COLLOQUIA

INVITATION | WEBINAR

The UJ Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class, in partnership with the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), presents a webinar based on the FruSTRAIGTingthenorm research project.

Views on Sex, Sexuality, and Gender in Higher Education: Preliminary Findings from the University of Johannesburg

DATE: Wednesday 27 October 2021
TIME: 14:00 – 15:30
WEBINAR LINK: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85164562696

INVITATION | BOOK DISCUSSION

The Department of Educational Psychology and the UJ Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class in partnership with The National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) host the renowned scholars in diverse genders and sexualities Prof Dennis Francis and Prof Renée DePalma: Book Chapter Discussion: Bodies, Spaces, Objects, and Schooling

DATE: Tuesday, 27 July 2021
TIME: 14H00 – 16H00
WEBINAR LINK: https://zoom.us/j/97759921347

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This chapter draws on Ahmed’s phenomenological project to consider how cisheteronormativity serves as a straightening device – ensuring that schools are orientated around the straight body. It complicates the conversation about gender and sexuality diversity and schooling by tracking how bodies are turned toward the objects around them and how this direction matters. Centering the voices of school managers, teachers, LGBTQI, and straight school attending youth, the chapter tracks how cisheteronormativity orientates bodies in specific ways and explores what happens when straight lines are crossed. It highlights how cisheteronormativity operates as a mode of directionality and repetition of actions that render LGBTIQ learners as – (1) deviating from the straight line and, therefore in need of discipline, (2) out of view or invisible and therefore positioned as out of place and not belonging and (3) turning away from objects that take them off the straight line; to reorientate inwards and internalize cisheteronormativity. The chapter concludes that schools are cisheteronormative spaces, where LGBTIQ learners learn their place, which is often invisibility, exclusion, and marginalization.