Gender (im)Material: Teaching Bodies and Gender Education
THE purpose of this paper is to insist on the sexed and gendered teaching body as ‘material’ to curriculum for gender education and gender equity in classrooms. It is not simply that the body of the teacher refuses to be excised, despite educational traditions of appealing to the mind as ‘above’ and transcending the body. It is that the sexed and gendered body of the teacher, male as well as female, must be the focus of more than censure if gender education projects are to be effective in generating useful pedagogical tools. In the paper, I give two reasons why the curriculum kit has been so visible and the teaching body so invisible. The first is the propensity of funding institutions to see a tangible ‘project’ such as a kit as the appropriate outcome of curriculum initiatives. The second is the ambivalence of many feminist educators about issues of bodily desire and pleasure in the context of a patriarchal society and culture.