As of January 1, 2019, “…..residents of New York City can change their birth certificates to legally indicate they believe they are not the male or female they were born. They can also legally declare they are neither male nor female, with a simple X.”
I scoured the internet for education and illumination on a national issue that is altering perceptions as well as vocabulary, pronouns, and the laws. Who are zey? What do them want?
Eureka! In Australia, the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) and a team of feminist scholars in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle sponsored a conference on gender, post truth and pedagogy. December 9-12.
https://www.geaconf2018.com.au/QuickEventWebsitePortal/geaconf2018/eventinfo/Agenda
Here are some pithy excerpts:
The first speaker Prof Raewyn Connell of the University of Sydney spoke of “Truth, Power and Pedagogy.”
“Feminist critique of the mainstream curriculum remains essential. Yet we need to look critically at the global politics of our knowledge about gender, which itself has an imperial history and is challenged by decolonization campaigns. Claims for the universality of knowledge, which provide some resistance to post-truth politics, are subject to familiar feminist critiques, yet cannot be replaced by claims of epistemic privilege. We need, in current conditions, a feminist model of truthful practice as a basis for knowledge and curriculum. I hope to illustrate what this means for teachers’ working lives as well as in theory. “
Dr Melissa Wolfe who is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University explained in her brilliant peroration: “Generative knowledges: thinking the liminal within gender and education research.”
“Education assemblages, as emergent collectivities entangled with gender and sexuality, continue to be active and productive of binary relations that reiterate inequity. Liminal threshold concepts abound within the field of gender and education research. In this symposium, we propose a focus on the concept of the liminal beyond thresholds. We understand the liminal, without before and after, as an ambiguous state of simultaneous flux – of being affected and affecting, within the co-constitution that is relational becoming.”
Dr. Jacqueline Ullman a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University spoke of “Gender & sexuality diverse teachers & the interplay & impact of socio-cultural discourses on individual lives”
“Despite increased socio-cultural visibility of gender and sexuality-diversity alongside national discourses of tolerance, acceptance and homonormativity, gender and sexuality-diversity remains marginal across the education sector – often experienced by educators as individual identity work with significant affective outcomes. “
Ms. Briony Lipton Academic at Australian National University opined in “Care-full Academics: shifting temporalities and recognisabilities of care-work in the academy.”
“What are the personal meditations that take place when feminist academics resist and re-work ideas of care-work to negotiate how we are able to occupy academic spaces? How can care-work act as feminist resistance in queer responses to competitive career trajectories which shape academic belonging?”
I could go on and on about how much I learned from the learned about the critical thinking on binary dystopian notions, but it is time to watch another soap opera on TV where she and he do it in various permutations which are biologically sound.
