Gender Issues Month – Week 4 summary by Leonor Marin

To close with a flourish, week four of our Issues Month was absolutely varied, interesting  striking.

Leo shared a poem: Equality – He for She by Shannon PerryCrawley

Some lines which stay in our minds:

You should have the right to express your emotions and be what you please,
You should not be pulled back by stigma, but instead be who you are at ease.

Equality is not a privilege but a human right, all genders on the spectrum should be able to shine bright.

Bill posted a strong reflective interview with a major feminist social theorist well worth reading in the context of GENDER as a global and local set of issues. Nancy Fraser, “Capitalism’s crisis of care’’. This interview presents her ideas about the nature of social reproduction over against production in capitalist societies and how social reproduction (not just birthing and child care, but neighborhood relations and much more), can be reimagined.

According to Nancy “Social reproduction” involves “a key set of social capacities: those available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally’ Bill also shared links

• https://www.dissentmagazine.org/issue/fall-2016
• https://newleftreview.org/II/100/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care

Bill also suggests one among several Fraser’s books: Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

Great sources of information , Bill!

Gergő shares about his finding in Lady Gaga’s song “Born this way’’, how well the lyrics fit our Gender Issues Month, he suggests it would be really interesting to ask our students their opinions , what the message it is for them  .Also, he shares a great idea to apply in our classes, have thought-provoking conversations based on the different issues this song has.

I felt really curious about this song, listened to it, did the activity in class , it did work, here the verse which brought to class the topic to have a discussion:

Don’t be drag, just be a queen
Whether you’re broke or evergreen
You’re black, white, beige, chola descent
You’re Lebanese, you’re orient

Discrimination was the issue my students found out , we were much surprised when we read the word ‘ chola’  , it is  a Spanish word ! it refers to people from my country who live in the Highlands, empowered, very hard working ones.

Unfortunately in my country, Peru, there’s discrimination, racism.  so if you say X is a cholo, you are being racist ,disrespectful and discriminating. To call a person  Cholo / chola  is really offensive, insulting.

Thanks Gergő!

“THAI POLICE have issued warnings over the safety of English language students and the risks of ‘hiring a native English tutor after the arrest in November of an expatriate teacher wanted for multiple rapes.” This is the piece of news , taken from EL Gazette(Feb.2015),that’S HOW Bill starts his post ,raising an issue , which , in his opinion, is  generally under-researched(Can’t agree more , Bill).This Sexual Predation of students by ELT teachers.

Bill acknowledges his colleague Dr. Vaughan Rapatahana, who partially inspired and co-authored the comment he posted .

From a recent (2015) search just on internet, Rapatahana identified “18 Western sexually predatory males ‘teaching’ English in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, PR China, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Egypt, India, Nepal, Nicaragua.”

Bill adds that a related broader area is sexual exploitation and malfeasance by staff connected with NGOs. Part of the problem is of course power of educators over their learners, people using their position for sexual ends. And the huge boom in ELT and the genuine and engineered desire to learn English creates a particularly attractive space for such potential malfeasance and predation. As Rapatahana stresses, some in the huge expanding field of TEFL . across the planet are “all too free to stroll in and sexually molest at-risk, poor and disadvantaged students, themselves striving to attain some measure of English language competency in an effort to escape penury.”

Akogare (desire) in Japan, a separate and different, yet related dimension to this is what is for example, whereby, as Rapatahana comments, “supposedly sensitive and refined Western male English teachers are often seen as objects of desire by adult Japanese women students, precisely because their ‘acquisition’ of such an English-speaking gentleman could open the doors to the West.” This is again the ‘power dimension’ especially associated with English as a proselytized super-inflated lingua franca of social advancement.

In Peru, we have cases of Sexual Predation of students by teachers in an upware trend, not only from the ELT arena but from other different subjects or people working in the schools.

I would say it is on TV news , let’s say six cases per month and after reading Bill’s post I feel really motivated to do more research on this, not only research but  to take action on this.

Thanks Bill, great post!

Thanks to you all for your contributions!