The ninth international Gender and Education Association conference, Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections, will take place in London this week. Hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, papers, keynotes and symposia are set to consider ‘diversity’ in education, exploring the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, and the role of feminist research at a time when education wrestles with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. Continue Reading

Reporting back from the 2013 Young Sexualities Postgraduate Conference at Cardiff University Continue Reading

Resources for teachers and parents about children’s books that challenge gender stereotypes Continue Reading

Why are girl things so despised? Consider the derisive response to music girls like, movies and television shows girls watch, social networking sites girls inhabit, activities in which girls engage, and the clothes girls wear. The criticism is always snide and condescending: girl things—which appeal to, attract, star, and represent girls—are considered, at best, vacuous and, at worst, distasteful. In a 1999 article, gender and cultural studies scholar Catharine Driscoll argues anything perceived as a “girl thing” is instantly dismissed without consideration of the importance it might have in the lives of real girls. While the Spice Girls and their fans offer an infamous example of this girl-targeted derision, there are no comparable examples of bashing boy-things; no ubiquitous hatred for boys and their things. Continue Reading

GEA Policy Report, March 2013

International women’s week was inaugurated in the media this year in a quiet way and yet it has spawned a tremendous amount of footage in the press and other media, culminating in the UK with a weekend festival of arts called Women of the World organized by Jude Kelly, indomitable director of the Southbank Centre in London. What is particular music to GEA is the welcome focus on Education as the main path to equality as can be seen in a myriad of articles, letters and comments and the launch of the new British Library website. Continue Reading

If I had been shown this poem, ‘If you don’t come…’ by Christa Bell at age 17, I think it would have blown my mind.  (If you haven’t seen it, I guarantee it will be the best four minutes of your day if you watch it now).  I was aiming for a high shock value when I showed it to a group of sixth form students at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, the top state sixth form in the country.  I had been asked to do a lunchtime talk on feminism for students by their sociology teacher, who told me that his students were sceptical about feminism and didn’t see the need for it – a red rag to a bull!  After consulting the glorious feminist twittersphere, I decided to talk about the equal right to sexual pleasure. Continue Reading

To mark International Women’s Day 2013, the University of Huddersfield’s Feminist Research Group are holding their inaugural event ‘Women’s Lives, Women’s Stories: A Feminist Narrative Research Symposium’. Continue Reading

GEA Policy Report, March 2013 Continue Reading

Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. –Cymbeline Continue Reading

Matters of gender and sexuality have already made headlines in 2013 and it seems hope is on the horizon for understanding and re-framing gender and sexuality as implicating all,  whereby the phrasing of its ‘socially constructed’ categorisation can  break out of academic sociology and enjoy a more public airing. From the continuation of last year’s backlash against ‘gendered’ products, to parliamentary time and space finally being given to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, from the mainstreaming of distaste for Page 3 to the recent outrage at the Sun’s depiction of the deceased law graduate and successful model Reeva Steenkamp, we see expansions of, in, beyond ‘the feminist classroom’. 

Recently, Yvette Taylor gave a talk at the Guildhall as part of the Brave New World, LGBT conference, collectively inspired to feel an ‘arrival’ in place as delegates remarked on entering the corridors of power. At last…Shifting cultural (mis)representations, legal (im)possibilities and movements between margins and mainstreams, force questions about the place of feminisms, its ‘publics’, policies and practices: in other words, who is feminism for and where does it reside? Who might be excluded still from those corridors and classrooms? Continue Reading