GENDER & SEXUALITY

Gender & Sexuality

[Name of the Institute]

Gender & Sexuality

Introduction

The gang rape of a retarded girl by football players in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming; and the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado-isolated occurrences by "deranged" or "evil" perpetrators? or symptoms of deeper social issues? Each of these tragedies has been "explained" in a variety of ways: easy access to firearms; distracted parents and broken families; the Internet and its dangers for troubled adolescents; a national decline in morality; or, as Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah suggests, the absence of school prayer.

It is noteworthy, I believe, that sexist and homophobic slurs have been implicated in each of these violent incidents. What, if any, response to these problems should social studies educators consider? It is not my intention here to try to make sense of what is, at some level, incomprehensible.

But as an educator with long-standing interest in issues of gender and schooling, I see disturbing cultural patterns lying behind this national epidemic of teenage violence. What strikes me about the examples above-as well as the school shootings in Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon-is the framework of gender, misogyny, homophobia, and violence that shapes these events. Misogyny is the fear and hatred of women or men perceived as effeminate; homophobia is the fear and hatred of people who are believed to be lesbians and gays.

In this article, I argue that misogynistic and homophobic norms in American society have contributed to the shape of these contemporary examples of social deviance. I believe educators should address these norms, along with the violence in our society, as part of the social studies curriculum.

In the wake of Columbine, two books, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999), and Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (Garbarino, 1999), brought overnight prominence for their authors. The authors of both books are psychologists who have been tracking the ways in which our culture's boys use "violence as armor" in upholding what Kindlon and Thompson call our "impossible self-image of manliness" (p. 224).

Media interest in these tragedies has been predictably intense but fleeting. By contrast, many teachers and administrators deal almost constantly with fears about school violence. Social studies educators should use whatever opportunity the contemporary climate of concern offers to explore the relationships between misogyny, homophobia, and violence from the standpoint of critical, transformative multicultural education (Banks, 1999).

New Conceptions of Citizenship Education

Social studies educators are in a unique position to consider gender and sexual identity because of their defining interest in citizenship education.

Over the last 20 years, new conceptualizations of citizenship education have been proposed in response to changing social needs. Parker (1996) has argued that social studies should embrace diversity as an educational imperative and reflect a non-assimilationist attitude toward the new immigrants once again entering our schools in large numbers. Makler (1999), echoing Noddings (1997) and Martin (1992), suggests that citizenship education be ...