes with this course; her insights were invaluable to my go at it. Thanks to Rich Schein, Catherine Lockwood, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article. Responsibility for the final version remains my own.

Stephanie Simon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. Her research interests include urban, cultural, and political geographies of fear and security.

Notes

1. The course is not a requirement for Geography majors. It is a course that Majors may select from a list of other courses to fulfill a certain number of credit hours for geography courses. It is also an option for fulfilling a university-wide general education requirement, perhaps explaining the course's popularity among non-majors.

2. These two texts are perhaps the most comprehensive and accessible for undergraduates. Other books of notable help in formulating this course included: Connell (2005), Lorber (1994), Longhurst (2000), McDowell and Sharp (1999), Nelson and Seager (2004), Pettman (1996), Seager (2003). An extensive bibliography of work related to geography and gender is available through the Feminism and Geography Discussion List, GeogFem: http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/fembib/index.htm.

3. See Moffatt and Norton (2005) for integrating feminist pedagogy and popular culture.

4. There are several good resources for locating films on gender, including Media Education Foundation Films on Media, Gender and Diversity, http://www.mediaed.org/videos/indexhtml, the University of California, Berkeley Women's Studies bibliography of films related to gender and sexuality, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/WomenVid.html, and the Women in Cinema guide from the University of Virginia, http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/libsci/womFilm.html.