Complicating gender

This week's readings traverse a complicated topography of gendered reading and literacy learning, and gender expression.

Stanley attends to a paradox of romance texts read by young women: at once they undermine young women's self-determinations of beauty, worthiness, relationship, and success, while they are also a rare place for young women to learn about relationships, sex, and desire. Her text prompts us to consider what, exactly, these texts do for young women, and what these texts may stand in for that would otherwise be absent in young women's lives.

Maher's text provides an overview of the significance of gender in schooling and education discourses. It both provides context and advances our discussions of the implicit yet central impact of gender on learning, on powered relations, and on what it means to be literate.

Williams provides concrete examples of the dynamics presented by Maher at play. This work extends readings by Gee on the literacy requirements of the new capitalism, and points to some implications of the ways in which new technologies and new literacies are gendered.

Finally, Hill's piece explodes our notions of gender as binary, and reminds us that gender, for most people, is not experienced as an either/or, but rather as a both/and, or even a neither.

It is important for us as teachers, as teacher-scholars to understand the differences between biologically determined sex, and socially constructed gender. Sex, as a category, is often determined at or prior to birth, by a medical professional, based on a look at the baby's genitals. Sex is fixed, is thought to be constant throughout one's life. It is a binary, one is either a male or a female.

In contrast, gender is socially constructed through culture, psychology-personality, and the body. Rather than determined by the doctor, gender is determined by the person, with help from (and sometimes in spite of) the family, the community, the world. Gender is not fixed, it can shift over time, it can change. Further, gender is expressed in ways much more complicated than can be captured by the binary of man/woman. For example, in some Native communities, some people are considered to be two-spirited, holding both male and female sensibilities. In many cases, two-spirited people are regarded with honor because they are considered as wise, precisely because they are two-spirited.

As educators, it is our work to respect and defend the dignity of all students in regard to their gender expressions.

I like that our readings explore the implicit centrality of gender, and then work to question assumptions of gender, of a gender binary, at work in each of these analyses. That the readings use the categories that they will later explode. Sometimes, this makes people feel uncomfortable because things are too slippery.

One thing that we can hold on to, is that we should believe what people, students, say about themselves in terms of their genders, and do what we can to make them know they are welcomed and respected in our classrooms.

I have included two short films that deal with some of the ideas from our work this week.

Please copy and paste the following links in your browser to view them:

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8380613

and

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Video/playerIndex?id=3102408