Teaching about Gender and Sexuality in the International Relations Classroom

Abstract

Feminist pedagogy considers the scholarship on and practices of teaching gender and sexuality in global politics. Humans narrativize (tell stories about) their lives, creating stories about the world that they see in order to make sense of their complicated realities. As such, there are multiple story lines of the ways that a feminist curiosity can affect approaches to teaching, strategies for teaching feminist curiosity, the role that genders and sexualities play in constituting the international relations (IR) classroom, and approaches to teaching material related to genders and sexualities in global politics. There are six story lines that reveal the distinctive features of feminist pedagogy: foregrounding an explicitly feminist politics, treating knowledge as situated, reimagining the purpose and structure of the classroom, recognizing and combating alienation, broadening the view of texts available for teaching and learning, and including explicitly activist components in teaching strategies. Across these story lines, feminist teaching is an important part of feminist academic practice, where pedagogy with a feminist curiosity foregrounds the politics of feminisms and the politics of pedagogy.