Object #6: “Philosophy and the Role of Teacher Reflections on Constructing Gender”

Collette Gosselin’s excellent article raises questions about the roles teachers have in helping children understand gender roles and identities. She examines two second-grade teachers and the ways their approaches impacted male and female students. She claimed that they were unaware of this in their teaching. One of the most striking features of her article is that when she presented the teachers with her findings, they were both furious and believed she had mischaracterized what she observed.

            This article is fascinating on several levels. Obviously the questions about perception versus reality are rich as Gosselin and the teacher-subjects she observed try to decide who was right about what really went on in their classrooms. Of more interest to this project, however, is Gosselin’s assertion that teachers need to reflect on how they construct gender and how they manage their classes in order to create an equitable space for all of the students.

 The citation for the article is:

Gosselin, C. (2007). “Philosophy and the Role of Teacher Reflections on Constructing Gender.” Educational Foundations. 21:3-4 (39-57).

Object #5: For Young Women Who Don’t Consider Themselves Feminists”

Mindy Nettifee’s spoken word piece encouraging women to start calling themselves feminists is at times funny, bitter, inspiring and thought-provoking. Her poem calls out young women who have accepted the limiting roles discussed in Miss Representation and other objects in this gallery, and demands that they start thinking critically about what feminism actually is. She acknowledges how the term has been demonized, and also pushes her audience to think about how far we have yet to go to achieve an equal society.

            Nettifee’s work needed to be included here as a call to arms. Equipped with the knowledge from personal experience and from research presented in Miss Representation, Nettifee forces us to ask what exactly is wrong with feminism, and who does it really harm? The answer is, of course, those already in power, but perhaps another generation of men and women who do not see these things as zero-sum games might be able to right the injustices of gender and sex discrimination.

Object #4: The Representation Project

In the gallery, there would be a viewing area for visitors to watch 2011’s Miss Representation, a documentary by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, which explored how women are represented in popular culture and the media, and the injustice that these limiting views of women as either objects of desire or objects of hatred does to our entire culture.The extended trailer is below.

The Representation Project is a non-profit organization that emerged from the film and describes itself as “a movement that uses film and media content to expose injustices created by gender stereotypes and to shift people’s consciousness towards change.” This web resource includes curriculum ideas to help teach media literacy, and focuses in on the problem of stereotyping masculinity and femininity in the mainstream media. Newsom’s new film, The Mask You Live In, addresses the problem with a limited vision of masculinity, and would also have a place in the gallery once it is available.

In this gallery, this piece represents a shift from exploring the notions of objectification to beginning to reclaim a level of subjectivity and begin to tell the story of individual women, rather than simply allowing them to be props in someone else's story.

Object #3: Speak

Speak is a Young Adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of a high school freshman who was raped by one of the popular boys in her school. Through the novel, Melinda, the main character experiences ostracism, bullying and harassment for what happened the night of her rape. She remains silent until the end of the book, when she finally, slowly, realizes that she might not have been alone in her situation.

Anderson’s book was banned by some school districts because of the nature of the subject. Rape is taboo in this country, and blaming the victim is common, in part because it’s easier to tell someone that they need to try to live up to an idealized image, rather than to admit that someone has fallen well short of how they were perceived. This is an even easier trap to fall into when it deals with an incident of sexual violence. We are all familiar with the trope that somehow the female victim was asking for it. She dressed wrong, walked wrong, was drinking too much, was not drinking enough, made eye contact. As soon as a woman starts acting as an individual, she gets herself into trouble. 

Object #2: Unintended Consequences; Or The Making of A Feminist

“Unintended Consequences, Or The Making of a Feminist” is my original piece for this project. Conceived as a short memoir of my experience on the receiving end of sexual harassment and bullying, it became the jumping-off point for this exploration because in many ways it showed the consequences of not being perfect, of trying to be the object that everyone expected me to be. The boys in the story marginalized me for not meeting their standards of beauty and social graces, the adults turned a blind eye, as they believed that boys would be boys and didn’t need to be taught to be better, and my own parents were let down by my less than perfect self. As I became more aware of the way that my story fit into a greater context of sex and gender discrimination, I began to fight against it, and slowly began to shift from being a victim to being someone willing to fight against it. Although I am by no means a traditional activist, I am a feminist, an identity I embrace wholeheartedly, and I have every intention to carry the idea that all people should be treated with respect, equality and kindness into every area of my life, including into the classroom.

The setting for the story.