There are a few moments in the last academic year that keep on coming back to me, and they all relate to gender and sexuality. The first moment took place in a discussion about PhD supervision after Geographies of Sexualities professor Gavin Brown left the department in protest. I was asked to take over two candidates who worked on the topic, despite officially being hired as an environmental geographer. The conversation started off a bit awkward, so I half-jokingly said: ‘So, you’re putting me on these teams, because of what I do in my private life…’ I was not exactly uncomfortable with this, although I did worry that the students would prefer a subject specialist, and that me taking on this role might limit the chance of a suitable replacement being hired. The reason why I do not mind this conflation of private and professional identity is that I am aware of my capacity to hold or amplify a certain space, of function as a translator in a default heteronormative space. This is also reflected in my interactions with ‘questioning’ undergraduates for whom I sometimes as a ‘sounding board’. The reason that I can be quite a safe or at least easily identifiable sounding board is because I use my identity as part of my teaching performance. This does not just include my gender and sexuality, but also other aspects of my upbringing around class and ethnicity, which I try to use as a means to challenge assumptions.
This then relates to the next moment. I inherited a lecture on ‘feminist geography’ that I immediately turned into a lecture on ‘sex’ to include gender, sex, and sexuality. I really did not want to turn this into a ‘conversion’ type session, along the lines of ‘why we all should be feminists and LGBTIQ+ friendly’. For me, this does not work to draw in the people that I want to reach. So, I begin with what is perceived as ‘hard’ geography: economics, population, geopolitics: How is land distributed in the world? Who can inherit? Who can marry? Who can inherit/gain citizenship in which country? There are always quite a few students in the classroom who have struggled with these problems or have witnessed others going through them. Others even chose Geography as a subject explicitly to grapple with these issues – they just had not thought about them as an issue of gender and sexuality. Only after showing maps, tables, historical events, photographs of protests etc do I move on to the ways in which people have resisted these legal impositions – which then translate into things such as feminist and queer theory. To me, this performance is imporant as a queer person, because it makes ‘my’ problem everyone’s problem (I use the same approach for my lectures on race). Most people are fucked over by the current methods of wealth distribution, but don’t realise how the things that they have aspired to, or protested other people from obtaining (such as heterosexual marriage), leave them off worse. Which brings me to the next anecdote.
At the moment, we have an undergraduate student, a postgraduate student and a staff member struggling with visa issues. This is unfortunately normal, but also getting worse due to UK and European hostile environments. Because the situation is getting desperate for staff and students to carry out their work, everyone, including my undergraduates, have been talking about strategic marriage to obtain rights of residence. I have a few friends who have married other friends so that they can stay in the country, and it is also a relatively common practice in the LGBTIQ+ community for community safeguarding (prevent people from being deported to almost certain death, for example), so I was not shocked by the premise – just by the scale this year. I ended up reading a brilliant article by Canadian geographer Anne-Marie D’Aoust that acerbically comments on the current UK Home Office crackdown on visa marriages, in particular its tying of marriage to a Western notion of romance (email me or the author if you can’t access the article). The scary thing is not only how the UK Home Office tries to enshrine a particular form of romance to effectively commit racial injustice, but the level into which people, including protesters against these practices, have bought into the love-marriage connection. Historically, marriages in Europe have always been legal contracts for men to obtain women and dowry as property, and to ensure that they carry biological (male) heirs. To put this crudely: marriage is the legalisation of sexual slavery for property transmission. The rather tedius (because overly didactic) film ‘The Last Duel‘ brilliantly draws out this relation, especially the final third of the film.
Because of marriage was initally an aristocratic practice, or anyone who wanted/needed to pass on property, but then the Church and the idea of romantic love came into play. There have been arguments that romantic love gave women greater leverage, but only up to a point. With the creation of nation states and borders, the state started to control people’s sexuality for its war machine and narrative of ‘internal cohesion’ (I still need to read watch this interesting round table and read the associated book!). If you look at the gender roles within citizenship laws, the technical languague barely hides how women are mainly regarded as potential rape victims, men as potential rapists. whose enemy offspring needs to be dealt with. Coming from a rather internationally composed family, I can say that my aunts, uncles and cousins have not exactly been impressed with their assigned statuses. Which kind of takes me back to the beginning of this blog post about my private life and my job. I have quite a few colleagues who completely divorce their private life from their work in order to make a point that their gender or sexual identity is not all they are, and to keep their private lives private. In my case, I prefer not to keep the distance in respect to gender and sexuality in the classroom, because of the subjects I teach, and my experience that has taught me that my performance can sometimes literally save lives. More importantly, I feel that this is also something that I am not imposing, but that I am performing as a response to discussions that are already occurring. And the fact that they are occuring gives me hope for a kinder future where there is greater clarity on geographies of relations – economic and otherwise.