Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men

Abstract

PERHAPS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULTto teach about sexism. The vilification and trivialization of feminism in the mass media is long-standing, shifting over time only in rhetorical content (Aronson 2003;Bordo 1993;Hall and Rodriguez 2003;Kilbourne 1999;Morris 2002). In the last several years, we have heard students inside and outside our classrooms use violent terms like "male-basher" and "Feminazi," without irony, to describe feminists. 1 The three of us have taught courses on inequality in three universities (one research-oriented, two teaching-oriented) for many years. 2 During that time we have noticed students' patterned resistance to the idea that sexism persists and is a pervasive feature of U.S. society.Colleagues who teach conventional courses mistakenly believe that our classes are filled with progressive, left-leaning feminists who make our jobs easy. Our classes on gender inequality are largely peopled with women, and one might expect them to be open to feminist concerns. Yet most of our students-women and meninitially resist the idea that women suffer systematic inequalities because of their sex category and that men are correspondingly MAKING SEXISM VISIBLE: BIRDCAGES, MARTIANS, AND PREGNANT MEN*This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women's desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye's (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students' resistance.

Student resistance in the classroom—Functional‐instrumentalist, critical‐emancipatory and critical‐functional conceptualisations

“…Therefore, authors suggest either preventing or eradicating student resistance to apparently liberating ideas and teaching methods. For instance, accepting students' predispositions and carefully attempting to offer them an opposing voice (Bowman, ; Kleinman, Copp, & Sandstrom, ; Parrotta & Rusche, ), using videos and engaging students in discussions about shared experiences (Baker‐Sperry et al, ), requesting students to write and share a one‐page autobiography through the lenses of race, class, gender and sexuality (Hunter & Nettles, ), or adjusting the course content to the point of no longer experiencing resistance (Webber, ) are some of the numerous methods authors propose to address the problem.…”

McJobs and Pieces of Flair

“…As noted by Kleinman, Copp and Sandstrom (2006), this tactic works well with Horace Miner's (1956) piece "Body Ritual among the Nacirema." In Miner's description of the American (i.e., "Nacirema") medicine cabinet through the lens of an outsider, our health rituals seem strange.…”

Last But Not Least

“…Engaging in such hypothetical thinking allows us to recognize how our lives really are structured by our biographies and histories. For example, Kleinman, Copp and Sandstrom's (2006) article about addressing students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women offers a number of examples of what Mills suggests. These authors have students invert their sense of proportion by getting them to substitute race for sex and by having them imagine women in men's bodies.…”